InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Son of the Mob ❯ What a Night! ( Chapter 4 )

Son of the Mob 4

I'M BAAAAACK!!!! For those of you who are wondering why Kagome has an American last name… well you'll just have to keep reading the story to find out! All I'm gonna tell you is, it fits in there somewhere. HAVE FUN READING!!!!!!!!

My teachers don't have very much in common with my father, but there is one thing they all share: everybody agrees that I don't work hard enough. Inu Yasha has the potential to be an excellent student if only he'd apply himself: it's on every report card I've gotten since kindergarten. So when Dad gave me that whole lecture about getting motivated, he was just the latest singer of an old song I'd been hearing for most of my life. Teachers: Get motivated about school; Dad: Get motivated about the future; Mom: Get motivated about family Miroku: Get motivated about girls.

What can I say? It's not me. While a lot of seniors spend their weekends filling out college applications, strategizing about Ivy-League schools, and second-choice schools, and fallback schools, I've been letting all that slide/ It's not that I've got better things to do-God knows I've hung up my shoulder pads. I just don't care that much.

Dad goes ballistic over this. "You could be the first Taisho to go to university!"

Never college; college is where Shippo went. Harvard, Yale-that's university. Privately, I think he shouldn't hole his breath. The only way I'm getting into Harvard is if Dad sends one of the uncles to have a little talk with the dean of admissions. I'm not a straight-A student-at least not since fourth grade, when the Calabrese hit was big news. Back then some of my teachers put two and two together and figured out I was related to the prime suspect. There was this one art teacher-when my dad showed up to take me to a dentist's appointment, she ate a piece of clay. She had been demonstrating how to make handles for ceramic pottery and she got so rattled that she just popped the clay into her mouth like chocolate. She wouldn't spit it out in front of Dad either. She swallowed it. Missed two days of school due to a "stomach virus."

But no one remembers the Calabrese murder anymore. And even if they do, they've certainly forgotten the guy the cops couldn't pin it on. Thank God. Life in the Luca house is tough enough without CNN camping on the front curb.

Actually, I wouldn't mind a little of that old notoriety for New Media class. Mr. Mullinicks is the toughest teacher in school. I'm not sure if he knows about my family, but I doubt that would change anything. He'd flunk me. He'd flunk Al Capone, and pack him off to summer school to make up the credits. And if Big Al put up a fight, Mr. Mullinicks would use his trademark lie, "That's your problem."

"What should our websites be about?" asks a girl in the front row.

"That's your problem," Mr. Mullinicks informs her. "So long as it's not obscene and nobody is trying to overthrow the government. And it's your problem to register your site with all the different search engines so you'll attract as much traffic as possible. Your grades are based on one thing and only one thing-how many hits you can generate by the end of the semester."

Miroku raises his hand. "What if you put together a great site, but not that many people find out about it?"

"That's your problem." The teacher tells him. "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a noise? This class isn't about having a magnificent tree, it's about making a big noise. The challenge of the Internet is to reach customers in an increasingly crowded marketplace." He scowls at us. "And don't think you can have your grandmother logging on day and night. I expect to see hundreds of hits. How you accomplish that," he finishes, "is your problem."

"It must be nice to be Mr. Mullinicks," I say to Miroku after class. "Everything is someone else's problem. I'd love to farm out all my problems and live a trouble-free life."

Miroku is distracted. "What are you wearing tonight?"

He's talking about Alfie Heller's party in the city. Alfie was at Goshinboku last year. Now he's a freshman at GU, and he's gotten the whole senior class invited to his fraternity's big bash-at least Alfie's friends, which means pretty much everybody.

There's a lot of buzz about it in the school halls. Going to a college party is every high-school kid's dream. A normal person would be psyched. A super concentrated mass of hormones like Miroku is vibrating like a guitar string.

"I'll wear clothes," I say. "Whatever I grab out of my closet. Come on man, this party's supposed to be fun. Don't turn it into a chess match."

"There are going to be college girls there, Yash," he insists. "We can't get cocky about this."

"Oh yeah, we don't want all the success we've been having with high school girls to go to our heads."

He's testy. "I can't think with all your negativity bouncing around my skull. Now, what do college girls like?"

"I'm guessing they're not too fond of an idiot who plans his wardrobe like D-day. When I get there, I'd better not see you stressing out."

"When you get there?" He's horrified. "You mean we're not going together?" He sounds like a disappointed prom date.

"I promised Sesshoumaru I'd drop by his apartment before the party." Sesshoumaru had a place in the city. Not far from GU, although Mom keeps his room as if he never moved away. Part of her will never accept that he has.

"A single boy should live with his family until he gets mated," she always says. It's not really that she misses Sesshoumaru, because he's home practically every other day for business. She just has this fifties TV view of what a family should be. Shippo mated his high-school sweetheart, and Sesshoumaru and I are required to be Wally and the Beaver. This casts Inu Taisho as Ward Cleaver. The mind boggles. I could never get a handle on why this is so important to her until I first read Hamlet my junior year: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

Miroku is distraught. "Why does it have to be tonight?"

I shrug. "He feels bad about the Angela O'Bannon disaster, and he wants to make it up to me. I think he's taking me out to dinner or something. We have to that in secret or Mom thinks we're dissing her cooking. Anyway, I figured since I'm going to be in the city for this party-"

"You decided to blow me off at the most crucial moment of out love lives," he finishes.

"We don't have love lives,
" I remind him. "Don't worry; I'll be right by your side for every humiliating strikeout. Just try to hold off on embarrassing yourself until I get there, okay?"

No one in my father's business pays for parking. Ever. They just leave their cars any old place-expired meters, school crossings, next to hydrants. They get piles if tickets, and they don't pay those either. Sesshoumaru is proud of his. It's like the organized-crime version of stamp collecting-Hey, I'll trade you an expired meter in Brooklyn for a Port Authority bus-loading violation.

The amazing thing is I can't ever remember anybody getting in trouble for it. It's hard to explain, but look at it this way. When normal, law-abiding Joe Shmoe does something illegal, he gets caught. But people who live entire lives outside the law are somehow immune, as if the criminal code doesn't even apply to them. How could you get tripped up by something that's as alien and irrelevant to you as the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead?

Moral of the story: If you're considering breaking a law, break all of them.

Great lesson, huh? Mobsters, like Charles Barkley, are not role models.

Since I'm a civilian, I aim the Mazda straight for the garage. Thirty bucks for the privilege of parking under Sesshoumaru's high-rise. Expensive, sure, but it seems appropriate for the only Taisho who paid for his car using actual money.

Sesshoumaru's astronomical rent leases a smallish one-bedroom apartment on the twenty-third floor of a luxury doorman building. In the elevator I'm hoping he doesn't have anything too fancy planned. I'm wearing jeans and a short-sleeved button-down shirt. It's September and the days are still hitting seventy=plus.

I ring the bell of suite 23B

"Hang on," calls a voice. Defiantly not Sesshoumaru's.

How do I describe the individual who answers the door? Not stunning exactly, but hot. You know how supermodels are gorgeous, but there's an unnatural perfection to them? Well this girl is as good-looking as you can get and sat ill be a real person. She's a littler younger than Sesshoumaru-early twenties, I'd guess. She's dressed casually, but her sexiness packs an atmospheric wallop like walking from air-conditioning into a hundred-degree day. Her sweater almost but not quite reaches the waistline of her low-rise jeans, revealing infinity sit-ups-worth of rock-hard abs. Words fail me, except these two, Oh, my.

She holds out her hand. "I'm Kikyo. You must be Yash."

I shake it, surprised but not blown away. Sesshoumaru runs with a pretty fast crowd-okay Sesshoumaru is a pretty fast crowd. He has been known to date some pretty impressive women.

"Where's Sesshoumaru?" I manage.

"He told me to look after you until he comes back," she says airily. "Want a beer?"

"Coke's fine," I reply. "Driving."

"Coming up."

I can't help but watch her as she heads for the galley kitchen. I don't even try to look away. It's that kind of attraction.

I sit. She stands behind my chair, asking politely interested questions about me. If she doesn't care-and, let's face it, why should a twenty-something knockout want to hear about what courses I'm taking?-she doesn't show it. That's real class. Sesshoumaru has latched onto a real keeper here.

That thought has barely crossed my mind when she starts massaging my shoulders. She's so smooth that it takes a second to realize that this isn't the most natural thing in the world.

"Where did you say Sesshoumaru was?"

She doesn't stop. "Oh, just taking care of a few things."

The last time Sesshoumaru took care of a few things, I ended up with Jimmy Ratelli in the trunk of my car. I start to tell her this, but now her hands are rubbing my chest!

This is not good! I mean it's good-it's great, actually. But not with Sesshoumaru's girlfriend. What the hell is she thinking?

"Uh-uh-Miss?"

"Kikyo."

`Exactly when did her mouth get so close to my ear? I can feel the vibrations of her reedy voice in my pancreas, not to mention other places. Oh, this is so not good!

"Well-it's just that-uh--" Forget it. I'm jelly/ No, worse. I'm a puddle of low-fat milk. "You know-uh-Sesshoumaru could walk in here any minute."

"Relax," she soothes, expertly springing the buttons of my shirt. "We've got a couple hours."

"But-aren't you afraid he'll find out?"

"Silly," she laughs. "He already knows."

"He does?"

"Of course! Who do you think set this up?"

I have these moments-vending-machine moments. It's at these times I come to realize that something I assumed was relatively innocent is part of Dad's world. Kikyo isn't Sesshoumaru

`s girlfriend: she a call girl! My brother brought me to his apartment so he could set me up with a hooker! That's his little gift to make up for the Jimmy Ratelli thing!

The realization is like a jolt of electricity applied simultaneously to every cell in my body. I leap out of the chair, shirttails flapping like a flag. She's got her sweater half off, an image that will remain forever burned onto the back of my retinas. But I'm already running for the door.

Kikyo catches onto what's happening. "Hey," she says softly, the yellow cotton knit bunched around her shoulders. "It's okay if it's your first time."

"That's not it-"I babble.

But how could I ever explain it? The problem is where this little goft is coming from. I mean, your first time is pretty important, right? You carry it with you forever. I refuse to put the permanent stamp of organized crime on my love life. On my wedding night, I shouldn't be thinking…and it all started back in 2004 when Sesshoumaru used his Mob connections to hire me a call girl…

The sweater comes off the rest of the way. If I was a pinball machine, my response would be: Tilt. Kikyo speaks just one more word: "Stay."

There are encyclopedias that say less. In that single syllable, I can envision the next couple hours, and they're rated NC-17.

I can't take my eyes off her, and I'm equally entranced and bewildered by the fact that in a few minutes, I'll be seeing a lot more. Going all the way. It sinks in that there's a set limit to how far you can go. It's not like long jump where you train really hard and squeeze out another centimeter next time. This is the end. The max. The finish line. Will it be here and now for me?

Sensing the kill, Kikyo reaches for the clasp of her bra.

It's the toughest decision I've ever had to make, bit I make it.

I outa there.