The Proviso: Vignettes & Outtakes Read online

  The Proviso:

  VIGNETTES & OUTTAKES

  So you read The Proviso and you’re slightly curious as to what might have happened off page?

  Sebastian and Eilis’s wedding?

  The murder of Tom Parley?

  The reading of Fen’s will?

  The Jep Industries takeover?

  You got it.

  Moriah Jovan

  PUBLISHED BY:

  B10 Mediaworx

  9754 N Ash Avenue, #204

  Kansas City, MO 64157

  b10mediaworx.com

  “The Proviso: Vignettes & Outtakes”

  ©2009 by Moriah Jovan

  All rights reserved

  Cover photography, Petticoat Lane, KCMO

  ©2007 by Eric Bowers of Madness Matrix Photography

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ELDER KENARD

  Bryce’s conflicted sexuality manifests early.

  JORDACHE JEANS

  Giselle, Sebastian, and Knox as teenagers at church.

  ATLAS SHRUGGED

  Sebastian’s mother and father have at it about money. Again.

  25 TO LIFE

  Knox’s innocence vanishes the night he turns to vigilante justice—and sets himself on the road to madness.

  JOHN 3:16

  Knox goes off his rocker completely.

  THE STONE WAS ROLLED AWAY

  What could possibly bring Leah back to Knox?

  JULY 14, 2001

  The fires.

  THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

  The dismantling of Jep Industries.

  MISS COX & PROFESSOR HILLIARD

  Giselle and Knox can’t help indulging their public personae.

  CINDERELLA

  Fen and Sebastian have a bonding moment after Giselle flees the art gallery, Bryce hot on her heels.

  THE LONG GOODBYE

  The day Knox was “forced” to hire Justice.

  TIRED OF BEING ME

  The blackest day of Knox’s life.

  SEXUAL HARASSMENT

  Knox and Justice finally find a way to settle their knock-down-drag-outs.

  BELTANE

  Sebastian and Eilis get married.

  MISSA SOLEMNIS

  The reading of Fen Hilliard’s will.

  ELDER KENARD

  January, 1985

  Bryce: barely 19

  “Good luck, Elder Kenard.”

  “Thank you, President,” Bryce mumbled. He was a missionary now, off to the Missionary Training Center in Provo. He’d been ordained and his father would be disappointed in him if he did something so worldly as calling him “Dad” instead of “President.”

  Bryce was on the Lord’s time now and part of that time would be spent in airports waiting on planes. Like today.

  He shook his father’s hand, firm, and looked him in the eye as he’d been taught. President Kenard’s shock of bright orange hair was losing its battle against the white and Bryce vaguely wondered if it’d be all white by the time he returned from his mission in eighteen months.

  “Now, if you want, I’ll see about getting you an extension to two years, Elder,” his father said. “I don’t much care for these eighteen-month missions. When I went on my mission, it was almost three years.”

  “William,” his mother said, tapping him on the arm. “Don’t scare the boy. Goodness, who wants to be out longer than they have to be?”

  Thank you, Mom.

  “I’ll think about it, Da— President.” He had no intention of staying out one minute past his five-hundred-and-fortieth day. He wouldn’t do this at all if he’d had his ’druthers, but he’d never had his ’druthers, so thinking about it was useless. He’d go, he’d do a good job, he’d come home and get on with his life—

  —which would include finding a nice girl to marry in the temple, getting an education, having kids, finding a good job, and getting on the fast track to bishop, then stake president, like his dad.

  Oh, yes, his whole life had been scripted, and long before he was born.

  He caught sight of a woman, one he knew from San Diego Mesa where he’d gone for summer and fall semesters after graduating from high school, a teacher, actually. He hadn’t taken any of her classes, but he’d noticed her.

  Oh, yes, he’d noticed her.

  It was hard not to considering she’d twirled a ten-inch sacrificial knife in her fingers while strutting down the hall to her office in the anthropology department. Whistling.

  Short skirt, double-breasted suit jacket, high heels.

  Long straight black hair to her waist.

  A scent that teased his nose and made him breathe deeply.

  Half Japanese, half Chicana.

  She’d sought him out a few days later and plopped herself down in a chair at the table in the library where he usually studied. She struck up a conversation with him, but it didn’t take very long before he knew he had to get away from her.

  Fast.

  “Bryce!”

  He suppressed a groan when she strutted toward him (she didn’t walk any other way), a mischievous smile on her face that his body responded to oh, so very inappropriately.

  Please, no. Not this. Not now.

  “How are you?” she enthused and took his hand in both of hers, caressing his palm with a fingertip. He managed not to suck in a sharp breath.

  “I’m fine, Ms. Yoshida. You?”

  “That’s Elder Kenard now, Miss,” his father interjected with a bland smile.

  Not in the least bit slow, she cocked an eyebrow at Bryce’s father and said, “Ah, I see. Mormon missionary, very good. I get it. You must be Dad.”

  “Yes, I am and we prefer the term Latter-day Saints,” said President Kenard with a trace of disapproval and laying his hand over the knot comprised of her two hands and Bryce’s one. The grip broke and Bryce felt the brush of cool air on his skin where hers had been and missed it.

  “I know,” she returned. “I say tomato, you say tomahto.” She turned back to Bryce, dismissing Bryce’s father as if he were nothing more than a lazy student. Amazing. Bryce had never seen anyone simply dismiss him out of hand. “Whereya headed?”

  “Scotland,” Bryce muttered.

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Oh, really! I’d spend more time there but shit, it’s cold and wet, especially up there in the highlands. No place for a San Diegan—at least not without a naked body to snuggle up with at night. Can you request a reassignment?”

  “Ah, no.”

  His father cleared his throat, which prompted her to glance back at him. The corner of her mouth tucked in and up when she saw the lowering of the bushy orange-and-white eyebrows. She looked back at Bryce, reached out and took him by the lapels, straightened them a bit.

  “Don’t forget what we talked about, ’kay?”

  Bryce gulped and she laughed before vanishing in a whirl of energy. He tracked her until she was out of sight.

  “What did you talk about with her, Elder?”

  “An English lit assignment,” he replied vaguely, feeling both his parents watch him carefully. Feeling guilty because he’d lied. And why.

  President Kenard harrumphed his disbelief, but said
nothing more about it, for which Bryce was eternally grateful. Finally his boarding time was called. His mother hugged him and his father shook his hand.

  “Remember to call on Mother’s Day, Bryce,” she called after him.

  “I will, Mom,” he called back, surprised at his sudden melancholy at leaving his mother, who never seemed to be disappointed in him at all. He’d never noticed that until right that moment.

  Once he settled in his seat at the window, his brain began to whirl.

  “Now, Son, don’t be upset, but your mother and I won’t be taking you to the MTC ourselves. We think it’s best you go alone and begin to lean on the Lord for your strength.”

  “Oh, I think I’ll be all right, Dad.”

  Yes, more than all right, thanks.

  “Bryce, I saw the way you looked at me the other day. You’re not my student and you aren’t likely to be, so why don’t you and I have dinner together?”

  “Ms. Yoshida, I really don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  “You’re right and I agree. Let’s skip dinner and get straight to the fucking. Here’s my address and bring condoms. You’re twice as big as I am, Bryce, and you are a beautiful, beautiful man. I can only imagine what you could do to me in bed.”

  Bryce couldn’t breathe. “I’m only eighteen.”

  “Oh, even better! I’m thirty.”

  “Ms. Yoshida, I’m LDS. I don’t—”

  “Oh, a Mormon! Can I translate that to virgin? Please say yes.”

  “Um, well—”

  “Oh, hallelujah and glory be. Initiation of a virgin. Don’t tell me you’re saving yourself for some little twit who didn’t have the good sense to go get laid before saying I do—”

  Bryce remained silent.

  “Ah, okay. Huh. Interesting.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Yoshida.”

  You have no idea how sorry.

  “Is there nothing I can say to get you to my house tonight? Or any night? Or day? Or my office?”

  He paused. “Erm, no.”

  “Well, shit.”

  He flinched.

  “I apologize. You don’t like cursing, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Oooh, I just want to take you home and eat you up. Okay, Bryce. You win.”

  He could smell her perfume when she arose from her chair, then swung one elegant hip around the corner of the table. Two steps and she was at his side, one hand on the back of his chair, one braced on the tabletop, her mouth brushing his ear.

  “You’ve got a raging hard-on, Bryce,” she whispered. “You want to fuck me so badly you can feel it and I do mean fuck. Like, hard. Up against a wall. Rocking the bed. I hope your God can give you whatever it is you’re looking for and fast, so you can get on with what you were made to do. It’d be a damn shame for you to wake up one day and realize you’d spent your best years chasing a myth.”

  He sucked in a deep breath, drowning in a strange combination of lust and guilt. She pushed away from him, chuckling, then strutted back out of the library.

  “Get thee behind me, Satan,” he whispered halfheartedly as he watched the elegant sway of her hips.

  “Get thee behind me, Satan,” he whispered wholeheartedly, willing himself to put it out of his mind with the same discipline he’d practiced since before he knew what that was.

  JORDACHE JEANS

  January, 1985

  Giselle: almost 15

  Knox: barely 16

  Sebastian: 18

  Giselle sat in the back of the room in a corner, her arms crossed over her chest. The Young Women’s president droned on about their goals, getting them approved, accomplishing them. For what? A medallion necklace she didn’t even like?

  Susan Mendenhall had set a goal of reading a two-hundred-page book. That was a goal? Giselle had two-hundred-page books for breakfast with a little left over for lunch if she stopped reading at just the right spot.

  Now, lose sixty pounds? That was a goal. Not that she would ever make her dreams and desires known to the perky, the popular, the pretty girls who surrounded her on Sundays and looked at her with a slight curl to their carefully glossed lips.

  “Today’s lesson is on chastity,” said Sister Bremmer with a brightness that Giselle supposed had to have come from having obeyed all the rules, having never messed up. Nobody could be that happy if they’d ever done so much as swiped a peanut from the bin at Milgram’s.

  As for Giselle, well, it was too late for that, what with her midnight forays with Sebastian.

  “ . . . necking and petting . . . ”

  What did that mean, necking and petting? Was that what she and Knox did? Just yesterday he’d slid his tongue in her mouth and touched hers. That felt so good—and in such a different way—she knew it had to be bad and it gave her leftover shivers when she thought about it.

  She raised her hand. “Sister Bremmer?”

  “Yes, Giselle?”

  “What is necking and petting? I mean, what happens?”

  “Well, um . . . ”

  The other girls burst out in knowledgeable titters. Sister Bremmer stumbled over her words and blushed. Giselle thought she might just like to melt into the floor. She looked down at the carpet and blinked tears back when Susan cast her a contemptuous glance.

  “If you don’t know,” she murmured under the laughter, “then Knox isn’t a real boyfriend, is he?” The titters turned into peals and shrieks of laughter.

  Sister Bremmer calmed the class, but never actually answered Giselle’s question. If she’d caught Susan’s remark, she didn’t betray it in any way.

  Not that she would’ve reprimanded her for it if she had.

  Giselle picked at her hand-me-down dress, the dull brown of it making her feel as dowdy as her classmates did when she stood next to them in their pretty clothes and perfect hair that Giselle didn’t know how to mimic.

  Class didn’t let out for another agonizing thirty minutes and Giselle tuned out most of the lesson. Meaningless words to her. If she couldn’t visualize it, she couldn’t avoid doing it. If no one would tell her what was what, how did she know when the line—what line? where?—had been crossed?

  About the only thing she really knew was bad was when the boy put his penis in the girl’s vagina.

  Yeah, that was bad. Her mother had lectured her on that over and over again, so she understood the basic concept. Why anybody would want to get that close remained a mystery to Giselle and, furthermore, what happened when the boy’s penis was in the girl’s vagina? Romance novels were no help; the love scenes weren’t actually described using any language Giselle knew. Even sneaking her Aunt Dianne’s copy of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) did nothing to enlighten her.

  She now knew a whole lot about a whole lot of sexual things, but absolutely nothing about the mechanics, logistics, or what it felt like. Still. And she’d never seen an uglier word than “orgasm” in her life. It didn’t sound any better than it looked.

  Chastity must have some other components, but it definitely meant refraining from putting tab A into slot B. Then she decided that if it wasn’t important enough to be explained in Young Women’s, it must not be bad.

  “ . . . self-abuse . . . ”

  Yeah, and that was another one. The only thing Giselle could visualize was a person slugging himself in the face with his fist and surely it didn’t mean that . . . ? If it had been mentioned in any book she’d ever read, it hadn’t been called “self-abuse,” that was for sure.

  Giselle waited until the other girls left the room, dawdling over the task of gathering her things.

  “Giselle.”

  She looked up, startled at the hand on her shoulder and she pulled away.

  Giselle, you fat little pig. Don’t touch me; I don’t want to catch your fat.

  Giselle figured if Aunt Trudy could get fat from her, then everybody else could, too. Sister Bremmer sat beside her, careful not to touch her again, which confirmed her feelings
about that.

  “Giselle, has your mother talked to you about—about, um, chastity?”

  “Yes,” Giselle drawled warily, wondering again what chastity actually meant to Sister Bremmer and if her mother really had told her everything. “She said making love was only between a man and a woman who are married and who love each other.”

  “And?”

  “And . . . ” Giselle trailed off, not understanding what else Sister Bremmer expected of her, “ . . . that it was to make babies.”

  Her teacher smiled then. “Right. And that’s all it’s for.”

  Well. Her mother hadn’t gone so far as all that, but Giselle could appreciate her teacher’s need to put the brakes on the conversation.

  “I still don’t understand what necking and petting are. And self-abuse?”

  She cleared her throat. “You need to ask your mother.”

  No, thanks. The minute Giselle got curious and started asking questions, Knox would have to go live with Sebastian.

  “Okay.”

  It didn’t brighten her day any to walk down the hall toward the chapel for sacrament meeting and see the same PerkyPopularPretty girls gathered like groupies around Sebastian and Knox. Susan flirted shamelessly with a miserable-looking Knox until he saw Giselle and broke away from the crowd to meet her halfway.

  “Save me,” he quipped, dropping his arm around her shoulder. “Not a brain cell amongst them.”

  Well, Giselle didn’t know if that was true or not, but at that moment, she preened when she felt the nastiness rippling her way. She did have one thing the other girls did not, that they wanted, that they hated her for having:

  Knox Hilliard.

  Not to mention her access to Sebastian Taight. Any girl who wanted Sebastian’s time or attention had to get it through Giselle, but Giselle had stopped granting that particular favor a year ago.

  “Giz, they’re using you to get to me and then they ridicule you behind your back. Stop feeding them. You’re too good, too smart, too savvy to play their games.”