Chapter 1: Never The Best: Chapter 1

‘Y‘all owe me. I got in there,’ I chuckled, my arm around Sage. ‘Or rather in her.’

Sage groaned. ‘You’re such an asshole, Rhett.’

‘I know, darlin’.’ Sage and I had been dating on and off for a couple of years. I was her first, and she was mine, but we weren’t planning on being each other’s last. We were seventeen, and life was too short or maybe too long to be stuck with the same girl forever.

‘I can’t believe you fucked Fat Pearl,’ Gary said in awe.

‘You said I couldn’t do it, and I showed you I could. She was easy. Real easy.’

She wasn’t. She’d made me work for it. Pearl was naïve but not stupid—in fact, she was brilliant. I had gotten close to her because of our shared love of reading, and we’d started a book club for two. In three months, I’d read more books I loved than ever before.

‘How the heck did you do it? She doesn’t even talk to anyone,’ Larry wondered.

‘Did you have to roll her in flour to find the wet spot?’ Gary cackled.

A part of me wanted to tell Gary to shut the fuck up. But Rhett Vanderbilt, the cool dude and future playboy, was too young and too much of a douche to fuck with his carefully curated image of callous cruelty.

‘It was virgin pussy, wasn’t it? Bet she was tight,’ Larry leered.

She was a virgin, sweet, and, fuck…sensuous. I, who prided myself on having slept with more girls than any other guy in my circle of friends, had been shocked at how sex could be emotional and beautiful, even while it was dirty. I wanted her again and again and again. But I couldn’t have her because choosing Pearl as my girlfriend would shatter my standing in the high school hierarchy.

‘She was a bet, and yeah, she was tight, so it made up for…you know, how she looks,’ I said, but the words tasted like ash in my mouth. Pearl had looked stunning naked, with silky skin, amazing tits, and an ass that was made for—I reined in my thoughts before I got a hard-on just thinking about her. ‘Now, pony up, assholes. Hundred bucks from each of you.’

That was when I heard Sage gasp.

I turned and saw Pearl standing by my pool gate, clutching a copy of The Grapes of Wrath. A few days earlier, she had told me she wanted me to read it and was convinced that I would love it.

There was no chance that she hadn’t heard me, because her beautiful, usually happy face was pale, and there were tears in her deep gray eyes. I wanted to apologize, but then Gary laughed, ‘Hey, Fat Pearl, my friend here give it to you good or what?’

I should’ve told him to shut up. I wanted to, but I didn’t.

‘You lucky girl,’ Sage added, joining in the fun. ‘Well, savor it, ’cause that’s the last time someone like Rhett is going to fuck your big ass.’

‘What are you doin’ here, Bumblebee?’ I knew she hated the nickname she’d gotten when she was a kid, dressed for Halloween as a bumblebee, and it had stuck. She’d been round and roly-poly. It was cruel, but that was life, yeah? ‘You come here for round two? I don’t do seconds, so you should run along.’

She held up the book in her hand and then shook her head before turning around and leaving.

I’d never in my life seen someone look as devastated as she did—not until then, or since. She was crushed. I had done that.

I woke up sweating, breathing hard. The nightmare swarmed inside me, making me nauseous.

I sat up, my heart pounding.

I’d had the same memory show up in my dreams on and off for years, but they’d become more frequent since Pearl Beaumont had returned to Savannah.

I looked at the clock on my bedside table. It was four in the morning. I could get another two hours of sleep before getting ready for the day, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. If Josie was in bed with me, I could’ve fucked her to get some respite, but I hadn’t been spending the night with her or fucking her for a while now.

How differently had my life turned out than I thought it would. When I was a seventeen-year-old asshole playing with the feelings of nice girls like Pearl—okay, so maybe only one nice girl; the others were sophisticated, like my fiancée Josie and my friend Sage—I’d thought I’d have the world at my feet.

On paper, I did.

I had a thriving business. Between the family wealth and my consulting firm, the Vanderbilt Trust had only increased in size. The Vanderbilts of Savannah were old-money aristocrats, our wealth a legacy carefully tended across generations. I now not only ran a successful business but also oversaw my family’s extensive portfolio, ensuring our fortune remained as formidable as our reputation.

Personally, my life was a shitshow.

Four months ago, Josie became pregnant with my baby. I’d had no choice but to propose to her, and we got engaged. Hell, the engagement party was in a week.

I’d known Josie all my life. We grew up together, and since she ended her engagement with Dylan Rafferty a year ago, she’d become part of my friends’ circle, and one night, when I’d had too much to drink, we had sex. That led to us casually dating, and I knocked her up. Before she crossed the twelve-week mark, though, she’d had a miscarriage. I’d been traveling and found out by text from my mother because Josie had been so distraught.

My first thought had been about the innocent child we’d lost, and it wasn’t until I saw Josie back home did I wished I’d waited to propose to her, as my Aunt Hattie had suggested. But Josie had told everyone and their mother, especially mine, that she was knocked up, and there was no way around that. A part of me wondered if she’d trapped me. A part of me wondered if she’d even been pregnant and then conveniently lost the baby. That thought made me feel like the seventeen-year-old prick I used to be. I wasn’t that boy anymore. Also, Josie had been so devastated that I’d pushed the thought out of my head. I couldn’t break off my engagement to a woman who had been expecting my baby and had cried for days after she lost the pregnancy. So, I let the status quo remain. We were now going to have an opulent engagement party and get married in a year.

I ran a hand through my hair and closed my eyes.

I’d always wanted to marry for love like my friend Royal recently had.

Royal Legere had married his best friend’s sister after what had seemed like an untenable and unending courtship. He was happy with Nevaeh, and as I’d stood with Noah, Nevaeh’s brother, as co-best man, I’d wondered if I’d be lucky enough to find the love of my life. Now, I knew that would never happen. I’d marry Josie and have the kind of marriage that so many men around me did—the kind Gary had entered with his father’s business partner’s daughter, Dixie May. The way Sage had been with the man her parents had deemed ‘appropriate’—the one she eventually had to divorce after ending up in the emergency room following yet another fight that turned physical.

The sad thing about my situation was that I’d always known I didn’t want what my parents had—a marriage based on what was suitable for the family.

George and Dolores Vanderbilt had a cold relationship, communicating only to discuss logistics around their appearances in society. That would now be my life, my marriage.

I didn’t want that, I silently screamed inside my head. I wanted…more out of life. I wanted a partner, a lover, a friend—someone who I trusted with myself. With Josie, it was all surface. The sex had been okay. The first drunken night hadn’t been memorable, as they never are. After that, it had been missionary all the way.

But I hadn’t been planning to marry her, so I didn’t care. But now we were engaged, and we were not compatible in bed. Josie wanted the lights out and to think about goddamn England while I fucked her. She didn’t participate. She didn’t make love. She faked her orgasms. She did what she had to do to make me think I was a great lover—but I wasn’t an idiot, and I knew that Josie wasn’t interested in sex, at least not with me. And that was fine. I just didn’t want her to be my wife. I liked sex. I enjoyed it. I’d had a lot of it—but since Josie, the whole fucking thing, pun intended, was a barren wasteland.

‘Why don’t you join Belle?’ Royal suggested when I’d told him that I was going to lose my mind being engaged to a woman who thought her duty was to be a serviceable hole for me.

Belle was a sex club in Savannah that no one talked about, but everyone knew about. A journalist had recently written a scandalous story about a senator who’d been a regular member.

Beau Bodine had been a member until he’d gotten married—for love. If that man could fall in love, that meant it was possible for anyone.

‘I don’t want to have sex with strangers. I want to have good sex with my spouse.’

‘Then I suggest you change your spouse,’ Royal advised.

He didn’t like Josie. Hell, none of the people I considered true friends did. Damn it, I didn’t even like Josie.

‘You know I can’t do that,’ I muttered.

The Vances, Josie’s family, and Vanderbilts shared deeply-rooted business ties that spanned generations, intertwined through land holdings, real estate ventures, and joint investments. The Vances, known for their real estate development firm, had often partnered with the Vanderbilts to transform Savannah’s historic properties into modern, lucrative ventures. It was a relationship built on old Southern alliances—equal parts mutual benefit and social expectation. This marriage was going to cement that alliance. My father and hers were fucking ecstatic.

‘I don’t get it, Rhett.’ Royal shook his head. ‘You’re a grown-ass man; live your life on your own terms.’

That was easier said than done, though, Royal had done it. He’d walked away from his family and only continued to have contact because of his grandmother. Once she passed, he’d stopped having anything to do with the Hilton Head Legeres. But I couldn’t do that. Family was important to me. My parents, my sister, and everyone expected me to behave like a Vanderbilt, and I had no choice.

Since I wasn’t getting any sleep, I got out of bed and decided to go for an early run. The air outside was heavy with the faint scent of azaleas and jasmine, the first signs of Savannah waking from winter. The pale blush of dawn was just beginning to bleed into the dark sky, and the streets were still quiet, save for the occasional hum of a distant car or the rhythmic chirp of crickets that hadn’t yet surrendered to the coming day.

I lived in the historic district, in the kind of house that tourists liked to snap pictures of—the one that made you think of long-dead cotton barons and gala balls under gaslit chandeliers. It was old-money Savannah through and through, with Greek Revival columns and wrought-iron railings that seemed too delicate to hold up under the weight of their age. The house had been in my family for generations, and though I owned it now, it felt more like a museum I was tasked with maintaining than a home. I grew up in this house, and when I was ready to find a place of my own, my father suggested I live here. My parents had moved to live on an expansive estate in the countryside in Richmond Hill, where we went to celebrate the holidays, as we’d have a full house with aunts and uncles and cousins. Their estate had an old plantation-style home and acres of land, including stables, a small lake, and even the remnants of old rice fields and outbuildings. I fucking hated that place almost as much as I hated the house I lived in.

As I turned off my street and headed toward Forsyth Park, the cobblestones beneath my feet felt slick with dew. The sprawling trees arched above me, their limbs heavy with foliage that swayed gently in the early morning breeze. The park was quiet at this hour, save for the occasional dog walker or a vendor setting up to sell fresh-cut flowers from a cart.

I fell into an easy rhythm, the steady slap of my sneakers against the pavement merged with the soft murmur of a world slowly waking up. Running usually cleared my head, but not today. My thoughts kept looping back to Pearl as they always did after the dream. Or was it a nightmare?

I hadn’t meant to, but my route took me toward my Aunt Hattie’s property on the edge of town. Harriet “Hattie” Odum’s home was sprawling, old plantation-style, and surrounded by acres of land she’d somehow managed to keep intact despite all the encroachments of modern development. It felt a little frozen in time, like out of a Flannery O’Connor story.

Since Pearl returned to Savannah, she was staying in a small cottage just beyond the line of camellias that bordered the estate. It was small, tucked back near the garden where Aunt Hattie’s roses would bloom in a riot of color later in the season. It was embraced by a wraparound porch with a couple of wicker chairs, a swing, and pale blue shutters the color of the Savannah River on a bright, sunny day. I didn’t slow down, but my eyes lingered, as did my thoughts.

I found it remarkable that she was closer to Aunt Hattie than I was, despite Pearl living in California for several years. Pearl left Savannah after high school and studied at Stanford.

No one blamed me for shaming her—everyone accused her of trying to fuck above her station, not societally, since the Beaumonts were as old and wealthy as the Vanderbilts—no, it was because of how she looked. The plump, dull girl deserved to be used for a bet. That had shamed me even more. Aunt Hattie hadn’t been reticent in telling me what a terrible human being she thought I was. But I’d been a young buck then and had not paid much attention to my crazy aunt. However, what I did stained my life—and me. I carried it with me like my own scarlet letter, carved into my soul. Now, fifteen years had passed, and the guilt was steady, my need for redemption growing just as firmly. And since Pearl was back in Savannah, I wanted nothing more than to make right the wrongs I’d done her.

I could only do that if she talked to me, which she didn’t. I’d tried, and she’d given me a blank look, said nothing, and extricated herself from my presence. Pearl had always had a spine of steel, and I had nothing but regret for what I did while high on youth and arrogance. Unlike me, she wasn’t going to submit to familial pressure. She’d once told me, when I’d been wooing her for that dumb bet, that she didn’t want any part of the Savannah society we’d grown up in. She’d said it with a fire in her eyes, a rare defiance that had fascinated me.

‘All that legacy nonsense,” she’d said, sitting cross-legged on the edge of the dock at her family’s summer house by the river where we used to meet up, where ultimately she’d given me her virginity. “It’s not a legacy, Rhett—it’s just an excuse to cling to a rotten past. You can call it Southern tradition if you want, but that doesn’t make it any less dark.”

I’d argued with her; of course, I did. At seventeen, I’d been so sure of myself, so convinced that it was our responsibility—our duty—to carry on what our families had built. “You can’t just turn your back on it, Pearl. It’s our history. It’s who we are.”

She’d laughed, low and bitter. “Are you sure? Our history is that of exploitation and slavery, of Jim Crow and the Klan.”

‘That was years ago; you can’t hold us responsible for the sins of our ancestors.’

‘You sure about that, Rhett? Look at how we live, look at our lives and those of the less fortunate. Have we really moved past the past?’

I thought I was protecting a legacy worth preserving, but maybe I’d only been hiding behind the weight of tradition. The conversation had stuck with me, even after all these years, though I didn’t want to admit why. Maybe it was because she’d been one of the few people brave enough to challenge me—or maybe because deep down, I’d known she was right. It was because of Pearl that I now contributed heavily to the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Planned Parenthood, and several other non-profit organizations my family would be shocked to learn I even knew about.

As I ran past her little cottage, I wondered who she had grown into. What had the past fifteen years done for her and to her?

She looked different, that’s for sure. No one would dare call Pearl big now. She was slender and elegant. Her auburn hair was cut in a sophisticated style and made her look like the finance executive she was. She wore skirt suits to work—I’d noticed that when I saw her at Savannah Lace. She worked there, and I’d been to the office a few times to meet with the CEO, who had contracted Vanderbilt Finance for a project. She elevated her five-foot-five body with high heels. She had an air of insouciance about her. I hadn’t seen her at any of the society events since she’d moved back three months ago—her brother, Cash, who I occasionally met at the country club, had told me how disappointed he, his wife, and his mother were that Pearl continued to shun society and embarrass them.

‘How on earth is she doing that?’ I demanded.

‘She refuses to behave like a Beaumont,’ Cash lamented. ‘Caroline has tried to get her to meet some women to socialize with, but she refuses, and hangs out with that Nina Davenport suffragette gang.’

Nina Davenport was the CEO of Savannah Lace, an all-woman design and architecture firm where Pearl was the director of finance.

‘Suffrage was a long time ago, Cash, since women have been voting since the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. Nina is a brilliant CEO, and Savanah Lace is involved with some of the biggest projects we’ve seen in this city,’ I remarked, annoyed with Cash. I had tremendous respect for Nina. My Aunt Hattie and she were close friends, and I would not have anyone tarnish their names.

‘Oh, please, don’t tell me you, too, believe in that nonsense.’

‘It’s not nonsense, Cash, it’s called progress.’

I had learned from my aunt that Pearl was close to Cash’s teenage daughters, which pissed off his wife, Caroline, as much as it did Cash. They worried that their daughters would become like their aunt. They should be so lucky.

When I saw a light flicker on in Pearl’s cottage, I felt like a creepy lecher, so I picked up my pace, not wanting to be caught gawking at her home.

The cool morning air stung my lungs as I pushed harder, like I could outrun the memory of her or the feeling in my chest that told me I still hadn’t figured out how to be the kind of man who was worthy of her forgiveness.