Total pages in book: 44
Estimated words: 41577 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 208(@200wpm)___ 166(@250wpm)___ 139(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 41577 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 208(@200wpm)___ 166(@250wpm)___ 139(@300wpm)
He rubbed his eyes. “You should’ve gone home with your mom.”
“You can’t mean that.”
He returned to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of scotch and then downed the contents in a single gulp. “I’ve spent the last six years telling myself I was in the right and that your mom was just paranoid. Then you show up here and…I can’t even say it.”
“You think she was right about you?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore. When I saw you at the museum it was like waking up after having been asleep my whole life. Then later, in your room, when you asked for a hug and I was finally able to hold you, I couldn’t get close enough. I wanted to live inside that feeling. I chalked it up to missing you.”
My father poured another whisky but didn’t drink it.
“I got hard later that night just thinking about your mouth. That’s why I put on the video. I convinced myself I was projecting old feelings for Charlotte onto you.”
Gently, I pried the glass from his hand and then kissed his palm. The divot between his brows looked deeper than I was used to seeing it. I was giving him wrinkles. Good, I thought. Let me mark his outsides as permanently as he’d marked my insides. If he was going to make me leave, at least there’d be some physical evidence that I had been here.
He brushed his thumb over my cheekbone. “You know the saying, when something is so wrong it feels right? This wasn’t like that. It didn’t feel wrong, which tells you all you really need to know. I’m exactly what your mother thinks I am.”
My mother had called him a monster. Granted, if anyone had firsthand experience with monsters, it was her. I wanted to crawl out of my skin thinking about what her own father had done to her as a child. Still, that didn’t mean she was right about mine.
I, myself, had been eaten by a monster earlier that night.
My father was not a monster.
“No, you’re not. She thought you were going to abuse me, and that’s not what this is at all. We love each other. We just love each other differently than most people.”
“Different is just a nicer way of putting it.”
I pressed my hands to his chest. “Is that why you won’t have sex with me? Because you think it’ll prove her right?”
“What I’ve done has already proven her right a thousand times over.” He guided my arms to my sides and then kissed my forehead, as if that simple fatherly gesture were enough to soothe me. “I shouldn’t have let this go on. That was my mistake. I’m sorry I let you believe I could be the father you needed.”
Panic scratched along my spine at the finality in his words. “But you are. You’re exactly what I need.”
“No, sweetheart.” His voice splintered. “You deserve someone who’s capable of loving you like a normal father.”
“I don’t want a normal father. I want my father. I want you.”
A small spark of hope ignited and then fizzled in his eyes. He looked defeated.
My mother was dead-wrong about him, but she was right about one thing: there was no going back for either of us. It didn’t matter if he never touched me again. We’d altered each other irrevocably, like mixed paint on a palette. You couldn’t take violet and separate it back into blue and red. Once blended, that was it, the colors persisted.
I reached for him again, and he guided my hands away. My eyes filled with tears. I fought to keep them there, convinced that I wouldn’t be able to remain standing if he saw me crack.
But I was already broken.
As desperate as I was to be with him, I couldn’t bear the thought of my father hating himself for loving me too much, or too intensely, or whatever my mother would accuse him of next.
We were either in this together, completely and unabashedly, or not at all.
“You say you can’t love me like a normal father. Then don’t. Love me like a father and a lover and a mentor and everything else, because I need all of you. If you can’t give me that, then I don’t want any of it. Loving you halfway hurts too much.”
I turned to go. He caught my arms, his grip tight enough to pinch through the terrycloth. For a second, I thought he was going to kiss me. Please, I thought. Kiss me. Ask me to stay. I held my breath and waited for him to make a choice.
He released me.
A sob shook my chest. There was no stopping the flow of tears.
I wiped my eyes and stepped away from my father, who looked like he’d aged ten years in the last ten seconds.
“I guess this is goodbye then,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even. “At least I got to say it this time. That has to count for something.”