“Out,” I replied, my voice flat as a gravestone.
“Don’t come back here unless you plan to act like a man,” he said, then dropped back into the chair.
That’s when I snapped. “I’m more of a fucking man than you. Your own wife couldn’t stand you and left. She left me here with a goddamn monster.”
My father lurched out of the chair, the remote thumping to the floor and batteries rolling under the couch.
His face was angry, veins throbbing in his temple, mouth wet and trembling with words that wanted to be fists. “You little fuck. I should have left you at the hospital. I should have drowned you in the goddamn bathtub the minute I found out you were mine.”
I almost laughed. It was the same threats, the same spit-streaked litany of disappointment and hate. What was new was the way a part of me, a very small and haunting part, felt nothing at all.
“I gave you everything. I put a roof over your head. I showed you how to be strong. And all you do is whine and mouth off, just like her. Useless.”
He continued to advance. A slow, rolling threat.
“You’re drunk,” I spat. “You’re always drunk. Your threats don’t mean shit to me anymore. You don’t even know why you’re angry anymore.”
My father sneered, as if reading my mind. He knuckled his bloodshot eyes and jabbed a finger in my direction. “You think you’re better than this? Than me? You want to know what a real man does? He takes what he wants. He gets even, and he doesn’t whine about his fucking feelings.”
My jaw tightened, feeling the muscles jump in my cheek. “You ever think maybe that’s why everyone leaves you?” I asked, the words landing with less force than I meant.
My father just laughed. A dry, rattling sound.
“Yeah? Well, at least when I fucked up, I got something out of it.” He wiped his mouth withthe back of his hand and leaned in, voice dropping to a hiss. “You know what your problem is, Caiden? You got your mother’s softness in you. All that hope, all that wishing. That’s why she ran.”
The room spun a little, his voice, the TV, the tang of blood and rot all swirling together in a way that was almost psychedelic. I could see the rage in his eyes, but underneath it there was something else. Fear. Or maybe regret, but more likely just terror that I would become something he couldn’t control.
“You wanna act like a man?” he sneered. “Then you gotta kill what’s soft in you. You gotta break it before it breaks you. That’s all women are good for, son, breaking men. They’ll smile at you while they stick a knife in your gut, and they’ll walk away laughing. You need to be meaner. Maybe you might actually be loved if you’re meaner.”
My face went cold, skin stretched over bone, my mouth opening and closing but only spit and air emerging.
There was no winning. Not with my father, not with myself, not with Amelia, not even with the world. It was all just a sick, looping game, and every night I told myself I didn’t care, I didn’t want her, I didn’t feel, but then I dreamed of her and woke up wanting to set something on fire.
Maybe my father was right. Maybe I needed to be crueler. Perhaps I was only good at crippling hearts with my words and bleeding them out.
I had to get out. I was a human fire alarm, nerves screaming, every fiber in my body ready to start a riot.
I scraped together my wallet and a pack of crumpled Camels and walked out, not sure where I was going, only that it had to be away.
The cold hit me in the face, wind biting through my hoodie, but I liked the pain. It was real, uncomplicated, nothing to decode.
The streets were empty except for the blinking neon above Duffy’s, the only bar in a ten-mile radius that would serve a kid who could barely grow a beard.
My fake ID was a joke, Dante had made it on a laminator in the school library, but the bartenders at Duffy’s didn’t give a shit.
All they cared was that you didn’t puke on the pool table or start a fight you couldn’t finish.
I pushed through the door. The regulars were hunched like gargoyles around the bar, eyes glassy and indifferent.
I liked that about this place. Nobody cared who you were, or what you were running from. You slid money across the counter, and the bartender slid oblivion right back at you.
I took a seat at the end, near the jukebox, and nursed a whiskey Coke with both hands, staring at the TV above the bar. Some sitcom played to a captive audience of zero. I drank until my jaw unclenched, until the edges of my anger went fuzzy and loose.
After maybe forty minutes, I noticed her.
Lillian Langston, Amelia’s older sister.
She had already graduated high school, but I remembered seeing her when she still went to our school. She was three years older, so I never interacted with her much.
