“Babe, where are you going? Seriously, stop. Get back into bed, right this instant. That’s a command, mister, and I expect you to follow it.”

“You know I can’t, Becky.”

“Can’t? That’s a totally stupid word. Of course, you can. You’re Garrett Wallace, remember? You can do any old thing you want. You can do anything, baby, so climbing back into bed with me should be easy peasy. See? Problem solved. Can’t argue with logic like that.”

Garrett hunched over, his elbows resting on his knees and his head resting in his hands. He hadn’t even been up for five minutes yet, and here he was, fending off the probably well-meaning barrage of demands of one Becky Silver. He gave her the benefit of the doubt—probably because she was his girlfriend and last time he checked you were supposed to give your girlfriend the benefit of the doubt—but he didn’t really feel like it was warranted. He didn’t get the feeling that she was trying to look out for his best interests, which made it hard not to assign all sorts of unpleasant and unsavory interior motives and agendas to her pleas for his return to their bed. No, not their bed, his bed. It was his bed, although you’d never know it by the frequency with which she chose to sleep in it. Lately he was starting to get the uncomfortable feeling that she was trying to move in right under his nose. It was like she thought that if she just moved her shit in a little bit at a time, moved her shit in and then eventually moved herself in, he wouldn’t even notice. It was like she thought he would just keep on trucking the same way he’d always done and that he’d be none the wiser about her now being a mostly permanent resident of his swanky Denver, Colorado loft. And was that strange? Was that out of the ordinary for a girl to do, or was it just par for the course once you started dating girls over the age of twenty-one? He’d heard all of his friends do plenty of bitching about the different kinds of crazy girls there could be, but this was the first time he’d experienced any of it for himself. And the real bitch of it was that Becky was acting like it was the most normal thing in the world. More than that, she was acting like nothing was actually happening at all, like she was just going about her business the way any other female would have. For a relatively smart guy, which was something Garrett liked to think he was, he looked at Becky’s actions and felt more than a little bit perplexed. Perplexed and uneasy, like maybe he’d been dating some version of the chick from Fatal Attraction. It sounded crazy, crazy and totally farfetched, but then again, didn’t that kind of thing always sound farfetched? Right up until the moment when the crazy chick tried to kill you?

“Babe? Is your strategy just to ignore me? Because you should know, that doesn’t really work on me. I’m pretty damned persistent when I want to be.”

“No, Becky, I’m not trying to ignore you. I’m sorry. I’ve just got a lot on my mind, okay?”

“That’s all the more reason for you to come back to bed, though! Sounds like the perfect way to distract yourself from your troubles to me. And believe me, I can make you forget just about anything.”

“That’s alright, Becky.”

“Oh, I don’t think you’re taking me seriously, but you will. By the time I’m done with you, you won’t even remember your own name.”

As she spoke, Becky crawled across the length of Garrett’s massive king-sized bed, then snaked her arms around his neck in a move he had no doubt she believed to be seductive. Too bad for her, to him if felt like she was trying to suffocate him, like she was going to choke him out or something if she didn’t get her way. All of the sudden, he couldn’t stand being near her. He didn’t want to be touched, didn’t want to be touched by anyone, and the fact that she couldn’t see that made him want to scream. How well could this chick really know him if she couldn’t see that? How well could she really know him if she couldn’t feel that need to be left alone? And then there was the chance that she did see it and just didn’t give a damn. That didn’t seem like it was outside of the realm of possibility, as unattractive as it was. Even though he had no evidence to support this idea, it was enough to make him shrug her arms off of him and stand up, moving far away enough from the bed that she couldn’t have captured him again if she’d wanted to. And he had no doubt that she wanted to. He could hear it in the whiney tone her voice took on; he could see it in the pronounced pout on her face when he finally turned to look at her.

“Alright, I give. What’s with you, Garrett? You were no fun at the bar last night; you were almost rude to my friends; you ignored them so much; and now you’re acting like a douche. What’s your deal?”

“My deal, Becky, is that I have to go and meet with my father, and I don’t want to. My deal is that I needed to stay in and get to bed early last night and you completely ignored me when I told you that. My deal is that I need you to leave me alone so that I can take a shower and get dressed and see what in the hell brought my dad here all of the way from L.A. Does that about sum it up for you?”

For a minute, Garrett was absolutely sure that Becky was going to jump up off of the bed and start hollering at him. He was so sure of it, in fact, that he actually took a step backwards, lifting his arms in a warding off gesture, as if doing that would be enough to keep her still. In this respect, however, he was off the mark because instead of throwing the tantrum he was expecting, she hung her head in shame. Initially he thought it was a lot better than her freaking out on him, but as the moments ticked by, he decided he wasn’t quite sure. See, if she’d started screaming and carrying on, he could have told her off and been done with it. With this silent thing, on the other hand, he couldn’t do that. If he’d started fussing at her or giving her grief at all, it would only have proved her assertion that he was acting like a douche was true. What the silence did, was force him to kneel down in front of her and comfort her, using up time he honest to God just didn’t have. Her face was turned down to her lap now that she was sitting on the edge of his bed, and he really did have to crouch down to make her look him in the eye.

“Hey. Hey, Becky, come on. Would you look at me please?”

“No,” she answered sulkily, making him want to put his fist through a wall, although that was something he would—of course—never do. “I don’t like the way you’re talking to me.”

“I know, baby,” he cajoled while simultaneously gritting his teeth. “I’m sorry. You’re right, I’ve been pretty rough these last couple of days.”

“You really have, you know.”

“I know, babe, and I’ll do better. It’s just my dad coming, you know? It stresses me out big time. We haven’t been together all that long—”

“Seven months!” she interjected indignantly, as if that were a seriously long amount of time for a relationship to go on. “I wouldn’t call that nothing, Garrett.”

“Right, no, I didn’t mean it was nothing. All I was trying to say was that—in that time—you’ve never really seen me try to deal with my dad, but I’m here to tell you it’s not an easy thing. He’s very particular, my dad. He likes things in a certain way.”

“Sounds like somebody I know,” Becky grumbled, pulling the bedsheet up to her chin in a move that somehow managed to look haughty. “You and your father must be an awful lot alike.”

“We’re not.”

“Well, it sounds—”

“We’re not, okay? Just leave it.”

“Fine, whatever.”

“He’s very exacting, and he doesn’t come to visit just to visit. If he took the time to come out here from L.A., he’s got a reason for it, and it won’t be a small one. He wants to talk to me, and me being late to meet him isn’t going to start things off well. Do you understand? I mean honestly, Becky, do you get it? I need to go. I should have been in the shower five minutes ago at least. It’s not that I don’t want to get back in bed with you. Believe me, nothing sounds more appealing. I just can’t. I can’t do it, not right now, anyway.”

“Okay.”

Her answer was so surprising to him that he didn’t answer her; he just knelt there with a dumb look on his face while he waited for the other shoe to drop. That right there, that moment specifically, was when he realized that this was not the girl for him. It was true that they had been together for several months and that for a lot of women that was more than enough to know that things were either going somewhere or they weren’t. Odds were that Becky had been thinking the two of them were really going somewhere for a while now, but this was honestly the first time he’d ever taken the time to consider it for himself. It was a bitch of a time for it, too, and something he couldn’t deal with at the moment, but he was also smart enough to know that at some point, and some point soon, he was going to have to end things with her. Six, seven months, and now he was realizing it was time to go their separate ways. Just another shitty thing to pile on top of a meeting with his dad that he was dreading more than he wanted to admit. Christ, he needed to get out of here. Ideally, he would get out of here and just keep going, get out of the state and to some place where nobody knew him at all. That was if he could leave his father’s Wallace legacy behind. It was an unlikely thing, and an illogical thing to wish for, but seeing as it was just a fantasy, it didn’t actually have to be realistic, now did it?

“Okay?” he asked weakly, a lackluster response if ever there was one. “Are you sure about that? You know I’m saying that I’ve gotta go, right?”

“Of course, I do,” Becky said curtly, the tone of her voice making it clear that she was dangerously close to losing her shit again. “I’m not an idiot, alright? Just go. I’ll let myself out.”

“Um, okay…”

“What, you don’t trust me enough for that? I can’t even take a shower at your place when you’re done?”

“No,” he answered quickly, doing a last-minute sidestep around this new minefield of a fight just in the knick of time. “Sorry. You can definitely shower here. Like I said, my head’s not really here right now.”

“Sure, fine. Whatever. Good luck with your dad. You better call me when you’re done. Like as soon as you’re done. If you make me wait, you’re going to be one sorry man.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he answered quietly, gulping a little bit as he did so. “I’ll certainly keep that in mind. I gotta go now, alright?”

Garrett was pretty sure he couldn’t have gotten out of there fast enough, which was saying a lot considering the fact that he had no desire to meet with his dad in the first place. He was in between a rock and a hard place, and for the first time in all of his life, he felt that he truly understood the meaning of that saying. He could feel the pressure of things bearing down on him, bearing down on his chest so that he felt he wouldn’t be able to breath the way he was supposed to for much longer. Maybe he’d crash his classic sports car on the way to the restaurant and get out of meeting with his dad that way. It was not lost on him that wishing for a wreck over meeting with one’s father wasn’t the ideal scenario, but that didn’t make it any less true. It was so true, in fact, that he was actually sort of disappointed when he pulled up to the restaurant’s valet line completely unscathed.

Once he was there, there were no more excuses not to go inside and see his father, who he could already see sitting in a table right beside a window. Garrett knew without having to be told that his dad would have insisted on that table, and if the unfortunate hostess had the gall to say it was already reserved for somebody else, that hostess would get chewed out in a massive, unforgettable way.

Good ol’ dad had a scowl on his face, a real just-ate-a-lemon expression that surely made all of the employees in the restaurant every bit as nervous and uncomfortable as it did him. He felt like a dead man walking, and yet there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Instead of breaking away and hauling ass out of the place, he sat down in the seat across from his father. He sat there just the way he was supposed to, the way all good boys would. Up close he could see that his dad’s mood was even darker than he had first supposed whilst glimpsing him through the window, and internally, he began to cringe. This was one of the old man’s darkest moods, one of the ones that had always scared the shit out of him as a little boy. He cleared his throat, determined to make the best of it, but before he even got the chance to say hello, his dad started to do the talking for both of them.

“You’re late.”

“Right,” Garrett said, his fists clenching underneath the table while the top half of him remained calm. “Nice to see you, Pops.”

“Pops?” Jack Wallace, Garrett’s most formidable of all fathers. “Jesus, Garrett. Don’t talk like that. You sound like one of those gutter rats.”

“Gutter rat, huh? Nice. You know that’s what Mom called her dad. I don’t think it really screams gutter rat.”

“Sure, your mom did that. Your mom did lots of things, Garrett, that doesn’t mean any of them were worth a damn. If we’re going to spend time together, I’d prefer you not use any of her little...colloquialisms. Deal?”

“Fine, Dad. Sure, whatever you say. Maybe it’s best we just get down to business, you know? Get down to whatever it is that brought you here.”

“Hold on. We’ve got drinks coming.”

“Drinks? Christ, Dad, it’s only noon! And that’s because I was late. Don’t you think it’s a little early for wine?”

“Of course not!” he barked. His face wearing an expression of ultimate contempt. “Besides, who said anything about wine? We’re not drinking wine, boy. We’re drinking whiskey, boy. That’s what men drink, or did your mom give you a different impression about that as well?”

“No, Dad, she didn’t. We probably shouldn’t talk about Mom, don’t you think? She’s never been your favorite topic of conversation, and seeing as I’m not going to jump on the ‘let’s all hate Maurine’ bandwagon anytime soon, it’s probably best left alone.”

“Fine,” his father answered dryly, accepting the most excellently timed glass of liquor delivered by their server and taking a large, saliva-inspiring swig. “Whatever you say. You decide when you’re ready to see your mom for what she is. That one’s entirely on you.”

“Great. So what did you come here for? I mean what brings you to Denver? You don’t really come this way very often. Truth be told, I was sort of surprised to hear that you were going to be here at all.”

“Believe me, it wasn’t my first choice. I’m never thrilled by the prospect of hanging out where a bunch of hippies live. I’m here because we need to talk.”

“Okay, I kind of figured that much, but talk about what?”

“Business, son. What else? I’m here for business.”

“What kind of business?”

“You remember us talking about how I was going to need you to come in on something with me in the future?”

“I do,” Garrett answered hesitantly, anything but pleased with the direction this conversation was taking and also totally unable to stop it.

“It’s time to make good, son.”

Shit. Shit. Of course, this was why his dad was here. Now that he was hearing it, Garrett knew he should have seen it coming from a mile away, but somehow, it hadn’t ever occurred to him that the conversation would be this one. It made sense, of course, now that it was out in the open. It made so much sense that it was clearly the only reason his dad would have traveled from his massive chrome tower to the place where all of the “hippies” lived. He only did things like this when he was going to get something out of it—and when there was something like that on the line, Papa Wallace was willing to go great distances indeed. Because the thing about Garrett’s dad was that, in person, he was almost impossible to say no to. He was a deal closer. It was his thing, and he would get that deal closed regardless of whether the person on the other end felt good about it. It was something Garrett knew his dad was proud of, knew it in the vague kind of a way that most children were aware of their parents’ flaws, but it was also something he’d always tried not to think too hard about. He didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to think about it because when he did he had to admit to himself that he didn’t like his dad all that much. It was something that many men his age, thirty-two and quickly approaching thirty-three, had had to come to terms with and most of them had done, either that or they’d just kicked those disappointingly less-than-perfect parents out of their lives entirely. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you looked at it) for Garrett, living in a different state and rarely seeing his dad made it shockingly easy to just overlook his overall shittiness and instead just think of his dad as a distant creature that wasn’t really an actual flesh and blood person. But now? Now the shittiness was being directed at him, and he knew there was very little he was going to be able to do to stand up to it. He was in the amateurs while his dad was playing in the major leagues.

“Time to make good?” Garrett asked in a vague voice, taking an unwanted but greatly needed sip of his own drink while focusing his efforts in on playing dumb. “Not sure I know what you mean.”

“Bullshit, you don’t know what I mean. We had a discussion, you and me, had it a long time ago, and it was made perfectly clear that you would be expected to pay back some of what you were given.”

“What I was given. Right, Dad, sure. What I was given for being your son? I’m assuming that’s what you’re referring to.”

“You’re damn straight, that’s what I'm referring to. You’ve been raised with a fucking silver spoon firmly in your mouth from the moment your mom pushed you out, and you’re still sucking on it. You think you would have all of this if it weren’t for where you came from? You think you would have gone to the schools you went to, would have gotten the job you’re working in now?”

“Do you even know what job I work right now? I mean really, Dad, do you? When was the last time you and I had an actual conversation? I don’t even remember the last time I saw you, for Christ’s sake, and now you’re talking to me about making good. Not your best delivery, Dad, if you want to know the truth.”

As Garrett watched, his dad slammed back what little remained of his drink and then snapped in the direction of their poor server, demanding a second one. Two glasses of straight liquor on under ten minutes before noon. From the looks of it, an outsider might have thought it was him being railroaded and manipulated instead of Garrett. When the great and powerful Jack Wallace turned his eyes back on his son, Garrett knew that he was sunk. He didn’t yet know how low his dad would go to get this particular thing. It was something he would later wish he had never been forced to know, but he understood that this was a battle he was never going to win.

“You want to get right down to it?” his dad said in a flat, loveless voice, his bright blue eyes that looked so much like Garrett’s own roaming over him with a contemptuous twinkle. “Here’s the deal. I’ve bought a company in New York. It’s a small company, but it’s been getting a whole lot of press lately and I’ve got plans for it. I’m going down on Monday.”

“You’re moving to New York? Good for you, Dad.”

“Don’t be a smartass, Garrett. You know I hate that fucking city. And there’s no chance I’d live in the same city as your mom, you know that as well. No, I’m going to make an appearance, do the whole inspirational speech thing.”

“And then?”

“Well that’s where you come in, son. You’re coming with me. You’re coming with me on Monday, and then you’re going to stay there for me. I’m not moving to New York, but you are.”