Twenty-Seven

Damien

 

The silent hours that passed before the driveway crunched under the tires of Dahlia’s Jaguar were long and painful. The echoes of the past had swarmed me, all the memories coming to the forefront of my mind as I waited.

The grandfather clock in the hallway ticked loudly. It screamed out every second, each more aching than the last.

For the first time in years, I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to talk about my past, about the decisions that the people in my family had made. About why my father held the belief that women were weak. About why I carried such a dull pain with me almost constantly. About why I sometimes struggled to sleep.

About the scar that hugged my eye, the same one Dahlia traced with her gorgeous eyes every time she thought I wasn’t paying attention to her.

Unfortunately for her, I always paid attention to her.

It was addictive. Just like her.

“Hello?” Her voice tentatively sounded through my house.

“In the kitchen,” I called back.

The sound of heels clicking echoed through the silence. She entered the room with a groan, slumping a small, black backpack-style bag onto the table in front of me. “I think there are matchsticks in my eyes.”

“Busy night?” I asked, eyebrow raised.

“You could say that.” She grabbed the backpack back to her. “Let me go change, okay?”

I smiled as she turned and disappeared before I had any say in the matter. She looked absolutely exhausted thanks to the dark circles that shadowed beneath her eyes, and that gave me pause.

Was tonight the right night to tell her everything? She needed to sleep. The heartbreak of my family would still be there in the morning.

The tapping of my fingers against the countertop was dull. Was I saying that because I was putting it off? Perhaps. It was anybody’s guess. What I really needed was to get it over and done with.

“All right,” Dahlia said, padding barefoot into the kitchen. “Let’s go get comfy.” She flounced off into the living room before I could say anything—again.

I followed her in there. “Are you sure? You look tired.”

She spun, grabbed my hand and literally yanked me down onto the sofa with her. “I’m fine. You promised me.”

“I’m not sure I said those exact words.”

“Stop being awkward.”

“Now you know how I feel every time we have a conversation.”

She pursed her lips, but she was clearly hiding a smile by the twitching of them. “Stop it.”

I laughed, but it was hollow. Hollow right down to my goddamn gut. “Where do you want me to start?”

“At the end. That’s obviously the logical place.”

She was using sarcasm to bait me into spitting it out. Could she see how this made me feel? I was thirty fucking years old, and here I was, feeling like a damn kid in front of a haunted house.

Hell, the woman sitting in front of me was younger than me, but she was stronger, too. She’d lost her dad just months ago and was able to deal with that pain already.

Me? Years later, and I was still fucking struggling.

Dahlia’s indigo-blue eyes searched my face. Her soft, warm stare traced every inch of it until she lifted her gaze to mine. “You really have never spoken about it before, have you?”

“Never. Not once.”

“Even when you were younger?”

“Nobody ever cared enough to listen.” My words were bitter—twisted and angry. But the truth. So much the fucking truth.

“I care,” she whispered, brushing her thumb over my jaw.

I knew it. I believed her.

“My parents were childhood sweethearts. Like yours.” I pulled my gaze from her and rested it on the bay window. The curtains weren’t fully shut so the light from the half-moon crept in, illuminating the room with the help of the dim table lamp. “They met in high school but broke up during college. They didn’t exactly reconnect in the most normal way—my mom auditioned for a job at Goldies when Dad was first opening it.”

“No way.” A smile twitched her lips.

“Yep. I believe he said something along the lines of ‘Fuck this, nobody else is seeing the woman I love up on a stage,’ and married her. Just like that.”

“He was different then, huh?”

“No doubt about it. My mom made him a better person. A few years after they got married, I was born. Mom had helped him run the business up until that point, so she found it pretty boring to be home with me all the time with nothing to do. I think that was when the problems started—she wanted to put me in daycare when I turned one, just for a few hours a week, but Dad refused. He believed it was her duty to stay home with me. He’d just bought another club and didn’t have time to reintroduce her to all the ins and outs of the ones they owned. Professionally, it was getting better, but personally, it was turning to shit.”

I leaned back against the sofa and ran my fingers through my hair.

“They fought pretty much all the time. For years. But neither left, because they loved each other, even if they didn’t have a relationship. After I started school, my mom would take me to a ‘friends’ house. What I didn’t know then was that she was cheating on my dad. He worked all the time and didn’t pay her attention, so although she loved him…” I shook my head and laughed bitterly. “It was fucked up. He had her heart and the money, but they were both fucking miserable all the time. The guy she was seeing made her happy, and I was too young to understand it. Anyway, she got pregnant by him, and my dad kicked her out.”

“Was it definitely not your dad’s baby?”

I shook my head. “When I was older and asked Mom if there was a chance Perrie was Dad’s, she said no, because basically, at that point, they didn’t have sex anymore. There were no doubts.”

“Wow. Did they get divorced?”

“No. Mom didn’t want to marry this new guy. We moved in with him on the rougher side of town—or it was back then. She’d never intended for it to be serious, and the longer we lived with him, the more obvious it was that he was hoping my parents would divorce, Mom would get a good-sized settlement because of me, and then he’d marry her, divorce her, and get the money.”

“What a dick.”

That was one way to put it—and she hadn’t even heard the worst yet. “Well, my mother wasn’t innocent in it all. She fell down the social pole like a brick being dropped off a roof. That was her own fault. She should have guessed what he really wanted. Fact is, he wasn’t a nice guy. He was abusive to her, both verbally and physically. He never touched me, but he made it known that he hated me, while he pretended to dote on Perrie.”

“Pretended to?”

“She was his meal ticket. Looking back now, I think he intended to beat my mother into submission, claim full custody of her, and get the money that way.” I scratched my jaw, anger nudging at my consciousness. “She couldn’t leave, of course. She had nowhere to go, and the only money she had was the child support my father paid her. It was very little, just enough to get by on, because he knew what the other guy was like.

“I think Perrie was almost two when it all changed. I remember going downstairs for something. I might have been thirsty or just woken up by their arguments, but it was the first time I saw Roy hit my mother. I wasn’t an angry kid. I never had been, but the moment I saw him hit her, I understood why people got so angry.”

Dahlia’s eyes widened, and she placed her hand delicately on her chest.

“I acted on stupid, childish impulses. I screamed, ran toward him, and hit him with the nearest thing I could find, which was a remote control.”

“That’s…different.”

I shrugged, a slight smile on my face. “Like I said… it was impulse. And the reason for a black eye on his mugshot.”

Her lips tugged up to the side.

“Now, I wish I hadn’t done it.” My smile disappeared, and I let out a long breath. “I should have called nine-one-one before he knew I was there, but I didn’t. He grabbed me and threw me into the dining table for daring to touch him.”

She drew in a deep breath.

I tapped a finger to my scar. “I was a scrawny kid. I flew through the air like a fucking bullet, and I still don’t know how I didn’t get blinded that day. But, the corner of the table cut right through my skin.”

“Oh my God,” she breathed, covering her mouth with a shaky hand. “Your sister?”

“Woke up when she heard me screaming. By that point, my mother, who was almost unconscious on the floor…I don’t know. I guess her maternal instinct kicked in when she saw him hit me. Somehow, she got up and hit him with a glass vase from the coffee table. Knocked the bastard out cold.” Chills ran over my skin, forcing all the hairs on my arms and my neck to stand on end as the memories flooded me.

It was all momentarily real—the anger, the pain, the adrenaline.

Until Dahlia touched my face, and it all disappeared.

“I’m so sorry.”

“You didn’t do it,” I said wryly. “My mother called the police. Turned out Roy had been on the run from an incident several years earlier in another state and was living under an alias. He was arrested and convicted of a bunch of counts of abuse, attempted murder on my mom, and an actual murder charge from somewhere else. He’ll never get out of prison, if he’s even still alive.”

“Wow. So, what happened? Did you move back in with your dad?”

I nodded, taking her hand as it fell onto my lap. “It was only supposed to be temporary,” I said, threading my fingers through hers. “My parents hadn’t been together for years, but Dad had never seen anyone else, they’d never divorced, and he had apparently realized that Mom needed something to do other than be a parent.”

“What about Perrie?”

“He adopted her at Mom’s request. It was a fight, legally speaking. I think Roy dropped his claim to his daughter in exchange for my parents paying his legal fees.”

“Again, wow.”

She didn’t need to say that twice. “Yes. It all seemed better after that. A couple years later, my youngest sister, Penelope, was born. Nobody had to say it, but she was the angel. Dad loved her more than anything—something that made it awkward for Perrie. She’d tried to be perfect for him, but I guess that all my dad saw when he looked at her was a mistake. I held some childish bitterness toward her because if she didn’t exist, my parents never would have broken up.”

“Maybe they would have.”

“Of course. But in my young mind, she was the cause of that. That changed over the years, though. The older Penelope got, the more she was idolized by my father. I was pushed away, and he became crueler and crueler to Perrie. My mom suffered from depression because of what Roy had done to her, and occasionally, she’d spend time in the hospital to heal the wounds. Dad took some of the blame for her, realizing he’d pushed her toward him, even if he didn’t know it then, but that didn’t make it better for my sister.”

My heart panged every time I said Perrie’s name. I missed all the women in my family—I’d lost them all so quickly, but she was maybe the one I missed the most.

“I became Perrie’s protector pretty quickly. She was tiny and quiet—as shy as one person could possibly be. I got into many verbal fights with my father over his treatment of her. He would tell me the same thing all the time. That, if it weren’t for her, my mother wouldn’t be crazy and I wouldn’t have this scar.”

“In the nicest way possible, your dad sounds like one of the cruelest men I’ve ever heard of.”

I wished I could tell her she was wrong.

“He didn’t—doesn’t—deal with emotions well. It’s where I get it from.” I squeezed her hand. “Around the time Penelope hit her teens, my mom got better. It was as though she felt she could finally live again, and Dad let her back into the business. She looked after the girls at her favorite club, which was Foxies. She relished in it. With both our parents out of the house a lot, I did a lot of watching over my sisters. Which wasn’t easy—I was working part-time for Dad since I’d just graduated, and those hours steadily increased until I was working almost as much as he was.

“Luckily, by that point, Penelope was sixteen and didn’t need to be watched anymore. In theory,” I added dryly. “If she hadn’t been so perfect in the eyes of my parents, maybe they would have noticed that she was the biggest fuck-up of the three of us.”

Dahlia’s eyebrows shot up, but she didn’t say anything.

“She could have shot someone in front of them and they would have blamed the gun.” Once again, my tone was tinged with bitterness, but I didn’t care. It was the fucking honest truth. “While I was busting my ass helping Dad run the business and getting criticized for bringing him coffee a degree too cold, and Perrie was working in the office, Penelope was out doing crazy shit. Drinking, drugs, hanging out with the wrong crowds.”

“How didn’t they know?”

“Rose-tinted glasses? Who the fuck knows? They blamed the smell of pot on me and the missing alcohol on Perrie. At least, Dad did. Mom ignored it entirely. She didn’t want to rock the boat with any of us. In her eyes, we’d been through enough shit, and she pretty much stopped parenting us. I was in my early twenties at this time, so I guess it was easier to blame me for the pot.”

“Did you ever tell them otherwise?”

“No. They couldn’t punish me. I was over twenty-one and only lived at home because it was easier at the time. Plus, I didn’t want to leave Perrie.” I sighed and rested my head on my hand.

I was numb. All the emotion I’d felt earlier had disappeared. I was just cold and numb and unfeeling.

Dahlia blinked at me with her wide eyes, waiting for me to carry on. I didn’t know if I could get the words out. They were fucking stuck, swirling around in the emotionless void that was my mind in that moment.

Why the fuck couldn’t I say it? I’d put it off long enough. I just needed to say the words. Four words. Four fucking words that would open the floodgates to the rest of the story.

My sister committed suicide.

Why were they so hard to say? It was a fact. She did. Knowingly and selfishly, despite my parents’ alternative beliefs.

Dahlia slid across the sofa, coming closer to me. She adjusted herself, swinging her legs over my lap and wrapping her arm around my body. The warmth of her as she laid her head against my chest was the comfort I needed.

My heart thumped a little louder against my ribs.

“My sister committed suicide.” Finally, I said them. Flatly, coldly, uncaringly. “She was found in a motel close to the highway surrounded by drug paraphernalia by the motel manager after she hadn’t checked out. She was dead and cold by the time she was found.”

Dahlia said nothing. She only squeezed me a little tighter.

I closed my eyes for a moment, breathing in the sweet, apple scent of her shampoo. “The autopsy ruled it an intentional overdose. My parents fought the ruling tooth and nail—they insisted she didn’t do drugs, that somebody had tricked her and either administered all of them to her, or it was accidental. They were insistent enough that the police reluctantly opened an investigation, although that might have been more to do with the fact my father threatened to out the chief’s extracurricular activities to his wife than the LVPD actually wanting to investigate it.”

“Your father blackmailed the chief?”

“Blackmail is a strong word,” I said slowly. “It was more of a…casual mention.”

She laughed silently.

“Anyway, it worked. They held off on a final verdict, initially, until they’d done more investigation, although the coroner was adamant nobody would accidentally ingest that amount of hardcore drugs. I think they investigated for about a week before security tapes confirmed that Penny was one hundred percent okay when she checked into the motel under an alias. She was alone, sober, and never left her room once she’d entered it. Nobody went in, either.” I ran my fingers through Dahlia’s dark hair. The softness of it had the strands slipping through my fingers like silk. “It was finally ruled suicide. I think they arrested the person who’d sold her the drugs, but it wasn’t good enough. My parents refused to believe she’d killed herself.”

“What about now?”

“My father refuses, still. Perrie and I found a diary in Penny’s room that expressed the stresses she felt at having to be constantly perfect. She was seventeen, maintained a four-point-oh GPA, captain of the swim team, head cheerleader…But in the rest of her life, she acted out. She didn’t care about anything, and she hated me and Perrie because we weren’t pressured the way she was.”

“Did you ever show your parents?”

I shook my head. “They had enough guilt. We felt it was better they never found out, and we burned it in the bathtub one night when we were both home alone. It was for the best. We’d all failed each other as siblings—we hated her for being perfect, and she hated us because we didn’t have to be. All she wanted was to be us.”

“That’s so sad.” Dahlia’s voice was soft. “I bet you blame yourself, don’t you?”

“It’s hard not to. I was her brother—I was supposed to be there for her, but there was always a line between us. I think back now to how we all were growing up, and if only me and Perrie had been able to put aside our jealousy, she’d probably still be alive now. It was always us and then her.”

There it was.

The guilt.

It ate me alive, snaking through my entire body like the disease it was. And it fucking hurt. What if I’d noticed? What if I’d not been so jealous? I was older than her by years. I should have been able to be there for her, but I wasn’t. I was too caught up in being petty and jealous that I’d never thought for a second about how she felt.

“Don’t.” Dahlia looked up at me, taking my face in her gentle hands, and speared me with a firm gaze. “Don’t you dare blame yourself for something you had no control over.”