Pretty, Dark and Dirty

“I got hard that night just thinking about your mouth,” he said.

The divot between his brows looked deeper than I was used to seeing. I was giving him wrinkles. Good, I thought. Let me mark his outsides as permanently as he’s marked my insides.

“You know the saying, when something is so wrong it feels right?” he asked. “This wasn’t like that at all. It didn’t feel wrong, which I guess tells us all we need to know. You might not be my biological daughter, but I was your father for twelve years. And I’m exactly what your mother thinks I am.”

My mother had called him a monster.

And 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 Mason.

“You’re both wrong,” I said. “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.”

“Differently is one way of putting it.”

I pressed both 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 already done has 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.

He pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket and laid it on the countertop.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“A paternity test. Technically you need a judge or a physician to order one for you in the state of New York, but I had my lawyer pull some strings.”

I turned the envelope over. “It’s opened.”

He nodded. I ran my fingers along the jagged edges of the torn white envelope, marveling at how something so small and innocuous could terrify a big, formidable man like Mason.

“Gretchen already lied to us once,” he said. “I wanted to be sure before we did something we couldn’t take back.”

I didn’t need to ask him what the results were. I already knew the truth.

He plucked the envelope from my hands.

“Then,” he continued, “I realized I was missing the point. It doesn’t matter that I’m not your real father. I was a father to you for over half your life. I never should have let you come here, let alone touched you. I’m sorry I let you believe I could be the man you needed.”

Panic wrapped itself around my heart 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 should.”

“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.

My mother had been 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 paint swirled on a palette. You couldn’t take violet and separate it back into blue and red. Once the colors were blended, all you had was purple.

I reached for him, and he guided my hands away. Once again, my eyes flooded with tears. I fought to keep them there, convinced that I wouldn’t be able to remain standing if he saw me crack again.

But I was already broken.

As desperate as I was to be with him, I couldn’t bear the thought of Mason 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 shamelessly, or not at all.

I tore the envelope from his grasp and ripped it in half.

“I don’t care what the test says. You think seeing it on paper makes a difference, but obviously it doesn’t. You'll always find another excuse to push me away. 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. And if you can’t give me that, then I guess I can’t have any of it. Because being loved halfway hurts too much.”

As impossible as it felt to turn away from him, I somehow managed to make myself go. Mason caught my arm, his grip tight enough to pinch.