Princely Passions

But it didn't work.

I read a News of the Times article that talks about how the Queen of St. Livy was checked into rehab and left one night. She went partying, and died of alcohol poisoning and a drug overdose.

The heroin was too pure apparently.

Pictures of my father at the funeral. Despite everything that she’d done to him - all the times he cou

ld have divorced her - he stayed by her side until she took her life. I look at shots of my father, his head bowed and sad, holding me.

“Where did you get all this?” I ask Daphne, awed that she could put this all together. “How did you get all this?”

“I’ve been digging Derrick,” she says. “You talk about your father so much, but he doesn’t deserve your hate. He deserves…”

I don’t let her finish. “Sympathy,” I say out loud.

Oh my fucking God. What the fuck have I done? All my father wanted was to preserve for me the sweet and innocent image of my mother that I had. He let me continue thinking that. He let me stay angry at him. He let me turn into the prodigal son, the embarrassment to the throne. Everything I ever did to hurt him, he took without question because he wanted me to have a mother.

And I twisted it, to where he no longer had a son.

Daphne coms over and wraps her arms around me.

Fuck, I’ve never cried in my life. But if there were any time that I would, now would be it.

I look over at my angel.

She looks at me as she speaks. “I love you, Derrick Blaine,” she says to me, a single tear falling from her eye.

I smile, wiping it away with my fingers. “I love you, Daphne Apple,” I say back to her. “God, I fucking love you so much.”

We kiss. It seems like forever and I don’t want it to end. I want that fucking moment to stay for all fucking time.

But eventually she pulls away and looks at me with a wan smile. “I think it’s time you made a phone call,” she says.

I nod to her. For once, sex can wait.

I walk to the living room, and pick up my phone and dial.

The personal number to his office rings and I reach his manservant.

“This is Prince Derrick,” I say into the phone. “I’d like to talk to my father, if I could.”

Dad comes on the line in a second.

“Son,” his voice is filled with concern. “Is everything all right?”

I choke back a sob. I don’t fucking cry, I’m not going to cry now. Instead, I speak into the phone, “Dad,” I say, cursing myself for everything else I’ve ever called him. “I’m so sorry. So sorry for everything…”

But it’s too hard to continue.

I look over at my angel as she comes out of her room and into the living room and smiles at me.

And that’s when I know everything is going to be alright.

19

Alicia

Sixty seven.