Dare Me

But now I wondered about every last thing she and Hunt had ever told me.

Dean dropped me like a ragdoll into the chair across his desk. I heard the sound of him ripping a paper towel off a roll. When he came back to me, he shoved his hand in my hair, held my head up and wiped the bile off my mouth and the collar of my shirt. “What happened.” There was no inflection in his question. I know I took too long to answer because he barked it at me again. My thoughts scrambled back together fast.

“My mom with Hunt.” And her sling wasn’t on. Her shattered elbow was working fine, I realized. It was reaching for the ceiling and plopped back to the mattress with a bounce when she noticed me. It was never broken. And I was an unforgivable idiot. “They were in bed. Together.”

“That ain’t nothing new.”

Still panting, I stared. “I didn’t know.”

“Whole lot you don’t.”

He sat down behind his desk. I finally got the chance to look up and around. I always imagined that inside his office, he had a big screen TV and calendars with fast cars and naked women on them. I imagined nice furniture – nicer, at least – and a permanent group of friends hanging out on the couch drinking beer. But there was none of that. There was his desk, his chair, the one across that I sat on and a torn couch on which a cardboard box rested. It was bursting with multicolored files and papers. His desk was no different. There was no excess and it wasn’t the bachelor’s pad that I imagined. It was a workspace. The telephone rang. He answered it, said something about how he’d have it fixed, and then hung up to return his irritated attention to me.

“I guess you don’t realize I ain’t really with your mom no more.”

My face crinkled. “What are you talking about?”

“Legally, we are together. The church says we’re together. But as far as I’m concerned, Trisha ain’t my wife or my family. Same with Hunt.”

My throat was raw. “Because of the affair?” My every word was a broken rasp.

“I confirmed my decision when I found out about that.” Dean dragged his hand over his face and tugged on his beard. He moved some papers around on his desk and didn’t look at me. His voice was casual, tinged only with annoyance as he proceeded to reveal all the truths that splintered me straight through my stomach. “Your ma’s been after your money since before I met her. She just didn’t talk about it much when we were dating. I didn’t want to hear about it. You weren’t nobody to me. But I didn’t have no choice once your grandma died. Trish was nonstop then. Real excited. She found you online and she looked at all the nice things you had and showed Hunt. He got excited, too. I guess he was seventeen then. He wanted a car real bad and Trisha said he could get a nice one if we got you to send some money.”

I was an even bigger idiot than I thought. The bile rose again in my throat.

“I didn’t like when they started getting it. I didn’t touch the things they bought with it. Not the booze or the toys or the drugs. She was off that shit for awhile but not after she had all that cash in her hands.”

God. I’d been fueling drug habits the whole time. My lips went dry. “Did you ever hurt her?”

He paused. His frown deepened as he looked at me. “I push her when she hits me.”

“Did you threaten her,” I clarified. “Or make her feel like you might hurt her? Or… she said there was… I thought there was a story with…” I tried to remember that article Trish sent me about war veteran Dean Casey whose episode of PTSD had him attacking a man with a bat, leaving him brain dead in the hospital.

“I got a domestic abuse call. We get them here. Cops weren’t coming so I went and he was rabid, foaming at the mouth. Had his girl duct-taped to her chair and came at me with a knife. I took his bat and I started swinging.” Dean drank from his mug. It had Mickey Mouse ears on it. I couldn’t process any of this.

“But – ”

“The news don’t cover us much and the ones that do like to make a certain kind of story. We’re all one kind of people to them here. They don’t care about the truth.”

The million realizations were crushing down on my skull, my shoulders. I grasped at my thoughts. “God, I let them take me here and just…” I couldn’t believe myself. I’d given away the year of my life I’d been looking forward to most. I was going to graduate. Callum and I were together, finally. We never made it official with words but it was enough that we were starting to talk about how to tell Caroline.

Fifteen months taken from people I loved, who needed me – and all to live in misery for a lie.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Dean rose halfway out his chair and spat. “You ain’t my family, girl. I got enough problems and you ain’t my business. I didn’t like the sound of you the second they started talking about you. I didn’t want you here. I don’t want your money. You ain’t my kind of people and I don’t have to do shit for you. All you are, girl, is a stranger who turned my wife and son into two monsters. I ain’t never spoke to you or even seen you before I knew I didn’t like you.”

I stared at the broken vinyl siding hanging outside his window like a dangling arm. I almost wanted to laugh through my tears. I was a curse to every family I went to. “You never…” I squinted, recalling everything I thought I knew about Dean. “You never spoke to me before I came here?”

“What did I just say? Do you remember me speaking to you?”

My gaze drifted back to him. I was numb now. “No,” I murmured, realizing it hadn’t been Dean threatening me on the phone that night. It was Hunt. It was him and Trish all along. It was him telling me he would kill me and Caroline with a smile on his face, posing as his father, playing the main role in the fictional story Trish had spent years writing me online. When I thought about it, I realized that I’d heard Dean yell before and it didn’t quite sound like the voice I heard on the phone. On top of that, the man on the phone called me “little girl.” The only person who ever did that was Hunt.

I felt like it was finally happening.

I was breaking completely. I was finally ready to just give up.

But for all the callous things Dean said to me, he did a lot to keep me from just throwing the towel in. I had to leave. He said I did and he said he would help.