“Need some Gatorade. Be right—” I paused when my phone rang. It was my dad. Again. I let out a long breath.
Caleb gave me a knowing look. “Which one of them this time?”
He knew that only my parents could put me in this mood. “My dad,” I said grimly, staring at my phone.
“You going to answer it?”
I balled my hand into a fist and bit my knuckle. Fuck it.
“Yeah,” I answered.
There was a pause before my dad spoke. “You might want to answer your phone more politely than that, lest people think your mother didn’t raise you properly.”
There was disappointment in his voice. As usual.
“She didn’t,” I said.
He scoffed. “How’s your friend Rick doing these days?” His tone was condescending. “Is he still begging people for money?”
We both knew he was trying to get a rise out of me. He knew how badly it affected me when he talked about Rick that way. Rick had been there for me when everyone had left.
“Nothing to say?”
I gritted my teeth and said as calmly as I could, “Why don’t you tell me why you called?” So we can both move on with our lives. You’ve never been in mine, anyway.
“Just checking up on you, seeing how you’re doing with your studies.”
“I have no time for this.”
He chuckled but not with humor. It was patronizing. A parent talking to an errant child. He’d never shown me anything other than contempt. There were moments I thought I felt his concern, but they were brief and left me confused. I remember one day he took me for a short flight in his plane, though I barely recall what he was like as a person. What made that day unforgettable was when we got home. My mother, Raven, was furious. I could only watch helplessly as she hit my dad with her fists and scratched at him with her fingernails. She hated anyone who took me away from her. My dad rarely attempted to reach out to me after that. On the rare occasion when he did, Raven would pick a fight with him and he’d end up leaving for weeks at a time. He became a stranger to me, a man who owned the house I lived in. The more emotional Raven became, the colder my father became toward me. Maybe it was to punish my mother. Maybe he just despised me. I had long stopped wondering about it. I had long stopped caring.
“Your mother’s back. She called me. I need you to see her and calm her down, so she can stop harassing me. Be a good son, won’t you?”
&
nbsp; “Why?” I could hear the bitterness in my voice. “You’ve never been a father to me. Why don’t you do one thing, just one thing, and get her off my back?”
I hung up, closed my eyes, and pressed my fingers to them. I hated showing any emotion to my dad.
The last time I saw Raven was a year ago, and it didn’t go well. There were only two things Raven loved in this world: money and herself. She despised Esther Falls and preferred big cities like Toronto, but when she got bored, Raven always went back to her favorite hobby: torturing my dad. And me. My dad didn’t want to deal with her and would always pass her off to me.
I could feel my mind shutting down, feel the anger taking over me. I needed to walk it off, do something before I exploded.
“Hey, Cameron.”
A flirty voice. I opened my eyes and found Lydia standing in front of me.
“You free tonight, Cam?” she asked, batting her lashes at me suggestively. “My parents won’t be home and—”
I reached for her wrist. “I’m free now,” I answered. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 3
Kara
Meeting him was a mistake.
A beautiful mistake.