“And your father wasn’t?”
“What you’ve got to remember about Dad is that he grew up in the Seventies, and he was the younger child. Gloria developed maturity and grace quickly – enough so that she overrode their initial qualms about her gender. Probably never occurred to them that a daughter could redeem the family name. But as for their son… Dad never really wanted any part of their world. He didn’t sit well with endless etiquette classes, primers on court manners, and classical piano lessons. Rebellion and escapism are probably why he developed his drug addiction.”
“Drug addiction?”
“Oh yeah,” Dalton continued. “That’s why Dad and I aren’t positively loaded right now. You see, love, it started with pot. After a while, he moved on up to heroin. Wasn’t too long before Dad was in and out of rehab centers, sullying the good family name. Don’t get me wrong, he cleaned himself up and never looked back. He even got himself into a good engineering school, but by then his relationship with them was damaged beyond repair. I know that my grandmother forgave him, but her husband always had a stiff upper lip…”
“I would have never guessed,” I thought to myself. “He seems so kind and well-adjusted.”
Privately, I wondered if Will still suffered. Did he feel those compulsions anymore? Would that ever truly leave his heart?
“So, he wrapped up his degree just in time to be cut off from the family money. At least he could support himself then. He turned to a life of meaningless sex, and I was the eventual end result there.”
“Do you know anything about your mother?” I asked him, curiously.
“Never met her. Don’t know a single thing about her, other than she was a beautiful and talented hairdresser. Tried to put me up for adoption but Dad took me instead.”
“Explains why you’re so presentable,” I chuckled. “But you’ve never wanted to find out about her?”
“Nope. If she’s willing to throw me away, I don’t need her,” he shrugged. “But anyway. That’s enough about the past. I’m more interested in the future now.”
“The future?” My breath sucked back between my lips, and I felt a telling patter in my chest.
“The future,” Dalton repeated firmly, his eyes searching mine. “Tell me about yours. What do you want most in this world, love?
I thought on this a moment.
A smile smile crossed my lips.
“You.”
Chapter 16
The day that my world came crashing down began just like any other.
It was Friday morning. Clara and I sat together in psychology class. She’d gone ahead and bought herself a psychology textbook, but we still read along together and compared notes as Professor Pritchard gave his lectures.
Our parents were going to be coming back into town from their honeymoon this afternoon. Clara and I had already made plans to pick them up from the airport and bring them back to their place. That’s why we’d wound up riding together in her car to school.
If only we could tell them, I wistfully thought. But no… that would have been a complete disaster. Neither of us were particularly close to our parents, but we didn’t need to antagonize what tenuous relationships we had with them over this… not yet, at any rate.
I walked Clara to her next class afterwards, and she planted a quick kiss on my cheek. “See you after school,” she grinned. “You coming over after we grab the honeymooners?”
“Of course,” I replied, giving her ass a quick little squeeze. “I’ll knock out that psych assignment in the student union while I wait for you to wrap up, and then we’ll drive down and get them together.”
“So diligent,” she mocked me flirtatiously. “Okay, I’ll text you when I’m done with my last class.”
The school day was a breeze, just like all the others, but something was slightly wrong in the air. I wasn’t sure what had me uneasy, but whatever it was… I didn’t like it.
The feeling only got worse throughout the day. The closer it came to time to leave for the airport, the more agitated I became.
I was so pissed off at the end of the day that I skipped my last class, resigning myself to failing whatever weekend homework I was getting assigned.
“Are you okay?” Clara asked as we climbed into her car together. “You look like you’re on edge.”
“I’m not really sure,” I conceded with a shrug. “Something’s got me kind of bothered… not really sure what.”
“Is it because of our parents?” She asked, tilting her head. “I mean, I’ve been kind of thinking about that all day…”
“What do you mean?”
She turned the engine on and pulled towards the main campus road. “Well, it’s just that we’ve been able to sort of pretend that they weren’t a problem, right? Neither of them were too important to our lives before the wedding, and they’ve been gone since then on this honeymoon of theirs… but now they're coming back.”
“Well, there is that,” I agreed.
“Listen, Dalton,” Clara turned to me as we pulled up to a red light. “I know I had my own… misgivings over this union of ours… but I've made my choice. I’m here. You and I, we’re in this together, okay? And I’ll face down whatever troubles come our way, because we’ll always be together.”
I was taken aback by her confidence.
“That’s the most conviction I’ve heard out of you ever,” I observed.
“Yeah, well,” Clara grinned, pulling us forward after the light turned green, “like I said: I’ve had a lot of time to think about it today.”
We played music most of the way there, lightening the mood up with some contemporary pop. I didn’t really care for the radio all that much, especially since the hot singles were almost entirely electronic music, but I noticed one particular rock song that came on.
“Wait, what’s this?”
“Oh, this? It’s this rock band that’s been dominating the radio waves these days,” she chuckled. “Trent Masters and the Whiplash. You like it?”
“Sure. Turn that up.”
We listened to the rest of the song, and a smile crossed my face. “Yeah, that harkens back to the shit I listened to when I was growing up. All that late-nineties grunge music… it’s obvious who their influences are.”
“Yeah. It’s funny, that Trent guy can come off as a real prick in the interviews, but he writes all of his own lyrics… and they can be quite deep, actually. He seems like a total misogynistic ass-hat, but there’s a rumor that he’s dating some mystery bartender chick…”
I noticed her tone. “Sad that the big rockstar asshole is off the field?”
“Nah,” Clara giggled. “I’m more into the military types myself. Bonus points if they’re foreign. She can keep him. Maybe that chick will even level him out a little.”
“You don’t say.”
Another electronic piece came on, and the topic subsided.
It wasn’t much longer before we were pulling into the arrival terminals for the airport. Dad and Sarah were waving at us from the curb, their suitcases stacked to the side.
Clara turned to me with exasperation.
“Well… you ready for this trainwreck?”
I faked an overly dramatic sigh. “Let’s just get this over with…”
Our parents seemed surprised that we were picking them up together, although it meant that they could continue sitting in the back together without leaving the passenger seat conspicuously empty.
“So, how was it?” I asked as we hopped back on the road and headed for the interstate. “Did you enjoy Hawaii?”
“Oh, it was fantastic,” Sarah cooed.
“Nice and bright. Warm. Very pleasing,” my father added. “Wish you could have seen it.”
“Well, maybe I will someday,” I replied wistfully, thinking of my intentions to travel the world. “It sure seems bloody nice.”
“How’s school going?” Sarah asked quickly.
“Oh, it’s fine. Just stressful,” Clara answered, keeping her
eyes on the road. “As I told you before, I scheduled a ton of really tough classes this semester… the next one should be a damned sight easier…”
“And you, Dalton?” Father asked.
“Much easier that hers,” I answered him dutifully. “We even have a class together, incidentally.”
Clara flashed me a quick look, and I realized that I’d spoken a little too enthusiastically.
“Picking your parents up together… going to school together… you know what’s going on here, don’t you, Will?” Sarah asked, a haughty tone entering her voice. “My god, I should have seen this coming before… it was inevitable with these two, with their ages…”