Taken (Dark Desires 1)

Lena put her head on my shoulder and glanced up at me. “I’m glad I met you, you know. You were a pain in my ass at first, but I’m glad I met you.”

I put my hand on the back of her head and leaned down to kiss her hair, taking in the subtle scent of cherry blossoms. She always smelled like cherry blossoms. “Me too, Lena. Me too.” Hell, I was pretty sure I loved her, but I could tell her that, not yet. It was still too soon.

She opened her mouth to speak, but was interrupted when her cell phone when off. She groaned and rolled her eyes a little, picking up and turning it over to read whatever was on the screen. She became flustered and turned it back over, setting it face down on the table.

“Who was that?”

“No one.”

“You can’t tell me that,” I grunted. “Your phone goes off like once a day, you get made and then you tell me it’s no one. I’m not trying to be an asshole, but I just don’t accept that it’s ‘no one’. You wouldn’t get so upset.”

Her lips pressed into a tight line. “Why are you pushing this?”

“Because I’m worried about you.”

“Well, there’s no reason to worry. It’s just some shit that I have to deal with.”

“But why deal with it alone if you don’t have to?”

“I just…This is my business alright?” She was getting flustered but I didn’t feel like it was the right choice to stop.

“I know it’s your business, but…I want to help.”

“There’s nothing to help.”

“Stop pushing me away.” I sat up and looked at her seriously, frowning deeply. “You made me come clean about my shit. I think it’s only fair that you do the same.”

She seemed annoyed that I’d called her out, but I wasn’t really worried about that. There was clearly something going on and I was going to get to the bottom of it. I wasn’t about to start my first real relationship in almost a decade with secrets.

“It’s my dad,” she murmured.

The answer surprised me. I had half been expecting an ex-lover. “Your dad?”

“Yeah. He wants me to come home. Mom is sick,” she muttered, clearly trying to tell me as little as possible.

Up until this point she had always been very open with me. She didn’t really seem to have any secrets, but now I could tell that there was something just under the surface that she’d been hiding. “You don’t want to go back home?”

Her eyes narrowed as she stared out into the blackness of the night sky and sighed softly, dropping her head and shaking it back and forth. “No. Not for anything.”

“Bad relationship with your parents?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

I sighed and leaned back a little, sipping on my tea. “You should go home.”

“What?”

“Even if you have a bad relationship with your parents, you should still go home. If something happens to your mom and you aren’t there…You’re going to regret it.”

“Don’t act like you know about my family life.” She was getting defensive now.

“I don’t know about your family life, but I know what it’s like to lose a parent and never patch things up. It fucking sucks.”

She relaxed a little and glanced over at me. “What do you mean?”

“I lost my dad when I was in my early 20’s. Me and him never got along. He wanted me to take over the family business back home in Georgia and I didn’t want any of it. We had this big falling out and that’s why I came to New York.” I finished off my tea and set it aside. “I didn’t talk to him for years. It wasn’t even that long, actually, but five years was enough. He got cancer and told mom not to tell me because I was making my way in New York. Even after all that shit, he wanted me to be successful and didn’t want to be a burden on me.” I shook my head slowly. “There’s nothing in this world I regret more than not patching things up with him, but if you would have asked me back then, I wouldn’t have ever gone back. It took him dying to make me realize all those fights were just…blips in our relationship. At the end of the day, he was still my dad and I still loved him.”

“This isn’t the same,” she whispered, looking away, her eyes fixed on the darkness in front of us.