Page 80 of Playing With Danger

Her pissed off, I could deal with.

“I asked, so yeah, I’m seriously asking,” she said.

“My father’s a drunk who lives in a pit,” I pointed out the obvious.

Calmly she moved around the table, putting more distance between us. My insides withered at the implication; Sophie always moved toward me, never away. She liked to be close and I liked her there where I could touch her, feel her body curled into mine, soak in all her goodness and use it to kill the pain.

“Not to be callous but I don’t see what that has to do with you. Or me. Or us. Or why you’re ending us.”

“That’s not the first time I’ve walked into that house and seen him like that and it won’t be the last.”

For the first time since I’d met her I detested her gaze on me. She saw too much. She always did and what had once been precious and cherished and brought me peace now felt like a noose. Either she was going to do it or I was, but I was under no illusion that by the time this conversation was over, I’d be the one hanging.

I’d be the one ruined.

She was it for me. The woman I’d never wanted. The one who I knew I should’ve walked away from immediately. The one who if I wasn’t broken I’d spend my life with. Who I’d love and adore for the rest of my life. The one who would bring me to my knees.

I was a selfish asshole but I wasn’t cruel. I’d tighten the damn rope around my throat myself if it meant she walked away unscathed. I had to cut her loose before she was in too deep. Before she fell in love. Before she wasted any more time on a jackass who wasn’t worth it.

“I suspect as much.”

Fucking hell.

“Then you know I’m a shit son. A total piece of shit who leaves his father to live in that.”

Sophie tilted her head ever so slightly, kept her expression neutral, and like we weren’t talking about my alcoholic father and the squalor he lived in, asked, “Is that what you think?”

“No, I don’t think that. I fucking know it.”

She nodded.

I was dangerously close to losing my shit. Her unemotional tone and gestures which contradicted the fire in her eyes pissed me right the hell off. I needed her to yell at me, tell me what a motherfucker I was. Ask me what kind of heartless dick leaves his father to rot away.

I needed it.

I needed her righteous fury.

I needed her to hate me.

“What exactly do you think you should be doing?”

Was she fucking crazy?

“I don’t know, Sophie,” I spat. “I suspect a son who wasn’t such an asshole would figure it out. But, I’m not that son. I’m an asshole who allows his father to sleep in his own vomit.”

“Does it make you feel better to call yourself horrible names?”

Fuck this.

Fuck it.

If she was too blind to see what was right in front of her then I’d force her to see it. I’d shove it down her throat until she had no other choice but to run away so she could breathe.

“I hate him, Sophie. Every day he wakes up and spits on my mother’s memory. On Vivi. On the family we once had. Every day he puts that bottle to his lips he disrespects what we had and we had a good family. I had a great mom. A sweet sister. A beautiful life. The kind you see on TV. Nice house in a nice neighborhood. Clean, good food on the table, birthday parties in the backyard. You saw it now, what he’s done, how he’s desecrated the home he shared with his family. With his wife. The mother of his children. The mother who took me to baseball and football practice. The woman who shared his bed. Who took Vivi to ice skating and soccer. Who kept his home and loved him. Kissed him every morning before he left for work. Held his hand often. Sat next to him at my games, at Vivi’s. I lost them, too.

“One day my perfect family, in a nice neighborhood, in a nice, clean house, with two parents who I knew loved me and a sister who idolized me, a family I loved, was gone. Vanished. Two of them dead. One of them forcing me to watch him slowly kill himself. And the fuck of it is, I understand him. I get it. The way he loved my mother. He didn’t hide it. She came alive when she was with him, but he breathed for her. He loved me and my sister but he adored my mother. If it had been me and Vivi who died, he would’ve been able to go on. But not her. I wasn’t worth it to him. I wasn’t then and I’m not now.

“But that’s not why I hate him. Why there are times like today when I see him, when I see what he’s done to my home, to the memory of our family, when I don’t wonder why God took my mother instead of him. I hate that I think that, so I hate him more. I hate he took the father I loved away from me. I hate he’s making me watch him slowly kill himself. I hate that no matter how hard I’ve tried to get him help in the past it never sticks. I fucking hate I’m not worth it to him to get sober and stay that way so I can at least have my father in everything I lost.”

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