Page 8 of Mating of Convenience
“Don’t tell me all of these are unpaid.” I stared at the stack of bills piled up on my father’s nightstand. It had taken me a week of nagging him before he’d finally agreed to show me exactly how bad the situation was and I’d totally expected terrible things, but damn. I wasn’t sure I could count all these bills if I used my fingersandmy toes.
“They’re notallunpaid,” he insisted.
They weren’t? I whirled around to my dad. “Which ones are paid then?”
He lifted one of the envelopes from the top of the pile. “I got this one yesterday.”
I waited for him to say something more, but that was it. One damn paid bill, and he seemed proud of it too.
“It’s okay,” he said in response to my skeptical look. “I got twenty lottery tickets in the drawer and we already won like fifty bucks last week!”
I stared at him. “How much did you spend to win those fifty bucks?”
“Oh not that much. I don’t know. I lost count. But you gotta start small, right? Our next winnings will be bigger. I figure at this point, the lottery is all we have.”
I didn’t even know what to say.
Why did my dad have to be such a fuck-up?
I grabbed the bills from the nightstand, resisted the urge to shred them between my hands and skimmed the letter heads instead. “You’re going to lose power again,” I muttered, because I couldn’t get myself to point out all the other things he was going to lose if something didn’t happen soon.
“I know.” He didn’t even sound all that upset. Just... resigned.
I tossed the bills to the ground and glared at my dad. “How the fuck could you let this happen?” How long had he been betting on lottery tickets instead of paying the bills?
“I understand that you’re upset, son,” he said, still in that way too calm voice.
“Upset? I’m way beyond upset! Why the hell aren’t you? You’re going to get kicked out of here, and then what are you going to do?” I demanded. “Where are you going to go with Kendra and Kevin?”
My dad only shook his head at me. “I know things aren’t looking good. But what was I supposed to do?”
“Not lose your fucking job?” I suggested. “Not waste money on the lottery?”
“Someone had to be there at the hospital with Kendra. And then I had to make moneysomehow.”
What? I looked at my dad in disbelief. Was he seriously telling me that he’d been fired because of Kendra’s hospital stay?
“They weren’t going to give me the time off,” he explained.
Holy crap, hewasseriously telling me that. Suddenly, I felt like a pile of shit. If I hadn’t left town I could have been here with Kendra instead of my dad and he wouldn’t have lost his job and we wouldn’t be in this mess now. “You should have told me! I would have come back!”
“When you were finally living your own life? I wasn’t going to drag you back. It was hard enough to get you out of the house in the first place.”
I felt my lips draw into a thin line, my eyes narrowing at the omega in front of me. “It was hard because I knew something like this was going to happen.” And if I hadn’t needed to put some distance between myself and Nathan...
I exhaled, as mad at myself as I was at my dad.
I’d messed this all up.
“I’m not leaving Oceanport again for a while.” I’d already talked to Conner about it. He didn’t mind letting me stay with him as long as I didn’t mind helping out at that omega shelter he was so in love with. The arrangement was good for me too, really, even if I felt a little out of my depth at work and the pay wasn’t great. At least it paid.
My dad gave me a helpless shrug. “I know there’s nothing I can do to change your mind once it’s made up.”
“Damn straight.” I walked out of the room, intending to cool my head--when I ran straight into my sister, who must have been listening at the door. “What are you doing here?” I pretended like I didn’t know what she’d been up to.
Surprisingly, the 15year-old before me didn’t try feigning innocence. “I heard you talk to Dad,” she said. “He’s really kind of hopeless, isn’t he?”
“We’ll figure something out.”
