14. Carter
Chapter Fourteen
CARTER
My dishonorable behavior had driven Dad crazy by the time we had landed. He escorted me to the house, forbade me from leaving, told Mom he had arrangements he’d previously forgotten to mention — as if! — and disappeared for three days straight.
I was certain that Mom knew what Dad’s arrangements meant.
There was no doubt in me left. He had all but admitted to whoring around when he was playing, and the way he had raged in the plane at the mention of his cocaine benders confirmed my suspicions.
He wasn’t an addict as much as he was a party-going asshole.
He wasn’t an employer as much as he was paying people so he could bully them.
And he wasn’t a husband and father so much as he was a jailor standing outside our gilded cage.
Mom had taken it with her head held high, but the moment the car glided away, she visited me. Patting my head, she asked, “Couldn’t you talk to him? He needs time to process things, and talking helps.”
I shook my head at that. “He’s a man-child, Mom.
I’m not gonna negotiate with him.” And what would I have bargained for?
In his absence, I immediately found my piano and poured all my feelings into my music.
That was good enough, even if I couldn’t make the music into a career with him watching over me.
And Nate had sent me away. He had sworn to me that his priority was his good name.
He had sworn on the funniest gift I had ever gotten and one I had cherished more than the blades Dad had given me.
Dad’s gifts had always come with a price attached.
Nate’s had simply been to allow me to be a child while I could have been one.
Clearly, it meant more to me than it had meant to him. I had attached meanings to the gift beyond reality. And I had fallen in love with a man who wasn’t at all the knight in shining armor.
On the third day, Mom found me in bed. My drills with a private coach hadn’t been arranged, and Dad was still missing.
Mom’s attempts to talk to me often resulted in one-sided conversations where I listened to her tactics for getting what she wanted from her husband.
She loved him, she admitted, even though she knew how hard a man he could be.
“He values his family,” she said once, sitting on the edge of my bed, her hand holding mine.
The sadness in her eyes didn’t match her words, and she knew it.
She smoothed her expression after a moment.
She was a calm, steady woman with the kind of outward pride that said she would never put up with Dana Prince’s bullshit, yet she still did it.
They had both come from money. They had both been part of the elite machinery that brought their children up to hide their feelings, to hide the truth, and to pretend like their lives were ever so perfect.
To leave my father was unimaginable to her, as much as it was impossible from his point of view.
“I know it hurt, baby,” she whispered to me then. In the three days of asking and talking, she had gotten enough of the story out of me to know what had happened. “But it will pass if you give it time.”
Why was she tugging on the stitches, then?
Besides, what other answer could I have expected from someone who had been trained to act like nothing at all was wrong in her life?
I loved my mother, I did, but she wasn’t the authority on these things.
Nobody seemed to know how anything in life worked, including me.
It was possible that I hadn’t completely left my childhood behind until all of this had happened.
I hadn’t become an adult at eighteen. I hadn’t grown up the night I’d lost my virginity.
And shaving the few dark hairs above my lip once a week hadn’t made me a man.
What killed the child in my soul was the realization that adults didn’t have their shit together.
The people I had looked up to my entire life were all screw-ups in their own right.
Adulthood was a lie told to children to make them behave in not necessarily a better but a more tolerable way.
That evening, I played my piano in the room I had long ago turned into a music room.
The sprawling house had way too many empty rooms and never enough warmth, so I had carefully chosen my bedroom and my hobby room.
This one was warm, its floor was dark hardwood, and the thick, antique carpet was from Dad’s storage.
The piano was a small one, nothing like the concert thing at Nate’s place, and it was pushed against the brown-painted wall with an adjustable desk lamp on top of it to shine its light on my sheet music.
I hadn’t used any sheet music in years. Often, I could just crack the code by listening to music intently for a day or two.
I played some tunes from my heart. None were familiar to me from before.
And if I had gone over them at some point in my life, I had forgotten all about them.
Now, I played the requiem-like melody that fit my dark mood to perfection.
And it was appropriate because the person who opened my door around eight in the evening was the death-bringer himself.
“Haven’t I told you to quit this nonsense?” Dad growled.
I stopped playing, but my hands remained on the keys. “You’ll have to cut off my fingers.”
He scoffed. “You still insist on looking at me like I’m the bad guy.”
I would have laughed if there was any laughter left in me.
The silence drove Dad mad more than my music. “I don’t need to cut anything off. I just need to lock this goddamn room.”
I looked at Dad over my shoulder. He was rumpled like he hadn’t slept last night. He had partied, of course. “Don’t you realize that I can hear music in my head? In my dreams? I can tap it out on my desk. I can write it in my mind.”
Dad’s jaw stiffened before he forced it to relax enough so he could speak. “You’re starting drills tomorrow, Carter. You’ll be too busy to think, let alone tap shit.”
I wasn’t sure what I was about to say. I knew for a fact I wasn’t going to fuss about it and give him the pleasure of exercising his power over me. Before I could even breathe in, Mom appeared in the doorway. “Dana?”
“Not now, honey,” Dad said sourly, the last word clashing with his tone, almost like he was mocking her, but he was oblivious to that.
“You should come,” Mom said.
“What is it?” With impatience, he turned from me to Mom. A look passed between them. I didn’t know what it was, but Dad believed it was important enough to put lecturing me on hold. And since lecturing me was becoming his favorite activity, I also considered the disruption significant.
As Dad followed Mom, I hesitated, but half a minute later, when hushed voices reached me, I hurried outside the room.
As soon as I crossed five paces and was in the gallery overlooking the entrance hall of the house, I felt a jolt of anger that Mom had fetched Dad instead of coming for me. The man standing in our lobby was wet from the pouring November rain, but it only helped to make him look better.
Nate Partridge wore a dark gray wool coat, water dripping from it all over the fine tiles in our entrance hall. His gaze was intently on my dad while Mom had her hand on Dad’s shoulder.
I stopped walking abruptly, watching in disbelief.
My first thought was that they had some unresolved business in order to make that horrible agreement binding, but that was not what was happening.
I knew it in my heart before I knew it for a fact.
Nate wasn’t here to dance to my dad’s tune.
And if I hadn’t hit my head and dreamed this up, then he was here for me.
As if he could hear my thoughts, he lifted his piercing gaze to me, the house growing dark around us.
Thunder rolled distantly across the sky while Dad’s voice increased in volume.
“…out of my house. You have no right…” He stumbled over his angry words, and I noticed in the periphery of my vision that he had followed Nate’s gaze and was looking at me. “Go back to your room, Carter.”
Nate watched me expectantly as if he didn’t know what I would do next. As if he expected me to turn away and leave, to confirm his fear that he had lost me. But he was here. He was here, and he was waiting for me to do something.
And even if I was absolutely wrong about everything, I was willing to take one more risk for this crazy thing. Could my life get any worse if I disobeyed Dad?
“No,” I said softly without looking at Dad.
Nate swallowed, and I made a few slow steps toward the staircase.
His gaze followed me even as Dad took a sudden step toward him as if to physically remove him from the house.
He watched me descend slightly curving stairs, my left hand dragging over the smooth wall where a normal family might have their framed photos hanging, but ours only had a coat of faded yellow paint.
And when I reached the bottom of the stairs, Nate had shifted away from my furious father to face me. “Hi,” he said or mouthed. I wasn’t sure. His voice was so present inside my head that I could hear him even if he didn’t make a sound.
“Hi,” I replied.
“Back to your room, Carter. Now. I swear to God, if I have to tell you one more time, you’ll regret it, young man.” Dad’s failed attempt made me chuckle.
“You can’t tell me what to do,” I said without taking my eyes off Nate.
He was so beautiful. The lines around his mouth were gentle, and the hints of crow’s feet around his eyes spoke of a man who had earned these lines by smiling.
His forehead wasn’t creased with worry when his face wasn’t relaxed.
His clear face and big, brown eyes radiated warmth that no rain and cold could ever extinguish.
“I’ll tell everyone,” Dad yelled. “I’ll tell everyone what he did to you.”