Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ALENA
“Finish your eggs. You need the protein.” Dad points his fork at my plate. “And don’t forget your banana. Potassium’s good for you.”
He made me breakfast, but he’s about to make me mad.
“Dad…” Calmly, I set my fork down. “I’m a grown woman. I eat what I want. If I want to snort powdered sugar off a donut, I can, and I will.”
Nadine grins at my dad, her espresso cup poised for a sip with her pinky up. “Can’t raise ’em to be smart, then get mad when they use it against you.”
She sips, Dad sucks his teeth, and I reach for his hand. “I love you, and thank you. I know I’ll always be a little girl in your heart, but in your head, get over it. I’m twenty-six.”
“I’ll always be your father.” His brown eyes glisten. “I love you and will always protect you. Get over it.”
My dad is a potent mix of fatherly love and ferocious protection. If he weren’t a forensic accountant, I swear, he could side-hustle as an assassin. Under his starched white shirt, he hides a body of ink, shredded muscles, and a criminal past.
It’s how he met Nadine.
Nadine’s son, Sire Rutledge, was my dad’s cellmate in juvie. They became best friends, so when Nadine found out that my mom was about to lose custody of me. That she couldn’t make ends meet as a teen mom because my dad was locked up, Nadine stepped in.
She rented an apartment to my mom for fifty dollars a month and babysat me when my mom was at work. My mom was like Nadine’s daughter until she lost her too.
Then my dad became like Nadine’s son, and here we are.
A found family fighting over scrambled eggs.
“If you won’t eat your breakfast for me”—Dad leans back—“do it for your job. It’s dangerous, Alena.
You told me it was just a flash flood in the park the other day, but I checked.
The news said there was a swift water rescue.
That some heroic ranger swam across rapids to save a naked woman. Know anything about it?”
My shoulders softly shrug. “It’s my job. I’m not a hero.”
“Darlin’…” Nadine sets her cup down. “While some men are all hat and no cattle, you rode in on a white horse, wearing a white hat, and swam across a raging river to save a woman. You’re a hero. Clearly, you’re okay, but is she?”
“I hope so.” I sigh.
Dad sips his cup, muttering, “Did they catch the men who had her?”
I pull back. “How did you know some men had her?”
He takes another sip before answering, “She was a naked woman stuck on the rocks in a flash flood, not a hippie sunning herself for the solstice. Clearly, she was running from someone.”
“I hear rumors at the club.” Nadine’s eyebrows knit. “These evil men are everywhere. The beach. The mountains. The capital and country corners. They’re trafficking women, and I’ve got a right mind to show them the business end of my pistol.”
Nadine would.
She raises money for women’s shelters. Donates to their political campaigns. Marches for our cause. She won’t shut up and sit down for anyone. She won’t even let them shame her for her sex club.
While I squirm, just thinking about last night.
What’s worse?
That my kinky night with Loch got cut short?
That it was by my dad, who was in a sex club with my pastor and my godfather?
That my godfather is secretly my first pity fuck?
Or that it’s my pseudo-grandmother’s club, and I had to run home in shame from it, like a teenager, almost busted by her dad with her dress unbuttoned?
Loch was sweet.
He understood, but I don’t.
When do you stop being someone’s daughter and start being your own woman?
“Ahem.” I refocus. “I don’t know what happened to her. The Feds whisked her away, but promised they’d keep me posted. And I gave her my bracelet to—”
“Your mom’s bracelet?” Dad barks, his veins popping.
“Yes.”
He starts to lecture me. “Alena, that was her—”
But I interject. After this week. After last night.
After Loch made me feel free and powerful, even bound in cuffs, I insist, “Dad, it was mine to give, and Mom would’ve done the same thing.
I know you want to protect me, but you can’t imprison me.
Not in the past. Not in this house. Not under your rules.
Your love is in the right place, but your control isn’t. ”
The irony whips through me. Along with the understanding.
This is what Loch meant.
I want Loch’s control because it’s my choice. It’s my power to give.
But with my dad, he acts like I have no choice. I know he loves me; he wants to protect me. But I don’t understand why he’s so extreme about it. Why everything I do is under his eye—I can sense it, though I live hundreds of miles from home on purpose.
I wanted to be free. To take risks. To play in the sunshine as I did with my mom when she was alive.
With my dad? There’s so much darkness. Yes, of course, there’s love, but it comes with a foreboding sense that he’s protecting me from something horrible, when ironically, it’s already happened.
My mom.
My bully.
My self-esteem.
And I refuse to live in its prison anymore.
“I love you, Dad.” I stand up, kissing his forehead. “But you need to see me for who I am, not for who I was.”
I’m taking my own advice.
“Sweetpea.” Dad reaches for my hand. “I just don’t want anything bad to happen to you, and—”
“Hello?” A familiar voice sings from our front door. “I smell bacon, bitch!”
Dad mutters as Vale bounds into our kitchen, “No, I smell trouble.”
Her gray eyes land on him, pause, a tense look exchanged before they fall on Nadine and me. “What did I just interrupt?” Vale tilts her head. “Let me guess. Another episode of Father Knows Best.”
Nadine laughs, Dad grumbles, and I kiss his forehead again before strolling across the kitchen to grab her hand. “Come with me.” I tug Vale upstairs.
“Alena!” Dad shouts. “Finish your breakfast first!”
“Love you, Dad!” I shout back before closing my bedroom door and slumping against it. “He’s on the warpath again. Guarding me like a man-eating lion.”
Vale flops onto my bed. “At least your dad still gives a shit. Mine’s too busy shooting his sperm into every willing womb.”
“Eww.” I laugh.
“What? It’s true.” She sits up. “And speaking of sperm and willing wombs. Girl, what happened last night? Last thing I saw you were strapped to a tower, getting your pussy properly worshipped by the Cunnophile King, then you were gone.”
“My dad showed up.” I yank off my pajama top. I need to get dressed for my date with Loch today. “Talk about a cunt-block from hell. What’s worse? That my dad and his friends walked into a sex club or that I ran out?”
Vale winces. “Your dad was there last night?”
“Yes. And I was finally feeling myself, whoever she is, and then he walks in, and I’m fifteen with fluffy thighs again.”
“Alena,” Vale gently chides, “you’re not fluffy, you’re fucking fierce. Look at those hot tits.”
She gestures, and I glance down, topless, remembering Loch’s hands, proudly fondling my breasts, not how I usually hunch over to hide them.
“It’s a mind-fuck,” I tell her, shimmying into my bra.
“For the first time, I felt free and sexy with a man, and then my dad showed up. Or I’m here, in his house, and he treats me like I’m a teenager again, and I feel it.
I feel all the shame and every mean word said about my body, and I’m struggling again. ”
“Tell him.” Vale bends her brows, sweet and supportive. “Tell your dad. Tell him about your bully. And tell Loch too. You need to tell the men you love how other men have hurt you.”
“I don’t want to talk about him.”
John Thurmond was my hell from twelve until fifteen. Every part of my body, he mocked. In the halls at school. In the classroom. On socials. On the bus. What was worse was how he got other girls to do it as well.
You’d think we’d stand up for each other. You’d think we’d know how body-shaming destroys you.
But I guess they secretly hated themselves, so hating me was easy.
But the worst day was when I was fifteen on Folly Beach. Vale and Blair had left for the day, and I stayed behind to finish my book. I fell asleep to the happy sound of waves and awoke to the dread of jeers. To a bunch of boys, led by John, pointing and laughing at me.
At first, I didn’t know why, then I glanced down at my bare thighs.
While I’d slept, John had written LANDWHALE on them in black permanent marker. And he stood there, for the entire beach to hear, shouting, “Hurry! Save her! Shove her back in the water!”
I was mortified and trapped. Ripped into pieces. I burst out sobbing so hard, I could barely see through my tears until two guys, throwing a football, saved me. They came over, swinging punches while I ran away, crying.
I never told my dad. I hated John Thurmond, but I loved my father. I didn’t want him to go back to prison for me because he would have.
But since then, I’ve been chained to those words until I finally felt free with Loch.
“Alena…” Vale is tentative with her words. She’s the only one I told. “Your voice is your weapon. Sometimes, it’s all a woman has.”
I nod. “I know, and I’m learning to use it. That’s what you walked into this morning. Me, telling my dad that I’m an adult. He can’t keep protecting me like his little princess, and—”
My phone, charging on the nightstand, chimes with a text, so I rush over to read it.
Robbie
Babygirl. Gotta take a rain check on Botany Bay. There’s a storm coming
True to my fear of my father’s wrath for any man I’m with, I changed Loch’s name in my phone. Not that my dad would check my phone. It’s mine. I pay for it. Not that I wouldn’t put it past him if he thought I was in danger.
Besides, it’s a nod to my mom, to Fate. Loch feels like my Robbie.
Glancing out my bedroom window, overlooking the steel-blue Atlantic, I see the line of dark clouds and flop beside Vale, texting Loch back.
I understand. Some other time
I’ll meet you back at the cabins.
5ish?
Three dots appear as Vale elbows me, muttering, “You’re still on the pill, right?”
She knows all about me and The Wedding Singer.