46. Gideon
Chapter 46
Gideon
F our minutes and nineteen seconds.
It was a new personal best, but if I would have known my father would be sitting in the bleachers waiting for me to surface, I would have weighted myself down to the bottom of the pool and stayed longer.
“Chlorine can’t be good for healing that scar on your chest,” he said, mouth pulled into a smirk.
“It’s been two weeks,” I told him, toweling off as much of the water as I could with the small towel I’d grabbed out of my locker on the way in.
Two weeks.
Two weeks since the initiation weekend and two weeks since all of our lives had turned upside down. It had been two weeks since I’d seen Fletcher, even though I knew Luca and Daren were sneaking around together more than they should have. Bellamy spent most nights at Thorn Hill, and I would have been lying if I said I wasn’t jealous of the fact. Even though I didn’t know whose bed he warmed, the thought of it being Fletcher’s was enough to make me see red. But the return to “normal” was part of our plan.
We’d agreed to lay low, a task Daren and Luca were failing miserably at. Fletcher and I had done better. We didn’t even have classes in the same building at the same time, as if years ago someone had learned that lesson the hard way and the story had spread like wildfire. I had seen Bellamy in passing, but beyond a small smile, he didn’t offer me much.
Fletcher had wanted to strike against our fathers quickly, but I’d begged for patience. We’d all started the year with the plan to lay low and make it out alive, but the revelations of the initiation made that harder to abide. Staying away from Fletcher, now that I’d finally had him, was the hardest thing I’d ever done. And it was foolish of me to want him, to maybe even still love him. I loved him once before, and he’d betrayed me.
We still hadn’t talked about the why of it. But we would.
We just hadn’t found the time.
“What do you want?” I asked, tossing the towel in the community hamper against the wall.
My father looked so out of place in the pool, sitting on damp metal bleachers in his three thousand dollar suit and his alligator leather shoes. One day, I would tie his arms behind his back. Bind his ankles together so he couldn’t kick. I would put a cloth gag in his mouth, the knot digging into the base of his skull, and I would shove him over the edge into the deep end. If he managed to break the surface, it would be my fingers tangled in his hair, my hand pressing him back beneath the water.
“You’re not even listening.” His annoyed drawl snapped me out of my recurring daydream, and I made a show of tipping my head to the side to shake water out of my ear.
“I’m always listening,” I said.
“How did you handle things with the offering exchange?” he asked.
“As expected.”
“I mean with Sinclair.”
I frowned, scratching an invisible itch at the corner of my mouth.
“As expected,” I repeated, even though he didn’t understand I meant in the “our fates are inevitably intertwined” kind of way, and not the “I hate him the way you hate his father” kind of way.
“Glad to hear you’re over that old dalliance of yours.”
I remembered waking up at home, screaming for my father, screaming for my mother, for Fletcher, for anyone. Screaming until my throat bled, only to wake up another morning alone and ignored.
“You ensured that years ago,” I reminded him. “That can’t possibly be why you drove all the way out here.”
“No,” he said, standing up and smoothing out the creases in the lap of his slacks.
He was older than I remembered him, shorter, less muscular. Maybe I didn’t even need rope to drown him. I could just wrap my arms and legs around his body and take him to the bottom with me. Maybe I’d kill myself in the process…
No.
Not that.
Not anymore.
“I just wanted to check in, son,” my father said, buttoning his jacket. He came to stand next to me beside the pool, and it took all my willpower to not throw him in, to not worry he was going to throw me in. “Make sure all was well. That you remember everything expected of you.”
He poked the brand in the middle of my chest, twisting his fingernail until he’d cut into the scab and drawn a trickle of blood out. It raced toward my stomach, diluted pink from the water I’d yet to wipe dry. If he expected a reaction, a grimace or a groan, he wasn’t going to get it.
Fletcher had done far worse.
“I remember.”
“The longevity of our family relies on you,” he said. “Everything I’ve built will soon be yours to carry.”
“I know.”
“And it doesn’t matter if you don’t want it.” He spit at my feet, wiping his bottom lip with the side of his thumb. I wanted to tear out his tongue. “There’s things bigger than you, bigger than me, than all of this.”
“I know,” I said again, staring down at him.
He was such a small man.
“You’re not capable of changing any of it, Gideon. I know you used to think you were, that you wished you could.”
“You made sure to take those ideas away, Father,” I told him. “When you tried to kill me.”
He scoffed, rolling his eyes. “I did no such thing, Gideon.”
He reached up and ruffled my hair, giving my head a rough shove. I held my footing, heels against the curved edge of the pool deck. “I knew you needed to be convinced to see it my way. I persuaded you.”
“Of course, Father,” I agreed.
His expression changed from a sneer to as much of a plea as I’d ever seen or heard from him. “There are lives on the line.”
I nodded my concession, my submission. “I understand, Father.”
And I did.
But it was his life in question now, not mine.