Chapter 5
FIVE
Emmett
I wake to the sound of hard pounding against the front door and I check my phone for the time.
Eleven in the goddamn morning; it may as well be the middle of the night.
I don’t remember ordering anything or making any noise that would bother the neighborhood, so I don’t know why someone would be banging on the door so aggressively, but whatever.
“Fuck off,” I grumble to myself.
I grab last night’s beer from the coffee table and throw a quick swig of it down my throat before trudging over garbage toward the door and swinging it open.
Standing in the doorway is my dad with his arms crossed over his chest and a look on his face that tells me he is pissed as he takes in my mussed and greasy hair, my bare chest, and the basketball shorts covering my lower half that I probably should have thrown out three washes ago.
“Hey,” I greet him, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
“Let me in the house,” he orders.
“Good to see you, too.”
“Let me into the house, Emmett,” he repeats, his tone harsher this time; more angry.
I scratch at my chest and move a foot or two to the side, gesturing with my arm for him to come in. He steps over a pile of garbage and I stifle a humorless laugh at the contrast between the disaster that is my living room and his freshly-pressed Armani suit.
As he carefully steps through the house, he reaches for an empty bottle and tosses it off to the side, shaking his head as if to say that he’s disgusted by me. Good. Maybe now he’ll leave, too, and I’ll be two-for-two on being abandoned by my parents.
“Jesus. What the fuck is this?”
“My living room,” I sass him, picking up that same warm beer as I drop back onto the couch.
I expect his face to be contorted into a million different kinds of rage, but when he turns to look at me, all I see is worry etched into his features.
He uses his feet, which don his favorite Prada dress shoes, to push trash away from him until he clears a path toward the couch and sits next to me. I avoid his gaze, but I can still feel his eyes burning a hole into the side of my head as he stares me down.
“Tell me right now. Are you in trouble?”
“I dunno,” I shrug as I take another swig. “Am I?”
My dad snatches the beer from my hand and sets it onto the coffee table, leaving it surrounded by all of its fallen brethren – to whom I offer a sad salute - and he pulls out his phone to shove the screen at my face.
It’s lit up with a screenshot that shows a series of text messages between some unknown sender and Nash Montgomery. One message glares against the screen.
Nash: Ran into the Fowler kid today. Stunk to high hell and looked strung out.
“You need to start talking,” Dad warns. “You lied to me.”
“I met Anna,” I tell him. “So, good to see you, Dad, but don’t let the door hit you on the way out. I’m good here.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I shrug. “I didn’t think she’d actually wanna meet me. Turns out she didn’t, but she showed anyway.”
“So you are in trouble,” he sighs, his tone finally matching the concern on his face.
“I’m dealing with it, so,” I gesture a hand toward the door, “you can go. You should go, actually.”
“That’s a great idea!” He shouts with a hand smacking down onto his knee. “I’ll just leave you here with the couch rotting around you while you drink yourself to death.”
I roll my eyes as he stands and slips off his suit jacket before carefully folding it and setting it down on the only bare spot left on the couch. He kicks more garbage away from my feet as he rolls up the sleeves of his shirt and jerks his head to gesture down the hallway.
“Get in the shower. Clean yourself up, get some fresh clothes on, and then get out here and help me clean up this dump,” he orders. “You are not dealing with it. And living like this certainly isn’t going to help you.”
“Dad, I—”
“You’re in pain, Emmett. You can’t avoid it by sending yourself into liver failure. So go take a shower, and we can go from there.”
By the time that I finally shove myself off of the couch and take the steps toward the hallway, my dad is already shoving things into one of those big black trash bags. I didn’t even know I had any of those.
I want to be pissed at him for intruding, for taking control away from me and scolding me as if I’m some petulant child in need of a time out.
Part of me even wants to be pissed at him for giving a shit.
I try really hard to be angry, and to hold onto that anger because Christ, anger would be so much better than everything else I’m feeling.
But as the hot water pounds over my skin for the first time in longer than I care to admit, all I can do is drop to the floor of the tub and bury my face into my hands.
I stay there, hunched over on the floor, listening to those voices until the water runs five degrees cooler.
It takes another fifteen minutes after that to drag myself through the process of actually showering, which drains all of the energy that I have left.
When I’ve finished, I step into a pair of gym shorts and a clean t-shirt and I join my dad in the living room, which he’s practically a third of the way through cleaning.
He lifts his head to look at me and offers a small smile, the hint of a nod of approval joining it.
“Keeping the scruff, then?” He asks.
“No, definitely not,” I tell him, scratching at the hair on my jaw. “I just—”
He drops the bag he’s holding and dusts his hands off against each other. “Come on,” he tells me, and he walks past me back toward my bathroom.
I follow behind, not sure exactly what he’s doing, and too tired to care. The hangover is starting to hit, and the sunlight coming in from the windows is slowly becoming just a little too bright. Combine that with the crushing weight of worrying my dad, and I’m toast.
Dad crouches under the sink and digs through my stuff, finally setting a can of shave gel and my razor on top of the counter.
“One more step,” he tells me.
I stand in silence as he dispenses the gel onto his hand and works it into a rich, foamy lather before spreading it over my jawline and down my neck, covering the untidy hair that has taken up residence on my face.
Tilting my chin up, he carefully pulls the razor across my skin. “I think the last time we did this, you were six or seven,” he tells me. “You were always watching me shave, and it drove you crazy that you couldn’t shave your own face. Jesus, you would get so frustrated. Do you remember that?”
“Yeah,” I answer. “You finally got a bunch of yarn and stuck it to my chin just to shut me up.”
“You were so excited,” he chuckles as he’s pulled into the memory of that day.
“That bathroom may as well have been Disneyland, the way you were bouncing around. You were so excited to be a man, with your little popsicle stick ‘razor.’” Turning my face the other direction, he says, “You are a good man, Emmett, and I am so proud of who you are; even if right now, I am furious with you for not telling me you were in trouble.”
“I’m sorry,” I choke.
“Don’t be sorry. If this happens again, just don’t let me find out about it because someone like Nash Montgomery is talking about you. You call me,” he tells me. “I will be here.”
I nod in silence as he reaches over to rinse the blade under the faucet. I’m so goddamn tired. My entire body feels like it’s made of lead and all I can think about doing is curling up and going to sleep for the next year of my life.
Dad extends the handle of the razor toward me and says, “Here. You finish the job.”
I have no option but to finish what he started; almost exactly half of my face is now clean-shaven, the other half a scruffy, unkempt mess that now, in contrast to the other side, absolutely screams ‘I’ve been wallowing in a pit of cheap liquor and self-loathing for two and a half weeks with no end in sight. ’
I lean in toward the mirror and carefully pull the blade over my skin, feeling my dad’s eyes on me the entire time, watching as if he thinks I’ll find some way to pull the blade across my throat and end it all right here and now.
By the time that my skin is cleaned off, I feel a little bit lighter. Those voices are still loud, still slamming around in my head, but at the very least my body doesn’t feel quite so heavy anymore.
We walk into the living room to assess the remaining damage – which is a lot – and Dad pulls his phone from his pocket. “Have you eaten anything other than pizza in the past two weeks?” He asks.
“Frozen nuggets.”
With a sigh, he pulls his phone to his ear and steps out of the room while he makes a call. I grab a couple of bottles and drop them into the trash bag sitting open in the middle of the floor before finding myself right back on the couch. I’m sitting upright, at least.
Ten or so minutes later, Dad comes back into the room, sliding his phone into his back pocket, and he reaches for the garbage bag on the floor.
“Real food will be here soon, and a new couch will be here in the next few hours,” he tells me. “So put five things into this bag, and you can be finished.”
“I’m tired, Dad,” I gripe.
“I know you are, bud, but you can do this. Just pick up five things.”
“Five things,” I repeat.
He holds his hand up with his fingers spread out and says, “That’s it.”
My entire body aches with exhaustion, but still, I take a deep breath before leaning over to grab some crap off of the table, counting as I shove each piece into the bag.
I force myself through eating in a similar fashion, counting each bite silently to myself as I dig through a bowl full of greens with a little bit of fresh grilled chicken mixed into it.
By the halfway mark, I’m choking it down and no longer trying to match Dad’s pace as he digs into his own lunch. I set my fork down into the half-full styrofoam to-go container and press the heels of my palms into my eyes.