Chapter 11 ~ Bellamy #2
He takes another step forward, stops when I back away. His bloodshot eyes track across my face like he is reading something he didn't like in the way I am acting toward him, before his sight lands on the bruise along my jaw, thanks to none other than Jamie Gallagher himself.
My dad’s eyes lock with mine. “I’ve been trying to reach your mother,” he says. “She won’t take my calls anymore.”
“I wonder why.” I break eye contact with him and look up at the ceiling. “She has a restraining order, you know that, right? After you showed up drunk at her home last week and screamed and banged at the door until she called the cops.”
“I know.” He says a little too fast, like he is trying to get ahead of the accusation. “I know about the order. I’m not trying to—” He stops, swallows, but his throat moves like the words are stuck on something sharp. “I’m sick, Bellamy.”
The words land somewhere in the space between us, and I don’t bother to pick them up. The days of me caring are over.
I just don't have it in me to care anymore.
“Lung cancer.” The way he says it, like he’s reading the words off a teleprompter or something, it feels too practised—hollow even. “Stage three,” he laughs, but it lacks any joy, which, yeah, I guess there wouldn’t be any positive emotion there. “Doctor Allen caught it late.”
I let the silence between us stretch, hoping he’s uncomfortable with my lack of words as I am with his presence.
“I’ll be resigning as mayor,” he continues. “Next week. I wanted you to hear it from me before it hit the news.”
My fingers curl into the strap of my bag, knuckles going white. “Why?”
It’s a genuine question after we haven’t seen each other in two years. Not that I am complaining; I was able to get closer to my mom in that time away from him and see my dad for what he truly is.
A monster.
“Because I want to do better.”
The bark of laughter that comes out of me isn’t even funny. It’s dry and sharp enough to cut the air between us like scissors to paper. “Do better?” I repeat the words, testing them on my tongue and finding them as hollow as his supposed cancer diagnosis. “You want to do better.”
“Bellamy—”
“Looking back, you’ve missed every birthday, every game, every important milestone in my life,” I say, my voice loud but not enough to draw attention to us. “Every single time mom needed help with the medical bills after you—”
I stop myself from going there, my jaw tightening. I can feel the muscle jumping under the skin, the same way it did before I threw that hit to Jamie’s stupid face, I knew was going to draw a penalty.
“I remember,” I start, blinking back tears because fuck him, he doesn’t deserve my tears.
“Every night she spent hiding bruises, every time she told me it was an accident or a misunderstanding. I remember every single lie she told me because you made her believe she deserved it. Do you remember what you did the day you caught me telling her she needed to leave your sorry ass?”
“No,” he bites out.
“No?” I raise a brow, then drop my bag and raise my shirt, showing him the scar that never healed fully—the scar he gave me after beating the shit out of me for daring to beg my mom to leave him, the one I hid behind a tattoo I asked Rafe to give me after it stopped bleeding.
“You did this to me, and you want me to believe you want to do better?” I laugh, but it's as dry as the tears on my cheeks are. “People like you don’t change, and that’s why I may sympathise with your ailment, but I will never let you anywhere near the new life Mom and I are building for ourselves. ”
Leonardo’s face goes pale. Not the healthy pale of a man caught off guard, but the guilty kind of someone who’s been found out and knows no spin on the story'll fix it.
“I–” He struggles to swallow what I can only assume is his shame when he looks away before I drop my shirt. “I’m not the same man,” he says, voice quieted and almost broken. “The cancer changes things; it makes you—”
“No.” I cut him off. “No, it doesn’t. It makes you afraid; it doesn't make you good or permitted to ask for unearned forgiveness because you aren’t owed shit from mom or me.”
I move to step around him after picking up my bag that swings with my pivot, and I have one foot heading toward the exit when his hand closes around my bicep.
His touch hit me like ice water, and my whole body locked down. For a second—just a second—I am seventeen again, standing in the living room while a hand that size closes around my arm hard enough to leave fingerprints.
“Don’t walk away from me,” Leonardo says, his voice cracking on the last word. “I’m trying to–”
“You need to take your fucking hand off me before your face meets the wall, old man.” The words come out low and venomous. I almost don’t recognise my own voice.
Before either of us can move, a shadow flickers across the hallway due to the light above our heads, and a familiar voice sounds from behind me—his voice that settles and grounds me.
“Mr Maddox.”
Two words, said so calmly and yet in such a menacing way that makes my skin tingle when Minho steps between us.
Not aggressively because he doesn’t shove my dad away from me, but simply moves into the space as it belongs to him, and I realise then that Minho is taller than my dad and maybe an inch shorter than me.
Minho looking down at my dad’s five-foot-three frame might have gone to my head, but I can’t get the look of fear on my dad's face out of my mind, and I love it. The way he gets the old man to let me go without saying another word might have made me fall harder for him, and I don’t hate it.
Not one bit.
“Is there a problem here?” Minho asks, his burning gaze remaining on my dad, but I swear they glance at me out of the corner of his eye, and when a ghost of a smirk curls his lips, I know for a fact he looked at me.
Leonardo clears his throat and backs away one step at a time. “Uh... n-no.” he shakes his head, unblinkingly looking at Minho like he’s a demon from hell, and maybe he is, but he’s my demon. “No problem here, I was just congratulating my son on his game today.”
Is he being serious right now?
Minho laughs, his teeth glinting under the light like fangs and God, I feel like a little girl right now, swooning over a high school crush or, in my case, my university crush.
“Sir, your son lost today.”
My stomach dips, and not in a fun way. Was Minho in the crowd? Did he see what I did to Jamie? I only ask this now because I know he is friends with the prick, or was—I don’t know anymore.
But did he have to say I lost in such a mocking way?
My dad stutters as he backs into the wall, then flinches away. “I know that, but what he did to that Jamie k-kid that w-was real hockey, no matter w-what his coach says.”
“His coach,” My evil, cunning stepbrother repeats amusingly before his eyes dart in my direction. “You mean my father?”
Leonardo looks ghostly pale, his eyes zinging between us before settling on me. “I-I will see you s-soon, Bellamy, have a good day.” He's gone in the next moment, practically speed-running down the hallway, and I’m left not knowing what the hell just happened.
But then I remember it was Coach Walker who issued the restraining order, and Minho is probably one of the people my dad isn’t allowed to go near.
“Thanks?”
Minho turns to me fully, eyes me down, then grins like the perfect picture of innocence. “What can I say? The only thing I love more than putting you in your place is scaring the shit out of people that touch what’s mine.”
I blink.
Did he say I’m his? Am I dreaming?
He smirks. “Don’t get your balls all twisted in a knot, Bells, I didn’t mean it like that—I’m not like, obsessed with you, like you are with me.”
I swallow. “Then what did you mean?” I ask, folding my arms over my chest, a little annoyed by his little jab, and that earns me another smile; I swear, it makes me potentially melting quite possible.
“That’s for me to know and for you,” he gestures at me with a finger. “To dot, dot, dot.”
I roll my eyes.
“What are you even doing here?”
He puts his hand on his chin as if contemplating what to say. “I was going to threaten to expose your little scandal with one beautiful professor, Sasha Smith, but then I saw you with daddy satan and decided to save your sorry ass like the good Samaritan I am instead.”
“How charming.”
“Right?” He tilts his head to the side, and adds, “You love it, don’t you? It probably turned you on seeing me size up your old man—probably made your dick so hard you’d fuck me right here, right now, if I let you.”
My head is spinning when all my mind can think about is his hands sliding down my body, reaching for the place that aches to be touched; my dick is fucking perv for him, and he knows it.
“Bet it makes you want to kiss me—again.”
It does, but I can’t be the one who makes the first move.
Touching him, sure, I can do that, but if I kiss him first—I’m done for.
There’ll be no turning back, no letting him run—none of that shit.
I’ll grovel, crawl, beg him if that is what it takes for him to want me.
But he doesn’t need to know any of this.
Not yet.