8. Rio
eight
Rio
The drive back to the apartment takes twenty minutes and I spend all of it thinking about how complicated this just got.
The girl I’ve been watching for six weeks just walked through my estranged father’s front door with her own key. A reasonable man would walk away knowing that’s their stepsister.
I’m not a reasonable man though.
I get home and Cole’s on the couch. He looks up when I walk in and something in my face tells him what he needs to know before I say a word.
“So,” he says.
“She lives in my father’s house.”
Cole sets his controller down. “Run that back.”
“Richard’s house, she had a key.”
He stares at me for a long second, putting it together. “Sooo.. she’s your stepsister?”
“Yep.”
“Fuck man, you’ve been jerking off to her for six weeks.”
“Yeah, Cole. Yeah”
“So, are you still taking her to dinner on Saturday?”
“Uh, obviously.”
He picks the controller back up. “I want to say you’re a sick fuck, but after that video with blondie I don’t blame you one bit.”
I just laugh and sit down on the couch next to him, picking up a controller.
“So, what happens after?”
“I figure out how to get back into that house.”
Cole shakes his head but he’s already queuing us into a match. “Someone’s gotta watch this trainwreck.”
We play for two hours, and Cole gets downed in the first match because he has no awareness and probably never will.
I carry us through and don’t say much because he fills the silence himself, loudly and without invitation.
I let him talk and trash talk the way he needs to because my head is somewhere else.
It’s on Saturday.
On Remi sitting across from me at a table thinking she’s safe because Ryan pulled out her chair and made her laugh.
Ryan seems like the kind of guy a girl meets on the internet and gets lucky with.
She has no idea I’ve seen every inch of her already, or that I know what she sounds like when she comes and what her face does when she’s close.
Saturday I’m putting my hands on her for the first time and she’s going to think it’s new.
It just won’t be new for me.
The violation should deter me in all honesty. But I stopped apologizing for a long time ago for the way that I am.
Cole logs off around midnight and disappears into his room while I stay where I am.
The apartment goes quiet after Cole’s gone to bed. No controller noise, no commentary, just the hum of my monitor and the blue glow of it across the ceiling. I put my phone down on the cushion beside me and sit with it for a while.
She’s in that house right now. Third floor I’m assuming since that’s where I was.
Red hair, glasses, the oversized shirt she had on when she sent me that photo.
Maybe streaming, or maybe not. Either way she’s up there living a life she thinks is hers, with no idea that the man she’s meeting Saturday already knows where she sleeps.
I’m not in a hurry, either. I’ve been patient for six weeks and I can be patient a little longer.
Ryan gets me Saturday. Saturday gets me closer than any screen ever did. And after Saturday, Rio figures out how to get inside that house.
I am willing to do whatever that takes.
Richard still texts on my birthday, sends messages I don’t answer, and reaches out like a man who knows he failed.
He doesn’t really know how to fix it except by trying again in smaller and smaller ways until one of them sticks.
He wants something back and has been waiting six years for me to give it to him.
Until now he’s been waiting for nothing.
I find his contact and stare at my screen for a long time, then I press call.
It rings twice before being answered.
“Rio.” My father’s voice sounds surprised, but I can tell he’s trying not to show it.
“Hey, Dad.”