Chapter 61
Quill
The Daughter. The Friend.
Oldies playing from another
room it’s a quite night
Oldies Playing
“Jesus Christ, Gravia!” Anthony blurted out, and I quickly recovered from my shock, realizing that I most likely looked distraught and completely flustered.
“Quill,” I corrected my brother, and he stared at me as if he had collided with the Queen of England.
“Quill...”
I tucked my straight hair behind my ears, trying to collect myself, and looked around, hoping Davian wouldn't appear out of nowhere. Because then Anthony would have questions.
“Do you have a death wish, sneaking around this devil's house?” I looked back at Anthony, whose expression now showed a hint of alarm.
“What do you think Troy will do if he finds you up here? Or better yet, Arnold.”
Worry mingled with his warning, so I raised both eyebrows.
“As if either of them would scare me.”
What could they possibly do? Kidnap me? Lock me in a secret torture chamber? I was pretty sure there had to be something like that somewhere here. This family really gave me the creeps. But tonight, both men were distracted by polishing their reputation in front of everyone.
Tony lowered his voice until it took on a conspiratorial tone.
“What if I told you that the ghost of Arnold's late wife haunts this place?”
A slight shiver crawled over my bare shoulders and the urge to look around the dark hallway came over me out of nowhere.
A broad grin stretched my brother's lips and I looked at him resignedly until his expression returned to normal.
“Can we talk?”
And immediately, any remaining good mood sank into the basement.
“If it's about Father, no.”
With growing frustration, I pushed past him.
“You can't run away from it forever.”
Of course he followed me.
“That’s rich coming from the one who bails every time because he can’t stand watching his father drink himself senseless.”
“You're right. I hate it! Because it's my fault.”
I stopped abruptly and spun around to face him.
“It's not, and you know it.” Taking a deep breath, I looked around again, because there was a good chance Davian would suddenly appear around one of the corners. “Tony...”
The smell of tar filled my nose and I squinted my eyes in disgust, inhaling even more air.
“Do you smell that too?”
“I don't smell anything.”
I looked at my brother suspiciously, stepped closer and breathed in, only for the smell to become even more intense.
“You... You smell like cigarettes...” Blinking, I stepped back, noticing how he avoided my gaze. “You... are you smoking again?”
His chest rose and fell heavily.
When I had moved in, he had just quit smoking. Brittany had demanded it because she disliked the smell as much as I did.
“It helps, okay?”
I didn't know what to say. It was his decision. His health.
I should be grateful that he didn't drink excessively. That probably none of the Richter children would ever reach for the bottle out of habit.
But with Tony, I wasn't so sure. He was so much like Father, except that the elite hadn't yet hardened his heart.
As silly as it sounded, one of my biggest fears was that my father would stop drinking and Tony would gravitate more toward alcohol as a result. It was selfish to think that way, but I didn't want to lose my brother to this drug too.
“It's getting worse with Father.” I pressed my lips together. “Last night he started throwing dishes. He kept yelling your name.”
Oh, that sounded a lot like my childhood.
“And he...”
“Tony,” I interrupted him and raised my hand when he wanted to continue. “No.”
It broke my heart to ignore the desperation in his eyes, but these were two different battles, and we were both better off staying out of each other’s wars.
“I don’t want to. That man... has no place in my life anymore.”
A lie. Because my father dominated every thought of revenge I had ever felt. I wouldn't be able to sleep until he had lost everything.
“Tony?” We both turned around at the tentative voice and stared at Lara, who was smiling cautiously and must have just stepped around the corner. “Would you give me a moment with Quill?”
Tony looked at me for a few seconds, completely thrown off balance. Then he straightened up, looked at me one last time with a silent plea in his eyes, and finally turned to Lara with a smile.
“Of course.”
I didn't miss the fact that Lara's cheeks were flushed.
Could it have something to do with her mother?
Tony gave her a quick, searching look and touched her shoulder for a moment. A gesture of reassurance that the two often exchanged when they weren't busy teasing each other about all sorts of things.
Lara and Tony knew each other longer than the total time I knew both of them. They were family.
What a strong bond the two of them must have built up over the years...
As always, I envied Lara for having male role models in her life who were there for her without any sexual ulterior motives, who had taught her that deep emotional bonds between two people of different ages and genders could exist far beyond sexual dynamics or emotional dependence.
I knew that Lara was uncomfortable when it came to relationships with older men. To her, my behavior was anything but normal.
Looking back, I knew that all these older men had only appealed to me because I had been trying to find maturity, experience, security, and comfort in someone's arms. Someone who had their life under control and could take care of me, someone with whom I could be the little girl I had never been allowed to be as a child.
Attributes of a father.
But I would never have a father and had to stop subconsciously wanting to find one. Placing that burden on someone else was not fair and, above all, not love.
Inevitably, my thoughts wandered to Davian.
He was all those things to me. A mature man with life experience who was there for me in moments when I myself didn't realize that I needed someone like him the most.
When I fell and scraped my knees bloody on the asphalt of life, he gently applied Band-Aids with his words and his touch to wounds that were never his to close. And yet he did exactly that.
Davian Rydell was my home. One I would never have dared to believe I could ever find in another soul.
But he was also someone with whom I shared the same interests. And more importantly, he was someone to whom I could give the same thing back, because he was just as broken as I was.
Davian was real. Not a father to me. Not a caregiver I had needed. Davian had a soul that danced in step with mine to a rare melody.
As my brother disappeared around the corner, I forced these thoughts that tore at my inner scars out of my head and silently thanked Lara for nipping this conversation in the bud.
“You just saved me.”
Her tentative smile filled with concern.
“He's your brother.” She stepped toward me and her right hand landed on my upper arm. “You know he means well.”
She stared at my arm, must have noticed how cold I was, and I fought not to avoid her gaze.
She should be mad at me. Avoid me. After the crap I had confessed to her.
“Just because you mean well doesn’t mean it’s good.”
I didn't know if I was right, only that I wasn't ready to talk to Tony about Father, and maybe I wouldn't be for a very long time.
“Do you think it's good to have a crush on your best friend's father?”
Caught out, I looked up.
“We don't have...”
I bit my tongue, watching Lara stare at me and let her hand slip from my shoulder.
“We?” She literally pierced me with her gaze, but I couldn't find judgment or any of the other things I feared in her expression. “So...” She hesitated, eventually looked down at the floor. “There’s something between both of you?”
Nothing in this world could have prepared me for this conversation. I had gone through all possible ways to respond in the car, had prepared answers to questions. Explanations that might make sense to her.
Now my memory was blank.
“Lara... I'm sorry,” was all I could get out. “I know it’s not okay. That it can’t be.”
I wanted to reach for her hand, but I fought the urge.
“I would never put his job at risk. And neither do I want to lose you as my best friend…”
My heart contracted convulsively, because something told me I was about to lose Lara.
“But we talk so much. I understand him. He understands me…”
I swallowed, unable to hold her frozen gaze any longer, and at that very moment, tears overwhelmed me.
“And whenever he's there... When no one else is there...”
I gasped for air, unable to get a word out, and my vision sank into a chaos of tears.
“I... I...”
Before I could even grasp a thought, Lara stepped toward me, wrapped both arms around me, and pulled me close.
An overwhelmed sob escaped my throat and I immediately clung to her. She did the same.
“I don't want to lose you either, Quill,” she whispered in my ear, her voice steadier than mine and yet on the verge of despair.
I had brought her there. And yet she hugged me.
She let go of me, but didn't step back, instead placing both hands on my arms and carefully running them up and down before pausing.
“I'm trying to understand you.” She drew her lips in slightly, looked away briefly, her gaze fixed. “To understand him.” Her absent-minded shake of the head that followed tore something inside me. “But… I don’t know if I’m capable of that right now.”
I just nodded, hoping she would always choose her father’s side, that she would never blame him for the mess I had left behind.
“Everything in me tells me it should be creepy that the man who raised me is getting close to a girl my age.”
The intensifying panic doubled.
“Davian isn't like that...”
“I know,” she interrupted me quickly, nodding as if trying to convince herself. “Please...” She blinked away a tear. “Just give me time...”
“No,” I whispered. “No, this isn't your burden to bear.” I stepped back, forcing her to let go of me. “I should move away instead of messing up both of your lives.”
“Quill.” Lara sounded desperate, wanting to step toward me, but I stepped back again. “Quill, please...”
It broke my heart to see how determined she was not to hurt me, even though I had messed up her life.
“You two are so alike.” My voice broke and three more tears traced paths down my cheeks. “I don’t deserve either of you.”
I had already said it to Davian, but at that moment I realized that I really needed time for myself. For the mess I kept mutating into over and over again.
In a knee-jerk reaction, I turned around and rushed back down the hallway, but this time I took a different one that I didn't know yet.
“Quill.” Lara's frantic footsteps behind me made me speed up. “I understand you. Dad stopped you from doing something very stupid. And you developed an emotional connection to him because of that.” I stopped abruptly and turned to face her with an unignorable tugging in my chest. “And he’s lonely, probably enjoys being able to talk to someone about writing. I can imagine that his boundaries have become blurred and he doesn’t even realize that he’s giving you false hope. ”
I'd rather leave this town than have Lara wallow in denial about something that was right in front of her eyes.
“We've both developed an emotional bond because we're writers and have difficulty living that life.”
“Quill…”
“Your father wanted to jump too.”
I bit my tongue so hard that the pain made my jaw tense.
Lara's eyes widened.
I had had no right to tell her that.
Could this evening get any better?
I decided that I had already crossed a line and that it was no longer worth holding back. Lara should know everything. Unfiltered. The whole truth.
I took a step toward her, but stopped two meters in front of her.
“Before I knew you were his daughter, I kissed him and he kissed me back.” Lara looked paralyzed, but I just kept talking. “The only reason he never kissed me again is because of you. So please don’t blame him, because he has a conscience and he would do anything for you.”
“He… kissed you?”
Her voice sounded unstable. Her gaze drifted to one of the paintings of a hunting scene in the Black Forest.
“Yes.”
Saying it out loud felt like someone was running a blunt pocket knife over my body without applying any pressure.
“Hate me for it, end our friendship if it helps, but please don’t be angry with him. All your father ever did was be there for me, without ever taking advantage of it once.”
Lara couldn’t bring herself to look me in the eye.
I had ruined us.
New tears welled up in my eyes and I turned around, taking the nearest staircase up to a hallway lined with furniture covered in white sheets.
Lara followed me.
“Exactly that is the problem, Quill. Everything he does, he does for me.” I turned to her again.
“And I hate it.” Tears were now burning in her ice-blue eyes, and I wondered who she had inherited them from.
“I hate it so much that I am the one to blame for him never living his life. That he always used me as a reason not to break out of his prison.”
She looked as if she was about to break down. Maybe because I never saw her cry.
“Everyone knows it's not your fault. That it's an excuse. That my father manipulated Davian. He never had to become a lawyer. He should have been writing.”
The despair in my voice was impossible to miss. Just as the one in Lara's eyes.
“Maybe you're right...”
She turned away from me, clutched the railing with her hands, and looked with glassy eyes at another painting depicting a building with German flags.
“But I need time.”
“Take it. Please. Please take all the time you need. Don't force yourself to forgive me.”
“It's not your fault.” Lara turned to me, tilted her head with a remorseful expression and a painful gleam in her eyes. “You have feelings for him. And you can't help your feelings.”
Relief wanted to nestle inside me, but I fought against even one spark of hope setting something ablaze inside me.
“Neither can he,” I whispered instead.
Lara swallowed, and I knew that a battle was raging inside her. Under no circumstances would I try to get her on my side. I just wanted her to understand us.
And yet the words hung between us.
It is wrong.
White is not a color
that should be worn around me.
– Blue