Jackson
"Holy shit, just take the shot already."
"Aww, leave him alone. He's in wuv."
"I hate you both."
I lean over the table, line up the eight ball, and take the shot. It drops cleanly into the corner pocket, which earns me a middle finger from Bennet and another obnoxious round of in wuv from Derrick.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Rose since Tuesday night.
Haven’t been able to stop talking about her either, which is how Bennet and Derrick ended up knowing every detail, including, and I cannot stress enough how freely I volunteered this information, the part where I came in my pants like a teenage virgin who’d never seen a woman before.
In my defense, I had never experienced anything like that before, and I only told two people about it. One of them has not let me live it down for four consecutive days.
Bennet moves around the table to line up for his next shot. “Are you going to see her again?”
“I don’t even know her real name. Just her username from the app.”
Derrick leans against his cue, grinning at me. “In wuv.”
“I will fucking end you.”
He laughs, thoroughly satisfied with himself, then reaches for his beer. “How was seeing your dad?”
Just like that, whatever good mood I had left from thinking about Rose disappears.
I look down at the table and roll my cue between my palms. I fucking hate talking about this shit.
“He’s still an asshole.”
Bennet misses his shot, but we don't give him shit for it. They both know enough about my dad to know there isn’t really a funny version of this conversation.
He’s been an addict for most of my life, and not the tidy, single-vice kind you can name in one word.
It’s alcohol and drugs and gambling and women, a rotating buffet depending on which one is closest to hand on any given week.
Sometimes he strings together a few good months, and I start breathing again.
Then the phone rings at two in the morning, or money disappears, or he doesn’t show up somewhere he promised he would, and I realize I was fucking stupid enough to believe him again.
I told him before he went into treatment that this was the last time.
Either he gets clean or I’m done. No more picking him up.
No more money. No more listening to him tell me he knows he fucked up while I stand there wondering how many times a person can say the same apology before the words stop meaning anything.
I even drove up there for family night so he could do his amends. Sat in a room with a bunch of strangers while he stood in front of me with wet eyes and shaking hands and told me how sorry he was for everything he’d put me through.
Same performance in a different building.
Same script. Same wet eyes. Same nothing behind them.
Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe he meant every fucking word while he was saying it. That’s the part nobody tells you about loving an addict. They can mean it. They can love you, regret hurting you, swear on everything they have that this is the last time, and genuinely believe themselves.
Then tomorrow comes.
Bennet studies me for a second. “Do you think he’s going to stay clean?”
Fuck no.
It’s the only answer history repeating itself has left me with.
He’s not my biological father, for the record. That man cleared out the minute my mother told him she was pregnant and was never heard from again. No name worth mentioning, no absence I ever learned to miss, just a blank where a person should’ve been.
Dad married Mom when I was a year old and adopted me not long after, which technically makes him the only father I’ve ever had.
He taught me how to ride a bike, threw a baseball with me in the yard, showed up to school shit when he was sober enough to remember and scared the hell out of my first girlfriend when she came to the house.
There were good years.
That’s what makes it so fucking complicated.
If he'd always been terrible, maybe I could hate him properly. Instead, I remember sitting on his shoulders at baseball games. I remember him teaching me to shave. I remember falling asleep on the couch and waking up in my bed because he'd carried me upstairs.
I also remember searching his pockets for car keys because Mom was crying and begging him not to drive.
I remember hiding her purse because he'd already emptied their bank account once that month.
I remember learning, way too fucking young, how to tell what kind of night we were going to have by the way he closed the front door.
Both versions of him are my dad.
I’ve never been able to decide whether I’m grateful for that.
When it came time for school, my grandfather had to mortgage the house to cover my tuition, because Dad had run the entire fund through a Vegas table a few weeks prior — every cent gone in the span of a weekend.
And my grandparents still made excuses for him.
Losing my mom did something to him, they said, gentle as anything, like grief is a coupon that never expires.
Maybe it did. Doesn't change the arithmetic of a mortgaged house and an empty college account.
Or the part of that I've never been able to put down: that there was no house left to mortgage a second time when my grandmother was diagnosed with colon cancer shortly after I started school.
I've done the math on that more times than is good for me. She died six months later.
My grandfather went not long after her, the way people sometimes do when the person they've spent most of their life waking up beside suddenly isn't there anymore. I never knew my mother's parents. They were both gone before she was grown, so by the time Grandpa died, that was it.
Dad and me.
Whatever the fuck we were to each other.
“That bad, huh?”
Bennet's hand lands on my shoulder and gives it a squeeze, pulling me back into the bar. I realize I never actually answered Bennet’s question. I've just been standing here staring at the pool table while my brain wandered through twenty years of shit that I had no intention of visiting today.
“It is what it is.” I shrug and reach for my beer.
They let it go.
I love them for that.
These are the only two real friends I have in this city, which makes it sting a little that Bennet and I are about to leave Derrick behind.
Not leave him behind in the dramatic sense.
Nobody's dying or disappearing. But tonight is graduation, and tomorrow the shape of our lives changes, whether or not any of us are ready for it.
Four years of college compressed into just under two because Bennet and I tested out of enough foundational coursework to make our academic advisors visibly uncomfortable.
Placement tests, independent study, overloaded semesters, and a combined refusal to sit through anything we'd already taught ourselves.
Derrick, being a normal fucking person, took one look at the pace we'd set and informed us that he enjoyed sleep and occasionally seeing daylight.
So, he still has school left. Bennet and I don't.
We're not even fully out the door yet and we're already ass-deep in building a business.
What started with the two of us throwing ideas around between classes has become real enough to have contracts, clients, invoices, and an office we can barely afford.
We've spent the last several months going from lectures to meetings and then working until two in the morning because finishing college in half the normal time wasn't enough stress for either of us.
It feels strange to be excited about leaving and already miss something that isn't over yet.
I don’t care if it’s just Bennet's name on the door. It’s accurate.
He's bringing the capital, the concept, the proprietary app, and the kind of business instinct that makes grown men in boardrooms feel like they've been called on without doing the reading.
The fucker is a genius. Legitimately. Mensa card and everything.
I've seen him do things with code that I didn't know were legal, and we've had more than one professor pull me aside after class just to ask what the hell is wrong with him.
I'm just bringing my pretty face along for the ride.
Okay, that's bullshit. I know what I bring to the table.
Bennet can build almost anything he can imagine, but eventually someone has to convince another human being to buy it.
That's where I come in. He builds the thing; I make people believe they need the thing, and somewhere along the way we realized those two skill sets might actually make us dangerous.
Assuming we don't bankrupt ourselves first.
And tonight I'm also bringing a humiliating amount of feelings about a woman I met four days ago in a hotel bar.
“You're seriously not going to try to find her?” Derrick asks.
“I did try.” I start racking the balls again. “Her profile was gone when I went back to look.”
Bennet doesn't even glance up as he chalks his cue. “Because you were probably a horrible fuck. You came in your pants, dude. No woman wants a redo of that.”
“And she's six years older than you, fuckface,” Derrick adds. “Maybe she realized she'd accidentally fucked a child and deleted the app out of shame.”
“She didn't know how old I actually was. She thought I was twenty-four.”
“Because of a fake ID that barely looks legal.”
“It looks very legal.”
Derrick stares at me. “It looks like you made it in Microsoft Word.”
“I paid seventy-five dollars for that ID.”
“You got robbed.”
“Regardless.” I steal Derrick's beer before he can stop me and take a drink. “We fucked four more times that night. She was absolutely feral for it. I more than redeemed myself.”
Bennet finally looks up. “So you say.”
“So the neighbors say. So the front desk calling at two in the morning to ask us to keep it down says.”
Derrick points at me with his cue. “Okay, that part I believe.”
“Thank you, Derrick.”
“You're welcome.” He takes his beer back and tilts it toward me in a mock toast. “You're a howler when you come.”
Bennet's face twists. “Why do you know that?”
“Thin walls.”