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“Shut your face,” I muttered darkly.
“Why are you up at four?” my dad asked.
I was thinking of a lie good enough to pass off as the truth when Zee continued without a care in the world to how bad it was going to piss my dad off.
“She was running at the track, in the pitch-black darkness, with a barely-there light that illuminated like a tenth of the track,” Zee explained.
See, here’s the thing about my dad.
Peter ‘Pete’ Cope was a Marine for thirty years. When he got out of the Marines, he became a security officer. And not just a security officer for the mall. No, a security officer for people like senators and governors and movie stars. Though, my dad didn’t so much like the movie stars. Apparently, they weren’t as open to following orders as other people, and he didn’t like when his clients didn’t trust him implicitly.
And what all that boiled down to was that my father was extremely security conscious.
When I’m talking ‘security conscious’ I mean, if my father didn’t blow a gasket right now, it’d be a goddamn miracle.
His body stiffened underneath me, and I closed my eyes, counting to ten for patience.
I got to seven before my dad exploded.
“You were doing what?!” Dad bellowed.
I sighed and pulled away from him, then kicked Zee under the table, offering him a glare.
“Some fucking guy hacked your neighbor up, and you think it’s a good idea to go to the track at four in the morning, and practically offer yourself up as a virgin sacrifice?” my father asked.
I hissed at him. “I’m not a virgin!”
Anymore.
Thanks to the asshole that was currently rubbing his shin and looking at me funny.
“Since when?” Dad asked.
I scrunched up my nose. “I’m not talking about this.”
“It’s a new development, or I’m sure my wife would’ve shared with me the momentous news,” he teased.
I hated him.
I seriously hated him.
A few years ago, my mother and I had it out because she wanted me to stop being so overly cautious and live. Me, being the product of my father’s upbringing, had been quite overly cautious of who I dated.
My dad had instilled in me that not only do you need to be careful of who you date, but I was also to be careful about who I let in.
Mainly because of what he did for a living, but ultimately because he cared about his daughter and didn’t want his daughter ending up with some loser.
And I’d taken that to heart.
Though I’d dated, I hadn’t found anybody that I’d be willing to share my life with that in-depth.
Meaning I wasn’t willing to just give my virginity up all willy-nilly to random strangers.
As for what happened with Zee, that I had no explanation for.
I was blaming my inebriated state, but if I was being honest, it was likely due to the fact that I’d always had a thing for Zee, even way before I started dating Eitan or Annmarie dated Zee. Though, that ‘thing’ died a dramatic death the moment that Zee looked at me and called me a ‘gross girl’ when he was nine and I was six.
Though, that’d be a lie.
Nothing had ever ended for me. Not when I was six. Not when I was fourteen. And certainly not now.
I had a thing for Zee.
There, I was admitting it.
I had a huge thing for Zee, and I felt guilty for having this thing. I felt guilty that I was alive to have a thing for him, and my sister, who had originally been with him, wasn’t.
In the beginning, it’d been because Zee had terrorized me to no end. Then it’d been because he’d been with my sister.
Now it was because my sister had died, and I shouldn’t want the things I wanted with him.
Should I? Was that bad? I just didn’t know.
“Why are we talking about this?” I muttered darkly.
“How about we talk about how you ran in the dark with no one knowing where you were, offering your body up to any man that was bad enough to take it?” he suggested.
I scowled and lifted my eyes to see Zee’s trained on me.
He was watching me with a weird look on his face that I knew meant he had questions.
Questions like ‘did I take your virginity.’
I looked away and up to my father. “I’m an adult. I had a knife and a light. I was okay.”
“A knife isn’t going to get you anywhere,” he muttered. “And what’s a flashlight going to do for you?”
I shrugged.
I didn’t know. But it made me feel better to know that I had them in case I needed them.
“Next time you want to do something stupid like that, at least inform someone that you’re going out, and when to expect you back, so they can raise the alarm if they don’t hear from you,” Dad muttered darkly.
