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And I like it that way.
“Nah, he’s a real sweetheart, but he wants to chat and I have a migraine.”
“Aw, there’s some Tylenol in my bag,” she shifts her eyes downwards, to the shelves behind the counter, and I nod.
“You’re the best darlin’.”
“Don’t I know it.”
The rest of the night goes by without incident. My eyes keep drifting to Carter, and Carter’s eyes keep drifting to me. Cole Savage is here tonight, so all the ladies are losing their minds, asking for him to sign their tits and w
hatnot. When my shift is finally over, it’s four a.m.
I wipe the bar with a wet cloth, arrange the beer pints and wine glasses-all still warm from the industrial dish washer-in a neat row behind the bar. I noticed that Carter stares at me harder when I do those things. Arrange. Make sure all the glasses are in a straight line. I’m funny like that, but I’ve always been a neat person.
Maybe a little OCD.
Either way, he doesn’t mind.
When he sees me fussing over the exact angle of the glass, how I want it to be placed so it won’t be half an inch too close or too far to the next one, he tenses. Then when I get it right-and I always get it right-there’s a relieved smile on his face.
We’re both weird, I know that.
But I don’t dislike that.
If anything…it’s nice. To feel like someone sees you and understands. Not everything. He’ll never understand everything. But the surface of things.
“I’m outta’ here, people, have a good one!” I fling my bag over my shoulder, smack my lips with a fresh coat of lip gloss and move toward the back door. I blow kisses to the other bartenders and bouncers-everyone other than Carter, for some reason, it feels weird to do that to him. Not because I don’t like him. More because it’s a charade I feel like he shouldn’t be a part of. Like he deserves more than my lies-and walk away.
I get out to an alley. It’s fall, and the air is fresh and crisp but the stench of industrial food and empty bottles of alcohol is rising from the trash containers. I sigh and throw the garbage into the nearest trash can. I turn around, beginning to walk out from the narrow, bricked alleyway and to the main street, when I feel a cold blade pressed against my neck. A cold hand snaked behind my back, the palm pressing against my lips. I shudder. I know this smell. Alcohol, salty peanuts and despair.
My father.
“You know, Quinn, I always found it hard to believe when people told me you’d leave me. I thought to myself – ‘she’ll never do it. I’m her father, and I need her. I’m sick’. But guess what? They were right and I was wrong. Because here I am, chasing my fucked-up daughter in the middle of the night, or the beginning of the morning, depends how you look at it, really, looking for favors.”
The first thing I think about is that he must be relatively sober. I don’t remember dad forming such a long sentence in a very long time. The second thing I think about is that I want him to just kill me. To get it over with. I’m done. This life means nothing to me anymore. I work, I take care of Gia and I repeat. This is not a life worth living and all I want is for it to end. I press my neck deeper into the blade and lean into it, and he cringes behind me, groaning, obviously exasperated with my antics.
“You’re crazy. Just like your mother.”
“My mother died,” I say to him. “Because of you. You made her that way, and then you killed her.”
“I had a bad feeling about that one from day one,” he mutters. He didn’t know her, not really. Even after all those years. What an idiot. Whatever, I still don’t care.
“Kill me,” my voice is steady, calm. “Just do it already, because I know what you’re about to ask me and I’m not doing it. The answer was, is, and will always be no. So you better just slit my throat, and if you ever loved me as a daughter, even for a second, then you’d have the mercy of cutting deep so that I die quick.”
“Ugh!” he squeezes the blade to my skin, producing blood from just above my collarbone, before removing the blade from my neck and pushing me against the wall. I slam into the red bricks and feel the familiar sting in my nose.
But I’m not going back.
I’m not doing this anymore.
God, why can’t he just kill me?
“You were a good entertainment girl,” he argues, and I turn around to face him. Still scrawny from “his sickness”, which is actually a severe addiction to crack and alcohol, still with a messy, curly mountain of grey hair and a matching grey beard, dirty skin-maybe it’s tan but maybe just dirty, he’s my father but I still never found out the truth about it-in Levi’s jeans and an ugly Christmas jumper he probably stole from someone’s clothesline.
“You mean a whore,” I retort tiredly, rubbing my eyes with the base of my palms. I sigh and shake my head. “I’m not getting back to that. You tortured and abused me. You tried to pimp me, dad, and I was only sixteen. Do you even get how wrong it is?”
“We needed the money,” he mutters, looking at me in complete shock, like he can’t understand why I’m doing this.
