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As long as her creepy stalker hasn’t tried to make contact.
Whenever I think of that shadowy figure, I can’t help the combination of rage and anxiety that gnaw at my chest. Especially because now I’m not around to protect her. Not there at night to make sure she’s safe even when she sleeps.
My librarian is out in the world, alone. And she wants it that way. Because she doesn’t trust me.
“She broke it off with you, huh?” My dad’s words have my fists clenching so hard, I snap in half the pencil I’m holding. The section with the eraser clatters against the metal bottom of the boat and rolls away from me.
“What’d you do?”
Nothing, I want to growl. But that’s not true. Or at least the nothing I did means a hell of a lot.
“She found out about prison,” I eventually admit.
“She found out, or you told her?”
“Found out.”
“Shit, Cole.”
“I don’t need to hear it.”
Dad readjusts his battered baseball hat. “I won’t lay into you. Bet you’re hurting enough as it is.”
My mouth twists in a grimace, and I opt not to answer. A good fifteen minutes go by, where my dad pulls up a bull redfish as long as his torso. Once he’s got the thing tucked away in a cooler and his line back in the water, I get another question.
“Why didn’t you tell her?”
I pick up the errant pencil half off the boat bottom and erase my last sentence before answering.
“You met her. She’s too…good. I just fuck shit up.”
“Language.” The chastisement is laughable, seeing as how he’s apt to call someone an asshole for not accelerating fast enough at a green light.
“The boy you used to be messed up. People change. You changed.”
“I still lie.”
“You lie about something else?”
“No.”
“So just one thing?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You tell her why?”
That has me pausing. “What do you mean?”
Dad shifts in his seat, his face pinching as if uncomfortable. “What did you say to her? When she found out?”
Shit. I hate reliving this. But I also know this is some rare, possibly insightful version of my father I’m getting. Maybe he can help me fix things. So I play it back for him as best as I can remember, cringing when I think on my exact words.
When I’m done, the boat gets silent, the only noise the small waves lapping against the hull.
“You said you didn’t tell her because you thought she wouldn’t give you a chance. That she’d leave,” he summarizes.
“Basically.”
