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“So now you’re replacing me?”
“You’re my father. He’s my husband. Neither of you can replace the other. So please, please stop hurting me, Dad. I beg you.”
Well, fuck.
38
Nathaniel
Iknew this would be hard, but I didn’t think it would be this fucking unbearable.
There’s always been an emptiness inside me—it comes with all the baggage of being an unwanted child. But I’ve managed it well through the years.
Or, I thought I had.
Turns out, I was only numbing it with no way to effectively deal with it. Which is why I’m here, in the middle of nowhere.
On the mountain.
I’ve done a lot of hiking and thinking, mostly about her.
The girl I left behind without a word because her dick of a father is testing me.
“Stay away for a while and take the time off as an overdue vacation,” he told me that day. “If she’s really serious about you, she won’t move on. But if she does move on, you will fuck off from her life.”
He also wants ten percent of my shares, which will give him the majority in W&S. We agreed to never sell our shares to outsiders or each other in order to keep an equal power balance. But he’s using the circumstances to twist my arm.
I agreed anyway. Fuck the shares and the firm; they don’t matter compared to her.
His other conditions included never letting her know where I was, talking to her, or even giving her any type of an excuse. The fucker wants her to be angry at me for ghosting her and hopes that will eventually make her forget about me.
But he sometimes forgets that she’s as headstrong as he is.
If she wants to leave me, she’ll do it on her own terms, not because of whatever the fuck he’s doing.
That doesn’t deny that the current situation is pure fucking torture. Being cut off from her bright smiles, easy laughter, and cheerful presence is similar to dying slowly. It’s different from when King first found out. At least then, I could see her at the firm and make sure she was all right.
Now, it’s a blank slate.
Now, I hang on to scraps of my memories of her and how she felt in my arms. I think of the colors she injects into my life and try not to let them darken like my soul.
It’s fucking hard, though. And on bad days, like today, it becomes almost impossible. The black ink I carefully locked inside me is spilling onto those colors and smudging them.
I take a swig of my water as I hike down from the peak. That’s all I’ve been doing lately, hiking and thinking about her. Then getting hard and fucking my hand to the memory of her tight heat.
Then I go through her social media like some sort of fucked-up stalker, just to make sure she’s all right. But she hasn’t posted anything for two weeks. Not even any fangirling updates about her favorite Twenty One Pilots or NF song of the week. Not even a throwback picture of when King took her to their concerts for her sixteenth birthday.
There’s nothing.
Only radio silence.
And maybe that’s what’s been darkening my mood even worse than being separated from her.
My feet come to a halt in front of the cottage. The last person I expected to see is sitting on the steps, flicking his lighter on and off. He stands out in the cozy setting with his black suit and menacing eyes.
“What are you doing here, King?” I remove my backpack and throw it to the side.
“Gwen said she’s pregnant.”
