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“Oh, no.”
He doesn’t seem satisfied with the answer. “What about money? Do you have a bank account where I can send you money from your trust’s cash account?”
“I guess my personal bank account should be fine. But I’m fine for now.”
He frowns. “What have you been doing with work?”
The questions are starting to irk me. And when I’m irked, I do the same thing each and every time. Get defensive. “The sameway I have been. By minding my own business. It’s worked fine all my life.”
“Luna. You are my business right now. If you need something, you need to tell me so I can help you get it. Nothing is out of your reach.”
I lean in, setting my face hard. “And I told you, Kingsley, that I know how to take care of myself. If I need something, I’ll tell you. Until then, consider me taken care of.”
The silence gets heavy, but then he settles back in his seat so he can survey me, shifting as though he’s crossing his legs under the table.
“Luna, do you enjoy being difficult just for the sake of it?”
I respond with a look arctic in its temperature. “That’s rich of you to say. You’re unnecessarily stick up your butt-ish.”
There’s a sound of something like muffled laughter from somewhere deeper in the house, but I might’ve just imagined it.
“Look, I appreciate what you’re doing and what you’ll be doing,” I continue. “But there are some things that I’m perfectly able to do for myself. You’re not my—”
I stop.
But we both know what I was going to say. He’s not my dad.
I didn’t mean Ernest. I just meant “you’re not my dad” in the colloquial, don’t-boss-me-around sense, but it hadn’t come out that way.
He doesn’t pursue it, just lets me squirm for a minute before he speak again.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“What?” Why is he asking? Does he care? He mocked me when I asked about him being married, but he hasn’t wondered the same in return? And why do I care so much that he does care?
“You heard me.”
“Why are you asking?”
He sighs. “I told you, Luna. I need to know these things about you now. I need to know everything. It’s to help you with your trust. To protect it and you. I just want the best for you.”
I push away from the table, throwing my napkin down in anger and hurt. “You know what’s the best thing you can do right now?”
“I’m doing it.” Passive. Cold. Robot-like.
“Well, you could do it like a human would do it! Like you did that night I came to you, asking you to hold me.”
His snicker digs like a fork in my side, twisting. “Actually, no. The best way is to take all the human parts out of it. The best thing I can do for you is to use nothing but my brain and logic. You’ll thank me in three months.”
“I can tell you what I’m thinking about you right now if you like.”
“You could. But I couldn’t care less, Luna. Your emotions aren’t going to change how I’m going to make my decisions. Because you’re going to have a lot of feelings toward me. You already do. And like it or not, I’m going to ignore them all. That’s what I meant about starting with a clean slate. Whatever emotions you thought you had for me from before? Whoever you thought you knew… before? Forget them. And trust me, that is the best thing for you. No matter what you and your little temper tantrum right now might think.”
His words incense me past the point of reason and I stand, fuming from every pore.
“So let me ask you one last question then. Since you want me to forget everything that came before. What if I told you that I do have a boyfriend? Would you be jealous?”
He gets up from the table, wipes his mouth, puts the folded napkin back down on the table, and moves toward me. I wonder if he’s just going to ignore me completely, but then he stops aswe’re shoulder to shoulder. His scent washes over me as he leans in, his voice low.
