“Whoa, don’t get so hostile.”
Ryke takes a deep breath, glances at Daisy once or twice and then shakes his head. “I didn’t realize that’s why you were firing the girls. I wouldn’t have gone near them if I knew that was the case.”
“Who’d you sleep with?” Daisy asks like it’s everyday conversation.
“Their store manager.” He doesn’t even lie?
Lo and I glance between them. What kind of relationship do they even have?
“Bad call,” she says.
“No fucking kidding.”
And then a shadow casts over the whole table. I look up and there’s my mother. My veins ice over, realizing that we have not talked. In so long. Still, she barely gives me the time of day. Her attention remains fixed to my little sister.
“There’s too much sugar in that, Daisy. I thought we agreed to just eat the vegetables.”
“I didn’t think—”
“It’s fine. I’ll get you a new plate.” Our mom collects the dish right in front of Daisy’s face and marches inside.
Daisy looks ill. She sets her half-bitten apple slice on the table, silence weighing down on us all. I don’t know what to say. Our mom has no self-awareness. If she did, she’d realize how much she suffocates Daisy…and how much she ignores me.
But then again, maybe she does realize it. And she just doesn’t care.
I want to give her the benefit of the doubt though. She hasn’t cast me out of the family. She’s just…dealing. In a very passive aggressive way.
Daisy breaks the silence. “She’s right. My agent said I need to lose ten pounds.”
“You’re already too skinny,” Ryke tells her, his features downcast like the storm outside.
“In your eyes, maybe,” she says softly. “To the people that matter, I’m fat.”
“Do I not fucking matter?” he asks, hurt passing through his voice.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Lay off her,” Lo interjects, glaring at his brother in warning. “It’s her birthday.”
“I’m not trying to lay into her,” he retorts. “You do realize that she’s moving into my apartment complex when she graduates in May?” Oh yeah. Ryke proposed the idea since Daisy doesn’t want to go to college, and our mom has been scheming to extend Daisy’s stay at her house for an extra two or three years. Which means more plate grabbing and general hovering.
Lo, surprisingly, has trusted Ryke with this idea, but it comes with some suspicions. How much of what Ryke is doing because he cares for Daisy as a friend? And how much of it is because he wants to have sex with her now that she’s legal?
I want to think better of Ryke, but his track record with women points big neon arrows to the latter.
“So?” Lo says. “Does that mean you can be a dick to her?”
“I’m a dick to everyone,” Ryke states, extending his arms again.
“Loren!” Jonathan Hale’s rough voice echoes against the glass ceiling and walls. One hand in his charcoal slacks, the other clutching a crystal goblet of scotch, filled to the brim. “Come here, son.” He practically chugs three-fourths of his drink, standing tensely next to a hanging fern and pool bar.
“Don’t,” Ryke says under his breath to Lo.
Jonathan’s eyes pulse with something familiar, something inhuman and soulless, like he’s ready to slaughter any man in his wake, like he’s ready to verbally tear through his son. My heart sputters in panic.
“It’s fine.” He picks me up off his lap and stands with me at the same time, the chair scraping back. Then he forces me in the seat and gives me one deadly look that says: Don’t follow me.
“Lo—” I start.
“It’s probably just Halway Comics,” he cuts me off. “I haven’t talked to him about my company in a while. I’ll be right back.”
This seems so much larger than that.
{ 43 }
1 year : 06 months
February
LOREN HALE
On the short trek to my father, I look back at Ryke once. He shakes his head at me like I’m going in the wrong direction, facing the wrong man. But I’m not filled with false bravado. This is a person I’ve faced my entire life.
He’s my future if I’m not careful.
And he’s Ryke’s biggest demon that he’s buried.
I’m not even five feet from my father before he starts talking, out of hearing distance from everyone else. “How tough are you?”