DEBT (9 page)

Crap.

But, to my surprise, Byron made a low, rumbling sound in his chest that seemed akin to a chuckle. "Good for you."

"Good for me?" I parroted back, not sure what the hell he was talking about.

"Did you see it in your job description that you had to take whatever shit I dished out?"

"Oh, you mean the job description that demands I wear a whore's uniform and watch you shower?"

"That'd be the one," he said, pushing off the wall, moving toward me. And there was something primal in his gate, predatory, like a cat stalking its prey, like he knew he had me.

Well, he fucking
didn't
.

"I believe it was in the fine print under 'I can threaten her father's life or well being anytime she tries to disobey me'," I snapped, effectively stopping him about a foot in front of me.

"Listen..."

"No," I said, shaking my head, folding my arms over my chest, refusing to take a step in retreat, but wanting everything about me to scream that I was in no way inviting him into my space.

"No?" he asked, brow going up as he searched my face.

"No. I'm not going to listen to you. What could you possibly say to make that okay? Nothing. Shakespeare, with all his words, could never find the right ones to put together to make that not completely and utterly screwed up. And, well, let's face it, you're no Shakespeare. So I'm not going to listen to whatever flimsy little excuses or explanations you can come up with to somehow make you feel like less of a monster. My father is the only person in this entire shitty fucking world who gives a damn about me. And, yeah, he's a fuck up. And, yeah, I've had to clean up his messes one too many times. But he is all I have. And you are trying to keep me obedient by threatening to take everything from me. So take whatever you were going to say and shove it up your ass. I don't want to hear it."

"Prue," he said, his voice whisper-soft, the sound of my name on his lips was way, way too intimate, too familiar, too appealing. He closed the space between us, his hand going to my chin, snagging it, and dragging it up so he could pin my eyes with his dark ones. "I'm not going to hurt your father."

"Forgive me if I am finding that hard to believe. One minute, your word is everything, the next you're going to round up my dad if I walk out of your bathroom, the next you're back to saying you won't hurt him."

"My word is everything. But if you remember, that word was that I wasn't going to hurt
you.
I haven't. I won't. But I am giving my word now that I am not going to hurt your father. I'm not taking anything from you."

I ignored the weird fluttery feeling in my belly at his words, at the firmness and honesty behind them. "Just my dignity," I said, trying to jerk my chin from his fingers, but his fingers were holding on tight enough to bruise.

"Your dignity?" he repeated like he didn't know exactly what I was talking about.

Well, I wasn't going to let him play dumb. "The clothes."

"You think those clothes take away your dignity?"

"What the hell else could the purpose of them be? Sorry if this bursts your little male fantasy, but women don't walk around their houses in lingerie and fuck-me heels every day of their lives."

"What is shameful or embarrassing about wearing a skirt and a camisole?" he countered. "Are you insecure? Do you have a problem with how you look?"

"How the hell could that be any of your business?"

"You brought it up."

"My point is I should be able to wear what I want to wear."

"Slacks and button-ups that you button
all the way
up, you mean?"

"What's wrong with that?"

"Prue, you can call the clothes I put you in a whore's uniform all you want, but don't even try to fucking convince me that those shitty clothes you put yourself in are anything other than another type of uniform."

"I worked in a..."

"Oh, fuck off. Those clothes have nothing to do with dress code. The woman who took my last deposit had half her tits hanging out of her dress. Those clothes have everything to do with the part you play."

"The part I play?"

"The nine-to-fiver. The woman who pays her bills on time. The woman who can take care of herself. The woman who is not the offspring of a man who can't hold down a steady job or pay the lights before they were cut off."

"Oh, please," I said, rolling my eyes, finally taking the step in retreat I had wanted to earlier. I needed space. Because something about what he said, it settled heavy down inside.

"Never met a woman trying so fucking hard to pretend to be someone she's not. And, babe, I've dated fucking actresses."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I objected, but there was an uncomfortable feeling inside, something akin to something breaking open, something being unearthed after being buried for so long I had forgotten it was even there.

"How long did it take? Ten, twelve years?"

"How long did what take?" I asked, trying to swallow, but finding my mouth suddenly chalk-dry.

"For you to perfect this act? This good girl who always does and says the right things, who wears the right things, who never fucks up act?"

I shook my head slightly, but I was pretty sure at that point that I was just desperately trying to cling to my denial, to wrap the comfort of it around myself, to shield myself from the cold, hard, ugly, and ultimately inescapable truth: he was right.

"It's not an act. It's who I am."

"Prue..." he said, taking the step I took by moving toward me. With the counter at my back, I was trapped there by his chest, his dominating presence commanding all the air between us, making my chest feel tight and my head feel light.

"Don't," I said, shaking my head a little frantically, the closest I could bring myself to begging him to let it go, let it drop, leave me and my false sense of self alone.

His mouth opened, then closed. His breath exhaled hard. Then he gave me a small nod. "So these cookies, are they poisoned?"

Surprised, I felt my lips curve upward. "I considered it. But I didn't want your poor, brainwashed employees all dropping dead too."

To that, I was actually awarded a smile and, for once, it wasn't cruel, condescending, sinister, or sly. It was just a smile. I didn't get full teeth, but I got a curve that made his eyes crinkle a little.

And it did not... totally did
not
make my lady bits quiver.

"My brainwashed employees?" he asked, reaching for a cookie that was still on the sheet I had taken out of the oven.

"Yeah, well," I said, moving sideways and pretending to put all my attention into checking on the cake inside the oven, "Aaron said you were a nice guy," I informed him. "I figured there must have been some kind of mental manipulation going on there to make anyone swallow and then spew out that load of crap."

"That high an opinion of me, Miss. Marlow?" he asked, his voice a shade more guarded than it had been moments before, making me almost wonder if I had imagined the softness there, the openness.

"Can't imagine what I think matters to you," I said, reaching for the spatula and scraping the rest of the cookies off the sheet, feeling almost a little sad that the conversation had taken a turn. But that was so ridiculous that once I finished with the cookie-scraping, I went right to the sink to start scrubbing. Focus, I needed to focus.

"Who taught you to bake? Mack doesn't seem like the kitchen type," he commented, grabbing another few cookies off the tray which, unfortunately, only helped to improve my opinion of him. I, by principle, didn't trust people who didn't have a sweet tooth. There must have been something seriously evil about a person who didn't appreciate sugar and chocolate.

"I taught myself I guess," I shrugged, scrubbing the oily traces of the baking spray off the cookie sheet. "We needed to eat and take-out gets expensive when it's an everyday type of thing. I cooked because I had to. I baked because I learned I loved it."

"And yet you worked in a bank."

I exhaled, trying to convince myself that didn't smart a little. It was something that kept me awake some nights, thinking about the missed opportunity that was going straight to work instead of attending culinary school. But work was necessary, learning how to bake the perfect, flaky, buttery croissant from a genuine French pastry chef was not.

"I had bills to pay."

"And your father to bail out."

My hands stilled as I looked down into the running water. "Can you not?" I asked, exhaling hard as I lifted my head to look out the window at his expansive property. How could someone like him, someone as well-off, someone financially secure no matter what should befall him, possibly understand what it was like to live in constant fear of having to drain your bank account to settle a debt, to have to borrow from the phone bill fund to pay the water? How could you even begin to describe poor to a rich person?

As if sensing something in my tone, I could hear his voice soften slightly. "Can I not what?"

"Act like you have any right to speak to me about my father. You don't understand and you never will. So just... stop bringing him up. We have both done what we have needed to do."

The oven beeped, prompting me to dry my hands on my pant legs, grab the mitts, and fetch it.

"Prudence, I don't think you fully understand how unfair..."

"I said don't!" I shrieked, slamming the pan down on top of the stove, throwing the mitts, and storming past him toward the doorway. "Don't," I snapped again, low, lethal, as I disappeared into the hallway, taking the stairs at a dead run, then throwing myself into my room to worry the floors.

Fact of the matter was, I knew that. I knew it was unfair. My entire life, I had been trying to quiet the little voice in my head telling me to just... stop. Stop enabling him, stop paying his debts, stop trying to get him away from the tables before he lost every cent to his name, stop being there to take him in when he gambled away his rent and was tossed on his ass. Just... stop.

But the fact of the matter was, I couldn't.

I couldn't because my father was a bigger part of me than I was. He was everything. He was in every decision. He was in every worry, every hope, every plan for my future. Him hurting, suffering, sorting through the rubble as his life exploded around him because I didn't step in and take the wire out of the bomb... yeah, I couldn't live with that. Even the idea of it made my chest hurt.

But that didn't stop me from having a moment here and there, when I was tired, when I had a bad day at work, when I had to turn off the oven and go fetch my father, when I had to drain my bank account for the third time in one month... when the anger and resentment and sadness would overwhelm me. It was in those moments that I mourned the loss of a dream, the chance to open a little bakery and spend my days covered in flour and going home smelling sugar and cinnamon on my skin and never having to worry about loan sharks or debts or casinos ever again. To be, to put it plainly, happy.

Happy. It was a foreign concept. It was the stuff of fairy tales. It was for people who didn't have to spend every single moment of their lives with a knot in their stomach, just waiting for the next shoe to fall, the next small catastrophe to come barreling into their lives, terrified for the call that could one day say that the worry was gone for good. But only because my father screwed over the wrong kind of man, the kind of man who wouldn't tolerate not getting their money when they wanted it, the kind of man who would take his life as payment.

As Byron had been willing to do.

See, when Byron told me that I didn't know much about the men in our town, he was wrong.

Because he didn't know all the times I had to creep down back alleys with bile searing through my stomach lining to find my father beaten and bloodied by small-time loan sharks. He didn't know about the time when I was fifteen and home alone and one of the men he owed money to came to the house and forced his way in, grabbed one of my barely-there teenage breasts and shoved his hand into my panties before my screams roused Old Olie from across the hall, prompting her to come storming in with a bat and strong arms from lugging around six babies in her youth. He didn't know about the time I had to walk through a massage parlor, my shoes sticking to the floor and I knew exactly what kinds of fluids that were on my soles, to find the owner in a back room as he fucked a skinny Asian girl who couldn't have been much older than my eighteen years at the time in the ass while another woman, older, used-up looking shoved a dildo up
his
ass, and pay him back the five grand my father owed him, five grand I got together because I took a night shift stocking shelves at a department store and a weekend job waiting tables.

I knew all about the men in our town.

I knew what they were capable of.

I knew all-too well.

That was why I never gave up on my father.

Because a bullet in his brain didn't solve my problems.

All that would make me was completely and utterly alone in the world with so much guilt filling my gut that I could choke on it.