Page 42 of Darling Venom
“He ever tell you he had a girlfriend?” I asked Terry, cutting up my turkey patty.
I used a company that pre-prepared meals for me to heat. I needed something packed with nutritional value, vegetables, and protein, and I needed it fresh.
It cost three hundred bucks a week, but that was not a problem, seeing as I no longer had to put Kellan through college.
Lucky me.
Kellan never got to discover just how broke our father had become. One less embarrassment to carry to his grave.
Terry didn’t glance up from his plate, either.
“No.” He cleared his throat. “Pretty unlikely, though. We would have known.”
“Would we?” I cut the meat into more tiny pieces, dismembering it until it became inedible. “We made quite a pair raising the poor guy. I ran into this girl today. I think she knew him. At the very least, he seemed to have confided in her.”
That made his head shoot up with interest.
“What did she say?”
Guilty much?
“Nothing yet. I’m going to look into it.”
“So you should.”
He bit into… whatever the hell it was I’d served us both. Food was like sex. I pretended to be interested in it to save face.
I took a hard look at my sperm donor. He’d changed. More so after Kellan died. He looked older. Frail and pasty, with a pink nose and ruddy cheeks, courtesy of years of alcohol abuse.
Crazy white hair sprung from his scalp in every direction like snakes. Protective black braces covered his wrists, from decades of writing millions of words and deleting them. He needed a brush, a shower, three years in rehab, and a clue.
If he’d been useless when I took Kellan from him, now he was one thousand percent toast.
“All of this wouldn’t have happened if—” he started, like I knew he would.
I cut him off, dropping my knife and fork on my plate. “Don’t go there. You dumped him on my doorstep and ran to Miami with one of your whores.”
“Her name was Nadia.”
“Her name could be the Duchess of Sussex, and it still wouldn’t change the fact that you left your goddamn kid to raise your other kid.”
I slapped the table. The utensils rattled. The wine glasses danced across the tablecloth. He stopped eating and looked up at me, his eyes wide. I saw my reflection in them.
I bulldozed forward. “You made me step into your shoes when I was fresh out of med school, doing my residency. You let me do your job while you chased tail and got hammered like a frat boy. I wasn’t perfect, but if someone’s gonna tell me where I went wrong, it sure as hell won’t be you.”
We both knew it didn’t really matter. I carried the guilt with me like an honor badge. That was why the girl’s words sliced so deep.
I didn’t accept any calls or make any appointments on Valentine’s Day because it was a day for me to take a long, torturous vacation in Guiltville.
Today’s menu consisted of day-drinking, followed by fucking my ex-fiancée’s best friend Allison, followed by being a world-class douchebag to Miss Richards (side note: what’s her first name, anyway?) before figuring out she knew Kel.
Spending time with my parasitic father was the undigested kernel of corn on the shit cake.
Terry pushed his plate away.
“Do you have anything stronger to drink around here?” He sniffed the air, scratching behind his ear. “Wine’s not cutting it.”
He should go back to coke. It always put him in a merry, good mood. He would, too, if he could afford the habit. Alas, bailing on the three-book contract he’d signed had made a hole the shape of a middle finger in his bank account.
