“Messy house, messy mind,”my mother used to say. I’d only recently come to understand that our home was always immaculate not because my mother didn’t want a messy mind, but because she didn’t want my father to beat the shit out of her.
Mydeadfather.
Sariah frowned at me. “What happened? Is it your mom? Is she in labor?” she sat up in excitement. Sariah thought it was amazing that my mother was pregnant, that I was going to have a baby brother when I was almost twenty years old. She’d already been shopping up a storm. She’d met her and Swiss when they came to visit and instantly fell in love with them.
Mom had instantly loved Sariah because it was impossible not to.
“No,” I replied, preoccupied with worries about this news and what it might do to Mom. Her due date was in a week and a half. I was leaving in a week to go and be with her.
“It’s my dad,” I said, voice faraway. “He’s dead.”
Sariah’s mouth opened, yet she didn’t speak, lost for words. I’d never seen her lost for words. “Holy fuck,” she eventually whispered. “And I just came in here talking about hot yoga. I’m such an insensitive asshole. I’m so sorry, babe.”
I knew she probably wanted to hug me right then, comfort me because that was the kind of person Sariah was. But she also knew me really well by now and was incredibly good at reading people and their body language, therefore, she understood being hugged was the last thing I needed.
Being hugged meant this was real. That I was grieving for my father. And that wasn’t true. You didn’t grieve for monsters.
“What do you want to do?” she literally jumped off my bed, moving into action. I knew she was not going to leave me alone, no matter what I said.
And I also knew, no matter what I said to my mother, there was no way in hell that I was going to concentrate on assignments.
Likely the healthiest way to deal with this was to go on a walk, get fresh air, sunshine, perspective.
Talk it out with Sariah, who would listen without judgment. Maybe then come home, drink tea, make something healthy to eat, take a long bath and feel better. Fresher. More able to handle this situation.
Yes, that was the healthiest way to deal.
“I would like to get very, very drunk,” I said.
Sariah clapped her hands. “I’ll get the tequila.”
ChapterTen
It had been hours.
We’d started in the living room.
Then we’d gone to a dive bar that had cheap drinks, great wings and didn’t card. We’d hustled a couple of douchebags in a game of pool.
They’d left after trying to stiff us the fifty bucks we’d won fair and square. Sariah had stood up to them, ready to choose violence if need be, but Stan, our bartender with a handlebar mustache and a ‘take no shit’ attitude, had rounded the bar and said something like, “you want to pay these two girls, or you want to try your luck picking on someone your own size?” Stan technically wasn’t their own size. Well, he was the size of both of them put together, so that worked.
Both men had handed over the money and left after that.
Sariah had kissed Stan on the cheek in a thank you, and he’d blushed before murmuring that we’d both have to eat a cheeseburger before he served us any more booze.
We had finished the cheeseburgers happily. Sariah had murmured something about calling some ‘contacts’ to get us the good weed. Then she’d gone outside to call them since there was interestingly no cell service in our little dive bar.
It was nice. It was dark and cool in there, and there was no possible way for the outside world to sneak in.
I was chewing on a cold fry, thinking of exactly nothing when a man walked up to my table.
“Someone like you shouldn’t be sitting alone,” he drawled.
The man who spoke was wearing an Affliction tee, had on designer jeans, was about ten years too old to be a student on campus and likely came here to try to pick up drunk college girls. There was a whole breed of these assholes, trying to act younger than they were, trying to impress younger women with their flashy, tacky shit.
He probably had a wife at home.
“Someone like me—a woman—should be able to sit alone and not be bothered by assholes,” I countered, slurring some of my words, resting my elbow on the table and cradling my chin my hand.