Never Tied Down (The Never Duet #2) (26 page)

   She nodded, then pushed a lock of hair behind her ear and even Riot grabbed my thigh under the table because it was like looking in the mirror.  “I’m a freshman at UCSD.”

   “Rachel is majoring in elementary education.  She wants to be a schoolteacher.”

   “I’m majoring in elementary education with a focus on special education.  I want to be a special education teacher in an elementary school,” she said, rolling her eyes, as if she corrected her father about this point often.

   “What?” Kevin asked, raising his hands in the air.  “That’s what I said.”

   Rachel rolled her eyes again and looked at me and I found myself doing the same thing.  Then I froze, realizing I was no longer nervous, and that made me nervous all over again.

   Rachel gave a little laugh and then I saw her eyes naturally move to Riot, back to me, and then with startling speed, back to Riot.  Then her eyes went wide.  Really wide.  And her mouth gaped open to match.

   “You’re Riot Bentley,” she said, completely in awe.  My eyebrows drew together and for just one moment I was confused as to how she would know who he was, but then she fangirled all over him and I remembered my boyfriend was kind of famous.  “You’re on that new awesome cop show, and you’re dating Lexi Black.  I love her.”

   My head drew back in surprise at her words.

   “I was never dating Lexi.  I’ve been with Kalli for a while now.  Ever since we worked together on the Lexi Black music video.”  His hand squeezed my thigh under the table again, and I loved that he considered himself “with” me, even when we weren’t together. 

   “Wait,” Rachel said with more excitement, “you worked on the music video too?”  Her bright and wide eyes were now on me.

   “I’m a costume designer.  I did the costumes for that video.  That’s how we met.”

   “Wait a minute…” She took in a deep breath, and I could have sworn she went a little pale.  “My long-lost sister is dating Riot Bentley?”

   Before I could respond, even though I wasn’t really sure how to, she continued. 

   “I’ve wanted to meet you forever, don’t get me wrong.  My whole life I’ve known about you, Dad talked about you all the time, and I knew as soon as I got the chance I would find you, but to find out that you’re actually
dating
Riot Bentley, I mean, this is kind of amazing.”

   Riot suddenly started to stand.  “Perhaps I should just leave you all—”

   “No!” Rachel and I said simultaneously. 

   “You’re not leaving me here alone,” I said, jerking his arm down, forcing him to sit again.  I knew he was only trying to make it easier for me to talk with Rachel and Kevin, but I wasn’t prepared to be left alone with them yet.  “Please don’t go,” I whispered, as soon as he was sitting again.

   His thumb and forefinger came to gently grip my chin and he smiled at me.  “I’ll stay.  Promise.”  Then he gave me the tiniest of kisses.  Then I heard a swoony sigh from across the table.  And I couldn’t help but laugh.  Riot was totally swoon-worthy.  In that moment, I could be nothing but grateful for my newly-discovered sister and her fangirl crush on my boyfriend.  Everything was one thousand times less uncomfortable and stressful than I thought it would be, only because she was there to break the tension.  I loved her already.

   “So, you’re an actor?”  Kevin’s voice had suddenly taken on a remarkably different tone.  It was skeptical and protective.  He was trying to give Riot the fatherly third degree.  My hackles immediately went up.  I was feeling a lot less anxious than I had expected, thanks to Rachel, but nothing had really changed.  Kevin was still the man who’d abandoned me and, as far as I was concerned, he didn’t have a leg to stand on when it came to suddenly acting like my father.

   “We’re not here to talk about Riot’s career,” I stated calmly.  “I love him and don’t care what your opinion of his profession is.  If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be here meeting you today.  He’s here today to support me, not to answer to you.  You’re the one who should be answering questions.”

   Kevin held his hands up immediately.  “You’re right.  I apologize, to both of you.   I’ll answer any question you have with complete honesty.”

   “Why did you leave?”  The question had been on my mind for twenty goddamned years, yet I was still surprised when I spoke the words.  I never thought I would get an answer; thought I would go to the grave wondering why my dad didn’t think I was good enough to stick around for.  The weight of that unanswered question was heavier than anything, and it dragged me down in a way I’d never be able to explain to anyone; it was a heaviness no one could understand but me.

   He took in a long deep breath, preparing himself for battle it seemed, but I didn’t feel sorry for him.  He had to have known I wasn’t going to open my arms to him and forget he’d damaged me in an irreparable way.

   “When I met your mother, we were really young.  Teenagers.  And when she became pregnant, it was not the best situation.  Neither of us had a decent job, our parents weren’t in a position to help, so we had to grow up really fast.  I loved her, but I loved her the way a seventeen-year-old boy loves a girl.  It was immature and childish.  And when you were born, I loved you the best way I could.  But I was
young
, Kalli.  So young. I knew I wasn’t doing enough.  I didn’t have a good enough education to properly provide for you, I couldn’t give you or your mom the kind of life I’d imagined giving my child and the mother of my child, and that put a dark cloud over me.  For years I worked to try and build a life, but we could never seem to get out of that state of just barely making it.”  He ran his hands through his hair and I watched as the strands stuck up, not immediately returning back to the previous kept state.  He looked frazzled.  He looked worried.  He looked guilty.

   “I was twenty-four the day I walked out on you and your mother.  Twenty-four-years old and I’d spent seven years thinking I wasn’t good enough to even give you a decent start in life.  That weighed me down, Kalli.  I felt trapped.  I felt bound.  It was stifling.  And at some point I just broke.  I convinced myself that you were both better off without me, that if your mother didn’t have me in the picture, her parents would take pity on her and help her more, do more good for her than I could being in the picture.”  He shook his head.  “I convinced myself of a lot of things that, as I grew older and gained more wisdom from life, I learned were the most disastrous mistakes I’d ever make.”

   He stopped speaking, his hands flat on the table in front of me, and he looked at me, pleading with his eyes for me to, I didn’t know, say something back?  Forgive him?  Tell him he hadn’t scarred me for life?  I couldn’t respond.

   “I’ll never be sorrier for anything than I am for abandoning you and your mother.  It was selfish, childish, and the biggest mistake of my life.”

   Well, there it was.  Words I never thought I’d hear.  Words I never imagined I’d hear coming from my father’s mouth.  And the kicker was that he sounded completely and entirely genuine.  I could tell, just from listening to him tell his story, he was sorry, right down to the depth of his bones, for leaving me behind.

   “Every time I saw one of my friends with their father, I wondered why I wasn’t good enough.  Every time I went to a friend’s house and her dad came home from work, hugging her, asking her how her day was, asking her if she’d done her homework, I wondered what I’d done wrong to push you away.  Every time I was with a man I wondered when he was going to leave, so I never stayed with one long enough to figure it out.  I also spent most of my twenties wondering if I would abandon my own family one day, so guess what?  I avoided starting one.  You took more from me than a second income.  You took more from me than a
good start in life
.  When you left me, you took all my security with you.  You took all my self-confidence with you.  You took away my ability to feel worthy of love and my ability to feel comfortable
loving
someone.”

   Riot’s hand found mine under the table and he squeezed it.  I could feel him tensing next to me, likely uncomfortable with my emotional state and not being able to comfort me the way he wanted to.  The tears stinging my eyes and the pinching in the back of my throat alerted me that I was close to a meltdown, so I sucked in a shuddered breath and tried to take it deep, then pushed it out slowly, all the while feeling Riot’s thumb move lovingly over the back of my hand.

   “There’s absolutely nothing I can do to fix that, except to say that I’m sorry.  I’m sorry.  You’ll never know how sorry I am, but I will spend the rest of my life trying to make you see how much I regret the choices I made.  I can’t go back and fix it, Kalli, I would if I could, but I can show you how much I’ve always loved you.  I never stopped loving you.  I thought, as lame as it sounds, that both our lives would be better if I left.”

   I wiped the tears from my face, cursing them, feeling as though they gave a piece of me away that I wasn’t ready to let him see.  I wanted to seem strong, to appear as if I were made of steel, like his absence hadn’t really altered me all that much.  But I simply could not keep the pain inside.  Hearing my father admit it was a mistake to leave me was every kind of emotional warfare I could imagine.  It bypassed every security I’d put in place to keep the pain out.  It jumped every wall I’d ever put up around my heart, and it simply hurt.

   “I’ve spent my whole life thinking the one man who was supposed to love me the most never loved me at all.”  The words were hard to push out past the cries.  I’d entered into ugly cry territory, but I was trying to keep it in check due to the fact that we were in public.  So I was exceptionally thankful when Riot finally wrapped his arm around my shoulders and pulled my face into his neck, letting me cry into him, stifling the sound of my sobs. 

   I gripped his t-shirt in my hands, my fingers tightening around the soft cotton, pulling myself as close to him as I could get.  In the last year of my life, Riot was the one constant.  Even when I’d pushed him away, he was still there, just lying in wait.

   “I don’t think I can do this anymore,” I whispered as quietly as I could against the skin of his neck.  I felt his arms wrap around me tighter, holding me even closer.

   “You say the word and I’ll take you home.  I’ll carry you out of here and you won’t even have to say a word to him,” he said quietly near my ear, but there was no way Kevin hadn’t heard him.  “But, Kal, leaving won’t fix what’s broken inside you.  The only way to mend it is to let him in.”

   “It hurts,” I said with only breath; I had no voice left.

   “For now, baby, just for now.  It’ll feel better after a while, after the wound isn’t so raw.  And,” he said, now caressing the side of my face, dangerously close to my ear, “I’ll do my best to make you feel better too.”

   I pulled away quickly, forgetting for a moment that I was having a life-altering moment with my absentee father, and narrowed my eyes at him.

   “Did you just promise to make me
feel better
?”

   He winked at me.  “Got you to stop crying, didn’t I?”

   At that I heard both Rachel and Kevin chuckling.  I wiped my eyes and turned back to them, halfway expecting to see them cringing at my emotional state, but all I saw was concern.

   “I’m sorry.”

   “No apologies from you, Kalli.  I won’t lie, it’s hurting me right here watching you cry,” he said, rubbing the center of his chest, “but I’m not going to ask you to hold back with me.  I deserve to know what I’ve done, the pain I’ve caused.  I know that if you hold back with me now, if you try and shelter me from the damage I’ve done, this won’t work.”

   “What is
this
?” I asked, still trying to keep myself together.

   “It’s whatever you want, baby doll.  If you want to walk out of here and never talk to me again, I get it.  I’ll be forever grateful I got to see you and to know you’re all right, but I’ll understand.  If you want to talk on the phone twice I year, I’ll take those phone calls and be thankful for them.  If you want more than that, I’ll give you whatever I’ve got.  I’m here, wide open, just hoping you’ll let me in a little bit.”

   “I’m kind of hoping you’ll let me in a lot.”  This came from Rachel and my eyes darted to her, softening a little.  “I’ve been an only child my whole life, always knowing I had a sister out there, and I’m kind of tired of not knowing you.”

   Before I could think better of it, I reached across the table and took her hand.

   “I could really use a sister.”  She smiled at me, a real smile, not a worried one, and I couldn’t help but smile back. 

   “Kalli is the best big sister in the world,” Riot said from beside me, his voice quiet.

   “We were really sorry to hear about your brother,” Kevin said.

   I pulled my bottom lip between my teeth, but then said, “Thank you.”

   “Dad told me he wanted to drive up to Seattle to see you when it happened, but I told him it wouldn’t be a good time.  I convinced him to send you the flowers.”

   “It wasn’t a good time,” I agreed softly.  I thought about my life the few days after Marcus’ death, the few weeks following it, and I wouldn’t have been in a good place to receive a surprise visit from my long-lost father.  Not at all.  That surely would have sent me off the ledge of sanity I had been clinging to.  “Wait,” I said, suddenly remembering I was missing a huge piece of the puzzle, “how did you know where I lived to send the flowers to me?”

   Kevin took a sip of his water, then he put his glass down and laced his fingers together, folding his hands and resting them on the table in front of him.

   “About ten years ago I started doing freelance work for a company that has offices all over the west coast.  I worked from home mainly, but sometimes travelled in to an office in San Diego, or travelled to other offices if need be.  It started as a temp job, something on the side, but a few years in they offered me a full-time position.  I accepted and was flown to their Seattle offices to meet with the staff coordinator.  Inside the headquarters office was a large framed picture of the Vice President and his family, and it was a memorial to him—your stepfather.”  He took another drink, cleared his throat, and continued.