I listened to my mother and it was hard to tap down the hate I had for my father in this moment. Oh, the hate I felt for him was continuous, but some days it was stronger than others. Maureen Evans was a devoted wife, mother, and doctor, and my father ignored all of that by being a selfish prick. Yeah, I might be a coward, but my cowardice came from a good place. There was nothing good about Quinten Evans.
“How long will you be gone?”
She glanced at her watch before looking at me and doing her best to place a comforting smile on her face. She knew I got...restless whenever she went away. “I’m going to do my best to be back by Monday, Gage,” she answered.
It was only Thursday.
I said the only thing I could think of. “I’m sorry to hear about your patient.”
Her tentative smile turned into a genuine grin. “Thanks, honey,” she replied. “And I’m sorry I’m going to miss your game tomorrow night.”
I shrugged a shoulder. “It’s okay,” I assured her. “The season’s almost over and you’ve been to all the other games. It’s okay.”
Her phone pinged, and I watched as her fingers flew over the screen. Her dark blue eyes, the ones that matched mine, found me again as she said, “That’s the car service. I need to get going.”
I dropped my backpack on the floor and reached for her two bags. She gave me a grateful smile before turning to open the front door and walk out. I followed her in silence and a part of me wanted to beg her to stay. Not because I was in any danger, but because I was tired of lying to her.
I was tired of keeping my father’s secrets.
It was tiresome to have to hold on to his secrets as well as my own.
The driver got out of the car when he saw us and immediately reached for my mother’s bags as we approached the car. I handed them over and my mom gave me the last minutes of her time as he placed her bags in the trunk of the car.
“I’ll text you when I land, okay?”
I nodded and did my best to school my features. “Be careful, Mom,” I told her.
She smiled again. “I always am, Gage.” She leaned in to kiss my cheek and I stuck my hands in my pockets and watched in silence as the driver ushered inside the car. It wasn’t until they were around the corner and out of sight that I finally walked back towards the house. I could feel the tension in my shoulders starting to settle in, but there was nothing I could do about it right now.
Later.
Later, I’ll be able to purge the hate, resentment, and anger.
Right now, though, I had to do some homework and inform Chance I was crashing at his place this weekend.
See, when the world looked at Quinten Evans and saw a loving husband, supportive father, and respected doctor, all I saw when I looked at Quinten Evans was a bastard of a man who hid behind his money, status, and family image. My father wasn’t a loving husband or supportive father where it counted. Oh, he was a respected doctor and had the skills to back up his medical reputation, but he was a farce, an empty image.
Granted, we were both cut from the same cloth as I, too, was a farce. I was a practiced actor and manipulator. I manipulated people into seeing what they wanted to see, very much like my father did. Of course, I learned from the best, so there was that.
One night, when I was twelve-years-old, I was supposed to have stayed the night at Chance’s while my mother had gone off to a psychiatric convention in Baltimore. But I had gotten sick and Chance’s mom had driven me home. When we had pulled up to my house, we had seen the lights on, and so, feeling confident that my father was home, Mrs. McQueen hadn’t walked me to the door. She had waited patiently in the car until I had unlocked the front door and had gone inside. When we had tried calling my father earlier, he hadn’t answered, so we assumed he had either been asleep or had had a medical emergency of some sort. What I never expected was what I had walked into when I had entered the house.
I had dropped my overnight bag in the foyer of the house and had followed the music, voices, and noises coming from my father’s study. I hadn’t given it much thought at the time and all I had wanted to do was let him know I was home and that I wasn’t feeling well. What I had walked in on will never leave me and it had ruined me forever.
My father and a couple of his colleagues had been stripped down naked and were covered with women in the same state of undress. I was twelve-years-old and I had walked in on an orgy in my father’s study.
Now, had it been a normal orgy, I might have been able to recover. I might have been able to conjure up the guts to tell my mom and out my dad.
But it hadn’t been a normal orgy.
None of them had been.
Those women had been beingbattered.They had looked like they were getting beaten up, not fucked. My twelve-year-old eyes had first thought they were witnessing a fight of some sort, but when their nakedness had registered, I had thrown up all over the carpet.
I had run out of my father’s office and it had taken him an hour to finally convince me to unlock my bedroom door; a decision I’ll always regret. And instead of calming me down and apologizing, my father had been so high, he had dragged me down to his office and had given me an unwanted crash course in sex-ed. I had watched for hours as my father and his friends used and abused the women in the room. I had watched how they had degraded them and fucked them like worthless whores.
But what had really fucked my twelve-year-old mind up? I had been traumatized by how the women had seemed to like it. They had moaned, they had begged for more, and they had never tried to run away.
When it was all over, my father had taken me aside and told me how important it was for me to keep his secret from Mom. He had explained that he loved and respected my mother so much, he couldn’t do the stuff he did with those women to her. He had made it sound reasonable when he went on to guilt me into making sure my mother was never hurt by finding out. He had sworn to me that it would ruin her entire life. So, I had kept his secret. I kept his fucking secret and I kept my mouth shut every time his friends and those women came over whenever my mom was out of town.
