He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, fingers laced together, and smirked. “I see the way you look at her. The way you’ve always looked at her. You’d give your left nut to get a piece of that ass.” He shook his head. “It’s never going to happen. Not with a girl like her. You’re too fucking scared to step up and be anything but a whiny little lapdog, following behind her. Yap, yap, yap.”
“Shut up,” I said with as much venom as I could muster. I stood, knocking into the table with my shins. My entire body quaked as I pointed to the door. “Get out.”
He didn’t move. Instead, he calmly reached for his coffee and took another sip, then looked up at me after he set the mug back down. “What do you think your captain will do when he hears how you fucked up? That partner of yours might keep his mouth shut, but he’s not the only one who saw what happened.” He paused, and then stood up, too, his gaze locked on mine. “My guess is you’d be ordered to talk to the department shrink. Maybe get put on leave. Even lose your job, if they find out you don’t have the balls to do it.”
“You need to go,” I growled. Hatred coursed through me. I couldn’t believe that this man, the one person I should be able to look up to and go to for support, was threatening to destroy my career for the sake of his own ego. Because he thought my failure might make him look bad.
He took the few steps to the door and put his meaty hand on the knob, pausing before turning it. “You know what, Son?” he said, looking over his shoulder. “I’m glad you didn’t decide to become a firefighter. Because no matter how hard I tried to toughen you up, you never had it in you. You just don’t have what it takes.”
Before I could respond, he slammed the door behind him. I didn’t move, his words banging their way through my entire body. I listened to the ragged edges of my own breath and the rumble of his truck’s engine as he drove away. Would he go straight to my captain and tell him how I’d screwed up, or was he just playing a power game with me, putting on a show? My work was everything to me—I loved helping people in need, being there for them in the midst of the worst moments in their lives. I loved having an experienced partner like Mason to show me the ropes. I’d worked hard to get where I was, and I worried that just when things with Amber seemed to be going well, a suspension—or even the loss of my job—might send her right back into Daniel’s arms.
I worried about these things, but mostly, as I stood in the silence, my heartbeat throbbing like an open wound inside my chest, I worried that my father might know me better than I knew myself. That all the horrible things he’d said about me, the painful jabs he’d thrown, might just end up being true.
Amber
“Come on, Pops!” I said, jogging in place at the end of our block, looking back at him about twenty feet behind me. “You can do it!” It was a little after three o’clock on the Fourth of July, which had turned out to be a warm, sunny Sunday after a stormy night of hard-driving rain. I had convinced my dad to take a walk with me, and now was encouraging him to jog part of the way home, which would help shift his metabolism into fat-burning mode and keep it there for the rest of the day.
“I’m glad one of us thinks so!” he gasped as he pumped his arms a little harder in order to catch up. His round face was red, his black hair damp, and his forehead beaded with sweat. But while his breathing was labored, he could still talk without too much effort, so I knew his body wasn’t being pushed past an unreasonable limit.
“There you go!” I said, when he came up next to me. “You did it! And now we walk to cool down.” I patted him on the back and smiled. “I’m proud of you.”
He leaned forward and set his hands on his knees, arms bent and elbows out, breathing hard. “Isn’t that supposed to be my job . . . being proud of you?”
“I’m an adult now,” I said in my normal voice. At this level of exertion, I hadn’t even broken a sweat. “It’s a two-way street.”
“An adult? No way. You’re still my baby girl,” he said, straightening back up. He wiped the moisture from his brow with his forearm. “And a taskmaster, it seems.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said, as we began to amble down the sidewalk.
“You should.”
I grinned. “I love what I do. I can’t wait to take it to the next level.”
“That’s what that certification will do, right? After you take the test?” my dad asked. “Give you bigger and better job opportunities?”
“I hope so,” I said. “That, and moving to Seattle should really help. I can spend a few years building a strong clientele working at a gym, and then use that experience to eventually apply for a job at the Seahawks training facility. I figure if I start at the bottom, maybe as an assistant to a coach or trainer, they’ll have to at least consider me if a senior position working directly with the players becomes available. It might not happen right away, but it will happen.”
“That’s my girl,” he said, smiling wide. “No goal too high.”
“Thanks, Pops.” I smiled in return, even as the muscles in my throat tingled with the threat of impending tears, knowing how hard I’d worked to get where I was, and how close I’d come to losing it all back when I’d been sick. It had been a bit of a struggle to stay on my regular food plan since I’d been home, but it helped that, after some subtle prompts, my dad had agreed to try to start eating healthier, too, so I’d managed to reach a compromise with my mom: I would eat whatever she made for dinner each night that I wasn’t out with Tyler, and she and my dad would eat the low-fat, protein-packed breakfasts and lunches I prepared for us all. It was working well so far, and my dad had already lost six pounds.
“Hey, Mom,” I said, once we were back inside the house. She stood at the kitchen counter, using a cookie cutter on a rolled-out round of pastry. The air smelled of apples and cinnamon stewing on the stove, and I assumed she would be covering the top of the pie with the stars made out of dough, just like the image she’d shown me on her Pinterest account the night before.
“Hello, my loves,” she said, looking up from her work. “How was your walk?”
“Brutal,” my dad said as he dropped into a chair at the table. He winked at me. “Our girl’s a gladiator. You should have come with.”
“Maybe next time,” my mom said. “I had to get this done for tonight.” She looked at me. “You’re sure you and Tyler don’t want to join us at the Millers’? Liz is coming, too.”
The Fourth of July was the one summer holiday that my parents didn’t throw a party at our house. Instead, we always spent it with their friends Sara and Jeremy Miller, who lived in a big place out on Eldridge Drive. Their back deck overlooked Bellingham Bay, lending an amazing view of the city’s fireworks show.
I shook my head as I opened the fridge and grabbed two bottles of water. “Tyler’s partner and his wife are going to be at this party we’re going to,” I said. “We’ve been trying to get together with them for weeks.”
My mother drew her brows together over the bridge of her nose. “Okay,” she said, which I suspected was a two-syllable code for “You’re ruining a family tradition.”