I was still a little breathless when I replied, “We should, perhaps, mark it again.”
He leaned in to kiss me again, but we were both laughing before our lips could touch.
“Can’t believe I said that.”
“Never mind,” he said.
I dared a glance in his direction, and sure enough he was staring at me again. Only this time there was something odd in his gaze. Maybe the look someone gives before walking into the blackest of caves without a torch. “Well, then.”
He smiled and didn’t wait a moment before returning his hand to my cheek and his lips to mine. Though after just a few quick seconds he released me to stare into my eyes. “And again?” he asked, his voice satisfyingly not quite his own.
I smiled and started to tell him how ridiculous he was and perhaps something else, which I forgot utterly when he kissed me again and again, no longer asking my permission, it seemed. Or perhaps I gave it every time I kissed him back.
Chapter 11
The day after our boat ride, two miracles happened.
First, the boys all filed off to bed on time. I was half convinced they had been replaced by changelings who’d grown weary in their years at the faerie courts. But then Michael belched loudly before I could close their door, sending Seanie into giggle fits, and I knew they were all still human. Well, still my brothers, at any rate.
No sooner had I walked down the stairs than the second miracle materialized in the form of a knock at the front door. Of course, not every miracle comes without a price.
“Door,” my dad grunted helpfully from his near-permanent perch at the table in the kitchen.
I tried not to indulge in a sigh before stepping down the final stairs and reaching for the doorknob, little knowing that the mundane act of opening the door would be like stepping back in time a full year to the first night I remember Dad drinking.
He and Mum always had wine with dinner, and, more often than not, their date nights had ended in drunken giggling as they fell through the front door and stumbled across the entry and into their room. But the night we found out my mom was sick and would have to stay in the hospital awhile—that she wouldn’t get better, even if she came home—that was the first night Dad brought out the bourbon, sat at the kitchen table, and drank until he forgot himself.
That’s how I’d lived with it later, the terror of that first night. I’d told myself and the boys that he wasn’t being himself when he slapped Freddie upside his head for spilling milk across the counter. That he didn’t mean it when I stepped between them and he yelled until his face was red about how worthless we all were, how he should just kick us out on the street to learn to appreciate what we have, and how we were probably what drove our mother sick. I told the police dispatcher that he’d never been drunk like that before, that he would never hurt us on purpose.
He’d never hurt us before that night. He wasn’t a mean dad. He never screamed or did anything that particularly scared me. Honestly, he’d barely paid attention. There wasn’t one picture of my dad holding me or playing with me in our family albums. Not even one of him and me together without my mom. He just always seemed indifferent, until the boys were born. But from the moment they brought Freddie home from the hospital, the boys were all that mattered. Our albums are full of pictures of boys-only trips and outings to the carnival. Those few times my dad wasn’t lingering around the house were when he was off with the boys in tow for another of their adventures.
His ever-present indifference toward me was perhaps the reason why I’d always assumed the things he said that first time, and every “Memories of You” night since, were the things he’d always secretly thought about me, the reasons why he’d never wanted me around. But none of that explained why he’d hit Freddie, why he’d screamed me into a shivering mess on the floor, why he’d gone after Michael for trying to hide. Not even Seanie had escaped a backhand that night, and still I’d made excuses for Dad.