“It has sleeves and a turtleneck. What more could he want?”
“A daughter who would be more appreciative of his efforts and grateful for his generosity,” he growls behind me.
I squeeze my lids tight. Shit.
Once again, my father arrived, unexpected and unwelcomed.
Panic replaces my shock. I don’t turn around, even when he reaches my side. “Why must you make such a simple task as picking out a dress so arduous?” he asks, his voice loud enough for the owner to hear.
Maybe it’s the humiliation, or the fact that I’m just so tired of taking his crap—whatever it is makes me snap. “Because it’s something I’m being forced to wear to an event I have no desire to attend,” I fire back.
My father hasn’t struck me in years. But if we were alone, he would have then. “Shut your filthy mouth,” he demands, seething with rage.
The sharpness to his tone causes the boutique owner to edge away. But from one blink to the next, the fury cutting ugly lines into his face dissolves, revealing the fine features of the gentleman he pretends to be. “We’ll take the blue one,” he tells the boutique owner, pointing to my left.
I make the mistake of looking, expecting the worst, and am not disappointed. There on a rack is a sexy number befitting most women in their nineties. I want to scream, but instead, there I stand, fighting the angry tears that come with being the daughter of Donald Newart.
The woman rushes away to fill Father’s order, falling all over herself to please him, as most do. It’s then that he leans in close, speaking through his teeth. “You walk a thin line with me, Contessa. Bite the hand that feeds you, and you’ll find it biting back.”
My stomach clenches tight. Fuck you.
Despite my vicious thoughts, the venom in his voice causes me to recoil, exactly like it’s done all my life, starting when I was just a little girl who simply needed her father’s love.
I lower my eyelids and take a breath when he storms off. This fear, it doesn’t come on suddenly. It’s always there, lurking beneath the surface just as he intended.
When did it start? I don’t know. If I had to guess, it likely started in infancy.
My earliest memory is of him ramming his fist between my shoulder blades and wrenching my shoulders back to “teach me” to stand straight and not slouch. I couldn’t have been more than three. But I recall that moment, and remember the feel of his knuckles against my small spine, just like I remember my heart breaking and my mother urging me not to cry, because “you’ll make your father mad.”
He’d smack my mouth if I didn’t speak clearly, or if I used words he believed were too simplistic. He’d make me wait to eat until he finished his meal to demonstrate he didn’t owe me anything, not even food. I wasn’t allowed to play around him. I wasn’t permitted to speak unless spoken to, and I couldn’t “behave like a child”—even when I was one.
This isn’t a form of abuse most read about online, or catch on the evening news. It doesn’t cause “real” bruises, but it bruises the soul.
It’s real. It controls. It hurts. And it’s effective. So for me to argue or speak to him like I did is unheard of. But, God, I’m tired, tired of taking his orders, tired of allowing him to belittle me, and tired of permitting his mistreatment.
I’m barely aware of his voice, and of the small clicking noises at the register as he completes the transaction, his words and anger leaving me as weak as if he’d beaten me with his hands.
It’s all I can do not to collapse.