When it’s over, I release her and she drops to her hands, panting, spitting.
I crouch down and grip her jaw to close her mouth and make her look at me.
“Don’t waste that, Isabelle. Swallow it down. All of it.”
I hold onto her as she does, tears streaming down her cheeks. She wipes at her face with muddy hands when I release her and I look down at her as I straighten to tuck my dick into my pants. She looks so small. So fucking small and vulnerable as she hugs herself, searching behind her for her ruined panties. And something about the sight of her like this, here and now, sniffling, more than a little lost, it sobers me. Or maybe it was the fucking that sobered me. Whatever it is, I don’t like it. Because it also softens something inside me.
And that is a weakness.
But when she turns huge, wet eyes up to me, I’m undone.
“Can I go now? Are you finished humiliating me for the night?” she asks, trying to sound indignant but only sounding hurt.
Fuck.
I don’t answer. I don’t know how. Don’t have a clue what to say.
I take a step back and find the bottle I’d dropped here earlier. It’s on its side and I pick it up, drink the last of what’s left, a dirty mouthful. I turn away from the girl on her knees in the middle of a fucking cemetery. The girl I’m breaking inch by inch.
“Get out of here,” I tell her hoarsely and walk toward the chapel. I can’t look at her.
“She waited for you, you know that?” she calls out as I get to the stairs.
I pause.
“All afternoon. Did you know? Did you even think about her?”
I turn to see her. She steps toward me but hesitates, stops.
“What are you talking about?” I ask, going to her as she scrambles backward.
“Angelique. She put on her favorite bathing suit and gathered up her toys and waited for you. She fell asleep on the floor behind the front door, you jerk. You fucking selfish jerk.”
Fuck.
“You promised you’d teach her how to swim. Or did you forget while you were drinking yourself into oblivion?” she asks, gesturing to the bottle, her voice surer as she takes strength from my silence. “I get it that you hate me. No, I actually don’t. You hate my brother and I’m a means to an end in your twisted mind, but your own daughter? You’re damaging her. Have you even thought about that? Thought about her rather than yourself? I doubt you have!” she turns to walk away, stops and steps toward me. “You know what? She’d be better off without you.”
The words hit me like a fist, and my brain rattles in my head. I stumble backward, drop down onto the step, let the empty bottle fall to the ground.
I expect Isabelle to go on. Tell me all the ways I’m failing my daughter. Because she’s right. I am. And she’s right that Angelique would be better off without me. Hell, I know that myself. Always have.
But she doesn’t go on. She stops. Pivots. Rubs her face with both hands.
“Shit,” she mutters into her hands. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean that.”
I don’t reply. I’m still stuck on one of the words she used. Damage. Stuck on the fact that my daughter would be better off without me. It’s true. But no one’s ever been brave enough to say it to my face. Even when Kimberly was pregnant, I just thought she’d be a good enough mom to make up for my lack. But now? All these years with only me as a parent? My daughter deserves better.
“Jericho?”
She deserves so much better than me.
“Jericho, I’m really cold,” Isabelle says. She has her arms wrapped around herself and is shivering hard.
I look at her. “Go.”
She studies me, hesitates. “Come with me.”
I shake my head, look at the empty bottle on the ground wishing it was full.
“I need you,” she says.
I watch her face, try to read her. “You don’t need me.”
“Please.”
I look at her standing there in that threadbare shirt, ruined panties clutched in her hand, her feet bare. I’m sure they’re cut up. I did that. Damaged her too. It’s what I do.
I leave the bottle where it is and get up.
She’s still afraid of me, though, because she takes one step back then stops herself. When I reach her, I look her over, wet and muddy and waiting here for me when she could have gone. When I told her to go.
And I find I can’t meet her eyes, so I pick her up, hold her cold and shivering against my chest and carry her back to the house. I leave a muddy trail to my bedroom and into the bathroom where I set her on the edge of the tub and look at her feet, the mud caked on her legs, the ruined shirt, the panties she’s still holding.
“Take off your shirt,” I tell her and shift my attention to the large tub. I run a bath, checking the water temperature as she takes off the shirt. When I look at her, she’s standing naked, one arm across her breasts, the other to cover the V between her legs. I don’t comment. “Get in the tub.”
I feel exactly like a jerk. The selfish jerk she accused me of being. I watch her climb into the tub and sit in the middle of it. She hugs her knees as the water fills up.
Without a word, I use the handheld to wash the mud off her, drain the dirty water and fill the tub until it’s almost to her shoulders. I switch off the water.
She only steals glances at me, but I can’t look away from her. I pull my shirt off and sit at the edge of the tub at her back. I don’t want her to see my face. Not right now. With the handheld I rinse her hair as she hugs her knees to her chest.
“You’re right,” I tell her. I lift her hair off her back and set it over her shoulder. I look at the tattoo. It looks good. It looks like she’s mine. And I wonder about karma. About why she’s been placed in my hands.
She turns her head to meet my eyes and I force myself to meet hers.
“Kimberly would have been a good mother to her,” I say, a sort of confession. “A better mother than I am a father. I know that. I’ve always known that.”
“I didn’t mean what I said. That she’d be better off—”
I put up a hand to stop her. “She would.” I’ve never said this out loud. Not in five years. Even though I’ve known.
She turns so she’s facing me. “Fix it,” she says.
“It’s too late.”
“It’s not. Just fix it.”
It’s too late. Isn’t it? “How?”
“Just be here for her. That’s all she wants. Just be her dad who is here for her.”
“I can’t—”
“You can. It’s a choice, Jericho. Like you said to me once. Everything is a choice. You just have to choose her.”
I lock my jaw. She’s right. I get up, grab the bottles of shampoo and conditioner, something new I guess Catherine put in here, and return to the tub. “Turn around,” I tell her. She looks at the bottle and turns and we sit in silence as I shampoo her hair, the only sound that of water dripping now and again into the full tub, that of me rinsing her hair, washing it again, massaging conditioner into her scalp careful of where I pulled her along by that mass not an hour ago.
And I think about what I’m going to do to her. Think about her fate.
She doesn’t deserve it either. Doesn’t deserve me or Carlton Bishop or any of the shit that’s happened to her. The shit she doesn’t know the half of. But here I am. And here she is. And when I’m finished bathing her, I lift her out of the tub and dry her and carry her back into the bedroom.