A Blooming Flower

Lily

Jason

I was only eighteen when I had Ellie. Her mother was somewhat my girlfriend at the time but when we found out she was pregnant, I decided to make her my wife. To care for her and our family as the proud man my parents raised me to be.

It's been seventeen years since we eloped fresh out of school and we've since had another child. There's no doubt that Charlie should have been our first born.

He's only five, rambunctious but still a good kid, the best of both his parents. My daughter on the other hand is now a teenager, with all the teenage urges I once remember having; each one was more painful to endure than the last.

Unfortunately for me Katherine, my wife, is the kind of parent who thinks our children need to find their own way through life. She'd have them make their own mistakes no matter how stupid and avoidable. Her fleeting attention only forces me to watch from the side-line though as Ellie reaches new heights of disapproval with each passing year.

Although Ellie won't tell me the details and I hardly want to know them, she's currently dating a boy named Olly. He's been taking her to and from school every day for three months now. The bastards a couple years older than her though, a college boy. He shouldn't even be eyeing her up let alone kissing her in the backseat of his convertible every day!

It's daunting that our little girl is turning seventeen in just a couple of days, dating a man who's about to turn twenty. There's no doubt that if she hasn't been coersed into it yet, she'll be having sex with him after that and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.

The problem is she's too much like her mother was at that age. She really knows how to pick a man. This boy is just the latest in the line of Ellie's 'bad boy' boyfriends. Before Olly there was Adrian, before him Lucas, both those boys were delinquents too but they were still better than Olly.

Our children seem to conveniently forget that we parents talk to each other and Olly happens to have a sibling in the same year as Charlie at school. When you're married to a social butterfly like Katherine, word reaches you even when you wish it wouldn't and a couple weeks ago they had a mother's meeting in the playground. She came home to tell me that Sarah's mother had mentioned finding cigarettes in Olly's room, however she hadn't brought it up to him yet which only worried me more.

The possibility that Olly could be passing them on to my daughter was high in my view, considering her defiant nature. His existence in her life pisses me off to say the least but without proof of his wrongdoings I couldn't find solid ground to shut down their relationship in the eyes of my wife, so here we are.

It feels like it was only yesterday that Ellie was ten years old, playing with her dolls on the bedroom floor alongside her best friend. Her and Lily were inseparable back then, they still are to an extent.

My thoughts slipped away as I watched Olly's car pull up to the curb and the two girls got out. Ellie's skirt was too short as usual, her long dark brown hair was blowing in the wind as she leaned forward over the drivers window to kiss Olly goodbye. As usual I resisted the urge to step outside and punch him when his hand fell out the side to slap her ass before she began walking towards the house.

Gripping my coffee cup till my knuckles turned white I watched on from the kitchen window until I saw Lily slide off the backseat. Her tiny frame wobbled from the sudden gust of wind, her short blonde-hair falling across her porcelain cheeks as she held down her skirt. Just seeing her relaxed me.