Fighter

One

Your POV

Back in my hotel suite, I let the hot water spray from the shower fall over my aching muscles. Two weeks away from training feels like a year, for all the suffering my muscles are going through now that I finally decided to stop procrastinating and get back to the gym despite my body complaining too much about me taking a few weeks off.

In the last two months I abused it. Trying to avoid the circus my family's life has become for the past six months, I've spent half the past few days dodging reporters and the other half wallowing in booze to oblivion. That's when they finally got to me. The assholes are tireless. They pretend to run while I do my usual route around Arlington Cemetery just so they can jump in front of me and take pictures. The angrier they make me the more money they must get for the pictures.

I've changed hotels twice in the last two weeks and still reporters manage to find me in less than a day. I'm the cheese for these damn mice and they seem to sniff out where I am before I can even unpack. The people of Washington know me and they know who my father is. It only takes a hundred dollars to tip the bellboy and the rats knock on my suite's door, pretending to be officials. If I can make it to the airport tomorrow without being followed, then I might finally have some peace in New York. No one there will care who I am. The news travels faster and the photos from the last story that hit the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago will hopefully have been forgotten by now.

As I dry off after my shower, I make the mistake of turning on the master bathroom's flat-screen TV, hoping to catch the day's scholarship newsletter. I wipe off the fogged up mirror and as soon as it's clear the TV behind me shows a pretty picture of my dear father. Unable to bear the sight of his pathetic humiliated face any longer, I quickly turn off the TV, sparing myself the pain of listening to the interview some twenty-two-year-old Harvard grad has probably written. A speech prepared using the results of a vote on what must be done to save his career in crisis, I am sure.

It turns out that my dear father, Senator Anthony Y/L/N, who was once a prominent pillar of the community, an outstanding public servant, is contrary to everything he preaches. The man I grew up admiring his honesty and hard work, is a complete lie. A scam. A liar. The opposite of everything he supposedly supported.

Too admired by the person who was my father to see the things that were right in front of my eyes i justified anything in the last decade: not coming home, interns too intimate and even the smell of perfume on his suit when he sneaked into the house out the back door in the morning, still wearing last night's clothes. I told myself that everyone wanted some of him, to enjoy his light, and be around the upstanding, church-going senator. When in fact he was the one who wanted a little bit of everyone. Of all women to be exact.

Christian values ​​my ass! Six months ago I found out I had a brother. One who is only a few weeks younger than me. A son who is the offspring of an affair between a rising senator and a drug-addicted stripper. The best part? my stepbrother, the other spawn of satan himself, is a fighter who just won the middleweight championship. Something I always dreamed of as a kid and my dad repeatedly said it wasn't a respectable career. Sometimes the irony sucks.

I just wanted this story to stop there. It seems like ever since the news of my father's infidelity got out there's been a never-ending stream of women who couldn't wait to share their stories. Hot stories between them and my father. The sick shit he got into were things a son should never know about his own father regardless of age. And the adultery wasn't even the worst part. When he ended the affair with them, he discarded them as trash, using his power and influence to threaten them into submitting to him. A cheating liar and an abuser.

How lucky for me. I look like him.

I wrap myself in a towel and go to answer my cell phone, which is ringing even though I don't feel like it.