Impress Me Not: Neon Underground

Chapter 64

"Why are you calling me?"

"That's a pretty strange way to greet your father," The voice was so foreign to him, yet so familiar. It was like a bad dream. One that Melvin had tried to heal from for a long time.

"You expect me to be nice?" Melvin kept his tone colder than cryogenic stasis talking to him. "You disowned me about ten years ago, haven't tried to contact me since, and you expect me to suddenly act happy that you decided to call?"

"I wanted to apologize," he said. "I wanted to try and make amends."

"For what?" Melvin asked. His heart closed the moment he heard his voice. For some reason, it just felt like he was working in his club again, dealing with a customer that was unruly. He didn't see the man for anything other than that. Melvin couldn't surface the good memories he had with him. They were buried and burned the moment that he was treated like the worst person to ever have been born.

"For disowning you," he said. "It wasn't the right thing for me to do."

"Is that it?" He asked.

"What do you want me to apologize for?" He seemed frustrated.

Good. Melvin wanted him to feel just like he did when he was just an innocent eighteen-year-old getting thrown out on the streets.

"What do you want to apologize for?" Melvin asked. "I'm allowing you time to convince me to forgive you."

"Melvin," his dad said. "You're making this more dramatic than it needs to be."

"Do you still think what happened makes me a monster?" Melvin asked.

There was dead silence on the other line as he waited for a response. That was the whole reason he was kicked out. An incident when he was sixteen, that two years of therapy didn't seem to fix to their standards.

"You sent a girl to the hospital."

"She wanted me to do it," Melvin said. "But I'm guessing you're going to continue to believe otherwise, even though she said it herself to everyone in that hospital room."

"You were both kids, Melvin!" He argued. "I would have thought now that you've grown up a bit, you would be able to see how alarming that was."

"And I would have thought that after so many clients and people you meet," Melvin said. "That you would have finally realized that some people enjoy things that you might not."

"Do you really think that sending someone to the hospital is what they really want?"

"No," Melvin answered. "But telling me that I was a monster rather than allowing me to understand my own strength isn't the best answer either."

"Do you still do that?" His father asked. "Do you still send people to the hospital?"

"No," Melvin smiled maliciously. "I still bring them enjoyment through pain, though."

"That doesn't make sense."

"It doesn't have to," Melvin told him. "If you still can't accept it, that's fine. Just stop trying to pretend that you forgive me just because you miraculously want something from me."

"I'm not pretending!"

"What do you want?" Melvin tried to keep it short. He didn't need this today.

"I wanted to-!" His father cut himself off, sighing in frustration. "I wanted to tell you that you have a sister."

"How?"

"Your mother and I adopted," he said. "I wanted her to meet you."

"No, you don't," Melvin stopped him. "You want her to meet the rest of the family here."