Tastes Like Candy

Thirty-Nine

Thirty-Nine

Michelle

The patter of rain against the window woke her. She blinked the grit from her eyes and saw that it was still dark, the sky beyond the window glass its usual colorless shadow, tinted with manmade light.

Candy was pressed up behind her, arm heavy across her waist. His breathing was deep, and regular. The sleep of the truly exhausted. She knew that, if she was careful, she could slip out of bed without waking him.

So that's what she did, slipping into leggings and an oversized t-shirt before she ducked out of the room. She knew all the creaky spots in the floorboards, and picked her way over them, searching out the hands of the grandfather clock at the end of the hall: four-eighteen in the morning.

She didn't bother to knock when she reached the door to Phillip's office, but let herself inside, and then stayed leaned back against it a moment. It wasn't a surprise to see her dad at his desk, poring over maps and photos and computer printouts. He didn't glance up right away, and she thought it was because he knew it was her, and wasn't startled. Better that thought than the idea that he just didn't care.

It was funny – she'd never thought of her father as careless. Before that day in the street, and Tommy's stabbing, and her being sent away.

She hadn't seen him since she got here.

"Hi, Dad."

He laid the map down and looked up at her, expression alert, despite the deep shadows beneath his eyes. "Hello, love."

She pushed off the door and walked to the desk, sat down in the chair across from it, the one Albie always took. It was an old chair, and it groaned beneath her slight weight; the smell of dust and old tapestry rushed to fill her nose.

"Big day today," she said.

"Yeah. It is."

She had no idea what to say to him. Because she wanted to see him, before everything went down, but she refused to be the person who put meaningless drama on his desk before a dangerous operation.

But she sure as hell wasn't expecting an apology.

Phillip cleared his throat, and the efficiency bled out of his face; behind it was fatigue, and sadness, and regret. "Oh, Chelle," he said. "I'm so sorry, sweetheart. I should have told you from the first."

"Did you say that because you wanted to? Or because Raven wanted you to?"

He smiled, eyes crinkling in the corners. "Darling. You know I love my little sister, but no one makes me say things I don't want to. Your mother was the only one with that power."

Michelle nodded; she couldn't talk about her mother, she just couldn't.

"I've been confused for a very long time," he went on, voice thin, almost frightened, she thought. "You're my child, and I've been using you for that reason – because I knew I could trust my own blood, and I knew you would think the way that I would. That you were my eyes and ears. And I thought, stupidly, that the universe would never take you from me, not after what happened to your mother.

"But I wasn't thinking about the fact that you would grow up and want to have children of your own."

"I never said I wanted that."

"You didn't have the chance to, because you were too caught up in being a soldier for me."

"No one's ever forced me to do anything. Except for when you sent me to America."