Depths

24. Visitor

Hey guys, I put Grammarly to good use and went back through all my previous chapters and edited them. So if you're interested in rereading them when they are grammatically correct, then they are now all correct.

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Danny had finally finished his homework, hours later, and was now probably hungrier than Phantom. He was ready to hit the kitchen and cook himself up a giant bowl of cereal and coke, but when he got downstairs, his father was alone in the kitchen eating ice cream with a very big spoon. Music was playing softly from the small radio and Danny knew that he was using it for meditation.

"Dad," Danny stopped midway through the kitchen entrance and asked as he slowly approached his father. The man only ever ate ice cream with a cooking spoon if he was suffering a stressful amount of melancholy. "Are you okay?"

The man looked up at his son with the most helpless expression he had seen his father make in a very long time, and he knew that this couldn't be good.

"Son," Jack put the enormous spoon down into the gallon of ice cream and spoke slowly, "sit, I have something to discuss with you."

The boy sat down slowly, staring at his father in concern and knowing that this had everything to do with the two FBI agents that were there earlier. The chair was cool against the exposed part below his thighs, his black PJ shorts riding up slightly and goosebumps rose on his skin.

"What is it, Dad?" He already knew it had to have something to do with Vlad, he had been reported missing a while ago and he knew that the police had been looking for him for a while.  He had been completely worried earlier that the police were there to accuse someone of murder, but Phantom had already calmed him down with hard logic so he continued to play it cool.

"Son," Jack looked like he was having a hard time figuring out what the right words were to say, so he started out with a question as if the answer would help him get his thoughts together. "Did Vlad ever make you uncomfortable in any way?"

Danny's face curled in confusion, thinking seriously how to answer this. Vlad had always made him uncomfortable ever since he turned 13, and he was positive that Vlad was creepy before then but he only started acknowledging just how creepy he was barely after turning into a teenager. Should he tell his father, now, what he had been wanting to tell and bring to his attention for years? Or should he just play dumb and say that Vlad always treated him as his godson? 

What brought this on anyway? FBI agents show up and suddenly his Dad suspected that Vlad was a creep to him? What gives?

"Um, I mean, uh," Danny was suddenly unable to look his father in the eye, and though he knew that his father could be very dense sometimes, he was positive that his father would take the answer as a yes unless he spoke some real English words. The music playing suddenly felt like it was putting artistic sugar on the confectionary of dread cluttering his mind.

His father wasn't going to just take the implied yes, though, apparently, because he pried a little more, "I mean, did he ever look at you strangely, or touch you in a weird way?"

Immediately, Danny had a very vivid flashback of Vlad's hand around his neck as he aligned himself to his unwilling body. Danny desperately wanted to say yes, because at that moment as he looked into his father's concerned and loving eyes, all he wanted to do was confess what happened. Get it all out. 

"None that I ever thought was horrifyingly inappropriate," he said instead, "sometimes he would look at me funny, but I never thought it was uncomfortable." He could never tell the truth, no one could know what actually happened to Vlad, especially not his father.