While having just been released from prison, due to a night full of misfortunate mistakes, Red McCoy witnesses an old friend of his, son being kicked out of his apartment in the middle of the night.
Beverly Reid had been living on his own since he...
| B E V A N D R E D | • • • | C A R O L I N E J E A N M C C O Y |
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Growing up had never been easy for me. Left and right, I'd see men cradling their daughters, looking over at them as though they were the most precious thing in the entire world. But when it came to my father, I only ever knew hate.
My oldest brother, Matthew, had hated my father with such a raging passion, that it had been passed onto the rest of us McCoy's.
My mother had tried to differ our thinking, trying her very best to install into our brains that it wasn't okay to hate family. No matter what they had done to you—and even if they deserved it.
Whenever she'd say this, Matthew would scoff beneath his breath, careful not to he heard by his understanding, yet scornful mother. "Don't listen to her," he'd say, "that guy who was supposed our dad, left all six of his children. We're meant to hate him."
And for many, many years after that, I had believed him. I had believed him so firmly, that the hate began to blind me. Blind me so thoroughly, that by the time I had turned sixteen, I had a raging hate for any man who'd bat an eye my way.
Any crush, was easily dismissed by Matthew's words, any of my drunken hookups were quickly forgotten, due to that pure fuel inside of me.
And I remember so vividly, that one summer after my senior year in high school, my mother had walked in on one of my many, many flings—but this time, I had been busy with a man both married, and twice my age.
There was no other day in my disposable life that I had felt so ashamed. And whenever returning to those familiar thoughts, I can't help but think about that man—whose name I had never learned.
His wife, potential children, and any other responsibility he might have lost that fateful day. While it all being all of my fault.
My mother had blown her top, shouting at the man at the very top of her lungs.
At that very moment, I had been mortified, coiling into the restroom as the man and my mother argued. Her argument, was that I'd been sexually assaulted, considering our notable age-gap, and the fact that I hadn't even reached eighteen, yet.
He had began crying, crying that he had no idea I was that young. Lie, I remember thinking. I had told him my exact age before we had even locked lips.
As soon as the terrified man had left, my mother cried to me. Cried to me over the fact that for some reason, her little girl had been broken. So broken over her absent father, that I had resorted to getting an older man's attention elsewhere.
This is what both she, and my most-definitely not at all qualified therapist called—daddy issues.
During one of our sessions, she had cried once more, explaining that she had no idea of what I was going through, due to my younger brother, Cole's mental illnesses. She had been so wrapped up with him, that I was slowly drowning in the midst.
