by Tiffany Sala
“I would have stayed around,” Brad said. “But Sue wasn’t going to have it. She wanted me gone, and it was not enough for her that I’d just come around now and then and take you kids out or something. She didn’t want to see me again. So she came up with this story that I’d hit her, that I’d hit you and Ryan, and she told me if I ever tried to push for custody or even to contact you, she’d get it out there. Press charges.”
“And I’ve made you come out and meet me today,” I said.
Brad shook his head. “I was younger back then. Fucking stupid. Too nice you might even have said. It didn’t occur to me that it’d be fucking hard for her to prove an abuse with no evidence. What was she going to do, mark you up herself?”
My face must have really changed at that. “She wouldn’t,” Brad said quickly. “Not your mum. Not unless she’s really changed for the worse since I last knew her. She’s nuts in her own way, okay, but I never stopped believing she loves the both of you, and I hope you never stop believing that either. Everything she’s done, she did because she thought it was best for you.”
I was shaking my head. I just wanted to get up and walk, no, run away from this, but this was my life. I knew that I had no choice now but to face this can of worms I’d opened.
“So you just let her take us, and you never got back in contact.”
Suddenly Brad couldn’t quite meet my eyes. “Honestly, I was a bit selfish about it. I was semi-famous at the time, on my way up to the big leagues. I knew if she made any allegations about me, they’d be splashed all over the newspapers with my face next to them, and I’d never play a big boys’ game in my life.”
“But you never played anyway,” I said, then realised what I was revealing. “I, uh, did a bit of research once I knew your name. All the biographies I’ve read said you just vanished, almost without a trace.”
“It weighs on you,” Brad said. “Even if it’s a totally made-up accusation you know you could fight if you needed to. Even if you know you’re doing everything she asked, not even trying to call to check how the kids are, even if your own parents have gone cold on you because you won’t let them know where their grandkids are now. You can be doing everything right… but once someone is making those demands of you, there’s really nothing you can do to save a career like that. It’s gone, Tamara, from that moment on. You have to let go of it eventually. What could have been is just too fucking heavy a burden.”
“That’s not fair,” I protested. “If you didn’t do it, and she never really believed you did it…”
“Nobody ever claimed life was fair, Tamara.” That really hit me in the gut: the first fatherly advice I could remember him giving me. “So I found myself with two choices at the time. Assuming Sue wasn’t going to deliberately come after my career, I could at least count on some grubby journalist finding out about Jess and her mum, and that Sue and I weren’t together any more. That I hadn’t seen my kids in months… eventually, years. I’d at least look like a deadbeat. And if she did decide she wanted my head as well, I’d either be ruined in a way that would hurt my new family, or I’d have to discredit Sue to clear my name. Hurting you and Ryan in the process.”
I felt like I needed to catch my breath. Was I seriously going from an absolute certainty my father was an abuser Mum had saved us from… to the possibility that he might have changed—to this completely crazy idea that he’d never hit anyone at all? That my mum was a liar?
The thing was, I already knew Mum would do some pretty strange things to, in her mind, protect me. She had her own issues, I’d always known that. I’d always accepted it maybe more than I should, because she was the only parent I had around. The only family I had, other than Ryan. Now here was Brad—my dad—with a possible sister for me, with an explanation for why things were the way they were.
“You have to understand, I can’t just believe this without thinking about it some more. Without taking some time over it.”
“Of course, of course.” Brad was grinning in a way that seemed pretty weird when I was basically cooling things down on him. “Honestly I wanted to reach out to you now you’re legally an adult and can make your own decisions. I wanted to reach out to Ryan too. But it just seemed like it had been too fucking long, you know? Like I would have had to get either of you to even hear me out first… and I knew that bi—” He broke into a coughing fit that rattled the table and made me jump in my chair. I knew exactly what he’d been about to say, too.
If it had really happened how he said, could I blame him?
“Did you ever do anything violent towards any of us?” I asked. “Something that might have made her think you were capable of…”
Brad spread his arms wide, nearly knocking over his cup. “I’m a big bloke, I can’t hide it. I did shout at your mum once or twice, I admit it. I’ve got a temper sometimes. I probably scared her a lot of the time without meaning to.”
But he’d calmed down quickly after his initial burst of temper. We were in public, of course… but it didn’t look to me that he had gotten out of control. He didn’t seem to fit the profile of a guy who would go off the rails enough to hit a small kid. It was like with Steven—not that I wanted to be thinking about Steven right now.
I didn’t feel anything in his presence, either. Like, there wasn’t some trauma buried deep inside me, no knowing that he was dangerous. Maybe I was being an idiot, but that meant a lot to me.
Brad cleared his throat. “Like I was saying before, it means so fucking much that you reached out to me first. It’s what I’d decided I needed, if I was going to come back into your lives. I couldn’t just push my way in. Made me fucking miserable to think about though, because I never thought it would happen. Takes a really brave, smart girl to get past that sort of poisoning…”
I was starting to feel warm inside, and that made me think it was time to get the hell out of here.
“I want to see you again,” I said. “But it’s going to have to be just me for the moment. I’m not going to be able to get Ryan here.”
“I don’t expect Ryan to ever come to me,” Brad said. “If he remembers the fighting he might be genuinely pissed with me still for his own reasons, and… Boys are different, you know? He’s always going to have that loyalty to his mum, and I don’t want to get in the way of that. It wouldn’t be the right thing to do.”
I gulped the rest of my coffee. “I have to get back to school now, but I’ll let you know when I’m free again.”
I might have to work out if Steven was going to cause trouble first. I almost expected, as I was walking out through the same doors he’d used, that he would be waiting there to bother me, watching from a distance… but I was more observant now I had that scary encounter out of the way, and I was almost certain he wasn’t anywhere near.
He’d left me alone to talk with Brad without even having to worry about him, and I had to appreciate that. It still burned, all the ways he’d made a fool of me, but maybe like Brad he was still trying to look out for me. In his own way.
If I could have done it all over, I would have shut my mouth about the restraining order. I’d been so stupid to use something I should never have known against him.
Steven was about as likely to forgive me now as Mum was to forgive Brad. I would just have to live with the consequences of the choices I’d made.
I couldn’t get over Ryan’s face on our trip home. Did he know how much he looked like Brad?
My mouth was going before I could manage to think better of it. “Ryan… do you ever think about our… our dad?”
Ryan stiffened so fast I felt the car sway on the road a little. “In what way?”
“Do you wonder what he’s doing these days? What he’s like? If we look like him?”
“Do you?”
I wanted to be honest, tell him exactly where I’d been that afternoon… and at the same time, I knew I couldn’t. Once he knew, everything would become a big fucking mess. If I wanted to talk, I should save it for Callie… but I
both did and didn’t want to talk, and the didn’t part was enough to keep me from trying to speak up with anyone not already involved.
It seemed like the only person I’d ever been safely able to talk about any of this with was Steven, and that had turned into a big mess.
I was going to do everything I could to avoid my life turning into an even bigger mess.
“I don’t think about him,” I said. “But sometimes it feels weird. Like, there’s this whole big part of us we know almost nothing about.”
Ryan braked a little harder at a stoplight than he usually did. “Not almost nothing. We know the guy is a scumbag, a woman-beater. We know he hurt you. That’s fucking enough, wouldn’t you think?”
The funny thing was, the anger in Ryan’s voice right now was scaring me a lot more than being in Brad’s presence had at lunchtime.
The idea of facing Mum again was scaring me a lot more.
When the lights changed and Ryan started the car rolling again, he seemed a bit calmer for the outburst. “Sometimes finding out more isn’t a good idea, Tamara. Sometimes it only makes things worse.”
I felt that, more than I could tell him. If only I could have kept being that Tamara I knew Mum loved: a quiet girl who hid away and didn’t make drama. The precious girl she thought she had saved.
But there was something else in me that was the complete opposite of that girl—maybe something that had come from Brad Chalmers. All I knew was it was just as much a part of me, and it meant I was not going to be able to let go of this now it had started. I wouldn’t let go of anything.
Chapter Eighteen: Steven
During Monday lunchtime, she came to me.
I’d gone to get something I left in my car and I slammed the boot closed and stood and there she was, staring at me. Her arms were folded tightly and her lips were quivering. I wanted those lips on my cock, like, five minutes ago.
Unfortunately she was gearing up to talk instead.
“So yeah, as you already know, I got in contact with my dad.” She moved around the car so both of us had it between us and the rest of the school. Somehow the sight of her fucking knees peeking out from her skirt had me desperate for her. I didn’t know why I was so obsessed with this girl, but the whole thing was going some seriously unhealthy places.
And right now none of that mattered, because she’d led right into what I needed to talk about right now. “Your dad is fucking Brad Chalmers.”
I could tell I’d scared her at first, spitting it out like that, but then a grin spread across her face. “You footy boys, do you just know all the old players?”
“He’s memorable because he never was a player. Just fucking disappeared… well, I guess we know why now.”
Tamara shook her head. “He says he never did it. Says he and my mum split up for… other reasons, and she lied.”
“Do you believe him?”
“Yeah,” Tamara said. “I think I do. Anyway, you can guess why he never played in any of the teams.”
A familiar injustice. Had I sensed something about him, when I kept his story in my head all those years? It didn’t seem like it could be possible.
Tamara stepped closer to me, intruding into my space. I was surprised my shy little fighter had been able to do that when her blood wasn’t up. It definitely put my blood up. “I know I have no right to ask… but did something similar happen to you? With your…?”
I was glad she didn’t dare to name it. It would have made it so much harder. I wanted to give her the complete truth, especially after what she’d just given me, and…
Those big eyes stared into mine. They seemed to stare past mine.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t say the words. I couldn’t take that step that would make her see me as someone who could be beaten down so easily.
I shrugged. “We all make mistakes when we’re young, don’t we?” She wouldn’t understand, of course, but that was also true about my situation.
I sort of expected her to back away from me then, to go cold at least, but she nodded. “I’ve made a few.”
It was like she’d been expecting me to say something like that all along… which made me wonder. “Is that what you thought when you found out about it? That there must have been—that maybe it didn’t…”
Tamara was squirming. I realised I’d moved closer to her too, boxing her in against my car again. Something about her body language was very different this time, though. She was slumping a little, almost inviting me in. “I thought there were a lot of potential explanations. It didn’t seem right to just believe the worst.”
I fucking got it now. She’d been hoping I would turn out to be not such a bad guy after all.
It was kind of fucked-up, and at the same time it really got me that she’d looked at me and all the bad shit I was capable of, and she’d seen potential instead of garbage.
I didn’t let myself think too hard about what I did next. I pressed up against her, pinning her to my car. My body still remembered hers from the last time we’d tangled, but not in a sense where I felt like I already knew everything and didn’t need more. I definitely needed more… and more.
I kissed that pretty quivering mouth, taking her in, and then I moved to her neck. While I sucked hard enough to leave a mark, my hands moved over her body. I was enjoying the curves I was finding, but I also had a purpose: I was pretty sure Tamara had exactly what I needed right now.
“For all you play a bit dumb sometimes, you’re not the sort of girl who lets herself get caught out in the same way twice, are you?” I murmured into her ear. I popped the top button on her school shirt open without needing to look… and then my fingers found it. A condom tucked into her bra.
She shuddered as I drew it out. “It’s hard when they don’t give you any discreet pockets in the summer uniform.”
Damn right it was hard. “I’m going to need to take this one back off you, babe. Is that okay?”
She started protesting when my hands moved down to get both of us ready. “Here? Now? We’re out in the—anyone could—”
I pushed her hands aside when they came up to fend me off. “Keep quiet and take it in, and nobody needs to know.”
Her mind was clearly still thinking that over, but her body had decided to go with what it wanted. She pressed against me as my hand went between her legs.
“Good girl. I can’t fucking wait for this.” I could barely coordinate myself to get the condom on. I was going to persist, though. Cutting corners like that had screwed things up the last time.
Tamara tipped her head back against the roof of my car, exposing her throat. That level of complete trust made me shake even harder. Then her cheek twitched into a wicked smile. “Now you know who my dad is you’re overcome with excitement.”
“Baby, your dad could have been the umpire at one of Brad Chalmers’s amateur games and I would be busting a nut to get back in.”
She stiffened as I pushed her panties down to her ankles and went all rigid again when I pressed into her, though she quickly recovered her composure. That was the sign I’d missed last time, and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. She deserved to be treated well.
So here I was fucking her in a corner of our school grounds, where anybody could show up and see us. Well, all I had to give her at the end of the day was me. My many flaws and my ability to make her squirm like nobody else.
Her fingernails dug into my arms. “This is so wrong… I shouldn’t…”
“Like it?” I moved carefully, slowly. It wouldn’t look like anything to anyone who wasn’t close to us, and I wanted to keep anyone from wanting to get close to us. I wanted to keep her to myself. It was just fine with me that going slowly was making a mess of her. She seemed barely able to contain herself.
Tamara bit her own lip to contain her ecstatic gurgling when she came, and that just set me off. I felt my car rock a little as I pushed into her one more time, hard, before letting her go. She was trying to look like she had it together as
she was staggering away from me, but she had to return to the side of the car to lean against it.
She remembered her lost panties at the same time I did. I was faster. When she was still turning they were in my pocket.
Tamara put her hand on her hip. “Steven, I need those.”
I patted my bulging pocket, using my other hand to make myself decent again. She seemed to be struggling to decide which direction to stare in. “No you don’t, sweetheart. You need a good reminder of how much you fucking love my cock so it won’t take you so long to come back next time.”
That made her eyes wide. “Maybe you should have just asked me instead of playing all these stupid games—”
“Shush, or I’ll vaporise more than your panties.”
“You shush,” said Tamara, “or I’ll make sure you never meet your idol.”
“He is fucking not my idol.”
Tamara was backing away around my car, keeping her steps small, her knees close together between steps. I liked it, her being careful. Even though I should have just hammered out every animal instinct inside me, it seemed like her just being around brought out that animal side of me.
“I’ll be in touch,” I said, struggling not to burst out laughing at that, and I watched her slowly walk away and into one of the school buildings.
Once she was gone, I finished adjusting myself and adjusted her panties in my pocket, so it was clear there was something in there, but not anything so interesting that my mates would want to steal it. Then I finally headed over to where Lucas was eating lunch, although everyone in the group was pretty well finished by then and I hadn’t left myself much time to eat my own lunch.
I realised as the bell rang that the textbook I’d grabbed out of my boot was probably still sitting on the top of the car, where I’d left it when I realised Tamara needed more immediate attention. Well, I wasn’t fucking heading back out there until I had to go home. I would just have to do without for maths. The class made about as much fucking sense without the textbook as with.
