Bet on Me (Bet on Love #2)

by Rachel Higginson

  “Hi, sweetheart, it’s your dad.”

  “Hey, Dad.” It was better to not remind him that I already knew that because of the caller ID. But to be fair, my number might not be programmed into his phone—or any numbers for that matter—so maybe he didn’t get the whole caller ID thing. I was mostly impressed he hadn’t clung to his cordless when I suggested he upgrade.

  My dad was the quintessential blue-collar man’s man. He’s worked hard. Every single day of his life. He was a mechanic in my home town, and memories from my childhood were always filled with his black-stained hands and the smell of oil and grease when he got home from work.

  I loved my dad. Don’t get me wrong. He was my hero. My standard for everything male and manly. He was completely devoted to me and raising me and making sure my life was everything that it could be after my mom left.

  Oh, I didn’t tell you that part yet? Yeah, my mom left my dad, and consequently me, when I was eight years old. My dad had never told me the real reason she left. He’d made up bullshit stories about how she struggled to be responsible, and there was something wrong inside her that just wouldn’t let her settle down.

  But when I was eleven, I’d found the letter she left him buried in his sock drawer, worn and wrinkled like he’d read it a hundred times. I saw the truth of that letter the second I picked it up. She hadn’t even had the courage to confront him face to face. She’d walked out in the middle of the night because “this wasn’t the life she’d dreamed of for herself.” Apparently, my mom had wanted big things out of her life, and she didn’t think my dad could give them to her. Plus, the whole having a kid thing was such a downer.

  She hadn’t said that specifically. But it wasn’t like she’d offered me the chance to go with her.

  Not that I would have. I was utterly loyal to my dad. Even back then, I liked to believe I would have seen how screwed up her behavior was.

  But try being the kid left behind. Try growing up with the knowledge that my mother wanted something different out of life than my dad and me so much that she left us both…abandoned us…completely disappeared and never reached out once. That was the kind of person she was.

  That was the kind of person I fought every day not to become.

  That was why I had a plan.

  That was why I stuck to the plan.

  That was why I never deviated.

  My dad’s low, scratchy voice pulled me from my thoughts. “How’s college life?”

  My dad said the word “college” like some people said Dior or Nobel Peace Prize or the Superbowl. It held respect and something deeper, reverence of a sort.

  He was so proud of me. He did everything in his power to help me out, even though we both knew I’d rack up some hefty student debt during med school. But it also kind of embarrassed me.

  He was a smart guy, but he didn’t always remember that. And intelligent people intimidated him. He thought I was this big deal just because I went to college and had done so well in school. I hated that he didn’t think much of himself. That he didn’t see his value and worth like I did.

  “It’s good,” I told him. “And bad. And kind of exhausting. But mostly good.”

  “Putting that brain of yours to good use. That’s always a good thing.” That was his standard reply.

  I smiled into the phone. “Trying anyway.”

  “Hey, listen, baby girl, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  Oh, God. “Are you okay, Daddy?” I sounded like a child. My voice came out tiny and weak, submerged in instant terror. This was my dad. The only person still alive on this earth that loved me. And I sometimes rolled my eyes at his goofiness or argued with him or felt misplaced pity, but he was still my dad.

  I would not tolerate anything being wrong with him.

  Not a single thing.

  He let out a soul-deep sigh that made my toes curl and my free hand dig into my comforter and hold on for dear life. “Well, Britte, I-I’m not exactly sure.”

  “Is it cancer?” I whispered. My brain instantly started spinning with what little I knew about treatment and types and stages.

  “Cancer?” His laugh grated through the phone rough and surprised. “Why would you think I got cancer?”

  Tumor, then. It had to be a tumor. Or liver failure. Or, oh god, Lupus. No, wait. It was never Lupus according to Gregory House. “Daddy, just tell me what’s wrong.”

  The suspense was killing me, but when my dad finally put me out of my misery, his words cut through me like a hot blade. They dug deeper than I expected them to, twisting with a jagged, uneven edge until my mutilated heart was hemorrhaging internally.

  “Your mother called, baby. She wants to see you.”

  His words bounced around in my head. I couldn’t speak for a full minute. I just stared at my feet, my purple toenail paint that had chipped, the trio of freckles that sat just along my arch, my second toe that was longer than my big toe.

  My big hallux.

  The technical term.

  My hallux was just one of my phalanx bones. Then the metatarsus. The tarsus. The-

  “Britte,” my father’s gravelly voice boomed through the phone. “You still there?”

  “Sorry,” I murmured. I swallowed, realizing I’d just woken up and hadn’t brushed my teeth yet. I ran my tongue over my furry teeth and wished for a cup of coffee to appear in my hands. I needed coffee before I approached this conversation. “I’m here.”

  “Well, did you hear me?” I opened my mouth to stop him from saying those hateful words again, but I wasn’t fast enough. “Your mother reached out to me. She wants to talk to you, honey. I think she wants to see you even.”

  “I’m twenty-one.”

  He was silent for a few seconds, digesting my response. It didn’t make sense. I’d stated a fact when he expected an opinion. But my father, my dad who barely had a high school education, understood exactly what I meant. “She wants to explain why she’s been gone so long. She’d at least like the chance.”

  I ignored him. “I thought you had cancer. When you told me you needed to talk to me, I thought it was something serious, like cancer.”

  His smile reached through the distance and wrapped around me, warming me and easing some of my panic. “Would you have preferred it if I had cancer?”

  I laughed at his dark sense of humor. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Well, you’re lucky that I don’t. And you’re lucky that your mother wants to talk to you.” His words were firmer when I started to argue, and he had to speak over me to be heard, “Now, Britte, I don’t care what she’s done in the past or how long she’s been gone. She’s your mother and that gives her a right to talk to you.”

  “Dad-”

  “What it does not give her a right to is your love and affection. Or even your trust. Those things belong to you and are yours alone to hand over to whom you see fit. She might never get them. And that’s fine by me. But you do owe it to her to speak to her, face her if that’s what she wants, and listen to what she has to say.”

  “I owe it to her? How? Why? What in the world? I don’t owe her anything! That woman owes me a childhood back. And puberty! And my freaking senior prom!”

  “Without her, baby girl, you wouldn’t even be a thought in the sky. She gave birth to you. She raised you for a good chunk of your life. And she got you a good daddy that took care of the rest when she couldn’t. Seems to me that you do owe her something.”

  Despite my bad mood, I smiled. “She did give me you.”

  He laughed again. “I want you to call her.”

  Iciness swept through me and my blood turned to sludge, dusted with frost and thick with hard, solid icicles. “I love you, Dad. But I’m going to stick with no.”

  “Britte.”

  “I’m still trying to catch up to the fact that she called you after thirteen years of radio silence. I can’t just jump into a phone call with her and pretend like she never left.”

  “Nobody’s asking you
to do that.”

  “You’re asking me to call her! That’s pretty much the same thing.”

  “It’s not and you know it. You know better.”

  Great, now he was scolding me. “Dad, I can’t do it. I don’t want to do it. And you know what? She didn’t want to raise a child. She didn’t want to stay married to you. She didn’t want to be a grown up and be responsible and be an adult and be a decent human being. So I’m taking a lesson from her and not doing what I don’t want to do.”

  He huffed a curse word under his breath. “You’re more like her than you think.”

  Since I was the one that initially made the comparison, I had to swallow the bitterness burning in my throat. “My argument stands.”

  I thought he would lose his patience with me. My dad was a lot of different things, but understanding wasn’t always one of them. He thought I got my stubbornness from my mom. But that was only because he didn’t realize how stubborn he could be. Instead, his coarse voice gentled, and he backed off. “All right, Britte. I should have known better than to expect you to open your arms for this woman. But promise me you’ll at least think about it. I think you need to hear what she has to say. I think she’s worth listening to.”

  I let out a defeated sigh. “I can promise you that I’ll think about thinking about it. How’s that?”

  His chuckle chased away the frustration between us. “You and your words. All right, baby girl. You think about thinking about it, and I’ll call you in a few days.”

  “Love you, Daddy.”

  “Love you, too. Now go study hard.”

  “You got it.”

  We both clicked off without a formal goodbye. I couldn’t remember my dad ever actually saying the word goodbye, but it was just another thing I loved about him. We’d both been so damaged by my mother’s goodbye that refusing to say it to each other felt like there would never be that horrible thing between us. We lived just one long, never-ending conversation and relationship with each other.

  He wasn’t going to leave me.

  And no matter where school or work took me, I would never leave him either. Not really. Not like she did.

  I crawled out of bed, fully awake now. I needed coffee stat, or I was likely to turn into my alter ego: Indominus Rex.

  Only my version sadly didn’t come with Chris Pratt.

  Ellie was already leaning over a cup of coffee when I stumbled down the hallway. Her sleepy eyes lifted from the mug of black gold, took in my disheveled, terrifying state and widened with fear. She moved to the cupboard without a word and pulled down my favorite mug. And because she was the best human on the planet, she poured me a cup just as I reached the counter. Next came the creamer, because we weren’t barbarians, and a spoon.

  “Thank you.”

  She smirked into her coffee. “I fear for the villagers.”

  I mixed up my creamer and took a healthy swallow. “As you should.”

  “Easy, Mr. Hyde. Don’t burn your tongue.”

  I lifted the mug to my lips again. “It’s worth it.”

  Her voice softened with concern. “Was it your date with Beckett last night? Was it that bad? Did he get handsy? Oh my God, did he try to roofie you?”

  I gave her the side eye. “Do you really think your brother would roofie a girl? Ellie, come on.”

  She blinked at me. “Under normal circumstances no. But he really likes you.”

  “So you think he would drug me in order to have sex with me?” I demanded dryly.

  She shook her head quickly. “Sex! God, no. What kind of man do you think my brother is! But maybe he’d slip you something so he could drag you to Vegas and marry you. He’s totally capable of that.”

  I glared at her.

  “Just kidding?”

  Pointing a stern finger at her, I warned, “Roofies aren’t funny.” I took a sip of coffee. “Neither is marriage.”

  “Okay…random.”

  We were silent for a few minutes as we stared into our coffee as if the creamy depths could whisper secrets about our future. I didn’t know what Ellie was thinking about, probably the hunky med student still sleeping in her bedroom. But my thoughts were whirling words as I tried to snatch them from the tornado of my mind and speak them into sentences.

  Ellie’s parents had this idyllic marriage that she didn’t, and probably because of lack of other experience, couldn’t appreciate. She saw them as these overbearing dictators threatening to smother her with their love and concern.

  From an outsider like me their affection was endearing, and their strong, healthy marriage was envy-inducing. I didn’t have a relationship to compare to. Nothing to hold as the standard for my future relationship goals. Except for Ellie’s parents.

  When she’d held them at bay last year, desperate to make a way for herself, I couldn’t help but, secretly, think she was a moron. My dad helped as best as he could, but my student loan debt was going to be a monster. I had a scholarship for undergrad, but my future was a gaping black hole made up singularly of dollar signs. Red dollar signs.

  Ellie’s hopeful chirp shattered my thoughts. “So your date with Beckett went well?”

  I gave her another side eye. Stalling for time, I took another sip of my coffee. Truthfully, I’d kind of forgotten all about Beckett once my dad called. And last night? Had it gone well?

  “It wasn’t terrible,” I conceded. “He wasn’t bombarded by his fan club. I didn’t have to walk home. When I put it like that, it was a major improvement from the first time we went out.”

  She laughed. “My brother is an idiot, B. That’s a given. But he’s also kind of nice when he wants to be.”

  “He is.”

  “So are you going to go out with him again?”

  I looked at her fully, shocked by her hopeful smile and wide, open eyes. She looked like a puppy. Like a sweet little puppy I was about to dropkick down an alley.

  “I don’t know…”

  “But you said it went well!”

  “I said it didn’t go badly!”

  Her mouth turned down in a frown. “Britte Tallulah Nichols.”

  “My middle name is not Tallulah.”

  “You are being unnecessarily difficult!”

  “I’m not being difficult at all! I went out with him!”

  She crossed her arms in a huff. “You’re ruining my happiness.”

  I glanced toward her bedroom door where Fin’s snores floated into the hallway. “Pretty sure your happiness is naked in your bed right now. Have you ever thought about a CPAP mask? I think he has some apnea going on.”

  Her cheeks flamed with a bright red blush. “He’s not naked!”

  But I had made my point. “I don’t know if we’re going out again. Beckett didn’t ask for a second date. Or is it the third? What number are we technically on right now?”

  She waved away my questions. “Just promise me you’ll think about it. About him.”

  Like I could not think about him, but her question rubbed my raw nerves. My dad had asked the same thing, only about my mom.

  I didn’t want to think about my mom and why she was back or what she had to say. The truth was, it didn’t matter. Nothing she could say would make up for the last thirteen years of my life. Nothing she could say would erase the hurt, pain, and rejection that had burrowed so deep in my heart, it had become a living, breathing part of me. Nothing she could say would make me believe she was even the tiniest bit sincere.

  It was easy to come back now. After I was grown. After I had built a life for myself. After I lived on my own, worked on my own, had my own future carved out of the wreckage she’d left behind.

  After I didn’t need her anymore.

  My dad and I had a really good life together. It hadn’t been easy. He’d never dated again or even considered it after she’d left. I didn’t know if he was still in love with my mom or just too heartbroken to face another relationship, but I did know he’d never fully recovered from her absence.

  I’d worked
through a lot of damage and some major trauma as well. I’d spent years of my life blaming myself for her abandonment and why she stayed away. But somewhere along the way, I’d realized my dad was enough. I didn’t need her. Maybe I’d wanted her, or at least a woman’s opinion and influence, at different places in my life, but I didn’t need her.

  My dad was my everything. He was my world. I didn’t want her coming back into my life and ruining that. Or making me regret the last thirteen years even more than I already did. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that talking to her would be disloyal to my dad.

  After everything he’d done for me. After all he’d sacrificed and given up and worked for, I couldn’t face my mom. I wasn’t ungrateful or entitled enough to forget that I was a better person because of my dad…because my mom hadn’t been around and it had forced my dad and me to be better people.

  More than all of those reasons, I didn’t want to see her for me. Yes, I was loyal to my dad. And yes, I didn’t need her anymore. But I didn’t want her either.

  Anger and resentment burned through me. Bitterness clawed up my throat and threatened to choke me. My hands trembled at the thought of ever speaking to that woman again.

  I would have welcomed her back a year after she left. I would have accepted her all through middle school. I would have found a way to move past the hurt in high school. But I was in college now. I had become my own woman with a bright future ahead of me. All on my very own.

  She didn’t get to come back now and try to make things better. She didn’t get to apologize now and get my forgiveness or my time or anything about me.

  She didn’t get to come into my life and erase all of that like it meant nothing.

  I wouldn’t let her.

  I didn’t want to think about Beckett either. Especially with my mom scraping at my nerves and poisoning my thoughts. I needed someone loyal…someone dependable. And that wasn’t Beckett.

  I was not going to live the life my dad had lived. I wasn’t going to start a family, a life…a…a…home, only for Beckett or any man to walk out on me the second things got a little rocky.

  I needed someone that was going to stick around for the hard stuff.

  I needed someone that wanted to stick around for the hard stuff.