“Stop,” She could not bear yelling, even now after so long and far away from how she was raised, it rankled against everything that felt proper to raise her voice any higher than it was now – and maybe that was the problem. Maybe if she did let herself yell – maybe if she did opt to exorcise her demons in some unholy scream of fury she might feel better.
But the last woman to do that had ended up dead on a dining room floor, so maybe it wasn’t propriety that chained her voice after all.
Taking a shaking breath, she eased herself farther away from him – needing space, needing to breathe without feeling as though each fill of her lungs was taking in more poison than clarity. “I don’t need you to tell me how to feel.”
Was she really addressing him? Or the ghost inside her mind that still sounded ever like her father? Opening her eyes, she made herself take in the man before her. A wide, mismatched gaze that did not beseech as much as it insisted, an abortive motion of a calloused hand that sated itself by furling and unfurling it’s fingers at a side that was too still by contrast. A beard that did nothing to hide the twisting twitch of his lips, but rather framed them in a way that made each flicker all the more notable. He was nothing like her father – and that alone was enough to banish the last lingering whisper of the man’s ghost, for now.
“There is nothing that I can say right now that won’t be hurtful in some way. You understand that, don’t you? That you’re the last person I can talk to about this? About missing him? Regardless – regardless of everything he did to you – he was still my father.” And there were days when she hated admitting it. Hated that such a man had raised her – and how much she still loved him.
Worse – there were days when she hated the felt like she felt she should have to hate him. Days when she wished she had never gone with Eleanor Guthrie, and had just waited for her ransom to be paid, because then she could have gone on seeing pirates as blackguards with no interests beyond their own personal gains, rather than human beings as flawed as any other – and more willing to show the truth of their ugliness. She would never know the kind of man her father truly was – and it would be terrible, but blissful, in a manner only ignorance could provide.
“Please – just. Go.” She just needed some time today. It would pass. It always did. Birthdays only came once a year, and all the memories and regrets that came with them would fade in the light of tomorrow.
Ocean Archive 