Page 3 of Truth or Dare

She wants to explore and shop and try local restaurants and go deep sea fishing and do yoga and take dance classes and live life to the fullest, but I don’t want her out of my sight for the stuff I wouldn’t do and half the time I can’t be bothered with the stuff I would do.

I go along with her when I can’t find excuses not to keep us home. She keeps looking at me with sad eyes and when I catch her… she tries to paint on a smile, a fake smile. It makes me wanna put my fist through a wall.

I’m doing therapy over the webcam. I’d rather just forget it all instead of talking about it. I need distance from home, from the business, from ex-associates and enemies. I need distance from myself, my urges, my needs, my nightmares. That’s why we’re here. We don’t know if I’m in danger, if Tia’s in danger. We don’t want questions from the cops about any loose ends back home. I don’t know if I’ll eventually take us back or make a life here or somewhere else, but right now we’re supposed to be taking time to breathe, be newlyweds. But I can’t just breathe.

Every day brings breaking news of shit Pop was into that we were oblivious about. I have a standing weekly appointment with the fucking shrink, which I don’t wanna do but which I do because Tia needs me to do it so we both can hang onto hope that I’m not a lost cause. The shrink specializes in helping men like me. Is it helping me? I don’t fucking know.

Yeah, I shot my father when he turned a gun on her in order to punish me. But in hindsight, the time between when my father raised his gun to Tia and the time I fired my weapon, I wasn’t sure but thought I saw something in his face that told me he wanted to die. I don’t know if it’s hindsight or just my nightmares haunting me.

I have alternating dreams where his expression changes. Did he raise that gun so I’d kill him with no intention of shooting her or me? Did I save her life and my own life by killing the man who gave me life? Did I pass or fail the ultimate Tom Ferrano test? The fact that I’d killed my own father, did it mean I really was no better than he was, or did I just protect what was mine? His face haunts my dreams.

The blood-covered wedding dress he had someone leave on the balcony outside my bedroom just before he died taunts me, tells me he intended to kill her or at least wanted me to fear that he would. I was relieved it looked nothing like the dress she actually wore and I never told her about the bloody dress or a bunch of other shit that went down because she had enough to cope with. That dress continues to haunt my nightmares. Most of getting her out of that dress on our wedding night was about my desire, yeah, but some of that was probably about those fears and getting her safely out of it while it was still white, rather than stained scarlet.

Dare’s doing good back home, really stepping up. He’d always been an asset to the business, mature for his age, serious about being successful, and he and I were on the exact same page about the company and about what we did and didn’t want in our lives. He was making my life a helluva lot less complicated and without him dealing with shit back home I don’t know how I’d be coping.

Then again, maybe if I was busy sorting that shit out myself, I would have something to focus on to take my mind off what I did. Take my mind off the fact that I’m cracked, damaged, probably irrevocably. But if I go back and that puts my wife in danger…the idea of doing anything to make her vulnerable, therefore allowing anything to hurt her? It’s unthinkable to me.

A few days after they got home from our wedding, I sat down at the computer to check emails and saw a chat notification from my brother asking me to get ahold of him as soon as possible. Finding out about the latest? Shit. The mess Pop left us just keeps getting messier.

1

8.5 Years Earlier

Truth, dare, double dare, or promise to repeat?”

“Double dare,” I answered her and leaned over and ran my nose from her chin, along her jawline, to the spot behind her ear.

She giggled and squirmed away, pink tinting her cheeks.

“I double dare you to…” She looked around and then whispered, “kiss someone you have a crush on.”

We were sitting under a tree outside our high school, skipping science class, away from the building on the far side of the thick trunk of a big weeping willow. No one would see us unless they were close. I was looking forward to trying to get to second base with my lab partner. I was pretty smitten with her, like Charlie Brown and his little girl with the red hair.

“On a dare, yeah, but a double dare? A kiss is way too tame for a double dare,” I told her. “Can’t you do better than that?”

“Depends where that kiss is,” answered a female voice coming from the other side of the tree trunk.

As soon as I saw the source of that voice the redheaded girl in the grass beside me no longer existed. No other girl in the world existed but the tall brunette with the leather jacket and huge tits smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke into rings. She was the only girl for me for the next six years. And what she did to me ruined me for the following three.

Debbie was a rocker chick. Her style consisted of heavy black eye make-up, tight jeans, fuck-me heels, plenty of leather and body-hugging fabrics like Spandex, and her signature long nails – talons, really.

The day we met was her first day at my high school and she and I were inseparable throughout the rest of it. She was wild, she had an insatiable sex drive, she was crazy about me, and the family I was from didn’t bother her a bit. In fact, she thought it was a thrill that my family appeared to toe the line between good and evil. She loved to suck my cock, had no sexual inhibitions whatsoever, and she kept me on my toes. She wasn’t my first lay, I was a pretty busy 16-year-old when I met her, but she changed the game for me. Back then I thought she was it for me.

On her 20th birthday, I gave her an engagement ring. It was logical. We had a great time together. In hindsight, there were things missing, things she didn’t give me, but I was young and in love with her spirit and the sex was incredible.

We split when we were 22, four months before the wedding when I caught her on her knees giving head to the goof hired to DJ our wedding reception.

When I walked into her place in the middle of the afternoon unannounced and found Debbie on her knees, I saw black. I got a lock on my rage with her but the guy whose dick was in her mouth wasn’t so lucky because he took the brunt. I hospitalized the guy, broken jaw among his injuries, and then I destroyed his life.

I had his and his father’s classic car that they rebuilt together crunched at a scrap yard and then returned to his driveway. I got him fired from his day job, had all his DJ equipment destroyed, trashed his place, and then took steps that wound up bankrupting his father’s business. You could say when I got pissed it meant blowback.

A few times in the first year after Deb and I split, I fucked with the guy just because. I didn’t want him to think it was over. I wanted him to keep lookin’ over his shoulder. Based on the shit I pulled he was probably still looking over his shoulder three years later. Yeah, I’d pretty much Greg O’Connor’d the guy.

I wasn’t proud of what I did to the guy’s father now, and learning about my father’s tendencies in the revenge department had me analyzing some of what I’d done to get back at people who pissed me off. But, back then? All I saw was black.

He knew she was mine. He knew who I was. He had a pretty good clue who my family was. He was a fuckin’ moron for crossing me.

She saw the error of her ways, so she said, but she no longer existed to me. She yelled, she slapped me, she threw things, then she begged and pleaded, tried to use sex to get me back, stalked me for weeks, sneaking into my bed, showing up where she knew I’d be. She no longer existed to me; just white noise. Women in general became white noise, unless I had to have a minor and shallow conversation with them in order to get laid. I had no trouble finding hook-ups.

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