Page 230 of Obsession

Maybe she wasn’t the best, but I couldn’t let anyone talk about my mother like that in my presence.

“If you say anything like that about my mother again, you’ll be sharing a chair with yours,” I said through clenched teeth, leaning down to her face because our height difference worked to my advantage.

“Oh, really?” Amber straightened up, full of superiority. “Then you tell me. What do you call a woman who works in a nightclub as a pole dancer, seduces men, eats their money, and then changes them like they’re used socks?”

I seemed to burst a vein in my temple, especially since no one was contradicting the amount of shit Amber was spewing.

I went to hit her again, but my dad caught my wrist and pulled me towards him.

“Kath, stop it. I know it hurts you to hear it, but… Amber’s telling the truth.”

I turned to my dad with a shocked look on my face.

“I’m sorry you had to find out this way, but before and even when I met Amanda, she was a stripper.”

I tore myself from his arms, my temples throbbing with anger as tears fell from my eyes in streams.

“Are you all trying to kill me? Are you planning to ruin me completely?” I shouted at them, my hands still clasped in my hair.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take all the blows anymore. It was too much.

I had been stalked by a psychopath. I had seen death with my own eyes just a day prior, and now this.

“No, Katherine, honey,” he moved closer to me.

“Stay away from me!” I shouted, feeling my breathing getting heavier and heavier.

“Katherine, just let us tell you everything from the beginning, then you can judge us however you want,” the blonde woman begged, but I already hated her with everything I had.

“What truth? Now you want to tell me the truth? After lying to me all my life?” I threw the jacket off me angrily.

Suddenly I felt really hot. I was boiling inside and wanted to hit everything. Hit, and scream, and destroy everything and everyone.

“So, tell me, dad, have you been living with two women all this time? With two children? Did you keep changing us so you wouldn’t get bored?”

I mocked him hatefully. Amber kept her mouth shut, and for the first time, she seemed to be on my side.

“Katherine, it’s not like that…”

“That’s why you wanted to move here, right? You had it all planned out.”

I concluded sarcastically, every detail now settling in my head and everything making sense.

“Katherine, listen to me!” he yelled this time, which only angered me more. “I wasn’t with both of them at the same time. Roberta was my first wife, but her parents never accepted me. I loved her, so we got married in secret and that’s how she got my name. When her parents found out, they forbade me from seeing her. I was a poor student and couldn’t do anything about it.”

He was breathing heavily, the memories seemingly causing him pain. And it was obvious that they did, he had lost his first love. It hurt me to my core to realize that my mother hadn’t been that for him.

“I was alone, waiting for her to come back, but that didn’t happen. One night I lost my temper and wanted to forget everything, so I went to a club with some friends where I got drunk and met your mother. She was a dancer there and blew me away in seconds,” he paused and looked at me urgently, “I slept with her that night.”

I was unable to move.

From the first night… My God!

She never wanted to dance with me, even though her love of dancing was clear in her voice every time she spoke of it. She never explained why she stopped dancing.

She always told me that her dream was living “clean” through me.

I never understood what that meant…. until now.

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