Page 54 of Contention

Then, without another word, she’s halfway down the glamorous hallway when she realizes that she doesn’t have her purse. Cursing flagrantly, stomping her feet in a minor tantrum, she turns back with gritted teeth, storming to his penthouse once more.

Just as Kara is raising her fist to pound on his door, it opens, because he’s already there, holding her purse in his hand. His hand. The one that had been in her only minutes prior.Oh my God, she can smell herself on him. His face has adopted that blank, precise expression again. “Thought you might need this.” His face turns slightly pained, like what he’s about to say is excruciating. “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you home?”

“No way in hell am I getting in a car with you ever again!” Kara snarls, snatching her purse, eyes blazing, humiliation overwhelming her.

Purse in hand, she leaves, taking the elevator down.

Outside, the sun is starting to warm the air. Maybe sixty-five degrees already, nice for a spring day. Kara looks at her surroundings, trying to get her bearings. There are taxis lined up at a cab stand, so she tells one her address, hopping in.

She takes the moment to ignore the way the guy gives her the typical judging glance, the ‘oh, look, the walk of shame in the flesh’. Fuck you, sir. Her cell phone has virtually no battery left, but she opens it to take a peek at the map.

The neighborhood is lovely, with French architecture and lovely stone and brick mid-rises, many with built in gardens on their terraces. Her phone maps shows that she’s close to the lake, in the Upper Coast neighborhood.

Holy shit.

Kara twists in her seat, looking back at the building she’s just left. A penthouse in this area goes for over $1million on average. She scowls, imagining Calais relaxing once more on his stone terrace, sipping coffee and reading his newspaper like nothing happened.

Like he didn’t just make his sweetpea come undone twice on his fingers. Not only that, she squirted like some sort of pornstar. What does he think of her? That’s never even happened before! She covers her face and groans miserably. She messed that up, let herself be led forward by an absurd hint of attraction that she has for an awful, horrid man.Why can’t I focus on someone else?

Breathing deeply into her hands, Kara finally acknowledges with a certain dismay that she wants Nicholas Havenwood-Calais, despite all the reasons she shouldn’t. She can almost hear her psychiatrist lecturing her, wheedling with psychobabble,you want what he represents; a losing battle. The overpowering, overbearing aura that your father carries. Don’t let yourself fall into the sinkhole, Kara. You’re only hurting yourself.

They say love is blind. Kara may not believe in love, but the phrase is one that makes sense at the deepest center of her being. Her father, Charlie Hayes, is the sort of man that no one should love, yet she and her mother allowed their worlds to revolve around him. As terrifying, as terrible as he was, they scrambled for any scrap of affection he would deign to give them.

It was their choice to cover their eyes and forget the bad, if only they could experience the good with himjustone more time.

A blindfold hides the whip, but it doesn’t hide the pain.

Don’t wear the blindfold, Kara. No matter how badly you want to.

Chapter 14

“He’s moved back in, to help with the bills…now that she’s g-gone.” Kara sniffs, rubbing at her face. With a tortured expression, she bites her lip and tries to keep her voice from warbling. Eighteen and almost alone. “He doesn’t even care that she’s gone.”

“How does that make you feel?”

Like tearing her heart out of her chest and stomping on it. Screaming until her throat is raw and scratched to pieces. Like begging him to smile at her. Like asking him to hold her in his arms so that she can pretend that he loves her and that everything is alright.

“I want- I want to make him feel as hurt as I feel. I hate him. I’m angry all the time.” Snarling, torn between fury and agony, Kara says, “All the time. Sometimes uncontrollably. I’m afraid I’m turning into him. M-mom said he was nice, once. Then, the anger came. And the indifference. What if I’m like him?”

Her psychiatrist, or rather,theirpsychiatrist, because the woman also sees Kara’s father, makes a small sound from between her teeth. “No, Kara. You’re not like him. He hid his nature from your mother for many years, faked it the best he could. You are a product of the environment you have grown in. You are what he has shaped you to be.”

“I don’t like feeling this way.” Nothing matters anymore, the sky will never be blue again. “I miss her. I miss how she cooked when she was trying to clear her mind. To clear her mind of him.” Kara laughs through her teary eyes in memory. “Or the way she would sit and do her makeup, so perfectly, all while telling me I didn’t need it, I was too pretty with such a fresh face. She was rather bitter about it. Why couldn’t he love her?”

“You know why.”

…Ghostly thoughts, echoing,the samereason he can’t love you…

Blowing her nose into a tissue, Kara asks sadly, “Does he talk about me? The way I talk about him?”

Her psychiatrist continues giving her that bland look that drives Kara to madness. She’s a severe woman in her early fifties, striking and distant, cold like the moon. Her gaze seems to dissect every horrid thing inside of Kara. Her voice is precise, like every word requires deep consideration. “Occasionally, Charlie will express concern that you don’t love him the way he believes you should. You understand, Kara, that his idea of love is very different from your own. He feelsentitledto your affection, yet feels no urge to return it to you. As is the nature of his disorder.”

It’s painful to hear, even though Kara already suspected it.

The woman writes her a new script for mood stabilization, the same one her father takes.

“This should help with the anger.”

Like father, like daughter.

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