Page 24 of Hey, Daddy

When Shasha’s daughter, Vivi, had been born, I’d had to have a long talk with Brecken about Shasha’s pension for suffocation.

And not in the “kill you,” way but in the “I’ll protect you until you want to run away” way.

I had done that, too.

Run away.

It’d been a last-ditch effort to keep myself sane.

And it’d caused my parents to go nuclear and Dima and Shasha to outright flip the fuck out.

Needless to say, the only way they’d gotten me back was to promise they’d let me live my life.

Which I would be doing, even now.

I just hoped in this process he didn’t find out where I was living.

He’d seriously lose his shit, and I’d never hear the end of it.

He looked fucking pissed, but I noted that he didn’t push anymore.

“So what am I supposed to do? Hope that you don’t get chopped up into little pieces like that young woman did?” he asked. “Just take a leap of faith?”

I gritted my teeth. “When I knew I was in trouble, I called you first, Shasha.”

He deflated.

He knew I was right.

“You’ll promise to always call me first?” He leaned forward then, eyes intense.

I stood up and patted him on the head. “Yes, Shasha.”

He grumbled under his breath and reached for me, pulling me into his lap and squeezing the shit out of me. “Don’t fucking get into a mess, Nastya. This is bad.”

“I know,” I returned. “I’m going to try my hardest.”

My phone buzzed, the alarm going off for my blood sugar this time.

I groaned when he said, “Get it taken care of, Nastya.”

I grumbled something under my breath and he pinched me. “This isn’t a game. This is not something that I’ll allow you to fuck around with.”

I rolled my eyes.

When I was fourteen, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

I’d tried really hard to act normal, but with the stupid diagnosis came even more suffocation.

I fucking hated my diagnosis.

Sometimes, I’d thought about how easy it would be to just do what I wanted and damn the consequences.

It was hard to live in a world where your body was against you one hundred percent of the time.

It was even harder to find out that you weren’t whole and would in fact spend the rest of your life catering to your disease.

I knew it was a bad mindset.

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