Page 100 of Can't Take My Eyes Off You

‘I lied,’ she says, like lying is just a normal thing in this family. No wonder I’m so fucked up. ‘Working in a bookstore isn’t my cup of tea. I’m above this.’

‘You’reabovethis?’ I laugh. ‘You might want to rethink that considering the Feds are possibly going to be throwing you both into the slammer, you’re that corrupt. You think working in a bookstore will be worse than working in the kitchen at a federal prison?’

‘Nobody is going to prison,’ Mom says with a roll of her eyes.

‘It’s Teddy,’ Mike says loudly, from where he stands across the room.

‘Michael!’ Mom scolds.

‘Oh, please,’ he says with an attitude he’s never had with our parents. ‘He’s not five. It wasn’t that hard a case to crack and this affects his life. He deserves to know.’

‘Teddy?’ I ask, my heart stalled in my chest. ‘As indeadUncle Teddy?’

Based on the seething look now filling Jacob’s face (I’m no longer calling him Dad), I’d say Mike guessed correctly. I look at my mom, attempting to hide the horror but unsuccessfully, based on the guilt now spreading across her face.

Teddy is my dad? I mean, I guess it makes sense considering I look just like him but I thought that was just genetics. JacobhatedTeddy. With a passion I never understood because even though I barely knew him, he seemed like a stand-up guy. He was the Sean Penn of the Adler family, using his money for humanitarian causes, a real philanthropist running into war zones and unsafe countries to help people suffering. He died in a helicopter crash when I was ten during one of these trips. It was my first experience with death and considering I only knew what Jacob had told me about Teddy – none of it good – I was unfazed, really. Until right this second, I never understood why Sylvia dressed me up and snuck me out of the house that day to bring me to his funeral. On the way there she’d said, ‘One day you’ll understand this.’ She had to have known the truth the whole time.

‘You had an affair with your husband’s little brother?’ I ask, a hand now firmly in my hair.

‘It was more complicated than that,’ Mom says.

Jesus. I just wanted to win back my girlfriend and now I’m fatherless, housing my asshole family in a bookstore, and shit’s constantly blowing up in my face. They are ruining this for Berkley and me, again. If they scare her away with their bullshit…

The two of them stare at me as I process this information, like I’m being unreasonable to want to know who my real father is.

‘Is Teddy myrealdad?’ I ask my mom, completely ignoring Jacob. ‘Keep in mind I’ve got a DNA test at the lab so Iwillsoon know whether you decide to be honest or not.’

Mom drops her head. ‘Yes.’

‘Holy shit…’ I walk away from the counter, my hands on the back of my head, the exact stance the cameras loved to find me in as it meant I was losing it and about to jump into a bottle of booze. This time, I’m wandering into the romance department, instead wishing this building was a fucking bar.

‘Hey!’ Berkley chirps as she enters the store, stopping in her tracks when she notices my family all standing at the front desk where she was probably expecting to see me. She looks around, noticing me as I disappear down an aisle of colorful books about love.

‘He knows,’ Mike tells her.

She doesn’t say anything, just approaches me and wraps her arms around me.

‘It’s Teddy,’ I say, holding her back, resting my chin on her head. ‘He’s my dad.’

‘Mike wasright?’

‘Youknew?’ I lean back, my hands on her shoulders, confused how she found out before me.

She grimaces. ‘Barely. Mike suggested it based off something your mom said earlier but we didn’t know for sure so I didn’t want to say anything yet. I should have, though. I’m sorry.’

‘Why are you sorry?’

‘I should have told you immediately; instead, I did exactly to you what I was always so mad you were doing to me – I kept it from you because I thought I was protecting you and now you’ve found out from someone else.’

She seems worried as she says this, like I’m going to be mad at her. Like it’ll start our years of fighting all over again. But I’ve done so much therapy. Is all this a shock to me? Like discovering Bigfoot is real, yes. I can’t be mad at her, though. I know I kept secrets from her because I knew that was best for me, not her. She’s never been like that and I’ve learned a huge lesson through all this. Open communication is the only way relationships survive.

I pull her to me again, kissing the top of her head. ‘Berkley, our relationship will never be perfect. We’re going to fuck up, piss each other off, annoy one another. It’s inevitable. I screwed up because I was thinking about me first before. But you are always thinking of me first, you last. I want to do the same for you now, so if we have things we think might hurt one another, whether it was done intentionally to spare the other’s feelings or accidentally, we need to talk about it. It won’t end us. I promise.’

‘You grew up on me, Adler. I was so scared you’d turned into Prince Willy for good, but you didn’t. I see my Will again, only now you’re a grown man and I like it.’

I’ve got to shove all this family crap aside and do what I came here to do. They can’t ruin this for her.

‘Wait until this grown man sweeps you off your feet on our date tonight,’ I say, hinting it’s going to be epic and having no doubt it will.

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