Page 12 of Emmett

Standing in the doorway is my dad with his arms crossed over his chest and a look on his face that tells me he ispissedas he takes in my mussed and greasy hair, my bare chest, and the basketball shorts covering my lower half that I probably should have thrown out three washes ago.

“Hey,” I greet him, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

“Let me in the house,” he orders.

“Good to see you, too.”

“Let me into the house, Emmett,” he repeats, his tone harsher this time; more angry.

I scratch at my chest and move a foot or two to the side, gesturing with my arm for him to come in. He steps over a pile of garbage and I stifle a humorless laugh at the contrastbetween the disaster that is my living room and his freshly-pressed Armani suit.

As he carefully steps through the house, he reaches for an empty bottle and tosses it off to the side, shaking his head as if to say that he’s disgusted by me. Good. Maybe now he’ll leave, too, and I’ll be two-for-two on being abandoned by my parents.

“Jesus. What the fuck is this?”

“My living room,” I sass him, picking up that same warm beer as I drop back onto the couch.

I expect his face to be contorted into a million different kinds of rage, but when he turns to look at me, all I see is worry etched into his features.

He uses his feet, which don his favorite Prada dress shoes, to push trash away from him until he clears a path toward the couch and sits next to me. I avoid his gaze, but I can still feel his eyes burning a hole into the side of my head as he stares me down.

“Tell me right now. Are you in trouble?”

“I dunno,” I shrug as I take another swig. “Am I?”

My dad snatches the beer from my hand and sets it onto the coffee table, leaving it surrounded by all of its fallen brethren – to whom I offer a sad salute - and he pulls out his phone to shove the screen at my face. It’s lit up with a screenshot that shows a series of text messages between some unknown sender and Nash Montgomery. One message glares against the screen.

Nash:Ran into the Fowler kid today. Stunk to high hell and looked strung out.

“You need to start talking,” Dad warns. “You lied to me.”

“I met Anna,” I tell him. “So, good to see you, Dad, but don’t let the door hit you on the way out. I’m good here.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I shrug. “I didn’t think she’d actually wanna meet me. Turns out she didn’t, but she showed anyway.”

“So youarein trouble,” he sighs, his tone finally matching the concern on his face.

“I’m dealing with it, so,” I gesture a hand toward the door, “you can go. Youshouldgo, actually.”

“That’s a great idea!” He shouts with a hand smacking down onto his knee. “I’ll just leave you here with the couch rotting around you while you drink yourself to death.”

I roll my eyes as he stands and slips off his suit jacket before carefully folding it and setting it down on the only bare spot left on the couch. He kicks more garbage away from my feet as he rolls up the sleeves of his shirt and jerks his head to gesture down the hallway.

“Get in the shower. Clean yourself up, get some fresh clothes on, and then get out here and help me clean up this dump,” he orders. “You are notdealingwith it. And living like this certainly isn’t going to help you.”

“Dad, I—”

“You’re in pain, Emmett. You can’t avoid it by sending yourself into liver failure. So go take a shower, and we can go from there.”

By the time that I finally shove myself off of the couch and take the steps toward the hallway, my dad is already shoving things into one of those big black trash bags. I didn’t even know I had any of those.

I want to be pissed at him for intruding, for taking control away from me and scolding me as if I’m some petulant child in need of a time out. Part of me even wants to be pissed athim for giving a shit. I try really hard to be angry, and to hold onto that anger because Christ, anger would be so much better than everything else I’m feeling. But as the hot water pounds over my skin for the first time in longer than I care to admit, all I can do is drop to the floor of the tub and bury my face into my hands.

I stay there, hunched over on the floor, listening to those voices until the water runs five degrees cooler.

It takes another fifteen minutes after that to drag myself through the process of actually showering, which drains all of the energy that I have left. When I’ve finished, I step into a pair of gym shorts and a clean t-shirt and I join my dad in the living room, which he’s practically a third of the way through cleaning. He lifts his head to look at me and offers a small smile, the hint of a nod of approval joining it.