Page 100 of Let the Game Begin

“No. You should just stay away from me.”

He turned his face away and looked back out the windshield. Then, he started the engine and put both his hands on the steering wheel. He was ready to flee that place, our conversation, and most of all, me.

It was always the same story with him: he told me not to believe in love, or silver linings, or fairy tales or the existence of Prince Charmings, and despite all that, I still preferred him and his disenchantment to any happy ending.

24

Selene

Two weeks had passed since the incident with Jennifer.

Members of the Krew continued to give me shifty looks whenever they spotted me around town, but none of them had approached me again. Jennifer herself seemed to have vanished into thin air. I didn’t know if Neil had gone through with his plan for revenge, but I was glad I didn’t encounter her again. Neil, on the other hand, proved himself extremely attentive to me in those two weeks. He asked me how I was every day but never touched me. He hadn’t once tried to seduce me or sneak into my room.

The last time we’d made love was now a distant memory, and I’d begun to suspect that he’d gotten over whatever weird attraction he had to me. An idea that, if I was being perfectly honest, didn’t thrill me.

“Hi,” I said as I walked into the kitchen, where my father was sitting at the table sipping a cup of tea behind his laptop. I had explained the bandage on my lip to Mia and Matt with a ridiculous story about falling down the stairs and always kept the bruises on my body covered with my clothes. Fortunately, by then my mouth was completely healed and my bruises didn’t hurt anymore, though they had faded from black to a sickly yellow color.

“Hey, Selene.” Matt looked and me and halted whatever research he was doing on his computer.

“Is Mia back?” I asked uneasily as I grabbed a carton of orange juice from the fridge.

“She’s still at work,” he answered, checking the Rolex on his wrist. Actually, it was strange that Matt was already home. He usually didn’t get in before ten o’clock at night. I sat down on a stool and drank the juice straight from the carton, not bothering with a glass.

“How are you? How are you finding it here?” And there he went again with his awkward questions. My father still hoped to repair a relationship that I now considered irreparable. A father was supposed to play a central role in daughter’s upbringing, protecting her and being responsible for her and providing her with a feeling of security—all things that Matt had never done. Instead, I’d always felt like I was imposing on his life, and that was the worst feeling a little girl could have.

“Suffice it to say I like Detroit better.” It was true. Especially after the episode with Jennifer had gone down, I’d been feeling like I was imposing in New York, at school, and especially in Neil’s life. He’d basically ignored me lately, and by then, I was sure that whatever had drawn him to me in the first place was completely gone.

Neil had been cured of the Selene virus.

“If there’s anything I can do, just ask. Has anyone given you any problems?” Matt’s voice cut into my thoughts with a concerned tone that I’d had never before heard from him in all my years of living.

“Don’t worry about it. The only thing you could have done is never allow your daughter to catch you having sex with another woman,” I said firmly. Matt blanched.

I got back up to replace the juice before I turned to look at him, taking a moment to conceal the unhappiness that those memories still conjured in me.

“I know that I made mistakes, but at the time things with your mother weren’t how they once were…” He got up from his chair and approached me, clad in his stylish, impeccable suit.

“Why didn’t you just leave her? Why not end your relationship rather than making her suffer while you had affairs with other women? Why?” My voice grew louder as I spoke. I couldn’t stand the ridiculous excuses healways tried to give me. A father was supposed to model male behavior for his daughter, to be a Prince Charming in her eyes. But for me, my father was just some rich surgeon, a coldhearted cheater.

“It’s not easy, walking away from the woman you’ve loved your entire life.”

“But I was there, too!” I burst out. He should have thought about the consequences his actions would have for me, not just himself. “I was just a child, and you should have thought about the good of the family!” I added, trying not to cry. I had stopped crying in front of him a long time ago.

Matt looked intently at me, troubled by my words. He stretched out a hand, but I backed away. I didn’t want any physical contact between the two of us.

“I made a mistake. Who doesn’t make mistakes in this life? Let me fix it,” he begged me softly.

Again, he was asking me for a second chance, but I couldn’t just put it behind me, not when I’d witnessed his infidelity with my own eyes. Not after my father had been gone from my life for so long.

“That’s asking too much of me.” I shook my head, staring somewhere over his shoulder. I wasn’t capable of forgiving something like that. I couldn’t do it; I wasn’t strong like my mother.

“Selene.” Matt took my face in his hands, but I shied away from his touch. Nothing was going to change. I’d known that from the start, from before I ever came to New York. I’d known that trying to reconcile with him would be a total failure.

It was simply too late.

On that realization, I left the kitchen without giving him a second glance.

The next morning, I needed to clear my head and not think about my father. I called Jared and asked him how his mother was doing. He told me that she had lost a lot of weight, that she was vomiting frequently, and she’d lost so much hair that she’d started wearing colorful scarves on her head. The more he told me, the more Jennifer’s threats to stay away from Neil echoed in my mind. I needed to prevent Jared from finding out the truth in the worst possible way. I felt so anxious that I went through all my classes with Detroit and Jared lingering in the back of my mind.