Page 5 of Something Like Sugar (Pine Forest Something #2)

DUSTIN

S o, I should just throw decades of hard work down the drain and buy real estate because you told me to? That’s bullshit!” I slam my fist against the freezer, trying not to chuck my phone across the room.

Every fuckin’ time.

“You call it bullshit; I call it keeping your investors happy,” Dad starts, but this is one conversation I’ve had enough of.

“If I’d have known you were gonna throw that investment of yours in my face every time you wanted control of my business decisions, I’d have declined the offer altogether. It’s not worth the trouble of dealing with you in my ear every time I turn around.”

“Then pay it back.”

His end of the line goes quiet, except for the creak of his desk drawer. I know the sound by heart. It’s the way he’s communicated since I was a child.

With money.

“Tell you what,” he says, “you come to the city for Business Week, talk with some of the investors about your bar—”

“Café. I keep telling you it’s a milkshake bar. A social hub for families, not a nightclub like you keep—”

“Potato, Pot-ah-to, Son. Point is, come see what there is to offer out here, get some parties interested in putting real money into your ventures so you can offer more than strawberry shakes after little league, alright? You do this, and I’ll give you the downpayment for that property on Mullins and Main you keep looking into. ”

“How do you know that?”

The self-assured asshole chuckles in way that brings me back to my teenage years, broken and belittled, doing anything I could to prove to the mightiest man I’d met that I was still worthy.

That I wasn’t just the fuckup that deafened one of my classmates when my fists became my fate.

“It doesn’t matter why! You have tainted the Campbell name.”

I still hear him scream it.

I wish I’d known that no amount of transformation would make him happy. Nothing less than being a carbon copy of him will do.

He thinks he’s so much better than Mom, but Devyn and I are his little shelf trophies all the same. He’s just waiting for another feather to place in his cap, even if he has to pluck them from his own children.

“You think you can investigate a property anywhere on the East coast and I won’t know? Come on, Son, you know better. I own this trade. And as I’ve tried to tell you and your sister for years, if you’ll only listen, land is power. With that power, you can have whatever you want.”

I scoff, loud enough I hope he hears it across the line. “What I want isn’t for sale.”

It grows quiet again. But this time there’s no drawer opening or pen scribbling to fill the void.

“Where do you see yourself in five years, Dustin?”

In the business sense? In life? Since it’s Dad, I assume everything’s about money. And his argument—as fucked as it is—is sound.

I wouldn’t be able to afford this life had he not stepped in where I failed and helped me get the Sugar Stable up to standards. Now it’s the talk of the town, and the revenue I’ve put away is steadily padding my next business venture.

One it seems he’ll never accept.

“You know the answer to that.” I bang the phone against my forehead, tired of him turning every damn call into a meeting for the Future CEOs of America or some shit.

“My workshop . For the fiftieth time, my plan is to manufacture customized, handcrafted furniture to independent wholesalers. It’s niche, but there’s a market for it. ”

“Making tables and chairs isn’t a career, Dustin. How will you earn a living making furniture? There’s no guarantee of profit in this economy for artistry! How will you provide for a family if you—”

“A family? You want to talk to me about raising a family? You flat out left yours in the fuckin’ boondocks for a twenty-something year old pair of tits on legs, and you’re gonna talk to me about how I’ll handle a family? Fuck off, Dad. Right the fuck off.”

“I can fuck off, huh?” Dad chuckles. Even at thirty years old, my spine straightens when he laughs like that. “How about this, Son , I’ll fuck right off to Cabo for the next two weeks while you spatter yourself in chocolate sauce and fry batter like a damn teenager.”

“Fuck you,” I breathe.

I hope he heard it.

I also hope he didn’t.

And I fucking hate that.

“I will see you at Business Elite Week, where you will present your quarterly reports for Sugar Stable to my friends on the restaurant board. If you’re lucky, one of them will buy you out of that dump so you can make real money, with or without the cherry on top.”

“Fine.”

What other choice do I have? I go to the conference and schmooze these rich assholes or he pulls the plug on my Sugar Stable loan. I can’t pay it all back yet, and he knows it.

He knows everything.

Right off the interstate, not too far from the city…I want that property on Mullins and Main like I want my last breath.

It’s craftsmanship the way I dreamed since I was a kid in a cell, stuck in my head and whittling my worries into scraps of wood, turning jagged nothings into something new.

I slide a five-gallon bucket beneath the ice-cream machine and add the ingredients for mint chip so routinely it’s like brushing my teeth. Dad’s words invade my thoughts, spatter yourself in chocolate sauce like a damn teenager.

Shana Holiday could never love me.

When it all boils down, I’m just a fuckup, and no matter what I do to prove myself, I’ll always be that same delinquent blinking at the crack of the judge’s gavel, terrified I’ll never be more than the record states.

Guilty.

“I’ll be there.”

“Great, I’ll send your tickets and itinerary out this week,” he says cordially, like I didn’t just tell him where to go fuck himself.

But that’s Dad. Fake.

Just like my relationships these days.

But at least it’s for a good cause. I don’t have to sell the Sugar Stable to anyone. I can always decline, so long as I continue to make my payments and grow profitably.

It will lock in that property for me, either way.

I might have to suffer in the presence of my father, but I can handle it.

I load the last tub of French Silk ice cream onto the freezer and reposition the phone on my ear, prepping to hang up without so much as an I love you or a goodbye for that asshole, but he stops me with a detail that could derail my plan altogether.

“And Dustin? Bring a plus one. There’s dancing.”