Page 23 of Sucker Love (Sugar Pill Duet #1)

You’d think I would enjoy these once monthly luncheons with my father.

My mother passed away when I was fourteen.

My aunt and uncle, who live down the street, travel most of the year now that they’re retired, and we hardly see them except during holidays.

My cousins have all grown up and moved away to start families of their own.

Yiayia and Papou are long gone. Really, all we have is each other.

I don’t, though. Enjoy them.

The blue and white flag of Greece snaps above my head in the wind as I mount the porch steps and knock on the door.

I’m nervous, wiping my sweaty palms on my jeans as if I’m going to inadvertently betray myself in some way, give the whole game away.

Not even just through body language; there is the part of me deep down that wants to have it all out, here and now, and get it over with.

Hell, tell him I’m gay too and take whatever punishment he doles out for that so I can go ahead and start healing.

Move on. That would be the smart thing to do. Demi isn’t wrong about that.

The problem is that I’m a coward.

Dad opens the door and peers at me with pale green eyes not unlike mine.

Every time I see him he seems older, more hardened.

There are harsh lines bracketing his down-turned mouth and deep furrows in his rough forehead.

His dark hair is turning, slowly but surely, steel.

“Right on time,” he says in his accented English. “I just set the table.”

He leads me through the living room and into the dining room, which is just as immaculate as everything else.

The gleaming hardwood floors and long, glossy table is overseen by the chandelier descending from the coffered ceiling.

I don’t understand why we aren’t eating in the kitchen, where we always used to take our meals as a family—just the three of us and then the two—at the smaller, cozier table.

But really, it’s been like this ever since I moved out.

This strange distancing, treating me as a guest in the home I grew up in and lived until I was twenty-four.

Making it known I wouldn’t ever be welcome back here if something were to happen.

Why the hell else am I living with a college kid?

It seems like a lot of people can go back to their parents if something happens between them and their spouse, but not me.

I sit and bow my head and let Dad lead with a lunchtime prayer, only chiming in with a mumbled amen before I serve myself. It’s an impressive homemade spread, as always: vegetable stew, bread, cheese and salad, much more than I’d ever feed myself for lunch on my own normally.

He pours me a glass of wine. “We haven’t done this in a while. ”

“Figured the New Year’s party was enough to see us through the rest of January.”

“I didn’t realize spending time with your father was just a quota you were filling.”

I stifle a sigh and pick up my wine glass. “We’ve been busy.”

“What’s got you so busy you can’t come have lunch with your papa once a month?” he complains. “It’s not a big ask. Rolling out of bed at noon to go scrawl on people’s skins the way you do. Not exactly taxing work.”

My aching wrists disagree, but I say nothing and sip my wine.

“You could do that, you know. Come see me before you go to work. I could make us breakfast. You could bring Demi.”

“Thirty minute drive. Worse, during rush hour.” From Revere, anyway. It’s half that from the Fens. “And Demi works at eight every morning.”

“I’m sorry it’s such an effort to see your one and only papa,” he snaps. “I won’t be around forever.”

I sort of don’t believe that, which is funny considering I already lost one parent so young.

I should live in some abject terror that I might lose the other at any time, but I just don’t.

When it comes to my father, I think he will somehow live forever on anger alone.

It will reanimate his body long after his soul has died and no one will even know the difference.

“I know,” I say. “I’ll make more of an effort. Things have been crazy.”

“Yes, I’m sure.” He rips a piece off his bread. “Everyone running over to you to put all sorts of things on their God-given bodies.”

This conversational road is well trodden and I don’t particularly want to go down it yet again, so I say nothing. I simply make a noncommittal sort of grunt as I stuff my mouth too full of food to be reproached.

“It’s a sin,” he goes on, as if he hasn’t said this a million times before. “Our bodies our temples to honor God and marking them up is sinful. It’s in Leviticus. 19:28, for your reference.”

I swallow. “Did you make this bread yourself? It’s phenomenal.”

“It was bad enough when you did it, but then Demi too,” he says mournfully. “I’ll never understand it, Luca. What next? Your face?”

“That’s an idea.”

The cutlery jumps as he bangs the table with one fist. “ Vlaka, ” he snaps at me. “Do you take nothing seriously? Not your family, not your religion?—”

I set my fork down. “On the contrary, Dad. I take my life very seriously.”

“When? Where? You don’t even go to university. Your work is barbaric—” This same fucking conversation again. Going in circles. Groundhog Day. We’ve done it so many times with the same outcome: nothing, absolutely nothing, but hurt feelings. I don’t know how he isn’t sick of it. I know I am.

Are you gonna just to live the same way you did before? What’s the point? Noel’s words live rent-free in my head. I hear them all the damn time .

“I’m going to Killington,” I say suddenly, breaking into my father’s tirade.

“What? When?”

“Next weekend.” I have decided this just now. “Going to do some snowboarding.”

“I thought you didn’t do that anymore.” It’s not an accusation; he’s genuinely curious. Meltdown averted, blood pressure lowering, the alarming red color draining from his face. The fist he’s clenched on the table relaxes. “Demi was worried you’d break your neck. I always thought that was silly.”

Demi had never really been truly worried about that. She simply wasn’t into it and I shed my identity to conform to hers. Safe.

And this is the perfect time to tell him that me and Demi are no longer a thing anymore, isn’t it? Great segue: Speaking of Demi, we’re separated... I don’t take the opportunity, though, of course I don’t. “Well, I thought it was time. I miss it.”

“Good.” He’s nodding, even smiling a little, and I hate how much his approval appeals to the stupid motherless child who still dwells somewhere inside me. “You took to it like a duck to water, Luca. Waste of skill to just stop because the wife is worrying. You only get one life to live.”

I pick up my fork again. “True enough,” I say.

“Now if only you’d go back to school.” Tone mournful. “And church.”

“Hmm.” So I can burst into flames the moment I step in.

“The body is a temple, Luca. Remember that. ”

As if I could forget. Every time I see him he tells me that my temple has been ransacked, defaced and sullied.

I wish every single encounter with my dad wasn’t always like that, fraught and tense, zero common ground or safe topics.

It has been this way since Mom died. Her death changed us both fundamentally as people.

He was always hard, and it seemed like only she could keep him in check—but when she passed, he got even harder while I got softer, and he loathed that softness in me.

Maybe he could sense the kind of man I would become, even then.

One who enjoyed bleaching his hair and modifying his body and preferred the company of other men, without swift and cruel intervention.

Except his attempts to inject me with his idea of masculinity never did take, and that only made him resent me even more.

The breaking point was, of course, when he found me in bed with Arin. That was when our relationship truly shattered beyond repair. There was nothing I could do to fix it—and I did want to fix it. I’ll always want to fix it.

I was scared of what would happen if I didn’t.

It’s why I tried so hard to kill that part of me.

I agreed to meet his friend’s daughter. I courted her and married her, and I tried so, so hard just so I could be worthy of his love because it was all I had.

Mom is gone and I’ll never get her back.

I’m not deluded enough to think she looks on from some afterlife, wanting me to live one way or the other, so I just kept trying to live up to Dad’s impossibly high standards.

And then I’d sabotage it out of my own misery, had to let these vestiges of myself come out in other ways—the piercings, the tattoos, the stupid hair colors, the livelihood.

This was as authentic to myself as I could get, within the set parameters.

I never meant to sabotage my relationship with Demi, though. I really did try with her. I thought.

And I’m sorry for it, at least a little.

Sorry in a lot of little ways. Sorry that I am the only kid my dad’s saddled with, a rainbow baby after years and years of failed attempts, and there’s no one else to pin his hopes and dreams on.

A child he can be truly proud of—I figure every parent deserves at least one of those.

But all he’s got is me and I have been a constant disappointment from the jump.

A glaring failure in a line of them, all the ways big and small his life has let him down.

I hate to think of him alone in that house that’s too big for just one person. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if he had Mom, but he doesn’t. I know what he’d say, though. That he’s got God and that’s enough.