Hendrix - Kelsey Clayton Page 0,33
that stipulation, consider me out,” I push my chair in. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I have something more important to attend to.”
THE STREETS OF THE city are hard to navigate, especially at this time of night. They're filled with people trying to get home from work, and traffic is a bitch. I whip around cars like I should have been a professional driver. It may be dangerous, driving this erratically, but I need to get to Brenna.
I drift into the driveway, relieved that the gate is already open. If it wasn't, I would've had to wait for them to open it, and I don't exactly have much patience right now. The second I get in front of the house, I throw the car in park and don't even bother to turn it off before I'm out and running up the front steps. I pound on the door and Saige answers, her face soaked and her eyes bloodshot.
“Where is she?”
She steps back and out of my way. “Upstairs. She won't open the door. She won't talk to me.”
'Well do you blame her?” I snap. “None of this would be a fucking issue if you had just let me tell her when I wanted to! Instead, she had to overhear it! Who knows what she's thinking up there!”
“Don't speak to my fiancé that way,” Topher growls.
I turn around and look him up and down. “Don't even get me fucking started on you. That's my daughter up there, and I'm not about to listen to your ass tell me how I should and shouldn't handle things that concern her.”
His mouth forms into a devilish smirk. “Yeah? You seemed to do such a great job of being her dad earlier, didn't you? That cast is real cute.”
My body goes stiff. Everything in me wants to pummel his face in until his blood soaks the floor, but there's a little girl upstairs that needs me. My little girl. A dry laugh leaves my mouth as I shake my head.
“You're not even fucking worth it.”
Instead of indulging them further, I leave them both downstairs and head up to Brenna's bedroom. I can hear her sniffles from the hallway, and I lightly tap on the door.
“Go away!” she sobs.
“B, it's me,” I tell her softly. “Can you open up?”
It takes a minute, but the lock on the door clicks, and I'm able to open it. Not wanting Saige to come in, I lock it again as soon as I'm inside. The minute I see the state Brenna is in, my heart breaks. It's obvious she's been crying, and being as the arm she broke is her dominant one, she's having trouble wiping away the tears.
“I-is it true?” she whimpers. “Are you my dad?”
I drop down in front of her so we're eye to eye. The way she looks at me, it’s like she’s begging for someone to finally be honest with her. To realize that she’s a person. Little she may be, but still a person with feelings that matter.
“Yeah,” I breathe, letting the reality of it really set in for both her and for me. “I'm your dad.”
Another sob rips through her, and when I go pull her into a hug, she steps back. “Where were you? I'm five now. Where were you before that?”
My chest tightens, thinking about how much of her life I missed. Milestones I can never witness in person. Years together we can never get back. And still, I don’t want to throw Saige under the bus, so I try to come up with an answer that doesn’t make either of us look like a villain.
“I didn't know about you, B. I promise. If I had known, I would've been there.”
“Mommy didn't tell you?”
I shake my head. “She couldn't get in touch with me. I moved away before I knew she was pregnant with you and she had no way to reach me.”
She crosses her arms over her chest. “Well, I'm still mad at her.”
“Why's that?”
“Because,” she says, like it's the most obvious thing in the world. “She lied to me. She should have told me who you are that first day at the park.”
Sighing, I sit on the floor and pull her into my lap, thankful when she goes willingly. “Sometimes grown-ups do things to try to protect people they care about. Your mom was just trying to protect you.”
The words coming out of my mouth sound foreign, being as I'm not sure I believe them. A part of me