Keep Me If You Can (If You Can #3)

24. You Say Daddy Issues Like It’s My Fault

Chapter twenty-four

You Say Daddy Issues Like It’s My Fault

I drove to JP’s apartment alone.

He offered to drive me. He insisted, actually, and I insisted right back that I take my car. I told him it was because I wouldn’t put it past my dad to have it towed off his driveway out of spite, but it wasn’t until I admitted that I didn’t want to have to ever come back to my dad’s house again that he relented.

He still refused to leave until I was ready to go. He said it was so he could make sure I followed him, but we both knew he wanted to be there in case I needed him.

I didn’t bother pretending to grumble about him being overprotective or something. Especially because he waited around to make sure Kimberlee was okay, too.

And somehow, she was.

“Why?” I hadn’t turned around to see her while I packed up the things I needed from my bedroom, but I could sense her standing in the doorway.

“Why did I stand up for you?” Kimberlee asked.

“No.” I shook my head, trying to figure out how to ask what I wanted to ask. “Why… him?”

“Why am I with your father?” she asked.

“How can you love him?”

She sighed, walking into my room and sitting on the edge of the bed.

“I love him because hearts are stupid and sometimes convince you to do things that make no sense,” she said.

“The only way that makes any sense is if you had a heart transplant taken from a death row inmate who happened to be a vengeful masochist,” I said.

She laughed softly. “I do not expect you to see the good things about him.”

“What good things?” I muttered.

“They are there. But when someone treats you like that, the good is overshadowed by everything else.”

I gritted my teeth together and continued packing.

“Witnessing him treat you the way he does overshadows many of those good things for me right now,” she said when I didn’t say anything.

“Not all of them.”

“Enough that I’m questioning a lot right now.” Mindlessly, she put a hand on her stomach. “But I’ve also witnessed him try to be a loving parent and—”

I burst out laughing.

“What?” she asked.

“A loving parent.” I snorted. “At what point has my dad done anything that would make you think that?”

She sighed again. “He struggles. His first experience with a loving parent was watching your mom after you were born. He didn’t have that experience with his own parents.”

“Poor baby,” I said sarcastically. “How hard for him. I guess that means I should forgive everything without question.”

“Of course not,” she said. “You don’t owe Max grace or sympathy or understanding. That’s not a requirement for children to extend to their parents.”

I glanced at her, uncertain. She shrugged.

“I don’t believe so, anyway. Your parents are responsible for creating a relationship where you would want to do that, should you ever need to, and not out of obligation.”

“Wow,” I said.

“My perspective of Max is different,” she said, looking down at her hands. “Just as he saw many of the things I needed in my life, I saw much of what he needed in his.”

I rolled my eyes. “Right. And you told yourself you could fix him. No really , you could totally fix him.”

She laughed instead of being insulted. “The first thing I told your father when we began to date was that if he wanted to be with me, he needed to fix himself, because it was certainly not my responsibility to fix a man who has every privilege possible in the modern world.”

“And has he?”

“He has tried.” She pressed her lips together. “He’s tried hard enough that it’s making walking away difficult, even though what I just saw makes me want to turn and never look back.”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure that there was anything I could say. She was talking about tolerating and forgiving someone who’d treated me like garbage.

But at its core, I understood it. It would have been so easy if all of this was black and white, but even sitting there in the aftermath of this disaster, after four years of my dad treating me the way he did, even with these unquestionable failures all stacked up and up and up in front of me, I didn’t want to go.

I didn’t want this to be it.

I didn’t want to leave knowing I was a disappointment, even though the expectations that made me a disappointment weren’t realistic.

I didn’t want to leave at all, as stupid as it was. Because while all of it hurt, everything he’d said and done, he was still my dad.

He was the first man in my life.

He was supposed to love me no matter what.

He was the one letting me down.

He was the disappointment.

He was the one who should be sitting here having his entire life fucked up by his actions.

Yet here I was, living through his awfulness, and still practically programmed at a biological level to want to impress him.

After everything, the thought of this being it hurt as much as anything else. Because even if I was never good enough for him, something in me would always want to try.

And wasn’t that just the—

Ah, shit.

I was going to have to text Ben and tell him he was right about the daddy issues all along.

Because that was the real issue here.

“Nellie?” Kimberlee said softly.

I blinked, my bag coming back into focus and the same clothes I’d been holding a few minutes earlier still clutched in my hands.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said, barely thinking the words. “I haven’t always been the nicest person to you.”

“That is the understatement of the century,” Kimberlee said, but her voice was warm. “But thank you for saying it, even though I very much understand.”

I nodded, putting the rest of my things in my bag. “Do you, like, have somewhere to go? If you leave?”

I wasn’t expecting her to laugh, but she did.

“I will be absolutely fine,” she said. “Max is the one who would suffer more if we broke up. Financially, at least.”

Alarmed and slightly intrigued, I raised my eyebrows. Kimberlee smiled as she stood from the edge of my bed.

“Your father is my hedge fund manager,” she said. “He’d hate losing my, and my family’s, portfolios.”

And I couldn’t help it.

I fucking cackled.

She laughed with me for a bit, even though I don’t know that either of us knew why, then came over and hugged me.

“It will be okay,” she promised, which was either arrogant or delusional on her part, because I had no idea how anything would ever be okay. But I nodded, then pushed my thumbnail into my forefinger.

“If you leave, like… like permanently,” I said, not able to look at her. “Would I… like, can I still… if you keep it or whatever, I guess, but like—”

“If I leave, you can absolutely still meet the baby,” she said. “They will still be your brother or sister.”

I nodded, a lump forming in my throat.

“And if you are…” she continued, then trailed off.

“I’ll let you know,” I whispered.

She smiled and patted my shoulder. “For what it’s worth, I think it’s clear to everyone that you and Jean-Paul are lovely together.”

I groaned, my eyes slamming shut. “Not you, too.”

“ Oh ,” Kimberlee said knowingly. “It’s one of those situations. Well… if it turns out you are, you might as well keep messing around with him. It’s not like you could get more pregnant.”

It felt very, very weird to hear Kimberlee say something like that and even weirder to laugh with her so hard that no sound came out because I couldn’t actually breathe, but what was one more weird thing to happen that day?

I didn’t know if Kimberlee wasn’t living with my dad full-time or if she just didn’t bother packing anything, but by the time I finished grabbing what I needed from my room, she and the Porsche were gone from the driveway. JP was waiting for me in the foyer, straightening up from where he was leaning against the wall as I started down the stairs.

“I told Anne-Marie to go home,” he said, reaching out to take my bag. “She wanted to stay and check on you, but since people would probably show up soon, I figured the priority was to get out of here.”

I nodded, then let him lead me out of my dad’s house. The front door shut behind us, the sound of it clicking into place far louder in my mind than it was in reality. I didn’t look back until I was in my car, the key turned in the ignition.

The house was quiet. Dark. Formidable in its loneliness.

God, was it lonely.

I spent the drive to JP’s trying not to think, my eyes focused on the taillights of his BMW as I followed a little too close so no one could cut me off. He’d given me his address, of course, but if I didn’t have to figure out how to get there myself, I wasn’t going to. The radio played in the background, just loud enough to numb my thoughts so I didn’t start processing any of what my dad had said or the fact that after nearly twenty-two years, I wasn’t going to be an only child anymore, and absolutely refusing to acknowledge that the little sibling Kimberlee was pregnant with might be an aunt or uncle before they could even sit up.

I knew the second I did, I wouldn’t be able to keep my eyes dry, and the last thing I needed was to rear-end JP’s BMW because I was crying too hard to notice he’d stopped or something.

When we got to his building, JP rolled his window down and gestured towards the visitor parking. I pulled in and waited by my car like he’d told me to until he’d parked. Once he rounded the corner again, jogging in my direction, I grabbed my purse and backpack and started walking towards him.

“You okay?” he asked when we were close enough.

“Just peachy,” I replied flatly. “I have a Schr?dinger’s baby situation going on here, I’m probably being disowned, I’m going to have a twenty-two-year age gap with a sibling, and worst of all, I’m stuck staying with you.”

The bastard laughed and reached for my backpack. “At least your sense of humour wasn’t damaged in the hailstorm of drama I got caught up in.”

“Yes, because it must be so difficult for you to be witness to my family’s drama.”

“Finally, someone acknowledges it,” he muttered playfully.

I half-laughed but didn’t respond. He hesitated, then put an arm around my shoulder as we walked towards his building. And for some reason, I didn’t mind it all that much, even though he was still in the t-shirt he’d clearly worn to the gym.

“Are you actually okay?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

He hugged me a little tighter, but neither of us said anything else until we reached the door and I realized I was being a jerk.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He held the door open. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Anne-Marie told me about your fight with your dad.” I bit my lip, not looking at him. “I’m guessing your dad wouldn’t be thrilled if he found out that—” I couldn’t bring myself to say it, so motioned at my stomach.

He let the door swing closed behind us, his lips curling up slightly. “Or he would be thrilled to know he was right. Either way, on the off-chance Anne-Marie does tell them what happened in excruciating, slightly embellished detail, I expect my mom will call once she’s finished hyperventilating to tell me she’s too young to be a grandmother.”

“Oh.”

He grinned, pushing the button for the elevator. “That will be her only concern.”

“They wouldn’t be hideously ashamed of the fact that you”—I pressed a hand to my mouth and faked a theatrical gasp—“dared to have sex outside of marriage?”

“Now that I’ve done the unthinkable and refused to do what my dad wants me to, I think they’ve given up on being ashamed of me and have resigned themselves to hoping whatever embarrassing thing I do is at least funny,” he said.

I was surprised when I laughed. JP just smiled, his hand moving to my lower back to guide me onto the elevator once the doors opened. An easy silence fell between us as we rode up and it wasn’t until we got into his apartment that either of us spoke again.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get this over with. Give it to me.”

“Wow, nothing stops you from being in the mood, huh?” he replied, closing the door behind him.

I rolled my eyes and held out my hand. “The test, JP. Give me the test.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “The test?”

“The… the test,” I repeated. “The pregnancy test? The whole reason for this mess?”

“Right, of course,” he said. “The pregnancy test. The pregnancy test I bought you. The pregnancy test I hid beneath your car. The pregnancy test your dad found and is currently in possession of. That pregnancy test?”

I started lowering my hand before he was halfway done and by the time he finished, I was nodding in reluctant agreement.

“Yeah,” I said. “That would be the one.”

“Yeah, no,” he said. “I don’t have it. Want me to go get another one?”

“No,” I said.

His neck snapped towards me. “What?”

“No, I want that specific one. Just march right in there and ask my dad for it back.”

“I’m guessing that would likely result in my balls being separated from my body.”

“Why? It’s not like he needs them. He already knows Kimberlee’s pregnant.”

JP snorted. Which made me smile, even though I didn’t want to.

“I’ll run and get another one,” he said. “And some food since I’m guessing you were planning to eat at the dinner party. Pad thai’s good?”

I didn’t know if he knew it was one of my favourites or if he was asking to make sure I wanted it, but I was too tired and overwhelmed to care. “Yeah.”

“Alright.” He set my backpack down. “It’s gonna be okay, you know.”

“It better be. If you bring back shitty pad thai, I’ll never forgive you.”

He smiled. “I meant the other thing.”

“Thing?”

“Thing…s.”

I didn’t quite look at him as I nodded. “I know.”

Something else was itching to be said, but he decided against it. “I’ll be back in a bit. Make yourself at home, okay?”