Total pages in book: 157
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
Salvatore’s throat clenched as he tried to swallow down that bitter pill. An invisible knife stabbed into chest, making every heartbeat painful to breath through. Words were just words. She didn’t mean them, and he heard this all before.
“Frankie, please—”
“I don’t know why you give a shit, you’re not even around!” she screamed.
Yep.
There it was.
She might have said how her anxiety and self-destructive behaviors weren’t about him, but those festering seeds took root somewhere. He first noticed when she was nine, going on ten. She made herself sick at the drop of a hat, couldn’t relate to her peers, became a target for bullies at school, and thus he pulled her out and took her places, travelling with tutors every chance he could.
Sal knew if he was gone long enough not to know her last game score, or have a basic overview of her week, then his daughter already started spiraling. If her phone calls and texts lessened, it was even worse. It always happened, and more than one doctor had pointed out exactly how he could fix it.
She needed things that she tried to get only from him—and from Sissy, too. Confidants. Proper peers. People her age. Friends. Things to do that wouldn’t somehow feed into the negative coping mechanisms. Routines. Stuff to look forward to. Medication, if a time called for it.
And he tried, but Frankie wouldn’t move an inch.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered when Frankie fell into the same chair where Nico had sat earlier and continued to cry. “I love you and because I love you, I don’t want you to do things to yourself that hurt you, baby. Can’t you just understand that?”
Frankie only cried harder.
Standing from his desk, Sal rounded the corner and headed across the room. His hands found her bare knees as he kneeled in front of her. Her trembling vibrated into his bones.
“I’m not going to take anything from you,” he said softly. It didn’t make a difference to punish her for things that sometimes seemed out of her control. That felt cruel. “I just wanted to talk and try to figure out some things to help.”
“Nothing helps,” she replied through sniffles.
“Yesterday was bad, then?”
“J-just a stupid day. T-too much s-stuff,” Frankie hiccupped out.
Sal nodded. “Okay, so we just break it down a thing at a time and deal with it.”
Everything came tumbling out of her in that moment. The girl at the game with her ignorant comments. The break-up with her boyfriend. Sissy excusing Salvatore’s lack of presence and telling her how Carina would arrive earlier than expected during a time that should have been about Frankie as her eighteenth birthday and graduation approached.
As if somehow feeling her owner’s sadness through walls, a familiar clatter of nails against flooring echoed from somewhere outside the office. Seconds later, the white ball of fur padded into the room.
Sassy, the Pomeranian-Poodle mix approaching her tenth year in their family, sniffed Frankie and Sal out in no time. The poor dog didn’t have the legs needed to jump more than a few inches off the ground. It took her three years just to climb a set of stairs.
“Come here, you little shit,” he told the dog.
Picking her up and feeling her legs run mid-air as if she were helping the process along, he dropped Sassy into Frankie’s lap. Instantly her hands left her face to tangle in something else familiar and comforting in her life. A constant presence that hadn’t let her down like he did.
Salvatore stood and rubbed at his forehead, unable to look away from Frankie’s tears. Soft sobs returned to hiccups the longer their silence stretched on. He decided to end it.
“I’ll talk to Coach,” he muttered.
“I don’t really—”
“Soccer does mean something to you. It’s something. Something you’re excellent at. Something that is yours. I’m sorry that cross-country had to end this year, but I did let you make the choice on which one, didn’t I?”
She nodded once.
“As for the boyfriend, well, he is irrelevant.”
An honest-to-God waste of Salvatore’s thoughts let alone his daughter’s time.
Frankie laughed. “He really is.”
“And too old for you, like I said from the damned start,” he added.
Frankie looked up with a scoff already forming. “Get real, Daddy. The legal age of consent in New York is seventeen. He’s only one year older than—”
A throat cleared from the doorway making both Sal and Frankie glance that way at the same time. A stoic Nico stood there, his gaze averted to something beyond the middle of the room and the private scene between them.
“Shit, we’re already talking consent, huh?” Nico asked.
From his spot, Salvatore had the perfect view of two simultaneous actions. A pink wash of color tinged Frankie’s cheeks while Nico clenched his molars and forced his stare to remain removed. The first of which disappeared the moment Salvatore blinked.