#Blur (The GearShark Series Book 4) Read online

  I had to wonder if she knew about all his affairs and just turned a blind eye.

  I didn’t want to think she would. I hoped she knew she was worth more than that. But just because I didn’t want to think it didn’t mean it was true.

  I learned that lesson the hard way.

  Doormat or not, it seemed the one thing my mom refused to back down on was me. She hated the way he treated me, something she told him almost every night. They fought about the name she called me, about the color of my clothes, my car, my dating… They fought about everything.

  And then the subject of conversion therapy came up.

  I didn’t know what it was. I Googled it.

  I wished I hadn’t.

  It was basically abuse disguised as “therapy” to make someone not be homosexual (or anything other than straight). The suicide rate related to something like this was off the charts. The practices involved made me sick. And the examples….

  Electric shock.

  Snapping a rubber band on the wrist every time a person got hard at homoerotic images.

  Institutionalization.

  Shame.

  Orgasmic reconditioning. (I was afraid to look up what the fuck that even was.)

  Forced hetero dating.

  Hypnosis.

  The list went on and on. The horror stories on the web were shocking. The fact that parents did this kind of thing to a child they claimed they loved was something I didn’t think I’d ever understand.

  That wasn’t love. Was it?

  Dad brought it up. Mom had a fit. They fought about it so long I fell asleep in the center of my bed. The resounding theme about conversion therapy (according to the internet, which of course is law) was it didn’t work. So basically, you torture someone who is already confused, and the only thing you manage is to break them.

  Maybe waiting it out until Syracuse was a bad idea. Maybe it would be better if I just left now.

  My parents were fighting, tension was high, and the way he looked at me…

  It would be better if I just left.

  Maybe I could find Jace. Maybe he would understand. He was basically my last hope.

  My eighteenth birthday came. In the eyes of the law, I was an adult. In the eyes of the law, I could finally walk out of this house and not be considered a runaway.

  I was already planning my escape, planning on calling Jace as soon as I could slip up to my room the second I got home. It was already dark out. I’d gone to school like any other ordinary day, gone to practice, and then some of us went out for pizza and women to celebrate my birthday.

  I just had pizza… I left the women to all my friends.

  They were planning a big party this weekend. Beer, more beer, and probably some weed. One of the guys’ parents were going out of town, and my birthday was the perfect excuse to throw a rager. Of course I said I’d be there; it was for me.

  But I wouldn’t. I’d be gone. I had no idea where… just not here.

  I had no earthly idea what my life would be like tomorrow, but I knew it wouldn’t be the same. I hoped my brother would know what to do, because in all honesty, I didn’t.

  Here I was eighteen years old, a man, but still a kid. The shock I felt that first day I’d boldly told my father I was gay hadn’t worn off. I was still surprised, still slightly numb from the way everything had shifted.

  He wasn’t at all who I thought. It was almost like I’d been living a lie up until recent months, but the lie hadn’t been my sexuality.

  It had been everything else.

  I bounded in the door and stopped dead in my tracks. He was the last person I expected to see. The last one I wanted to see. Something went flat inside me, like soda that suddenly lost all its fizz. The numbness I’d just mentioned, I grabbed it, tugged it around me like a thick blanket. Like armor one dressed in before a battle.

  He’d yet to say one word. Not a single syllable. But I knew what he was doing.

  Waiting for me.

  “Dylan!” he said, almost jovial. I didn’t know how he did it. How one minute he sounded like the father I always thought he was, and the next, he was some complete stranger. It was like two people lived inside one skin.

  I hadn’t seen this side of him since that day in his office. The father I thought he was. He smiled at me like the past few months had never happened, like I was still the son who made him proud.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, cautious.

  “It’s my son’s eighteenth birthday. Where else would I be?”

  “Work,” I deadpanned. With your trashy ho-bag of a secretary.

  “Work can wait. This is a big day! I have plans for us.”

  “I already have plans.” I shook my head and started past him. There was no way in hell I was going to celebrate turning into a legal adult with him. I wanted to celebrate by getting as far away as I could.

  “Cancel them,” he replied. That fatherly tone I hadn’t heard in so long vanished, replaced by one I was all too familiar with.

  Even though I’d heard it less than the previous, I understood this was the real Sullivan Lorhaven. The man I thought he was all these years?

  A lie. A fabrication. A wish.

  I think that hurt worse than anything he’d said or done. I longed for that man who didn’t exist. I missed the lie I so comfortably lived. I guess I could understand why my mother always just went with what he wanted, how she just kept the peace.

  She lived a lie, too.

  Sometimes lies were easier than the truth.

  Why did I open my mouth that day? Why couldn’t I just have said nothing at all?

  A question I’d asked myself a million times. I didn’t think I’d ever know the answer.

  My feet reached the bottom of the staircase before he spoke again. “I have your birthday gift.”

  I stopped, looking over my shoulder. “I don’t want anything.”

  “I think you want this.” He held up a familiar packet of papers enclosed in a crisp envelope with the address already neatly applied to the front.

  The admission to Syracuse. My escape. My way out.

  But it wasn’t anymore. Was it? I planned on throwing it all away tonight when I walked out the door.

  “I signed the papers and transferred the money and wrote out a check for the whole first year’s tuition,” he said, still holding up the envelope. “All that’s left is to mail it.”

  Did he want a thank-you? I wasn’t going to give him one.

  “I’ll drop it in the mail tomorrow.” I lied.

  It was a painful lie. Soccer wasn’t my life, I didn’t really want to go to college, and Syracuse was his choice, not mine… But it was still something to me.

  A way out. A fresh start. A chance to be something other than what he wanted.

  “I’ll make sure it’s mailed,” he said, taking it over and dropping it on a nearby table. The centerpiece was a large bouquet of blue and black balloons with two silver Mylar balloons in the in the shape of a one and eight. They were from my mother.

  She’d gotten me up early this morning, ushered me into the kitchen where the balloons, a latte from the café I loved, and a wrapped gift sat on the table. While I drank my coffee, she made homemade blueberry pancakes and we talked just like we used to.

  “I made us a reservation,” he said, giving the balloons a distasteful stare.

  He probably blamed those for making me gay, too.

  “Go change,” he said, glancing at my soccer pants, T-shirt and letterman jacket. “Put on something nice.”

  “And if I don’t?” I challenged.

  He looked up at the ceiling, slid his hands in the pocket of his dress pants, and waited a few heartbeats before he spoke carefully into the room. “Be smart here, Dylan.” He warned. “You’re a man now. I’ll treat you as one, but I need to see you’re ready to be who I raised you to be.”

  You didn’t raise me. Mom did.

  “Prove to me you’re ready to be a man, and everything goes bac
k the way it was. Your car, your college career, your life.”

  So this is a test.

  A final exam. If I passed, I could go back to that comfortable lie I was living. I could go on like all of this had just been a bad dream.

  I wouldn’t have to move out. I wouldn’t have to tell Jace I was gay and risk losing my big brother. My mother could have her world back… I wouldn’t hear them fighting anymore. I could go to college, get some distance, and then maybe I could start to make sense of things.

  My father didn’t wait for me to answer. He picked up his keys. The way the metal jangled together made a distinct sound. “I’ll pull the car around. Meet me out front. Don’t keep me waiting.”

  With that, he was gone, out into the night, the front door not completely latched.

  I went up and changed. I put on a pair of navy dress pants, a white button-up shirt, and added a blue striped tie.

  I had no idea where we were going. Did it really even matter?

  As I slid into the leather passenger seat, I glanced over, the interior lights lighting up his face. He didn’t look at me; he didn’t smile. I used to think maybe my old man had a resting bitch face. You know that look where you just always appeared pissed off even when you aren’t?

  Sullivan Lorhaven didn’t have a resting bitch face.

  He was just an asshole.

  And by getting in this car, it felt I was selling my soul to the devil, succumbing to the pressure to be who he wanted me to be.

  A moment of panic hit me hard in the chest, and my breath shuddered. I groped for the handle. I wanted to eject myself from this car, from this situation.

  He hit the gas, and the car accelerated forward. My back hit the seat with the force of the acceleration. He’d known what I was about to do.

  He wasn’t about to allow it.

  I was in his clutches, and it appeared it was where I was going to stay.

  The last place on earth I would have expected…

  That’s where I was.

  Brought here by my father, the last person on this earth who should have brought me here.

  I could just consider this another those unexpected blows robbing me of pieces. Pieces of who I thought I was, of who I always believed myself to be.

  How ironic really, how very… humbling to realize that in the desire to be accepted for who I was—to become more of the man I felt like on the inside—was actually the very thing that took more away.

  Did that make sense?

  In my convoluted mind, it did. There was a cost to everything, wasn’t there?

  A cost to being a person, to being accepted. Maybe acceptance wasn’t something any of us had. Perhaps it had been nothing but a juvenile pipe dream, something my innocence thought I deserved.

  Perhaps acceptance was just a perception. An overall herd of people who acted the same, who portrayed something they weren’t in order to appear like everyone else. Who decided what that something was? Who declared what it was that made each of us “acceptable?”

  The thing was we all wanted to be accepted. I hadn’t realized how much pretending was required.

  And so here I was, sitting in the passenger seat of my father’s Jaguar, staring through the windshield at a place I never imagined I’d be.

  Clearly, I needed to expand my perception of the potential of those around me. This shit just got weirder by the day.

  “Seriously?” I said, glancing at the neon sign in the window. “A strip club?”

  What kind of father took his son to a strip club?

  He shut off the engine and pocketed the keys. “You’re a man now. It’s time you enjoy the privileges that come with it.”

  So was it privilege by age or by dick that I was able to come watch women shake their skin?

  “I’m pretty sure you have to be twenty-one to get into this place,” I said. It was my last effort at getting out of this.

  It was fucking gross. Who the hell went to a titty bar with their dad?

  “I called ahead. We have a private room.”

  Money. That’s all it took to break the rules. It’s all it took for him to get what he wanted.

  What do you want? To not be here.

  “Happy birthday, son.” He clapped me on the shoulder.

  The second we approached the solid black door, it opened and a large bouncer stepped out and held it open. He nodded at us on the way in, and I felt his eyes bore into the back of my head.

  The inside was just what TV and movies portrayed. Oh, and porn flicks, too. Yep, this joint looked like the perfect setting for some bad porno.

  There was a huge stage with a runway that stretched out into the center of the tables. A silver pole ran from floor to the ceiling at the end, with two more farther back on the stage.

  The lights were dim, all of them focused on the stage and the girl. She was naked. Completely. The men all hollered and whistled as she worked the pole, spinning around and spreading her legs wide, showing everyone exactly what she had between them.

  Her tits were fake. They literally looked like globes positioned under her skin.

  Dollar bills floated onto the platform as she gyrated and sexy music pumped through the air. It smelled like smoke and alcohol with a hint of sex. As far as I knew, most strip clubs were for only stripping; usually you weren’t allowed to touch the dancers. Maybe it only smelled like sex in here because the women were all naked and the men were turned on.

  I wasn’t.

  Not in the least.

  In fact, as I looked at her on the stage, I couldn’t help but feel kinda sorry for her. I wondered what led her here, what kind of life she must live to be willing to let perverts ogle her on a nightly basis.

  Her long legs wrapped around the pole. She leaned backward so her head was below her feet and she was totally on display upside down. The long length of her blond hair fell like a curtain toward the floor, and body glitter glistened across her stomach.

  I was staring, and she must have felt it because our eyes locked.

  A mutual understanding tethered us. I had a lot in common with that girl. Neither of us wanted to be there. And whatever it was that led her to that stage, something equally as shitty had me standing in front of it.

  “This way.” A woman appeared with a small, round tray in her hands and a tiny pink G-string on her bottom. Her top was bare, her chest glistening with oil or something.

  My father’s eyes went right to her rack and then locked on her ass as she sashayed ahead. She stopped in front of a velvet curtain and motioned for us to go ahead.

  Dad went first. Then I ducked in right after. The heavy fabric fell immediately back into place, closing in the private room.

  There was a single table, two chairs, and several drinks already waiting. Looked like several shots of an amber-colored liquid and a few mixed drinks with small straws bobbing at the top.

  There was also an ashtray in the center and a stack of what looked like dollar bills.

  My stomach rolled. Instead of being excited or turned on by any of this, I felt embarrassed, humiliated, and honestly… bullied.

  This was my test.

  Be a man. Get drunk. Grope naked women. Do it all right here in front of a man who should have wanted better for me.

  Why didn’t he want better?

  And if I succeeded in being enough of a pig, I would get my future, a future that came with a whole lot of strings.

  But freedom, too.

  “Have a seat,” Dad said, already pulling out a chair. He took off his suit jacket, hung it over the back of the seat, and then loosened his tie and the buttons around his neck.

  I pulled out the chair and sank into it, and he handed me a shot.

  “Bottoms up,” he said, lifting an identical-looking glass into the air.

  I emulated his action, and then we both tossed back the tequila. Mine had the worm in it. I fought back a gag and hoped it didn’t get stuck on its way down.

  Dad laughed and slapped me on the back. “That�
��ll put some hair on your chest.”

  He picked up another shot and glanced at me. Quickly, I reached for the mixed drink and took a swig of it. He seemed placated as he tossed back his second shot.

  I’d only ever seen him drink expensive shit. I’d never seen him do shots.

  After he slammed the glass down, two cigars appeared out of his jacket. One for me and one for him. We lit them up, and the distinct scent of tobacco filled the small room.

  “Drink up, enjoy,” Dad instructed, settling back in the seat and motioning to someone I didn’t see.

  I took another drink because, frankly, being drunk for this seemed like a pretty fucking brilliant idea.

  A dim red light came on across the room, and three women dressed in what looked like lingerie appeared. One of them already had her chest completely bared, like her bra was missing all the fabric that actually offered some modesty. Instead, all she had was the band that wrapped around her ribcage and the lacey straps around her shoulders. Her panties were also lace, and her thigh-highs were white.

  Both her nipples were erect, and I wondered if she’d been fondling them before she entered the room.

  The other girl was wearing a tiny see-through dress, a pair of thongs, and nothing else. The third stripper had on leather chaps, leather crotchless panties, and a black leather vest that showed a lot of cleavage. Her heels were probably five inches high, and she carried a long black feather in her hand.

  Music started playing through speakers I couldn’t see, and the women converged on the table.

  Their hands were everywhere. In my hair, on my shirt. Fingers trailed across my lips, dipped into my ears, and slid beneath the collar of my shirt to scrape their nails over my chest.

  I reclined in the seat, forced my body into a lazy, relaxed position, and stared at one of the women’s chest as she straddled my legs.

  My father made a grunting sound, and I glanced over. He had one hand wrapped around a boob and the other was stuffing a wad of dollar bills in the tiny string that held up her panties. He was taking his sweet time with the money, too, shoving it between her legs way farther than it needed to go.

  She giggled and purred like she liked it a lot and ran her hands through his thick hair.

  He noted me watching, and our eyes locked.