Filed to story: Submitting to My Bestie’s Daddy Read Online >>???
I stalked out of the room, wishing I had the anger back to make me feel powerful.
Sal stood in the front room, coat on and hands behind his back.
“Livi!” he said as I approached. “Did the little guy have to go down?”
I nodded, and the lie didn’t even ache anymore.
He smiled. “Ain’t that the way with babies.”
That pang I’d felt earlier, that Elio would have him in his life at this formative age when I didn’t, came screaming back to the surface.
“Well, thanks for having me over,” he said. “Great food.”
I offered him a wan smile. “Are you really still glad you came over?”
He shrugged. “Any chance to see you is a good one. And I just wanted to say I was sorry for my part in that little debacle. I had a bit of a temper back in the day, and I let myself get riled for no good reason. I won’t cause you any more trouble.”
I swallowed and mentally held that up against Gio’s apology. He accepted blame and promised to be better without an ounce of prompting. He met my gaze and seemed honest like he always did.
“Is it too much for your old man to ask for a hug at this point?” He opened his arms invitingly.
I hadn’t hugged him since our moment in the stairwell after dinner, but raw from my fight with Gio and downright exhausted, I couldn’t deny the appeal.
I collapsed into his arms. He was warm, and he stroked a palm over the back of my head.
“Take a word of advice from your dad,” he said quietly. “Change always seems like it’s turning your whole life upside down. This is just the adjustment period. Everything’s gonna settle out soon enough, and you’re gonna be as happy as you’ve ever been.”
I smiled into his chest and was shocked to feel my eye filling with tears. Were they happy or sad? I couldn’t quite tell.
I released him and stepped back quickly.
“Thanks,” I mumbled, keeping my eyes averted so he couldn’t see my reaction.
“Anytime, sweetheart,” he said. “I’ll just hit the road. Reach out about getting together later this week, okay? Or I will, if he’s causing too much trouble.”
Sal’s eyes drifted along the hall to where I knew I left Gio. Something in me bristled.
“I will,” I promised. “Drive safe.”
He opened the door and waved as he left. When it closed behind him, I leaned my forehead against the wood and swiped at my tears.
I’d just decided to trust Sal, despite the Russian connection, despite the half-truths he told about his past, but it seemed like every time I made that call, something appeared to make me question it. Just now, he’d been a perfect gentleman—a perfect father, I allowed myself to think—until he threw in a little dig at Gio in the very end. Gio was nearly insane with paranoia, and he kept stomping all over the boundaries I set up, but in the end, he always seemed to say or do the right thing.
I thumped my head against the door. Gio had proof–scraps, sure, but still proof. Sal had nothing but his own word on the events of twenty years ago. Even when Gio promised to trust Sal, I knew he’d be looking into the Costa family and their change of leadership, for professional reasons if nothing else. I hadn’t heard anything about it yet, and I didn’t know whether that meant he hadn’t found anything, or he’d confirmed Sal’s story and didn’t want to admit to it.
I wanted to trust and love them both, but more and more, they seemed to be forcing me to side with one or the other. I didn’t want to keep fighting with Gio. I didn’t want to keep defending him to Sal. I just wanted a father and a husband.
Was that really too much to ask?
I shoved up off the door. I could sit here and spin hypotheticals in my mind all night. The only path to any sort of clarity was another perspective. Gio had proven time and again that he couldn’t be objective about my father. I needed to lay this all out in front of someone a little further away from the problem who I knew had my best interests at heart.
I took off down the hallway, looking for Dahlia. I just needed someone to tell me I wasn’t crazy, and that my father wasn’t a bad guy.
Both he and Gio made that difficult to believe on my own anymore.
*Olivia*
I poked my head into Dahlia’s bedroom and found her, for once, sitting at her desk instead of on her bed.
“Olive!” She shot up immediately. “Are you here to save me from the nightmares of Organizational Behavior 103?”
Despite everything, I laughed. “Not intentionally.”
“God, I’ll take it,” she declared, standing and flinging herself backward onto her bed. “It’s like, I get it, there’s a lot of human behavior research that goes into a successful business. But if I really wanted to learn about human behavior, I’d have majored in psychology!”
I perched on the bed next to her and patted her head. “Sorry, Dolly. Organizational Behavior waits for no debatable heir to a crime family.”
She rolled on her side and pouted at me. “Tell me you’ve got something more interesting going on in your life?”
I groaned. “I guess that depends on how you define ‘interesting.'”
Her eyes lit up. “Spill.”
I told her everything–the weird tension between Gio and my dad I’d been feeling since the first time they met, the time I went to his place and he thought I shouldn’t have bodyguards, Gio’s zillion promises to back off that he kept breaking. I even told her about the surveillance photos of the Russian tattoos, the bank account inconsistencies, and Sal’s explanation for everything.
Dahlia’s face grew more and more serious as I spoke, but I couldn’t tell who she was upset with.
“And that brings us to today,” I said with a huff. “Where I invited Sal over for lunch after Gio promised to trust me again. Sal left to go to the bathroom for like five minutes, and I found the two of them screaming at each other in Elio’s room.”
She sat up. “Whoa, that’s a huge escalation.”
I threw my hands in the air. “I know! Gio’s being totally unreasonable.”
“I don’t know, Olive, that seems really out of the blue. Are you sure you didn’t miss anything?”
I frowned at her. “I thought you’d take my side.”
She crossed her arms. “I thought you didn’t know which side you were on.”
I flopped back on the bed. “I don’t!”
Dahlia stared down at me, nothing but an earnest desire to help in her eyes. “So are you sure that’s exactly how today went? You’re not leaving anything at all out?”
I shrugged. I wanted Dahlia to tell me she thought my father was a good man. I didn’t want to mention the part about him getting lost on the way to the bathroom, because everybody kept fixating on it like it was damning evidence. I got lost the first few weeks, and I lived here. Somebody getting lost sometimes isn’t a smoking gun.
“Why did you invite Gio to lunch with Sal anyway, if they’re really not getting along?” she asked.
I looked away from her. “I didn’t. Gio just kind of… stumbled into him.”
Dahlia furrowed her eyebrows. “But Gio knew he was coming over.”
I nodded.
“And, wait,” she rubbed her head like it hurt, “how did they end up in Elio’s room anyway? Were you eating on one of the balconies?”
