He looked over at me as I clicked away with a frown on his face, and that frown captured on my phone had me laughing loudly and breathlessly. “What are you laughing at, Sara?” He was a self-conscious guy, so he smoothed out his hair with his hands and tidied up his crinkly white shirt.

“Nothing.” I set the phone down and feigned ignorance.

He scowled and looked back at the television, scratching a spot on his chest. “So has anyone asked you out to prom yet?” he asked casually with a hint of a smile on his lips.

It was my turn to scowl. “Not yet, but I still have a few weeks to go before I need to worry about that.”

“What are you going to do if no one asks you?”

I shrugged. “I’m sure someone will ask me. Doug’s been giving me some interesting looks as of lately. I think he’s trying to find the right moment to ask me out.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Doug? Who the hell is Doug?”

“Some guy in my math class.”

“What’s his last name?”

Oh, God. Here comes the interrogation…  He was always bugging me about guys. “Mackenzie.”

He sniggered. “Are you serious? Doesn’t he look like a weed? Fucking seven feet tall, weighing a hundred pounds or some shit?”

“He is very tall, but he’s gotten really buff lately.”

He made a distasteful face. “Yeah, okay. Have fun with that one, Tiny.”

“Maybe I will.” I smiled, leaning back into the recliner. I turned my attention to what he was watching, and found him on a parental controls channel, trying to put in a code. “Jax, your mom put a code on this for a reason–”

“I’m twenty, Sara. I can watch what I want.”

“How do you even know the friggin code? Your mom changes it every week.”

His eyes shot to mine. “How do you know that?”

I raised an eyebrow in a “are you really asking me that” look. He knew how close his mom was to me. She told me everything; sometimes too much.

After a few attempts, the dummy actually got it right. I gasped in shock as he smirked and clicked a movie. For a few minutes, I sat and watched a babysitter dressed in a white belly top and tiny skirt scold a boy that looked no older than eighteen.

“You have to be a good boy,” she said, pursing her unnaturally gigantic lips at the boy who happened to be in just his shorts and nothing else, although, he did display a nice set of abs so I wasn’t entirely put off. Why the hell is she babysitting an adult, I idly wondered.

“You know, it’s impossible for someone’s lips to get that big on their own, right?” I told Jaxon.

“Shut up, Sara,” he murmured without taking his eyes off the screen.

The bimbo babysitter eventually gave the man-child a sticker and ordered pizza. A few seconds later – and wow, that was a fast delivery – a blonde woman in an equally skimpy pizza delivery outfit knocked on the door.

“Did someone order… pizza?” she asked, winking on the last word at the two of them. What the fuck?

“Oh, please do come inside. I was just rewarding this good boy for his great behaviour,” replied the red head who was now rubbing her breasts with a manicured hand.

Quickly knowing where this was going, I stood up and looked away from the screen. “I’m going home, Jaxon.”

He barely batted me an eye as I walked out of the room.

“Where is the charger?” I asked him.

“Bedroom.”

Going into his bedroom, I found the charger on his dresser among other suspicious electronic devices. I could see no receipt. Hearing the moans erupting from the TV, I quickly left the house, shuddering at the things some guys watched.

As I arrived to the front door of my house, I could hear laughter from inside. I stopped breathing and put my ear against the door. I could make out my mother’s voice. And his. My skin crawled at the familiarity of it. Going in was the last thing I wanted to do, but I had no choice in the matter.

Walking in, the talking immediately ceased. He was seated on the couch in a dirty white singlet and jeans. He looked fatter than before and had grown a light beard around his large face. But I wasn’t paying attention to his overall appearance. It was his eyes; those same brooding, dark eyes that fell over me and made me feel like I’d been kicked down to the ground by hate.

“Well, lookie who showed up,” he slurred, pointing the tip of his beer bottle at me. “Lookin’ real good there, doll. Come and give your daddy a kiss hello.”

My feet momentarily would not budge. They weighed a ton as I slowly made my way over to him. Mom was nearly passed out beside him, half a cigarette lit in between her fingers. I accidentally knocked a few empty beer bottles over on the floor, and peered down to see that the tiles already had mud stains and cigarette butts all over the place. The smell was positively revolting.

I stopped a few feet away, staring at him with a chill that I was sure he could feel.  “How long do you intend on sticking around this time?” I asked, not bothering to hide the bitterness in my tone.

He laughed, eyeing my body. “I’m gonna stick around til my heart’s content, little thing, and lookin’ at my grown up daughter, I’m thinkin’ I’m gonna enjoy hangin’ about.”

“Yeah, I bet you are,” I retorted, eyeing Mom plopped half consciously beside him. “Back to doing what you do best – destroying Mom like the nothing you are.”

His eyes widened, and that familiar fury erupted out of them. So his anger hadn’t improved much. Go figure.

He made an attempt to get up, but in his half drunken state, he couldn’t seem to balance long enough. I was long gone at that point, running up the stairs to my bedroom. I shut the door in and locked it. A few minutes later the knob rattled. I never thought that putting a lock on it was going to be useful, but I was glad I was wrong.

“Yeah, you hide in there, you little thing,” he grumbled, scratching at the door. He put all his weight against it, rattling the knob repeatedly. “You can’t hide in there forever.”

I rolled my eyes. What was this drunken asshole going to do from across a locked door? I plugged my new phone into its charger and plopped down onto the mattress on the floor. I watched the door in complete darkness. Watched him rattle away until he growled in anger and stalked off.

*****