Daddy Issues

Chloe knocked gently on the door. There was no response, not that she had expected one, so she went in uninvited. Turning the handle and easing the door open, the red-head slipped inside, into the dim light of the bedroom. The curtains had been pulled casting the room in a veiled shadow but there was just enough light for Chloe to see her former best friend and one-time boyfriend sitting on the edge of the bed. He was hunched down, head in his hands, his fingers grasping at his hair. Softly, Chloe closed the door and padded through the room, stopping beside the night stand. Reaching down she switched on the lamp.

“Go away,” Zack replied to the illumination.

“No,” Chloe said, tender but firm as she took a place beside him on the bed.

“You of all people shouldn’t care,” Zack snapped from beneath his hands. “Just let me be miserable.”

“By all accounts, I should hate you. You were my best friend and I trusted you enough to let you see my body, to give myself to you and become ****. And it felt like you abused that vulnerability when you ignored me to pursue your passions with Ashley. I should hate you, Zack, but I don’t,” Chloe admitted, a hint of bitterness to her tone, her hands clenching the bedsheets. “When you’re hurting, if you’re truly hurting, my first instinct is still to be there for you. It’s kind of messed up, I think, but I can’t help it.”

“I’m fine,” Zack insisted, though he hadn’t moved since she entered. “I’m just being melodramatic, so you don’t have to feel pity for me.”

Chloe ignored him and asked, “Is it true?”

For a good long moment, there was silence, and then Zack confessed, “Maybe. I’m waiting on the results of the paternity test.”

“So, it might not even be true?” Chloe asked optimistically. After eighteen years, she couldn’t imagine anyone else but Gregory Bishop as Zack’s father.

“Why do you care who my father is?” Zack shot back. Maybe if he pissed her off she would leave.

“You’re my oldest friend. And although ‘friend’ might be a bit strong right now, there have been times when your family has felt as much of a family to me as my own. Sometimes Taylor has felt more like a sister to me than Holly,” Chloe admitted, smiling nostalgically at the good memories. “And I know my family would feel the same. Every time you come over Holly uses it as an excuse to go shopping and get something new to wear. And my dad loves talking to you about old films. Our families just feel interwoven in my mind, like your family influenced the tapestry of my life as much as my own.”

“Yeah, right until I went and unravelled the whole thing,” Zack scoffed and then with a half-hearted shrug, he added, “though I can’t take all the blame. My mom had been pulling at loose threads long before I did.”

“So, your mother had an affair?” Chloe deduced with a frown. “I wondered if maybe you were adopted or something. Does your dad know?”

“Apparently my mother has a high sex drive. Usually she sates it with toys and masturbation, and yes, my mom did actually tell me this herself,” Zack said, running his hands through his hair and smoothing it back as he resigned himself to the fact that Chloe wasn’t going away. “My dad knows about that but not about the affair she started after Taylor was born. My mom had depression after her birth which affected her and my fa-Gregory’s sex lives. They went to a sex party one night, to try and rekindle the flame in their marriage but it wound up being a swinger’s party and they had sex with other people.”

“And that man is your father?” Chloe asked, then remembered that Zack was still waiting on the paternity test results. “Or might be your biological father?”

“Yeah. The affair went on for some time but when my mom got pregnant, she didn’t want to divide our family, so she broke it off and raised me as Gregory’s. Who I know, is my dad, really,” Zack said, throwing himself onto his back on the bed and staring up at the ceiling. “He raised me, he’s always been there for me, he’s the best father I could ask for, regardless of whether we share genes or not, but every time I think of him now, I just think about how different we are. He’s kind and good-natured and loyal, and all I’ve done is selfishly screw over everyone else.”

“I’m sure if you could ask him about it, Gregory could tell you some stories of his youth that would make you realise that everyone can be like that, sometimes. I’m the same. When I was hurt at your betrayal, I acted in ways that I never thought I would either. Gregory didn’t come out of the womb the way he is, he grew and developed and matured into that man, the same way you probably will,” Chloe insisted encouragingly, lying back on her elbows and sticking out her tongue when Zack glanced over at the use of the word ‘probably’. “How did you even find out about this? Did you mom tell you?”

“Sort of,” Zack said, thinking about the confrontation in the bedroom todays ago, and at the clinic yesterday. “But the reason I asked her about it was because she started up the affair with the man again, and I overheard them talking about how they’d broken it off eighteen years ago.”

“Your mom is cheating on Gregory again?” Chloe asked, rhetorically, repulsed. “That’s horrible. I don’t understand how she can keep treating him so disrespectfully and then just going back to him every night. I know she’s your mother but what kind of woman treats a man she’s supposed to love like that?”

“Now you understand why I feel like I’m a lost cause,” Zack admitted, scornfully. “What if I’m just doomed to repeat the mistakes of my mother, regardless of who my father is?”

“I don’t think it was in your mother’s DNA that she was always going to cheat. Maybe it made it easier for her to do it, but it was still her choice to make one way or the other,” Chloe argued, still trying to wrap her mind around Monica’s behaviour. Though Chloe hadn’t exactly been innocent in her actions lately at least she had always regretted her mistakes. Monica didn’t seem to regret them, but rather resolved to repeat them. Hannah’s words echoed again in her mind, saying, ‘some mistakes are worth repeating’. Clearing her throat, pushing the thought back out of her brain, she asked, “who is this man you overheard your mother talking to? Who she’s ruining her marriage for?”

“That’s what complicates things further,” Zack said, focusing on the white of the ceiling. “It’s Robert Ravers.”

Chloe stared at Zack for a moment, her mouth opening and closing like a fish, trying to find the words to respond but finding the language centre of her brain failing her. Not for a single second had Chloe imagined that Monica’s affair might have been with another parent, and certainly not Robert Ravers. Though, thinking about it, it made sense. Even among the student body, tales of sex parties at the Ravers’ estate were legendary. If Monica were likely to meet anyone at a sex party, it would be Robert Ravers.

“So, you and Heather…might be brother and sister?” Chloe finally got some shocked words out. “Hell, you might even have a claim on Ravers’ Enterprises.”

“I don’t really care about any of that. It would be weird, being related to Heather, but I like her, so I don’t mind if we’re to be siblings, or half siblings I suppose. And I have no interest in being rich and powerful,” Zack closed his eyes, mentally and emotionally exhausted, almost as if he were making a wish. “I’d give it all up to go back to being a normal teenager with normal, boring parents.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think you can know, Chloe. It’s like, I thought I was one thing, and now everything is so twisted that I don’t think that it’s true. I don’t know what is true. It’s not like I think my parents are all that I am, but up until this week, I’d made mistakes but that’s all I thought they were, mistakes,” Zack said, sitting up.” I got drunk and cheated on Lisa, and I regretted it, but I accepted it as my mistake. It had nothing to do with my parents, until this week, when I cheated on you and then, not long ago, down at the lake, at the first sign of fragility in my relationship with Ashley, I went and fucked Victoria too.” Zack jumped up onto his feet and began pacing the room, Chloe sitting up and watching him walk to and fro. “When you lay it all out like that, doesn’t it start to seem like a pattern of behaviour? Like an alcoholic who keeps turning to the bottle as a comfort. The way I hurt people around me, it’s starting to feel like a disease. And maybe it’s hereditary. Maybe I got this disease because my mother fucked around when her relationship went south and because my father just can’t commit.” He stopped in front of the mirror and stared at the reflection, his face creased and aged, his hair messy and misshapen, his eyes red and wet. “I don’t recognise myself anymore, Chloe. The person I thought I was, he feels like a dream. A young fool’s dream.”

“I think I can relate better than you know,” Chloe said quietly. Zack looked over his shoulder at her, not derisive or dismissively, just patiently curious. “You know I spent the night at Hannah’s last night, right?”

Zack nodded, turning away from the mirror, and looked at Chloe. “I was surprised because I’d never known you to be interested in girls before.”

“Exactly. Honestly, I went out with her because I was bored. I didn’t even realise it was a date until much later, at which point Hannah leaned over and kissed me. It was weird, and soft and wet and not at all like kissing a guy and I liked it. I found myself enjoying this thing that I’d never really given much thought to before, and, suddenly, after kiss, I began to notice her more. Her breasts, her ass, just how beautiful she was beyond a recognition or appreciation, and it was confusing, to not just see her, but to actually want her like I’ve only wanted men.”

“I can understand that,” Zack said, rubbing his chin. He wasn’t sure if it was an appropriate question or not, but he was curious, so he asked, “Does that mean you’re a lesbian now?”

“Maybe. But I still like men in the same way, and nothing feels like a real cock…but the way I feel around Hannah, it’s like there’s infinite chasm yawning beneath my feet, but it doesn’t scare me. When I’m with her, I don’t feel like I can fall, ever or at all. Maybe that makes me bi-sexual, I don’t know. Maybe I’m not supposed to put a label on it, or maybe I’m just tricking myself because I’ve never felt this emotion for a woman before and I’m losing myself in it,” Chloe debated with herself, her forehead wrinkled as she turned her head one way, then the other. With a shake of her head and a slow blink, she said, “The point is that I understand what you’re going through. I had this image of myself in my head as well. And now that image is fading and being replaced with someone I don’t recognise either. Someone who looks like me but doesn’t act like me and wants completely different things than I wanted just a couple days ago.”

Zack raised his eyebrows expectantly. “Well, what’s the solution?”

Chloe cracked a smile. “There isn’t one. I’m just saying, I understand what you’re going through. Something similar is happening to me.”

Shaking his head and laughing softly, Zack asked, “You aren’t going to tell me to take responsibility for my own actions? That I’m just blaming my daddy issues to avoid accountability? Or insist that no matter who my parents are that I have the power to make my own decisions?”

“It sounds like you’ve already heard and know all of that before,” Chloe noted, bemused at Zack scepticism. “I agree with whoever told you your choice are your own, but I don’t think there’s a solution to change. We may not understand it right now, or know the way through, but moving forward, even in the dark, is the only way through. As I said before, Gregory matured and developed into a man that you can admire. We both have to work through our issues if we’re to become the people we need to be for the rest of our lives.”

“You’re right. I know there’s no quick fix for this, unfortunately. But I shouldn’t let it overwhelm me like it did in the living room. Just this feeling of being powerless. Powerless to control myself, to control my family, where I come from, where I’m going, and now, on top of everything, this whole deal with Hannah is my fault and there’s nothing I can do about it. In fact, getting involved might even make things worse,” Zack replied, sitting again on the bed next to Chloe. “I just wish there was something I could do.”

“Same,” Chloe quipped with a sigh. “I was with Hannah for a whole night and I never suspected a thing. And now I don’t know if what I did with her was right or wrong, or whether these feelings I have for her are good or bad. Knowing what she did, and to Lisa, it changes all these feelings I have for her. I don’t know what to do with them, so much so I had to recuse myself from recording her confession because it felt like a betrayal to be with her one night and against her the next.”

“At least you had to power to do so. You were able to pull yourself away because you didn’t trust yourself in that situation. Me, time and time again, I have **** but to wait, and make the wrong decisions over and over again,” Zack reasoned, looking sideways at the red-head. “But you’ve grown Chloe. I can see it. Less shy, more body confident, wiser, and making the right choices. You’re a better person than I am.”

“Oh, Zack,” Chloe rocked her body, nudging him with her shoulder and laughing softly. “I was always the better person. At sports, at video games, at-”

“Alright, alright.” Zack genuinely laughed, as only an old childhood friend could make him do. “I get it. All hail Supreme Chancellor Chloe.”

Chuckling, Chloe stood and held her hand out to the troubled teen. “It’s like you said, you can’t let your problems overwhelm you. Instead of worrying about what you can’t do anything about, focus on what you can change. For instance, are you gonna stay in here and brood or do you want to come with me and face the world?”