《Say You'll Stay》Chapter 7
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After I got Tom to invite me over for dinner, I started devising a plan of how to break the news. Since Jadon and Allie would no doubt be there, we would have to have the conversation and hash this out.
Allie would have nowhere to run. Tom would definitely be mad, but seeing his grandson's father step up when he found out he had a kid would show maturity. Responsibility.
Besides, it's not like I even knew. She knew who I was and apparently cyber-stalked me all this time, she could have told me, but she didn't. That's on her.
How else would she have known that I had a few good experiences in college when I wasn't working or studying? Bet she didn't check on that, though. Only focused on whatever I was tagged in, I'm sure.
I have to hand it to her, though. I probably would have been reluctant at first because she probably had him middle of my freshman year and during that time I didn't care about anybody but myself. I was studying and getting laid at house and dorm parties.
If we met at Spring Break, he would have been made in early April. So he was born... January? December?
I found Tom's house easily and saw the tricycle on the grass in the front. There weren't too many toys outside, the front looked manicured. Tom took really good care of his house. Glad my son has grown up in a safe home.
My son. Yikes.
How is that kind of conversation supposed to even start? I mean, I practiced possible openers, but I'm hoping maybe she'll break first. Or that Tom will notice. I mean, most of our interactions have been outdoors, so Tom hasn't noticed my eyes yet with sunglasses on, but he definitely will inside the house.
I knock on the door and Tom answers with a friendly smile and handshake. "Hey, come on in," he waves me inside, "you're in luck. Allie took Jadon so we can eat real food tonight," he laughs.
That little... So she wants to play hardball. I can play hardball. I excel at a challenge, especially if I see something I want and I absolutely want to have some sort of involvement in Jadon's life.
"Real food?" Vaguely, I remember an affinity she had for cereal or something.
"She and Jadon are vegans. Tonight," he held up some grill tongs, "we get man food!"
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It's a good thing I chose not to bring Katrina because even I am still processing this and Tom and Jadon still don't know. Plus, Katrina isn't very subtle and would probably freak out. I need her to freak out when it's just the two of us in my house so no one else will see her probable meltdown.
Also, I don't know that she would hold in her adult language in front of Jadon and he clearly doesn't need to learn Katrina's favorite four-letter words.
"I got the grill on out back; there's beer in the fridge if you want some. Otherwise, there's water, and whatever vegan crap Allie and the boy drink."
I nod and head to the kitchen after Tom showed me the back where he was outside grilling. I walked into the kitchen and looked at all the pictures on the fridge.
There's one of Allie when she was little with a woman, I'm guessing her mom. I'm pretty sure Tom's wife died since I haven't heard anyone talk about her. There's another one of Allie holding Jadon in the hospital after he was born. She looked tired. The labor must have been rough. There's a couple of pieces of paper with crayon all over, drawn by Jadon and then I see something I wasn't expecting. There's a picture of Allie and Jadon with some guy who has Jadon on his shoulders and is kissing Allie on her temple.
They look like the picture-perfect family.
"Hey, you lost in there," I hear Tom call.
"No, just getting some water, thanks, I'll be right there." I grab water from the fridge and head out back to sit with Tom.
Dinner goes smooth, we get to know one another a little. He tells me about his college days at USC, then how he met Allie's mother and followed her home and married her. He started as the assistant coach for the football team and then needed the extra income to pay for his wife's medical bills so he worked double-time to coach the basketball team.
"That's a lot of hard work, Tom. So why are you giving up the football team now?" I asked.
"Well, I got the team into a good position over the years, and have been trying to get the basketball team up so I knew I needed to choose them. But after Allie had Jadon, I wanted to help her out more since the guy wasn't around, and I'm not going to have her pay for daycare and babysitters when she's trying to pay her way through college and everything else. Not after everything she went through."
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"Oh, did she ever say anything about him? The guy, I mean," I ask, wanting to see where he stands on the issue and what lies she probably told about me being a horrible person. Granted, I wasn't my best self that night.
"Not much, just that he went to Bear Valley and dumped her out of his car after he was done. She said he never even knew her name before he took everything from her. I swear though," his face got a touch red, "if I ever find the guy, he's getting acquainted with my knuckles in his damn face."
Shit, well, maybe I should work on this slowly with Allie before telling Tom. I know he's not going to be pleased with me when he finds out, but if I can establish a friendship beforehand, maybe he won't go so hard on me.
"Enough about that wasted life, though. Tell me, what have you been up to since you beat us for state championships that year?"
Fuck, I feel lost right now. "Well, I got my degree in communications. But college wasn't that exciting," normally I wouldn't mind talking about all the girls and spring breaks, but Tom probably wouldn't want to know once he found out I was the one he wanted to punch so bad.
"You have a girlfriend or anything or are you just going that bachelor-for-life route?"
"Oh, yeah, I have a girlfriend. We just got serious. She hints at marriage often but we aren't really there just yet." She needs to stop totaling her cars and demanding everything from daddy.
"Ah," he nods and takes a swig of his beer, "yeah, don't put yourself in that until you're absolutely ready. Once it happens, you get kids in the middle, things happen. If you're not fully committed to another person's issues and responsibilities, you'll end up miserable."
"I guess," I shrugged. I think Kat is just the person I know. There are issues, but she'll grow out of them eventually.
"My daughter has had this boyfriend for the past year or so, and he's great. They grew up together and all," he takes another drink. "It took them twenty years to realize they liked one another and even admit to it. Now he wants something serious and she doesn't even see it."
He takes another drink. "He asked me for my permission to marry her the other night when he was here." Great, some guy she will probably allow Jadon to call his dad when I'm right here trying to get to know him.
This may end up being some kind of court battle I'm not ready to handle. I really need to work my charms with Allie so we don't have to go that far.
"I didn't realize men still ask for permission to marry women in this day and age." It's not exactly like we pay a damn dowry or something for them. They have, you know, brains.
I notice the more Tom drinks, the more honest and open he becomes.
"Well, Ted knows how much I love my family and holds a lot of respect. Besides, his dad and I are close so he just wants to do things old-fashioned, I guess. Also, I know how nervous he is about it asking her since it took him twenty years to even ask her out. He won't propose for a while, anyway."
"Dad! We're home," I hear Allie call. Suddenly Jadon comes running outside through the sliding glass door and jumps into Tom's lap. Someday soon, he will be running to me. Just need to get through the hard part.
"Hey kiddo, did you bring me anything?" Tom looks down at Jadon while holding him steady on his lap.
"No, but mommy took me to the bouncy place and jumped with me on all the tramp-leens and then she let me jump in the ball pit!" This kid just beams up at Tom and Tom engages with him like he's a kid too.
"Oh, so what you're telling me is that you're gonna sleep so great tonight, right?"
"Huh?"
Tom laughs at Jadon's confusion. Yeah, hyper kid, alright. If he didn't have my eyes, the energy is proof enough. And the fact he looks exactly like me.
How has Tom not noticed the same eyes?
Allie steps out and jumps at the sight of me. Can't run anywhere now, can we?
"Allie, you remember Lucas."
"Mhm," she avoids eye contact with him and just watches her son. No, our son.
"Come sit with us, we're just talking."
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8 205The Oresteia (Modernized)
All three of the great Greek Tragedians have written plays about the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the royal family of Argos. Yet theirs is in fact not a story of tragedy, but rather one of redemption. As they move from darkness to light, from rage to self-governance, from primitive ritual to civilized institution, their spirit of struggle and regeneration becomes an everlasting song of celebration to be heard throughout the ages. Forming a discourse set against the emergence of Athenian democracy out of a period of chaos and destruction, the Orestian plays are compelling stories of the tensions between our obligations to our families and the laws that bind us together as a society. In the beginning, we witness how a king’s decision to sacrifice his daughter and turn the tide of war inflicts lasting damage on his family, culminating in a terrible act of retribution. In the aftermath of regicide, we behold how a son must set out to avenge his father’s death by committing a most egregious sin. In the end, the sinner is tormented by supernatural powers that can never be appeased, but ultimately finds redemption and ends the curse on his house once and for all. Woven through all of this is the story of a friendship so close that it elevates itself to brotherhood - Where the blood of the covenant is shown to be indeed thicker than the water of the womb. In this very brief twelve-chapter modern rendition of the Orestian plays, I have chosen to place my focus mainly on the lives of the characters Orestes and his best friend Pylades. The chapters, each around 2000-2500 words, are split up evenly between them in first-person narrative. I hope that you will come to enjoy reading this heartwarming story, but more importantly, that you see how the conflicts portrayed in the story, whether human or institutional, are still much very relevant to our societies today. Note on Sources: The details of this story is very loosely based on The Oresteia by Aeschylus. And I mean very loosely. Other sources that I referenced for detail and inspiration are Mythology by Edith Hamilton, Electra by Sophocles, and Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides. You may also find that I have quoted some of these works, and others (such as Shelley's Ozymondaeus), without citations (average of 1-2 such quotes per chapter). I did this because I do not have the ability to describe certain scenes nearly as well as some of those writers. If you read a particularly beautiful piece of prose here, chances are it's probably stolen lol. Also, I wrote this during the summer between my high school senior year and my college freshmen year. It was the summer of 2020, and being quarantined apparently gets my creative side out lol.
8 191One Man's Journey (2nd Draft)
Adam's life was normal; he teased his sister, daydreamed of becoming a powerful spiritualist and slaying evil dragons, and absolutely loved staring at the colorful night sky. All of that changed on one nightmarish night. AN: Hello once again! This is the second draft of my work that makes many changes tothe first. It's not just an edit, but an entire rewrite! Hopefully I am fixing some of the issues both I and others perceived with the first draft as well as improve the overall quality with everything I learned from writing the first draft. I hope you enjoy my work ^_^ Current cover by ChaosPenguin
8 120Through the Fog
Love in the shape of poems. Pain in the shape of words.
8 196SIPPY CUP
❝ blood still stains when the sheets are washed ❞Obsession: BLACKPINK Jennie's fatal flaw. She is willing to kill anyone just for Kim Jisoo to love her. Will she succeed?[ BOOK 2 OFTHE DOLLHOUSESERIES. ]ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 2017RE-PUBLISHED: 2020
8 208Let Me Start Again [Completed]
Start Date>>>> 1.4.2020End>>>20.5.2020ကိုယ့်ဘက်က အချစ်တွေပေးခဲ့လည်း ပြန်ရခဲ့တာက နာကျင်မှုတွေတဲ့လား မင်းအမုန်းတွေကိုထပ်ပြီးမခံစားနိုင်တော့လို့ ငါထွက်ပြေးပါရစေ'ခက်ထန်'ငါအရမ်းမုန်းနေတုန်းက တွယ်ကပ်နေပြီး အခုကျထွက်ပြေးတော့မလို့လား အရင်ကမှားခဲ့တာတွေအတွက် တောင်းပန်ပါတယ် အပြစ်တွေကိုပေးဆပ်တဲ့အနေနဲ့ မင်းကိုဂရုစိုက်ပေး ချစ်ပေးမှာမလို့ ကိုယ့်ကို အစကနေပြန်စခွင့်ပေးပါ'မင်းစစ်မောင်'ကိုယ့္ဘက္က အခ်စ္ေတြေပးခဲ့လည္း ျပန္ရခဲ့တာက နာက်င္မႈေတြတဲ့လား မင္းအမုန္းေတြကိုထပ္ၿပီးမခံစားႏိုင္ေတာ့လို႔ ငါထြက္ေျပးပါရေစ'ခက္ထန္'ငါအရမ္းမုန္းေနတုန္းက တြယ္ကပ္ေနၿပီး အခုက်ထြက္ေျပးေတာ့မလို႔လား အရင္ကမွားခဲ့တာေတြအတြက္ ေတာင္းပန္ပါတယ္ အျပစ္ေတြကိုေပးဆပ္တဲ့အေနနဲ႔ မင္းကိုဂ႐ုစိုက္ေပး ခ်စ္ေပးမွာမလို႔ ကိုယ့္ကို အစကေနျပန္စခြင့္ေပးပါ'မင္းစစ္ေမာင္'
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