Smelling like Shaun.
Brilliant.
I’m drying myself when I hear a noise in the hall and Shaun comes barging into the room.
“Fucks sake woman, you’re not even dressed yet?!” he says, looking at me in my towel with a frown marring his perfect face.
“You’ve only been away twenty minutes!” I tell him.
“Eg-fucking-xactly. If you keep stalling like we have all the time in the world, I’ll take that to mean we have time for a blowjob.”
I roll my eyes at him while I dry myself with the towel. “I’d go much faster if you fucked right off.”
He chuckles and shuts the door, before shouting from the other side, “Be quick, my old man wants to meet you afore he leaves for work.”
I stop what I’m doing. He cannot be serious. This is the man who wanted rid of us so desperately, that he set his thug of a son loose and told him I was #1 target.
I try not to think about the fact I’ve just spent the night in that thug of a son’s bed.
Nope. Not doing it.
I get dressed anyway and sit on his bed, wishing I had my phone so I could pass the time better. It’s not even ten minutes later, and he’s back up the stairs, crashing into the room like a bull in a china shop.
“What are you doing?”
I look down at myself, lying on his bed. “What it looks like.”
He rolls his eyes. “I know what you’re doing, wide-o, what I’m asking is why.”
“I don’t want to meet your dad!” I tell him.
He does a little huff and comes and sits on the bed beside me, before turning towards me and petting his lip. “Is the little princess scared?”
“Should I be?!” I shake my head at him and he just chuckles.
“Everyone’s scared of my dad. But he’s not going to carve you up or poison your porridge. He told me last night he likes you,” he says with a shrug and an amused smile.
I wonder if the whole family is just genuinely a bit mental. The gran, the dad, the son. They say that, don’t they? Madness runs in families. Like that family with the dragons from the TV. Every one of them utterly mad. I think you’d have to be, to go from being hell bent on destroying someone to liking them — before you’ve even met them. I sigh. “Do I even have a choice?”
“Absolutely not,” he says. He’s trying to keep his tone stern and his face serious but his eyes betray him.
I haul myself up off the bed and follow him down the stairs.
He leads me to the table we sat at last night. The man from the photo in the news article — it was his dad after all — and his sister are already seated, his dad with his eyes fixed on the back page of a newspaper and his sister with her face in her phone.
“Grab a seat, darlin, I’ll get your breakfast,” he says, squeezing behind me and heading to the kitchen.
“It’s okay, I’m not—” But he’s already away before I can finish.
I take a seat across from his sister, and she looks up from her phone and smiles at me.
“Shaun’s Mrs — my dad, Jim. Dad — Shaun’s Mrs, Lacey.” She introduces us and her dad nods at me. Another Jim, how creative. “And I’m Heather, we’ve met before but I was… eh it was that day in school.” I think back to when I did meet her, and the state she was in. So her dad mustn’t have found out about that…
“Nice to meet you,” I tell them both, before looking down at my place mat.
Hashtag awkward.
Shaun comes back relatively quickly and puts a bowl full of steaming hot porridge in front of me, before he takes the seat next to mine with his own.
I pick up the spoon, blowing it a little bit before I taste it.
It’s quite possibly the blandest thing I’ve ever had in my mouth, bar water.
Heather must clock my expression because she pushes a little silver jug across the table to me. “You just need to keep adding syrup til it tastes edible,” she says. “Unless you’re a fucking weirdo like Shaun and want some salt?”
Shaun flashes a smile at her and goes back to wolfing down his food.
“Syrups good I guess, thanks.” I take her advice and try again, and this time it’s actually alright.
We sit eating in a kind of uneasy, awkward silence until their dad puts down his paper, and I feel his eyes on me across the table. “Why don’t you tell us about your parents, Lacey?”
I glance over at him, shovelling the food that’s already on my spoon into my mouth and swallowing it down before I answer. “There’s really not that much to tell.”
He does a half chuckle that’s not particularly friendly and continues to stare at me. “I’m sure there must be some stories. He’s a big name in the oil industry, your dad.”
There’s something in his tone that sounds threatening, and I don’t much care for it. Like he’s actively trying his best to make me feel uncomfortable. “I’m sure you probably know more than I do,” I tell him.
“I’m sure if I did, your dad wouldn’t still be a problem.” This time his eyes are dancing when I look at him, and the threat is unmistakable.
“Da’,” Shaun says, stopping his eating and turning around to watch us.
“Why don’t you tell us about your parents, Shaun?” I ask Shaun — but I look right at his dad when I say it.
I remember the first night I met Shaun, when he did exactly the same thing to me, and how fucking menacing it felt to be on the receiving end of it. Not saying I’m menacing, I’m about half as big as a minute, but it felt good to do it, nonetheless.
I hear Shaun suppressing a chuckle behind me. Jim regards me for a moment and then his face cracks and he throws his head back laughing. “I fucking told you I liked her already, son, and I was right.”
Shaun drives the both of us to school. I asked him if he could take me to collect my car, but apparently that wasn’t an option. Why — I do not know. And I didn’t bother fighting with him about it, either. I’ll see if Stevie can give me a lift home after school if he’s still refusing.
I try to seek her out in the morning before my first class, but I don’t see her. Since I’ve no phone, I stand in the main entrance area at morning break and try to intercept wherever she’s going.
“Stevie,” I shout. She almost walks straight past me, but comes bounding over when she hears me call her name.
“Where the fuck have you been? I text you like eight times,” she says, throwing her arms up in the air as she approaches.
I smile at her. I hardly got the chance to speak to her on Monday, what with everything going on, and yesterday well… “It’s a long story. Come.”
We head out to our little spot and I fill her in on the last 48 hours. As much as I can in the space of a fifteen minute break, anyway.
“So Liam thinks they’re involved in weird shit too, then,” she says when I finish.
Fuck all about the fact my dad’s forcing me to marry Liam and Shaun is hell-bent on stopping it, and WHY he’s so determined.
I clear my throat. “Well, Liam said that at first, but then the next day it was all about how he’d be such a good husband and we were such a good match… so I think he was just saying that.”