Admit It.

The girl walked slowly into the coffee shop in spite of the nipping cold outside, fear was already deeply set into her skin, the cold couldn't affect her now. She gripped onto a lined piece of paper, one that had been folded and dampened with tears, one that had made broken sobs rip through her chest as she wrote it. A piece of paper that had taken every ounce in her body to construct, words that had been dug into her skin as scars but could never be said aloud.

She knew he would be late, or maybe she was just early out of nervous fashion. The thought of him getting there before her made her want to vomit, she could take him walking in and greeting her, but her walking to greet him made the situation dark and turn knots in her stomach. She ordered a coffee, not paying attention to what it actually was, too sick to drink it and too paranoid to sit in a place as such alone without one. Her hands were white as bone as they clasped around the cup, not the usual soft ivory they portrayed in better circumstances, and she sat ram-rod straight in a too soft green cushion one would usually slouch in.

He walked in, his jaw clenched as his eyes swung over the cafe with a curious but guarded stare. Of course she would ask him to meet her at the coffee shop he had forbidden her to drink at when she was a pre-teen, young children like that didn't need coffee, it would stunt their growth and probably poison some part of their brain. She was 17 now, she could drink as much coffee as she wanted, clearly this was a statement she had been trying to prove to him a long time, I can do anything I want. 

He saw her sitting in the corner, though he barely recognized her now, she looked sick. Her face was drawn and pale white, her back straight with her hands shaking ever so slightly, but what surprised him was her expression. The scowl he had been greeted with over the past 2 years whenever he was present or in the room, the one that had burned straight into his soul, had been wiped away, and in the shadow of it's former hard shell was an expressionless flat line accompanied by reddened eyes that screamed You hurt me. His breath caught at the change, but he put on that stupid smile, the one he always put on when he saw her in public. Why didn't she care? Didn't she know what people would think of her tear stained face?

The smile he gave her made her heart do two things, break in half once more because it just told her once more I'm doing just fine, and then consumed itself in an inferno of hot flames of utter hatred that made her want to scream and weep at the same exact moment. The tears came first, though, and she had to bite her lip to keep them from spilling over. She shouldn't have done this. It was too soon, she wasn't strong enough. She probably would never be strong enough. Closure, closure, she needed this though, she needed to stitch the wound that wouldn't stop bleeding.

He sat across from her, the smile still plastered on his lips and she had to remember to breathe. Words came with oxygen.

"Hi," He said, and at that exact moment she could have ripped his lips from his face and left the conversation at that. Hi, not a Hello or a What's Wrong? Just Hi. His face had aged considerably, though this is the first time she had really looked at it in 2 years, he looked his age for once, instead of the eternally youthful father that had spent his free time jumping on the trampoline and giggling with her. He didn't look half as old as her mother had come to look in the past 2 years, though. So, it wasn't good enough for her, not enough. It wasn't enough pain for her. He couldn't have possibly escaped this unscathed, no, not when she had bled as much as she had. Not as much as her family had bled.

"I'm not here for small talk," she choked out, her voice was frosty, the hate for him still resided there it just wasn't as apparent at the moment. He was grateful for that, it felt like some kind of victory for him.

"What are you here for?" He asked, he had never been good with conversation with her. Not since she had been a teenager.

"What the fuck do you think I'm here for?" She spat, her blue saucers of eyes shining with tears. Her language took him aback, and a hot lick of anger ripped through him.

"Excuse me?" He asked with a blink, the smile wiping off of his face completely. "Don't talk to me like that."

"Don't talk to you like that," she said with a scoff, something she did out of pain as much as sarcasm, "You hold no authority over me to tell me how to or not to talk." Her hostility made him reinforce his guard, the anger burning hotter and the want for power over her re-surfacing. He could never control her, God knew his mom wouldn't help him either.

"Young ladies don't use that language, and certainly not to people they should respect." He said in almost a monotone. She thought she could have done this without yelling, wanted to, but the emotion was bubbling and coming in hot.

"Why in hell should I respect you? What have you possibly given me to respect you for?" She hissed and her face was red with anger, her voice thick with emotion.

"Why are we here?" He asked, letting the comment go. She gripped her coffee cup tighter and sucked in a breath, he just stared, jaw set.

"It's been over a year." She said simply, and his jaw tightened, "It's been over a year since I had the right to call you Dad. It's been a year since I've spoken to you, really actually had a conversation. It's been over a year since you tore my fucking family to shreds and didn't apologize for it." Anger, hot and fast, ripped through his veins.

"Your family?" He spat, his voice hostile now.

"Yes!" She said, tears rolled down her face this time, her jaw set. "My family. They're not yours any more. None of them."

"Isaac's-" she knew he would say that. Something about his biological son. Something about he was still his, that he still had Isaac.

"Fuck you. Fuck you for only thinking of him. You only ever think about him." She was shaking her head, the tears were faster now, the scowl was back but there was that crippling undertone of pain there too.

"He's my son-" He started but her scoff cut him off.

"Your son. You know who was your son before him? Isaiah was. My brother was your son before your son was. You were his dad, the only one he really ever knew. And you left him in the dust. You chose Isaac over him, you dropped him as if you never met him a day before in your life. Do you know what it's like? To have your very own father walk out on you like you never meant a thing to him? Do you know what you put him through? And it's not even him. My mom. Do you know what you put her through? Do you even fucking care? And you walk in here, and you ask me Why, well, why do you think I'm here? It's not for a chit-chat over some coffee." Her breathing was unsteady, her petite chest rising and falling and it reminded him of an angry humming bird.

"No I don't know what it's like, but it wasn't working, you-"

"It's not about me! This isn't about me! No one ever says what they think, so I have to do it for them. I have to fight for them because you gave up the fight. Answer to them, for their sake, not for mine. I think you're shit, but for God's sake answer to your mistakes! Admit you did something wrong, admit you were wrong, admit that you did something horrible to us and that you didn't even care! Admit it." Her voice rose as she got to the end, her coffee cup starting to crumple under her grip. The fire she was providing reminded him of the one argument him and her mother had had, when it had gotten rough, the yelling out of control, she had stood between them, her arms out protecting her mother and brothers, a look of determination in her eyes that read she would stop a train from hitting them even if it tore her body to shreds. Screaming at him to leave, not a tear shed though everyone behind her was cowering and sobbing. She had always butt her head in places it didn't need to be. The same look was in her eyes now.

"It wasn't just me, it was everything, it wasn't working! None of  this is solely my fault, your mom had a part in this too. You had a part in this."

"We loved you, you know. You were our Dad. You were our rock. That was you, and somehow that's all torn away and you can sit here and say 'It wasn't my fault, it wasn't my fault', well then what was your fault? Can you kneel before the King and say 'I'm clean, I'm clean!'? Can you?" her voice was low, a mere whisper, her tears puddling onto the table.

"What do you know about the King? What do you know about God? How dare you use that against me!" his voice was raising, he had to check himself, people were starting to stare.

"You can't answer the question. You can't answer because your guilty, your hands are as black as mine and yet you can't even man up and make your peace. Your problems don't just go away by scooting them under the rug, they'll find you, and they'll burn you just like mine are burning me."

"What do you know about guilt, about black hands? What can you possibly know about mistakes burning you? You're a child, you don't know anything." She was being ridiculous, of course she was, she always wanted to be grown up, older than she was. Drinking coffee too early in life, cursing and back talk.

"I know a lot. I've had to grow up a lot in the past year, I've had to deal with a lot of grown up emotions, things you clearly can't even embrace, a grown man." She said, a dagger in his side.

"And how do you know I can't embrace them?" He barked, too loud, too loud, but they didn't care. Not anymore.

"Because you sit there, and you deny your faults! Because after a year and a half you still haven't talked about what happened with us! Because I've been waiting all this time for something, an apology, a conversation.. something. But you run, and you treat us like strangers, and you smile that stupid fucking smile in public like there was nothing wrong. And I hate it because I just want you to be as torn up inside as I am. I want you to feel as dejected and forgotten as Isaiah. I want you to feel the weight of responsibility Jacob feels to be the Father when he's only as old as me. I want you to feel the broken heart of my mother times ten, and I want you to see the split you've put in Isaac's life. But you ignore everything! We're always just strangers, nothing more. How can you just let us go? How can us not being there not affect you?" Her words were hardly audible, she was full out sobbing now, it was racking through her body. But then she said a sentence that struck him to his core, something that made his facade shatter to rubble.

She looked up at him, those eyes wide and watery, hurt and no hate in them at all, just pure sorrow, ripping agony, and she said, "Didn't you love us too?" It was like a wind tunnel, sucking him into a vortex of memories he had long since forgotten. And it was her, there, with her wire rimmed glasses and her crooked teeth aligned in a perfect smile. Her white blonde hair was pulled back into a pony table and she was wearing her favorite t-shirt, and he remembered when he was proud to call her his daughter. What had happened to her?

He was back then, staring at this teenage girl, her eyes watering as the question remained in the air. No, nothing wrong with her, something wrong with him. He had done something awful, something terrible, and he tried to go down the line, to find the first mistake. It was a tangled thread, bad decisions all the way down and all of his faults were there, staring into his face and burning his eyes.

"Can you kneel before the King and say 'I am clean, I am clean'?" The words echoed in his mind and reached his core, a broken note escaped from his lips and he felt as though the world were crashing onto his shoulders for a moment.

"Tell me what was wrong with us loving you? Tell me what we did wrong, tell me something. Because I'm tired of pretending nothing ever happened. I just need some kind of closure. I need to know why we weren't good enough. Why I wasn't good enough. Why we weren't worth the effort. Tell me something that will stitch up the wound you've put into me. Because I loved you, and that damn well should be reason enough."