I Could Never Get Enough

I went back to work the next day, and I was really excited for the entire drive there, up until I realized that I was going to be the newbie. I wasn’t going to know anybody in the office, and even though it did frighten me and bring me a great deal of nervous knots writhing in my stomach, it also gave me hope – hope that I could make some more friends. Preferably ones that didn’t hate me or were manipulated by my sister’s lies.

The day went by smoothly, though, and I was extremely thankful for that. I didn’t meet very many new people, it was mostly my new boss – Rosie – showing me around the office and making sure I knew all of the major employees in the building. Since I wasn’t anything much higher than an intern, I was going to be taking orders from pretty much everybody, and she made it clear that those orders would include coffee runs and lunch pick-ups. I didn’t mind, tough. I figured there would be hazing and working myself to the top. After all, I did apply for the job here, anyway.

I decided to call my father and ask him to pick me up from work so I could go over to his house for dinner. I needed to set some things straight with him.

Once we arrived back at his house, he immediately headed into the kitchen where he had some soup simmering on the stove.

“I left it on low so it would still be warm when we got back,” he explained with a smile on his face. He stirred the soup before lifting the ladle to his mouth to have a taste. “Not as good as your mother used to make it, but it’ll do,” he explained with a slight chuckle.

I winced at the mentioning of my mother – it was hard to believe that this man was the same man that I used to favor back when I was a child. I was always a Daddy’s girl, and that was probably why I took the divorce much harder than Jane did.

“Was that weird to say?” he asked, sitting down with a bowl in each hand. He placed a bowl in front of me at the table, the spoons already sitting on the placemat along with some napkins.

I shook my head to make him feel better, but it was a little weird to me. He spent most of my lifetime with Nance, but I often forgot that he spent most of his lifetime with my mother. “I just forget that you knew her longer than I did,” I commented.

“Yeah,” my dad chuckled. “We were together for ten years before we even had you,” he commented.

“When did you know?” I asked. “When did you know that you actually loved someone else?”

My dad was silent for a moment and brought a spoonful of his soup up to his mouth to buy him some time to think. I shoveled in a few spoonfuls to pass the time of waiting for my dad’s answer.

“I cheated on your mother after I found out she was ill,” he explained. “I didn’t know how to deal with it and the thought of being without your mother frightened me on no end, so I went out and looked for someone to fill that void to make me feel less alone. I told your mother immediately after it happened, and she was actually okay with it.”

“What?” I asked, confused at how my mother could be okay with something like that.

“I was confused, too,” he said with a chuckle. “But she knew that something was off in our relationship and after she was diagnosed, it just kind of clicked. We loved each other, but not enough to be together anymore. The only reason we really stuck around each other for so long for you girls. The second I met Nance, I just knew. And I think your mother did, too.”

The fact that my father was able to leave us for love still hurt, but being –somewhat- on the other end of that situation gave me hope. Even though Alan was under the impression that he was going to be a father, there was still hope that he could eventually leave Jane to be with me. When we were together, we just knew. Alan and I were made for one another – I knew it from the second he sat down in front of me at that little Café in England. I knew it the first night we kissed. When we made love. When we talked. And I knew I definitely knew it that night I snuck out of his bed to let him return to the states in peace.

I missed Alan, and the harsh reality that he never went through with our plan settled in and I lost it. I dropped my spoon into my bowl of soup, causing a bit of it to splash up and onto the placemat. I immediately released the tears. I felt that I had no choice but to cry. The dam had broken – there were too many emotions pushing up against the barrier that I had built and it was finally breaking free.

My dad didn’t exactly know what to do. He slowly let his spoon drop and just watched me with sad eyes, but after a while the tears blurred my vision and I didn’t have to see the expression on his face anymore.

“I miss him, Daddy,” I cried out. I allowed my head to drop into my hands, covering the horrible expression that I had no control over as the emotions continued to barrel on through. I let myself go, I didn’t hold it back any longer, and the pain that followed made me regret that decision immediately. The room started to spin and I felt the need to roll up into a ball and just stay there forever.

I stood up, trying to mumble something about heading to the couch to lay down, but the head rush that followed the action caused me to collapse onto my knees. I heard my father’s chair scrape against the wood floor of the dining room and before I knew it he was lifting me into his arms and carrying me over to the couch. He sat down, keeping my wrapped up into his arms, as I cried into his chest.

“Alan?” my dad questioned softly.

“How did you know?” I asked, wiping the tears that were rolling over my lips. I had never directly told my dad that I loved Alan, I never told him the extent of everything, but yet he still managed to know.

“I knew something was off from the moment I saw you at Jane’s house – at her baby announcement party. You were drinking a lot, and it runs in the family to use alcohol to cope with things.”

He was completely right about that – when my mother got deathly ill, right after my father left, she resorted to alcohol. When Jane found out that she was pregnant, she ended up drinking at the club – probably because she didn’t know what to do. And when I found out that Alan would never be mine, I drank, too. I never really saw my father drink, though, but maybe he was talking about my mom’s side of the family. Or then again, I probably was just never around to see him pick up a bottle.

I let everything out, my words spewing out faster than my tears as I explained my entire relationship with Alan. I started from the very beginning – expressing every single memory, I even went and told him that we had sex. I left out the details of that, of course, but I just needed to let my dad know about how much he meant to me. I told him that sex is huge to me, and I don’t usually give myself up that easily, but with Alan, it was so natural.

My dad just listened to me try and explain my complicated situation – I even told him about Adam and how I dated him and how he loved Jane. And then I came to the end of my story, where I was unsure of if I should tell him that I was pretty sure it wasn’t even Alan’s baby. I decided to hold my tongue, though.

My father hugged me tighter, humming lightly as he smoothed out my hair. And much to my surprise, the tears finally slowed, and eventually stopped entirely. But the pain never left. I had let the pain in, and now there was no getting rid of it.

“It’s heartbreak,” he said after a long while. “That’s the pain you’re feeling. I know it all too well.”

I just nodded, not really saying much else about it. I figured he probably knew it from losing both of the women he even loved – my mother and Nance…each of them taken by a form of cancer. My dad also lost me and my sister, and I could only imagine how horrible that heartbreak was.

I ended up finishing the rest of my soup and telling my dad about my first day back to work before I decided I was ready to go home.

“Take Nance’s old car,” he insisted, shoving the keys into my hands as I stood by the front door. “Even though you only met her a couple of times, I know she would support my decision in giving it to you.”

I looked outside to the ugly yellow car that was parked along the curb. It wasn’t so bad – really. It had character, and in a way, I felt like that car was destined to be mine. “Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll take good care of it,” I promised.

“I know,” my dad smiled. “Call me soon, okay? You still need to come over and meet Oscar.”

“Oscar…?”

“My cat,” my dad said with a smile. “He likes to run off and hide, but next time you’re over I’ll make sure you get a proper introduction.”

“Okay, sounds good,” I replied with a chuckle. I opened up the front door and began to walk down the walkway. “Bye, Daddy.”

My dad walked down the path and pulled me into a huge hug. “I haven’t heard you call me that since you were eleven.”

I accepted his hug. I couldn’t help but smile in return at the bond I was finally forming with my father. Going through my adult life without any parents by my side was difficult, and although I managed just fine – I did need some parental love in my life. Especially with everything that had been happening lately.

I made my way back to my new home in Nance’s old car, but decided to stop off at a gas station and run the old thing through a car wash and then fill up the tank and even buy some air freshener and a steering wheel cover. It felt nice to be a bit productive, especially after I had spent a month or so sitting around and sulking over Alan.

At the thought of his name, the pain doubled me over. I had just barely stepped through my front door when I collapsed onto the ground, screaming out at the pain that was ripping me from the inside out. I should have never let that pain into my life – I should have pushed it back, because now I was going to suffer.

I crawled into my bedroom, peeling off my shoes and pants as I did so. I crawled into bed in my fitted work shirt, not really caring if it got ruined in my sleep. I pulled the blankets over my head and tried my hardest to steady my breathing before I lost control again. I could feel the tears building up once again, daring to spill over and bring me more pain and blubbering.

I felt like it took hours before I could even see without the tears blurring my vision as I did nothing but cry in a heap of blankets while my knees where pulled up to my chest as I was curled into a fetal position. Once I finally felt a breath of clear, uninterrupted air, I grabbed my phone off of my nightstand and opened up my text messages. I scrolled clear down to the bottom, looking for the name of the boy who had caused me to be this way.

I found Alan’s name at the very bottom of my messages – the last time we had texted each other was ages ago, back when I first came back to Long Beach, but I never deleted the messages for some reason. They just got pushed all the way to the bottom of my list as our first and only texting conversation grew older and older. I opened it up, seeing the last message be nothing but an emoji from Alan after we had discussed something irrelevant.

My thumbs hovered over the type pad, wavering from one side to the other as I contemplated sending him a text message to tell him that I was back in the area. I just needed him to tell me straight up – either he was really going to leave her or he lied. I didn’t want the bullshit anymore. I didn’t want any of this anymore. I only wanted Alan to be mine. I was sick of all of the drama and the avoidance and the hate and the lying and the crying and the pain.

I had nothing to say though. I wanted to type out just a simple hey and send it; just to remind him that I was still waiting for his call, but I couldn’t get myself to push my thumbs onto the screen. I just stared at the screen, waiting for some sort of sign or something to tell me to do it.

Just as I was about to give up, a little bubble appeared on the left side of the screen, just above where my blank message was waiting to be typed. It was a gray speech bubble with an ellipses inside, the three dots each taking a turn in glowing as Alan typed on the other end. My heart raced and I couldn’t believe that Alan was actually typing a message in that exact moment that I was staring at the messages.

This was my sign. So I listened to whatever had given me the sign and I quickly typed the simple, three-letting greeting and hit send. I watched as my blue speech bubble popped up on the screen. Alan’s typing bubble went away for a second, and I felt my entire body slump even deeper into the mattress.

But then the bubble returned, but this time, there were no dots, there were actual letters.

Hey

Even though he only reciprocated my text, the fact that he replied at all gave me butterflies not only in my stomach, but I felt like they were tingling my skin, tickling me and immediately bringing up my mood. I still felt the pain in my chest from the heartbreak that I felt that was ultimately inevitable in this situation, but that momentary feeling of giddiness and hope made me feel a little less broken and a little more noticed.

I didn’t want to say anything, so I searched through my emojis and picked out one of the blushing faces and hit send. I nearly did flips when I saw that he turned his read receipts on, and the little status of Delivered changed to Read 6:57 PM.

Alan replied not soon after he read it, and he send an emoji back. The winking emoji.

And that was all I needed to know that Alan still cared.

Notes

Sorry this is short and fillerish! I just really needed to get something up for you guys so I can transition into the next wave of drama! The story is a little bit more than halfway through, I'd say. And there IS going to be a sequel once it is finished. I wasn't originally going to make one, but I decided that I want to because I have a great idea for it! But don't worry, it's not finished yet!

Tell me what you guys think about Addie's pain and her conversation with her dad! And how about that little bit at the end there?

Love you guys so much and I can't believe the amount of support I've been getting! I love all of your messages on tumblr and your comments on here, they make me so happy and really inspire me to write more!

Here's all of my info in case you wanted to follow me or chat or whatever! I'm super talkative and love to chat! haha
Tumblr
Instagram
Twitter
PTV fanfics