Wait! Have you read ‘An Unexpected Visitor’ ?
She cried. Paula Andrea LaVine fucking cried in the arms of a woman she barely even knew. And to make matters even worse, Paula spent the night, again. Wrapped in the blankets, Paula found herself swimming in a sea of warm vanilla and clean linen. Sometime in the middle of the night she and Dani must’ve woken up and migrated to the bedroom.
Lying in Dani’s bed, Paula, for the first time since her father had introduced her to the life of crime, felt at ease. The never-ending to-do list that usually sat at the back of her mind was now empty. All she wanted to do was lie in Dani’s bed and forget everything. Forget her father, her good-for-nothing uncle, and all the pain that remembering Ronnie’s death brought.
If she could she’d quit. Drop the LaVine name and run away to a tropical island somewhere. Or maybe she’d go back to school and get her GED and finally go to college. As a little girl, before she knew who her father truly was, before she knew the weight of bearing the LaVine name, she dreamed of becoming a counselor.
As a kid Paula was obsessed with anything having to do with the human psyche; she wanted to know everything about the brain. In middle school, she became obsessed with diseases like Alzheimer’s, dementia, depression, and anxiety. When her father would take her to the library, she’d beg him to get the big science books and she’d make him read them to her at night before bedtime. She had hopes of going to medical school, but all that changed on her eighteenth birthday.
Like pulling back the curtain to a secret underworld, Paula entered her father’s world. No longer was her father just some ambiguous businessman like all her friends’ dads. Nope, now she knew every facet of her father’s life.
In the beginning, it was scary and hard; there was so much of her life she could no longer talk about. She started to lose friends, but that didn’t matter, she had her father and his men. Though she couldn’t really trust anyone, besides her dad, in this line of work, to her that was fine. Pauly was enough.
But after yesterday, after seeing the greed and willingness to throw his morals, the morals that he preached about religiously, out the window for just a few dollars, Paula felt foolish. It was almost as if the last decade or so of her life was nothing but lies.
“Hey, how long have you been up?” Dani asked from beside Paula.
Paula ran a hand over her face, trying to rid her cheeks of the tears. It was too late, Dani saw them.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” Dani whispered.
Paula sucked in some air through her nose and tried to stop the tears but the only fell harder.
Lying down on her back, Dani slipped a hand under the other woman and pulled Paula into her.
Face planting into Dani’s chest, Paula let it all out; the pain of losing her oldest brother, the pain of not having seen Leo in decades, the pain she felt for Mike who was now under her father’s spell like she was. It all was just too much.
Dani held Paula firmly against her, slightly shooing the other woman as she raked her fingers through Paula’s hair.
Paula cried and cried, emptying herself of all the pain and hurt she’d been carrying around with her for years.
Then, as she began to calm down, a phone sounded. The ring tone was the theme song was Adam West’s Batman, which kind of made Paula chuckle a bit.
“Sorry, I have to get this.” Dani said.
Paula nodded and Dani grabbed her phone and exited the room.
As Dani pulled the door close, Paula flopped down onto the bed, her hands falling above her head. What the hell was she doing?
Had Dani’s phone not rang Paula would have spilled her guts to the woman. Her head was a mess of conflicting thoughts and she just wanted to get them out. But could she trust Dani? What the hell was she thinking? Of course, she couldn’t trust her! Paula barely knew the woman. So why did she feel the desire to spill her guts to Dani and tell the woman everything that plagued her mind?
Sighing, Paula closed her eyes, she just wanted to run away. Run away somewhere far from her father and all the headache and drama being a LaVine caused her.
Looks like Paula is thinking about making a run for it. You think she’ll actually do it? What do you think Pauly would think of all this?
If you enjoyed this story be sure to hit that say, and if you REALLY LIKED it, you can support the site by buying a cup of coffee. Thank you so much, until next time.- C.
Leave a Reply