Colleen should’ve looked out the peephole first.
Summer air blew through the apartment’s open door, heating her face.
The man standing outside Colleen’s door was stocky and older. Iron gray shot through his short beard and buzz-cut hair. He squinted at her, examining everything from her muscle tone to the jammies she was wearing, and the tiny muscles around his nose tensed. He demanded, “What happened to you?”
“Dad?” Colleen hadn’t seen him in over a year, ever since that last fight when he’d pointed to the door of their house, his teeth bared in rage while her mother stared at the floor, and Colleen had chosen the door over begging for forgiveness again. “What are you doing here?”
Her father said, “I came to get you. You haven’t logged on to any of your internet places for three days. Your mother thinks you’re dead or kidnapped by the human traffickers.”
“Well, I’m not dead.” No contact for several years, and then he shows up at her door, angry? “I can’t believe you’re here, and what do you mean I haven’t logged on to my internet forums? Are you spying on me?”
Her father pushed past her and walked into the room of her apartment. “After you broke the family, your mother insisted we keep tabs on you. Mace figured out where you were logging in on the internet and set up accounts so we could keep an eye on what you were doing.” He pointed at Tristan, who was sitting up in the bed and had run his fingers through his dark hair. She was glad to see he was wearing a tee-shirt, which was blue and had Shine Industries written across his broad chest. “Who is this man? Why do you have a man in your apartment?”
Tristan stared at her father but didn’t say anything.
Colleen closed the door. The neighbors didn’t need to hear them arguing, and the air conditioning was getting out.
“Never mind him.” This was crazy. Her brother Mace didn’t even have social media accounts. There was no way he had the computer savvy to put a key-logger program on her computer or follow her around the internet. “What do you mean, you set up accounts to keep an eye on me? Mace couldn’t have hacked my accounts.”
Her father shrugged. “You used your mother’s laptop to go to your places when you were home that last time. Mace just looked up where you’d been.”
Colleen must not have cleared the browser history when she’d used her mother’s laptop because it was sitting in the kitchen and she’d been standing right there, the rookiest of rookie mistakes. “You shouldn’t have done that. That’s intrusive. That’s spying on me.”
“Well, we couldn’t let you just go off. We knew you’d screw up and have to come crawling back eventually. I can’t believe you chose the username QueenMod. You always thought you were better than us and never knew your place.”
Colleen couldn’t look at him anymore and stared at her fingers that were climbing over each other in panic. “I couldn’t think of a name when I joined the board, and they asked what my favorite classic rock band was.”
Her voice sounded small.
Her father jabbed a finger in the air toward Tristan again. “Have you turned into a slut? This isn’t how your mother and I raised you, having a man in your apartment overnight.”
Shame clouded around her. “No, I’m not that.”
“I’ll bet you aren’t even going to that church we picked out for you while you were in college, are you? The minister started calling us after your first year, asking why you weren’t in church and why you hadn’t made a pledge for that year.”
Everything was wrong. Colleen’s shoulders hunched as the weight of her father’s words settled on her. “I didn’t like that church.”
“If you hadn’t stopped going to church, maybe you wouldn’t be such a slut that I walk in and find a man has been sleeping with you in your apartment overnight. Are you still a virgin? Are you still a virgin before God? Where’s your purity ring? I paid forty dollars for that. Where is the purity ring that I gave you when you pledged your virginity to me until I gave you in holy matrimony to your husband?”
Words and ideas and vows jumbled up in Colleen’s head, and what had seemed like good arguments now wouldn’t organize themselves in her mind. She muttered, “Virginity is a construct. A man’s penis doesn’t have the power to change who I am or what I’m worth as a person.”
But she didn’t say it very loudly, and she didn’t think her father had heard her because his voice rose as he pointed at Tristan. “I can’t believe that I come here and you have fallen so far that you have a man in your apartment. Pack up your things. You’ve proven that you can’t handle life away from home. Your mother was right all along when she said you shouldn’t go off to college. She said that if you left home, you’d turn into an embarrassment for the family. And look at this place. You’re living in a hole with a mattress on the floor. You have nothing, and you’ve done nothing with your life. You need to come home with me. We’ll get you straightened out.”
Colleen’s hands cramped from hanging onto each other so tightly. When she looked at the situation through her father’s eyes and saw her tiny apartment and Tristan sitting on her bed because they’d woken up together, she was a failure and a disgrace. She’d rejected everything that was important to her family and thrown it back in their faces.
Her father continued, “You’re a disappointment. I always knew you wouldn’t be able to get along by yourself. You need to come home because we have provided for you with the feed store. If you come home with me now and apologize to everyone you’ve wronged—me, your mother, your brothers, and Pastor Williams—then you can take over running the feed store for us so your mother and I can retire.”
Colleen had heard his words dozens of times in different orders and different contexts, and her future closed around her and clicked shut.
He said, “It’s a good thing your mother and I are going to provide for you, what with running the feed store for us, and you can live in our house and take care of us as we get older. I mean, look at you. You’re worthless.”
“Are you going to pay me to run your store?” she asked.
“Well, no. You can live with us, and we’ll give you an allowance or something.”
Colleen whispered, “And after you’re with Jesus, after I run the store and take care of you, are you going to leave me the feed store and the house?”
“Of course not,” he scoffed. “We couldn’t cheat your brothers out of their inheritance. That wouldn’t be fair.”
They were going to take everything away from her again, everything that she’d tried to do in her life, and then they were going to leave her with nothing and throw her away.
Not that she had done much with her life. She’d managed to go to college until they wouldn’t give her access to their tax information for her FAFSA federal student aid form anymore, so she couldn’t get tuition loans for her last two years.
But even after that, she’d managed to take care of herself, make the payments on the loans, and pay her bills.
And she’d built a tiny community of friends online and in town who seemed to give a damn about her, even after she’d dropped out of college.
She’d helped people, saving the minnows in the Sherwood Forest forums from the predatory Killer Whales who would cheat them out of their life savings.
And then there was Tristan, who was sitting in the snarled sheets of her bed with his arm resting on one knee, watching her. His blue tee-shirt was a few shades grayer than his eyes. His fist clenched, and the corded muscles in his forearm bulged. His other hand held onto her sheets as if he would otherwise have leaped to his feet. His gaze was steady, and he wasn’t smiling.
Her father continued to rant, his tone becoming harsher. “Hurry up and get your things together. You were always so slow to get going. I can’t believe we’ve been so patient with you. You’re an idiot. You’ve always been a clumsy idiot. Now quit being a dumbass and do the right thing for once in your life.”
Tristan’s jaw bulged, and he didn’t look away from her eyes as if he were trying to pour his restrained strength into her. He said very quietly, “Say the word, and I’ll jump in.”
Colleen’s father was pacing as he snarled his words. “I said get your shit together and get your worthless ass in my truck.”
“No,” Colleen whispered.
Her father spun and glared at her. “What did you say to me?”
Colleen continued to stare into the blue fire of Tristan’s eyes. He wouldn’t let her speak that way about herself, and her father shouldn’t be doing it either. No one should.
She swallowed hard and lifted her head to look at her father. “I said no. I’m not packing up, and I’m not going with you. I’m staying here. And stop calling me an idiot. I’m not an idiot. No one should call me an idiot, not even you.”
“You have nothing here. Look at this shithole.”
“I’m making a life for myself. I managed to go to college until you sabotaged me so I couldn’t get any more student loans because you wanted me to come home and work for you for nothing. I’m not your cow to milk or chop up into beef. I’m not your bags of grain, or saddles, or baby chicks to sell, and I’m not your inventory to put on a shelf or put on sale or use me up and throw me away. I’m me. I’m mine. I belong to me, and you can’t take that away from me and use it up or sell it to someone else. You never owned me, which means you never had the right to throw me away.”
“We didn’t throw you away. You ran away.”
“You wanted to use me up and throw me out.”
“You still can’t get those Pell Grants and loans to go to college without us. You’re stuck here like this, or you’re stuck with us.”
Colleen shook her head. “In six months, I’ll have lived on my own long enough that I won’t need your tax information anymore for the FAFSA form. I’ll fill it out by myself next year with just my numbers, and I’ll get grants and loans and enroll in college again in the fall.”
He sneered, “Are you going to get yourself deeper in debt and keep throwing good money after bad to go to college? A college education isn’t even worth anything these days.”
Last night, Tristan had slept curled around her, his warmth permeating her down to her heart. Her body was still warm from his. “It is. It’s worth a lot. It’s just that more women than men are enrolling in college now, so people like you are devaluing it because it’s not just for men anymore.”
“Don’t bring politics into this. And you should be ashamed to take handouts like that. We raised you to be stronger than that.”
“It’s an investment, and I am smarter than that.”
“Education has corrupted you, and I’m taking you home so you can come to your senses. Pastor Williams will set you straight as to what your role is. Right now, you’re nothing but an idiot and a failure.”
“I’m not going with you, and I’m not a failure,” Colleen told him and glanced back at Tristan. A hint of a smile curved Tristan’s lips. “I just needed time to separate my finances from yours so I could do the FAFSA paperwork without you, and I just needed someone to believe in me so I could make myself stronger. I’m staying here.”
Tristan blinked, his dark lashes sweeping over his eyes, and his smile grew.
“The hell you will.” Her father reached out and grabbed Colleen’s arm.
As Colleen twisted and wrenched her arm away, her father jerked.
Tristan was standing with his forearm against her father’s neck, having shoved him up against the wall. Tristan growled, “Don’t touch her.”
Her father yanked at Tristan’s hand, but his arm was like an iron bar across her father’s throat and didn’t move.
Unconsidered duty made Colleen step forward to help her father, but she stopped. She didn’t want to go with him.
Her father spat at Tristan, “And who the hell are you to tell me what I can or can’t do with my daughter?”
Tristan growled right in his face, “I’m the man who loves her.”