Ruin Me, Daddy novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Sixty Miles

In the truck they confess everything, he deletes the episode while she watches, and he drops her in Louisville before dawn; then her label owner calls to say her contract renews for five years unless she pays $60,000.

"Yes," I said. "That's me."

The word sat in the cab between us.

Forrest gripped the wheel with both hands.

The green exit signs slid by. Frankfort. Shelbyville. Louisville, fifty-one miles.

"How long?" I asked.

"How long what?"

"How long have you been listening?"

He kept his eyes on the road.

"A year. Most nights."

I stared at him.

"I don't sleep," he said. "Not since my wife. I tried pills, whiskey, rain sounds, a man reading train schedules. One night I hit the wrong thing in some app."

"And you got me."

"I got you." His jaw worked. "You talk like somebody's in the room. I'd fall asleep before the end."

"Tonight you weren't falling asleep."

His ears went red in the dashboard light.

I'd never seen a grown man blush. I'd never seen this one do anything but carve ham.

"Tonight I heard my son through the ceiling," he said. "I heard what he was doing and how loud he wanted it."

He swallowed.

"I turned you up so I wouldn't have to hear him. And then I didn't stop. That part's on me."

"You didn't know it was me."

"No."

"When did you know?"

"When you said my name upstairs." He glanced at me. "Your real voice. Telling him you have feet."

A laugh came out of me before I could stop it.

It was two thirty in the morning and I'd left my boyfriend half-naked on a guest bed, and I was laughing in his father's truck.

Forrest's mouth moved. Not quite a smile.

"Your turn," he said. "If you want it."

I looked out at the dark fields.

"I was twenty-one," I said. "Waiting tables. My grandmother raised me, and she was sick, and her rent was due."

"Okay."

"There was an ad online. Voice talent, adult audio, work from home. Forty dollars a finished hour."

"That's nothing."

"It was rent." I pulled my cardigan tighter. "Marlee lined my closet with moving blankets. I bought one good microphone. A man in Nashville named Lyman Ritchie gave me a fake name and a contract."

"Honey Vale."

Hearing it in his mouth did something to my stomach.

"He owns her," I said. "The name, the episodes, all of it. I just read the lines."

"You don't just read them."

I turned to look at him.

He kept driving.

"Brady thinks I do car-lot radio spots," I said. "Two years, and he never once asked to hear one."

Forrest said nothing to that for a long time.

Somewhere past Shelbyville I made my rule.

"Nobody knows," I said. "Not Lettie, not your son, not anybody in Woodford County. Ever."

"Nobody will."

"And you delete it."

He didn't argue.

He pulled onto the shoulder and put the truck in park. Hazards ticking.

He unlocked his phone and held it out between us so I could see the screen.

Ruin Me. Downloaded episodes, forty-one.

He pressed his thumb on the first one and hit delete.

Then the next.

I watched him do it forty-one times.

He didn't hurry. He didn't skip a single one.

When the list was empty, he deleted the app and turned the screen toward me.

"That's all of it," he said.

My throat hurt.

"You'll have to find something else to sleep to."

"I'll manage."

He put the truck back in drive.

At 3:40 he stopped in front of my duplex in Germantown. The porch light was on. Marlee never turned it off.

I had my hand on the door when I remembered.

"It's your birthday," I said. "It's after midnight."

He looked at the clock.

"So it is."

"Happy birthday, Forrest."

"Get inside, Jessa. Lock it."

I climbed the outside stairs. He didn't pull away until I was through the door.

Marlee was at the kitchen table in a Sonic Youth shirt with a mixing bowl of Lucky Charms.

She looked at my face, then my bag, then the clock.

"Where's Brady?"

"In his dad's guest room. He bet his friends five hundred dollars his father would hear us having sex through a floor grate."

The spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.

"Did he win?"

"Yes."

She set the bowl down very carefully.

"I'm going to kill him. I'm going to drive to Versailles and back over his truck with my car."

"Your car can't back over a curb."

"Then I'll push it."

I sat down across from her and told her the rest.

The study. The chair. Episode twelve.

Marlee's mouth fell open slowly.

"His dad," she said. "The quiet one. With the forearms."

"Marlee."

"I'm just confirming the forearms."

I put my face on the table and laughed until I was crying, and she pushed the cereal toward me.

I slept four hours.

At nine my phone buzzed on the pillow.

Lyman Ritchie. He never called on weekends.

"Morning, Honey," he said, soft as always. "Happy to catch you. Just a housekeeping note."

"Okay."

"Your contract renews on the sixth of December. Five more years, same terms. Unless you'd like to buy yourself out."

I sat up. "How much?"

"Sixty thousand."

The room went very still.

"And I wanted you to hear it from me," he said. "Honey Vale is going to start making appearances. Conventions, a little video."

"I don't do video."

"I know, Honey." He sounded almost kind. "That's why I've hired a face."

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend