Status: This is for Brinlee, so I hope you guys enjoy, too! :)

All I'll Ever Need

15. Right and Wrong

Sidney and I didn’t talk about what happened in the players’ lounge. Really, as much as Sidney liked to talk about things, I was surprised it didn’t come up at all, but he didn’t say one word about it.

To be honest, I think he wanted me to bring it up, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to yet. The idea that I had already accepted that Sidney and I would be together was horrifying to me. How could I doom him to that fate?

How could I be so selfish?

On the other hand, how was it selfish? People get into relationships all the time, even people with bad pasts like I had. That didn’t mean I was selfish, did it?

Not if Sidney knew about my past—which he did.

The first thing I did after dropping Sidney off at home was go by the diner. Since my friend, Janelle, was working, I decided to just go inside and ask if she wanted to cover my shifts for the weekend. After all, she was complaining because she only got fifteen hours that week.

She was more than happy to take those days off my hands, so I let Mr. Johnson know and left. After the diner, I headed back to my house to not only get more clothes for Chicago, but also get more clothes in general. I didn’t know how long we would be staying at Sidney’s place, but I grabbed clothes for a while for both Matty and me.

When I walked by my dad’s room to leave back out the door, what I saw was a bit terrifying. The man who normally just slept his life away was sitting in a chair in the dark corner of the room. There was no light, but the sunlight should’ve been enough. Instead, he picked the darkest corner and sat there, waiting.

I pushed the door open with raised eyebrows. “Do you need something?”

“Where the hell have you been?” he growled. “You left me here to die.”

It was all I could do not to roll my eyes. My dad and I didn’t get along, but he was still my dad. Every fiber of my being told me that I did, in fact, want to just leave him here and let him live out his life alone. After what he had done, after how little he had really cared throughout my entire life . . . he deserved nothing better.

But I couldn’t actually do it. I hated him, and the fact of the matter was, I would always hate him. I would also always be missing something in my life, from both angles of parenthood. I mostly grew up without a mother. I made it through the first stage of my life where a mother was so essential because she was still there.

How about the second stage? After she killed herself and left Matty and I alone to deal with him? No. All I had was Matty, and Matty knew absolutely nothing about girls and periods. He knew about puberty because he was still going through it when I started hitting puberty, but he didn’t know anything about what it was like for me.

At that point, I was on my own.

Then there was the fact that I completely grew up without a father. He was never home, and when he was, he was usually locked in his bedroom fucking some prostitute or free whore he picked up somewhere else. There really was no way to know how much money he spent on hookers throughout the years, and to be honest, I almost felt bad for him. He was clearly addicted to sex, but the thing was, he had no desire to fix it. After Mom killed herself because of it, after he spent more time having sex than he did with his own children . . . he never wanted to change.

His mother cried and begged him to get help, but he laughed and said, “Getting help means there’s something wrong with me, and the only thing wrong with me is that I’m wasting precious sex time talking to you!”

I didn’t feel sorry for him after that, not in the slightest bit. He mocked my mother’s suicide, mocked us for actually caring and wanting a father.

“You don’t want a real father! A real father beats you all the time, makes you do your chores and do your homework. I let you do whatever you want.”

Doing whatever you want gets old much faster than most kids realized it would. By the time he said that, Matty and I were over doing what we wanted. Maybe it was because all we wanted was a real parent to teach us, but we never got that.

I guess I was lucky, though. I at least had Matty, who was more of a parent than anyone else in my life, but he wasn’t so fortunate. Sure, he had me, but I was no parent to him. I was more like his child that he had to take care of.

It wasn’t right, and there was nothing in the world that I could do to express how truly grateful I was. Even with everything that had happened, I could never give him his childhood back. Once your childhood is gone . . . it’s gone, and there’s nothing that you can do to get it back.

I would do just about anything to give him his back.

“I didn’t leave you here to die,” I finally said, after I got over the frightening sight of the devil incarnate sitting in the dark corner of the room. “The police were watching you last night, and your nurse just left.”

“And you’re about to leave, too,” he said. “Off to see that man whore boyfriend of yours.”

For just two seconds, I didn’t even know what to say. My body went rigid and stiff while my heart nearly exploded in my chest. After those two seconds, anger ripped through me like electricity in a power line, and I was ready to detonate on him.

As much as I wanted to, however, I did what Matty always did—I held my tongue and calmly told him to fuck himself.

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I said. “And even if I did, you are in no position to call anyone a man whore. You’re the sluttiest of them all.”

His lips turned into a frail smirk. “Maybe so, but at least I’m proud of it. Your man hides it and pretends to be a saint when we all knows he’s just as much a sinner as the rest of us.”

“Fuck you!” I exclaimed. I almost regretted it the moment I did, but it felt too good to say it. Just the first two words was so relieving that I felt light enough to float away. “Sidney Crosby is probably the best person I know. No, he’s not my boyfriend, but there’s a damn good reason for that.”

Dad knew I was gonna continue, but he didn’t want me to. He had something to say instead. “Because he’s ashamed of you? No, I know why. You don’t think you can be with him. He’s ‘too good’ for you. You know what? Your mother was too good for me, and I destroyed her. Proudest part of my life.”

I couldn’t even believe what I was hearing. My heart felt like it was slowly breaking off into little tiny pieces. I had experienced quick and sudden heartbreak, but this? This was far worse. Every second, another piece broke off. Another reality of his statement hit me, and it was devastating.

Sidney wasn’t the acid in my life—I was the acid in his.

It took me a minute to realize how horrible it was that he was proud my mom went out the way she did. All her family ever talked about was how wonderful she used to be before my dad, and then after she killed herself? They didn’t want anything to do with any of us, especially Matty and me.

They blamed us for not being enough to keep her here. They blamed us for keeping her attached to our dad.

They blamed us for everything when we weren’t the ones to blame, as proof by the statement the monster whose seed created me just made.

“You’re a fucking terrible piece of scum, and I find it quite ironic that after all the women you’ve been with, none of them are here to watch you die,” I said, my voice as cold as the Arctic Sea. “After all the people you’ve met, all the people you’ve shared something that’s supposed to be special with, you’re gonna die alone.”

“I’m not alone,” he laughed, but as soon as he did, he had to take a minute to violently cough into his arm. “You’re here, aren’t you? Just like you’ll always be. For the rest of your life, nothing will ever satisfy you. You’ll search and search for someone, something, to make everything better, but nothing ever will. Because you grew up without a father, without a mother, and there’s nothing in this world that can change that. You’ll spend forever trying, forever coming to my grave, wondering why I wasn’t there for you like you deserved. And you’ll die just like me.”

Before he even finished talking, I was crying. Crying because I knew he was probably right, crying because I knew the best thing in the world was for him to be right. My mind kept going back to Sidney, going back to how Dad was wrong about some things.

Sidney would satisfy me, if I was willing to destroy him. He would make everything better, if I was willing to be selfish and ruin him.

I could sugar coat it all I want, pretend that I wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but the reality was, Sidney was just too good for me, and whether he wanted to accept it or not, that was reality. We were both falling for each other much faster than I was comfortable with, but even love wouldn’t be enough to make this okay.

So I would always go back to Dad’s grave, always sit there and ask him why he was such a horrid person. Ask him why he enjoyed ruining my life. These were questions I had asked him before, but instead of answering, he only smiled and went to sleep. He found that not telling me was all the more amusing.

But there was something deep down inside of me that cried at the idea of ending up alone. It wasn’t that I was scared to end up alone because I had already faced that. This was something else entirely, something . . . that was supposed to be beautiful.

As I stood here, my legs wobbling while my heart continued to break off piece by piece, I realized that I wasn’t falling for Sidney. Somehow, in less than a month of knowing him, I had already fallen for him.

My mind swirled with this realization, but it didn’t make things any better. If anything, it made them worse.

How could I walk away from something I loved? Something I cherished enough to actually develop these feelings for?

People say that your first love is always with you, that even when you love another, you’ll always love that first person.

I was someone who didn’t believe in “other loves.” From the way I saw it, if you loved someone as fully and wholly as you claimed to, you didn’t have love left to give to someone else. Maybe you sort of loved them, with a piece of your heart, but if you gave every ounce of love you had to one single person, you couldn’t get it back.

And as I stood face to face with death, with the man who would haunt me more in my life that my rapist ex-boyfriend, I realized that I would be alone. The rest of my life would be spent loving someone who I was too bad to have, someone who needed an angel, not a demon. All I would do is destroy his life like my father destroyed my mother’s.

I couldn’t do that to him.

“He’s just using you, Mika,” he said after I didn’t respond. “You know that. I know you do. Why on earth would Sidney Crosby want you? Your life is a train wreck, and it’s only getting worse as the days go on. Your best friend is addicted to heroin and shows up in the middle of the night to bum money off you, and you let her. You met a stalker creep who is dangerous to you and anyone around you. He’s in your life because you let him be. Your brother is a worthless cripple, and your father is dying of HIV. Please explain to me what Sidney Crosby, captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins, might possibly see in you other than a charity case?”

And once again, he was right. I knew he was right, though it didn’t diminish any of the respect and love I had for Sidney. It just made sense.

A part of me had always wondered why Sidney would want me in his life, but I never dared asked Sidney in fear of what I might hear.

Sidney was a good person, but lately, the “classless” remarks had upped. People were starting to forget all the wonderful things he had done.

So he had to do something big, something like befriend a charity case? Make her feel loved and appreciated?

The way Dad smiled as my eyes continued to leak was disheartening. I never knew what I did to deserve him as a father, but I knew the question would be yet another question to forever haunt me.

There was nothing I could say to my dad to make me feel any better because nothing in this world would make me feel any better. With sobs erupting out of my chest, tears falling like rain in a thunderstorm, I turned and ran right back out the front door and toward Sidney’s Range Rover.

When I did, I practically ran right into Cindy, who was standing beside his car looking in.

I wiped the tears that had fallen down my cheeks away. “Fuck off, Cindy. I’ve got somewhere to be.”

“That’s right, because you’re a bitch who leaves your dying and crippled family at home to go see superstar Sidney Crosby,” she said.

I didn’t respond to her, didn’t really know what I would even say. She didn’t have all the facts and made her judgments based off what she saw, but she wasn’t far from accurate. I was a terrible person, and the only way to make things right was let go of the one shot I had at a happy life.

Because why did I deserve to be happy? Sidney deserved to be happy, and with me, he wouldn’t be, not in the end.

I could barely see, but this had to be done. I pulled out of the driveway and made the semi-short drive to Sidney’s with tears still clouding my vision.

I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe right. Somehow, I made it without crashing, and as I fell out of the driver’s seat into a mess on the concrete underneath me, I didn’t even realize I wasn’t alone.

“Holy fuck, Mika, what’s wrong?” Matty asked.

I knew if I told him, he’d tell me I was stupid, tell me that I wasn’t bad, and tell me so many lies that he believed to be true.

I might be stupid, but I wasn’t stupid for doing something so good for Sidney. It was the only good thing I was gonna do in my life.

I threw Sidney’s keys onto the porch and put my hat back in the driver’s seat, only so I could put my hair up in a ponytail for when I left. I didn’t plan to take Sidney’s car anymore, not where I was going. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going, but I wasn’t going somewhere Sidney or Matty could find me.

Matty had to grab his crutches so he could stand up, but I didn’t give him a chance to get near me. I took a few steps back towards the road and shook my head.

“No, Matty!” I exclaimed. “Just let me do the right thing for once in my fucking life!”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he asked. “Mika, come here! What did Dad say to you?”

“It doesn’t matter what he said to me,” I whispered, and I took another step back as he tried to move closer. “What matters is that reality has caught up with me, and I’ve gotta do the right thing for once in my life.”

I think he understood. By the wide eyed expression he gave me, his body frozen in place while I turned to run, he understood everything I didn’t say, every heartache that had come to light.

It didn’t matter how much love I felt for Sidney, how much love I could one day feel for Sidney. The reality was, Sidney and I weren’t right for each other.

I wasn’t right for anyone, but especially not Sidney Crosby.
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The lyrics are from Killer by The Ready Set. I've heard some of their songs, but not this one. :P

Anyways...you have no idea how horrible I felt writing this chapter. o.o I hope you can enjoy this torment anyways. I know there's not much good in this chapter—is there any?—but I hope you enjoy reading.

I should have the next chapter finished soon. Let me know what you think!