Leashed by Luxury

I. Affluenza

Father’s Day: awkward AF when you’re adopted and not exactly on speaking terms. Twice as awk when he was your pimp. Well, HE’s blowing up MY phone. I’m blocking him for the tenth time this month.

It’s not that I totally hate him—even though I should. (I UNblocked him nine times just in June, after all). It’s that I tell myself I deserve the space—a few hours I unfortunately spend ruminating on how I wish he wasn’t mad at me. Wish he wasn’t such a black cloud bastard, pickling himself in whiskey until his words and worries and emotional welts rain down on me.

Seriously, I still cut that guy a percentage of all my checks when he’s not even clicking the buttons to upload my Craigslist ads anymore! I’ve obviously grown into OnlyFans territory on my own—a technology that’s outpaced him, made him outdated, while getting occasional “dates” for me.

But none of those are ringing right now. Not my sugar daddy Giovani, who doesn’t even have kids. Just my “real” (adopted) daddy ironically named Angel.

“Raised you but you can’t lift a finger to dial back your old man,” his voicemails persist. “Can’t leave that precious penthouse of yours to mix it up with the common folk? City girl: shitty goals. Should’ve bought a house by now. Real real estate. Something to hold on to in case something happens.”

I roll my eyes. As though I haven’t paid off his house he reared me in. Or the town house people paid him to rail me in. My throat makes a choking guffaw as my tongue rolls over a Lifesaver mint. Stabbing the little circle until it cracks as he carps on and on.

I don’t even know whose phone he’s using at this point. Is he barking up strangers to side-eye him as he rants? My adopted “sister” Joles is in and out of his house so much lately, I doubt she’d lend an LCD screen for him to tap and snap into.

It’s weird to imagine he has any friends at all, though he’s become a fixture (whatever a “partner” means) at this weird lounge by their house. When I try to imagine his posse, I see a blur of ugly mugs, smeared like spent gum, levitating over plain black suits. Kinda like that famous apple-face painting by Rene M—something or other (my sugar daddy’s funding my arts degree but not my attention deficit drugs at the moment).

My phone vibrates until it nearly falls off the tufted upholstery of my circular bed. It’d hit the belt buckle of my sugar daddy’s discarded pants, not the plush carpet. So I groan and yank it back by the case chain, wishing my sugar daddy was actually here. Not just last night’s clothes. He never stays the full night even though he has a full closet here and pays for me to live here full-time. A sultry, sky-high spot between his congressional office and married residence.

If he was here, he’d playfully pluck out a couple of my dark curls and tell me, “Look, now you have something better to worry about,” slide my phone silent and into a drawer. “Now these hairs won’t have a chance to gray,” he’d say as I smirk at his all combed sleek and shiny. Then we’d sink into an embrace, my hand on his soft quail-gray suit, his on my silken hip, sliding lower, lower, fingers curling under the thin, tight nightie, and—

Bnnnn. Nnnnn. Nnnnn. *Chirp*.

Oh my f*****g god, I can’t with all this buzzing. Not when it’s not from my vibe or CashApp. Who even messages someone on YouTube? He’s invading every app. Notifications falling like blizzard flurries from the top of the screen. Ping. Ping. Ring.

Teeth clenched like I’m back on the coco, I swipe up on the FaceTime call. “What?!”

His golden-hazel eyes bulge slightly, like even he’s surprised he made it this far. “I just…”

“You can’t ‘just’ anything after fifteen rings!”

He sighs, creases deepening in his tan forehead. Downy (Jr) brows bunching up. God, I hate how handsome he is even when I wanna push that rugged visage across the room, dip my manicure into the stubbled cheeks, if just to get him to be the wide-eyed one for once. “I—“

“Spit it out!” I take a page from his "time is money" pimp playbook, knowing I’m safe in my penthouse three hours away. Twelve stories off the ground. Secured by doormen and Giovanni’s D.C. detail, many recording and locking devices, if rage really could rocket him all this way.

His pillowy lips pull away from one another a few millimeters, mood deflated. Tone billowing out of bravado like a falling parachute. Gusto guillotining: “Naria, I just wanted to talk.” Suddenly, he looks way older than his 40s. More like the man who taught me how to til soil for basil sprouts or kissed my brow when I skinned my elbow roller-skating.

And my chest churns like lava, then caves, scorching the top of my belly. I’m so pissed, so enraged, to feel this ravaged by regret. The corner of my eyes pinch, but I won’t let them sting with hormonal tears. “Talk about what?” My voice reminds me of the leather he used to whack my calves with after I’d said something “suspicious of our financial situation” around visiting relatives. Tense, breathless. I want the scab ripped swiftly. Like my hymen was.

“Naria..." He swallows, looking me in the eye, knowing he only has a few seconds before I cut the feed. "I’m dying.”

…

Why do I still hear buzzing? There are no notifications. All windows are closed. I am sober. Awake, aren’t I?

And didn’t I promise myself I wouldn’t cry? Wouldn’t let this hole in my chest grow bigger?

So why do I feel cratered out, my cheeks slug-slimy after my morning moisturizer?

My heart ga-thumps like an old truck engine. Ga-thump. GA-thumP. Irregular, like my whole childhood. My whole family: first and foster and forged in tears, sweat, slick and salty crimson.

“Wh-what did you say?” How is it ME who’s slurring?

“Naria, I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for days, and, every time I’d try to bring it up around you before, you’d call me a drama king, but the doctor—“

“That’s not what I asked.” My voice is sharp, echoing in my empty apartment. Uncouth even if it doesn’t match his old cruelty. Shock turning to shaky: “I asked what you just said to me.” Because it can’t be true. The Mephistopheles who raised me doesn’t get to be felled by mortal mundane things like drink or age or contagion.

“You know things haven’t been good. The coughing. The hacking phlegm. How my side stitches all the time like a motherf—“

“So you’ve kept drinking?” I cut off.

The silence is my answer.

A small noise slowly winds from me like I’m the one who’s been punctured, prodded by medical tests, liver gutted. A whimper. As involuntary as the one I made after he first sold me to a random boarder in our house. Once we were alone again, and I was still clothed in the damp pink nightie. He held me lightly from behind, and we watched the sun die sideways from my scratchy twin bed. “Daddy,” I’d said like a question, black eyes bubbling with tears, knowing better than to believe there were honest answers but fishing to bridge the distance between us anyway. “Daddy, why?” I’m still saying now.