Her Forbidden Threeway

The sky altered from a honey yellow to a gloomy shade of gray by the time Reade reached home and she inhaled a deep breath of air with the hopes of pacifying her nerves. In the driveway, her father’s truck was parked and waiting. It looked untouched since Scott and Jackson had driven it back. The nerves in her stomach began to boil like water in a raging pot as she thought about facing him.

“Here goes nothing,” Reade said to herself as she walked along the small pathway and into her house. Her father was sitting in his favorite armchair, savoring a glass of whiskey. “Hey, Dad.”

 “Where have you been, Reade?” He asked, fatherly and concerned, but leaving no room for small talk. “I’ve been worried.”

Reade shrugged, searching the fridge to look normal despite the nausea she was experiencing. She hadn’t been able to eat since witnessing everything that happened the night before. The explosive battle between man and beast, beast and beast, girl and beast had rendered her to the point where she didn’t even want food.

The sound of Clyde’s fist slamming against the table caused Reade to nearly leap out of her body and she whirled around, unable to hide the surprise on her face.

 “You better tell me the truth right now, or—”

“Or what, dad?” Reade asked. “Are you going to lock me in your hidden study with all your dragon slaying books?”

Clyde Duncan stared in shock and looked at his daughter as if it were the first time. He had no idea how informed she was.

“I know all about it, and the weight of the confusion that has been on my shoulders…” She shook her head. “It’s not even worth talking about, is it? At least you’re not lying to me anymore.”

Clyde set his glass of whiskey down. “It was for your own good.”

“My own good? Imagine my surprise when two man-shifting beasts break out into a fight in the middle of the desert, and I’m left with nothing but a few crystals I stole! I could’ve died because of your ignorance!”

“I never wanted this,” Clyde admitted as he rubbed his wrinkled forehead. “I didn’t want it at all.”

“And I never wanted to be lied to.”

Silence fell across the room and Reade stared at her father as if he was a stranger. Someone she didn’t even share a mutual respect with. She didn’t know how to act around him, she didn’t know how to be around him or even talk to him.

“Wait,” Clyde said, stopping Reade from leaving the room as he looked up with a concoction of fear and worry. “You killed a dragon with a crystal?”

“No,” Reade replied, shaking her head. “I used one of the gold ones and it turned them back to their human form and I managed to calm down the situation.”

Clyde was standing. “Them? There were two?”

Reade nodded.

“This is… good. Very good. You need to describe them to me, I need to sketch them and send them to the group. Where was it? What did they look like in their impersonating bodies?” He said, knocking over his glass of whiskey for a scrap of paper and a pencil, ready for her description. “Tell me everything.”

“You can’t kill them. They’re my friends!” Reade disapproved, moving to the stairs. “No.”

Reade’s father ran after her and slipped around the banister, slamming the door to her bedroom. He heaved the door back open and stepped forward, clearly angry.

“You can’t befriend a beast,” he said, his eyes darkened.

“Really?” Reade whirled around to face him. “Because I have a father as one! They don’t hurt anyone, they live in silence and people like you have to throw your weight about and cause havoc for no reason! You’re bored because mom’s died and you have nothing left to do!”

Clyde launched his weight across the room, pushing Reade into her dresser.

“You stupid child!” Her father yelled. “It’s in our blood.”

“What do you mean ‘our’?”

“As in you’re a descendant from a line of dragon hunters. You won’t feel the need to kill yet, but once you’ve made that contact with magic, you’ll be itching for it.”

The words that Clyde said caused Reade’s brows to furrow and she thought back to when she had used the crystals, and her sudden and very strange hunger for Scott. She wondered if that was the itch her father was talking about and if her feelings for them were moving to love instead of hate. The passion was undeniable in each one and it wouldn’t be impossible for her to confuse them.

“I feel nothing but love for them,” Reade said with confidence, her chin raised to act as a sign of pure defiance. “I wouldn’t hurt them.”

Clyde appeared to be shocked, as if his daughter had proceeded to smack him in the face.

“Then you will stay here, locked in your room until you have the need to kill anything with a tail. Too long have I worked to put the Duncan name back on the map. I’m not having you ruining it with a fantasy obsession.”

Reade moved to grasp the arm of her father as he turned away, begging him to be reasonable, though he didn’t want to hear it. Clyde pushed her into her dresser once more, and the lamp fell from the worktop and smashed against the hardwood, leaving them in a sea of darkness.

She listened as her father slammed and locked the door, banging on it once to check its stability.

“Those inhuman things you call friends will be hunted and killed, Reade!” Her father hollered. “You can’t keep living in a fantasy because you’re having withdrawal symptoms from your mother.”

Reade picked up something hard and threw it at the door with a scream of protest. She moved to the window where she heaved and pulled, trying to open some type of exit, a tunnel of freedom to the fresh hell she had been placed in.

“Scott.” She whimpered. “Jackson.”

Reade closed her eyes and hoped that somehow, the brothers would be able to hear her. As she slid down to the ground and enveloped herself in suffocating darkness, she hoped that they would run to her rescue.

Jackson, Scott and their beastly secret. She needed them to save her the way she saved them.