What Happens After Dark by Jasmine Haynes Page A

her feel that way, he was replaceable.
    Then suddenly, there was Luke, offering more, and after the initial rush of inexplicable fear—most women would have died and gone to heaven for a man like Luke to take her out for expensive dinners at fancy restaurants—Bree had started to think about it. Wanting something more than sex from a man always made you vulnerable. You got dependent on that something . Still, over the past two days, she’d fantasized about a real date. Finally, she’d started to want it.
    Except that her father was dying in the hospital bed she’d consigned him to on Sunday.
    “Brianna, would you give him the morphine? He won’t take it from me.” Her mother held the pill in the palm of her hand.
    Bree shuddered as if it were a big, ugly spider. She’d been peeling potatoes for dinner. Her mom did most of the caretaking, running up and down the hall so many times she was wearing new holes in the tired old carpeting.
    But there were things Bree couldn’t avoid, like feeding him. Or getting him to take those damn pills.
    “I’ll try, Mom.” She washed her hands, dried them, took the pill, and left her mother to finish the peeling.
    In the bedroom, the bed was cranked up to a sitting position so her father could watch TV. She wasn’t sure he understood the words anymore, but the flickering images were something he could fixate on.
    She sidled around the bed, putting her back to the window and the dollhouse still visible in the quickly fading twilight. His flesh was sallow, and jaundice had set in. His veins were a patchwork of blue lines beneath his paper-thin skin. She had to cover his legs, which were no thicker than sticks; the sight of them frightened her. He was four days and a hundred years worse than he’d been at the beginning of the week when the hospice man had put him in the bed.
    “Here’s your pill, Father.” She held it out along with the cup and its straw, not telling him it was the morphine he’d just refused from her mom.
    He looked at her, blinked slowly, a crust along his upper eyelids. She’d clean that away once she got him to down the pill. The previous one would soon be wearing off, and when it did, he would start a pitiful moaning that sent chills along every nerve ending in her body.
    “You’re trying to kill me,” he snapped, flinging his hand out. It fell back to the bed, missing her entirely.
    “I just don’t want you to be in pain. This will help.”
    “You want to kill me so you can have all my money.”
    She was patient. At least he wasn’t calling her a stupid slut. She hated the word stupid . “I don’t need your money, Father. Now take your pill.”
    “Bitch.”
    She’d been called far worse by him. The word sounded so much better in Luke’s deep voice. She had to admit she deserved it, though, these past few days for sure. She’d refused to let her father get out of bed. She’d had the hospice aides put in the necessary tubes so they didn’t have to help him go to the bathroom. He’d screamed at the indignity, but eventually he’d stopped trying to pull everything out, thank God.
    “Daddy, please take your pill.” She hadn’t called him daddy since she was eight. The term only came into her head in bad moments. But if it worked now, she’d use it.
    She was too close when he batted at her this time, and the pill went flying. The water splashed her face and dripped down onto the bedclothes.
    “I want my fucking whiskey. Where’s my whiskey? Nobody gives me my whiskey anymore.”
    She bent down to feel around on the carpet, but she couldn’t find the pill. “I’ll get you another one.”
    In the kitchen, she took another from the medicine bottle, then poured half a shot of whiskey.
    Her mother gasped. “Brianna, you can’t mix morphine and alcohol. It might kill him.”
    “Mom, he’s been taking morphine for months now. A little bit of whiskey to wash it down isn’t going to do a damn thing to him except get him to take the pill.