The Savannah Situation Pt. 01

She shrugged. "I forgave you a long time ago." And then she nestled back into my side and I wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

"That's it?"

Another shrug. "I know who you are. You're good."

"Thanks, honey. I'm glad you think so." I had to take a deep breath before I could say what I wanted to say. "Can I ask you something?"

"Of course."

"Why'd you want to go to that boarding school?"

She took a long time to answer, and I worried she was looking for a way to confess that she'd been trying to get away from me. "I knew if I was going to get scholarships for pre-med, I was going to have to be the best. And I had to go to the best school I could, so I made it happen."

I squeezed her shoulder. "I'm really proud of you. I don't know how you had your stuff together so young, but I'm just so happy for you that you're not gonna end up like me. I wish I could take some credit for it, but it's all you. Not giving you more than I did is one of my greatest regrets."

"Is that why we're living in this dumpy apartment? Because you give me all your money?"

"Well, not all of it. I don't want you to have to worry, honey. I don't want my own economic situation making things harder for you. Not if I can help it."

"What's the lease on this place, anyway?"

"Month to month."

"You know I've got a shit ton of scholarship money, don't you? Let's get a nicer place."

"Absolutely not. You're not gonna waste your school money getting a fancier place for me. You want to find yourself a nicer place or a room in a nicer place or whatever, I get it. But you're not spending that money on trying to make my life better."

She giggled. "Okay, calm down." Then she did something confusing. She lifted her chin, pressed her forehead against my neck, and inhaled deeply. When she spoke, her breath was warm on my skin and I thought I felt her lip there for a split second. "You smell good."

It was confusing enough that I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything, and she reached across my chest and rested her hand lightly on my shoulder. It was confusing enough that I didn't do anything except start the show again.

Can you be anything but obtuse about your own daughter? Who would've thought?

Savannah started coming into my room at night, before I turned out the light while I lay there reading for a bit. It seemed like she liked for me to hold her a lot, but then again, I'd never really been a dad to a daughter so I thought maybe it was the norm. In any case, when it got right down to it, I liked how she felt against my side, head on my chest, her little breaths soft and warm on my neck, arm stretched possessively across my waist.

That's what she was doing the night things started to change, laying under my arm in an old, threadbare shirt of mine, her legs bare atop the covers. She wasn't wearing any pyjama bottoms or anything, just my long t-shirt and a pair of underwear, and I swear I didn't think anything of it. She was my daughter. She was at home. Why wouldn't she wear what she wanted? All I saw anyway was her legs.

We were laying there, I was reading an old book she'd suggested, some wordy work from some highly learned, long dead man, when I felt her lips on my neck, briefly, but long enough that it was clearly intentional. I froze, so confused I couldn't begin to imagine what she was doing, and she did it again, pressing her lips to my beard line.

"Savannah, what are you doing?" I said, taking my arm from her shoulders and forcing her to sit up.

She pressed her lips together until they disappeared, staring at me with a knit brow. Then she let out a breath with a puff. "I love you."

"I love you, too, honey."

She stared at me again, for a long time, it felt like, and then said, "Not like I love you."

What can you say to that? What do you say to your daughter when she tells you she's in love with you? I knew what she meant; there wasn't anything else she could've meant with that. And I felt all that guilt come rushing back. This wasn't how healthy daughters felt. "Honey, you don't love me like that."

"I do."

"Look, we haven't spent much time together and now we're getting really close with you living here, and I think it's easy to feel these strong feelings from everything you missed with me and feel like they're something they're not."

Another long stare. "No. I've loved you for a long, long time. Since before I got here." This time, I didn't have any response for her, and after a moment, she spoke again. "I know it's not supposed to be like this. But it is."

"No, it's not," I said firmly. "You're not in love with me. Savannah, I love you, and I will never leave you. You don't have to be like this for us to have a relationship. I'm your dad. Now and always and I love you and whatever you need from me, I'll do everything in my power to give to you. You don't have to do this."

"You don't understand," she said, and she moved out a couple weeks later.

I planned to move out of that place since she left. No sense paying for two bedrooms when a studio would suit me just fine. Technically, I had the money for something reasonably nice for Crooked River. It was just that I really did give her a lot of money. Anything to ensure she was going to be okay. Except then she stopped accepting it.

I called her up when the first check she returned got back to me. "Savannah, why didn't you take the check?"

"I don't need it. I haven't needed it for a long time."

"Honey, I want you to have it. Put it into a savings account if you don't need it today."

"Oh, I have been. But I'm not going to accept it anymore. I don't need anything from you, Chris."

It made my heart skip a beat. "Don't call me that."

"I don't want to call you dad. I can't pretend you aren't my father, but I'm not calling you dad." I had no idea what to say - it happens a lot, if you can't tell - and after a long stretch of silence, she said, "Can you come see my new place? I'll make dinner."

"Of course I'll see your new place, honey."

"Good. How about tomorrow night? I miss you."

It felt fast, not enough time to process going to see her in light of her confession, but she'd been gone for a few weeks and we'd barely spoken and I missed her so, so much. "I'll be there."

I was so uninvolved in her life I guess I was severely underestimating just how much scholarship money she'd gotten. Or maybe it came from somewhere else, I didn't know. It made me realize I knew fuck all about how she actually handled her life when I pulled up in front of her new place, a sleek, contemporary townhouse at the end of a dark road that was all square angles and hard surfaces.

Savannah answered the door and I had a thought that she hadn't looked young, exactly, in a long time. I mean, she was 22, what else could she be? But her bone structure, with high cheekbones and a strong jaw and a strong nose gave her face a sculpted look instead of that round fullness of youth. She was wearing a sheer pink silk blouse with a ruffled collar and skinny black pants and she didn't hesitate to hug me, but it was decidedly chaste. "Come in. I'll give you the tour."

"Your place is beautiful, honey. I'm glad you're here and not stuck in my crappy apartment anymore."

She glanced over her shoulder, her hair glossy and cascading down her back as she led me inside. "I'd rather be there with you than here alone."

"You don't like it here?"

"That's not what I said." She splayed a palm toward a living room with a plush white area rug, tan velvet sofa on gold bracket legs, and a round frosted glass coffee table in a gold frame. "Here's the living room. I'm not done filling it in, as you can see."

"It looks great. That couch looks a thousand times more comfy than mine."

She smiled wryly. "It is." She took me into the dining area, then into the kitchen where something in a covered cast iron skillet on the stove smelled amazing, and then up the stairs to pause briefly on the guest bedroom before leading me to her bedroom.

"How the hell did you afford all this?" I said. The bed was a king, with a wood and brown leather headboard that bordered on masculine, and a pair of classic club chairs in matching leather straddled a fireplace, angled toward the foot of the bed.

"I told you. I don't need anything from you."

"That's not an answer, Savannah," I said.

She sighed and leaned against the headboard, fiddling with the nailhead trim on the leather. "I had a roommate freshman year who was a fucking genius. I'm not kidding. It was like she knew what the stock market was going to do weeks before it did it. I watched her making these amazing deals with super small investments - like pocket change investments - and I gave her a thousand dollars and said, 'Can you do anything with this?' and a couple months later she'd turned it into $7,000. So I started giving her more money and we played the stock market together. Well, I watched and listened and kept telling her she was a fucking genius because she didn't really believe it at first. But I left it all up to her. So we're both doing fine and she's still making investments for me."

"Jesus."

"I can give you your money back that you sent me. I have it all. More than what you sent me, actually, because I asked her to invest it somewhere that was going to be safe for years to come, even if it only produced modest returns. The whole time I was in school, you sent me $60,000, Chris. $15,000 a year."

$15,000 was more than half of my annual income. Like I said, I was trying to give her everything I could, make up for everything I wasn't there to give her before, and I'd gotten real used to living on a shoestring budget in a shoestring town. "How much is it now?"

"$80,000. I know that's not much more than what you gave me, but I wanted to put it somewhere safe and not worry about it. I'm sorry it's not more."

"Savannah..." I said, and I realized I didn't know jack shit about her, and for a moment she didn't feel much like my daughter. "I meant for that money to make things easier for you."

"It did. Knowing it was there, that I had something to fall back on if I really, really fucked up, got me where I am now," she said. She went to leave the bedroom and paused at the door. "I want you to have it. Actually, I want you to have the opportunity to do whatever it is you wanted to do and couldn't because you had me."

I had to stand there in shock for a moment after she went downstairs, and then I followed her, right into the kitchen and took her bare shoulders and spun her around to face me. "Honey, I never for a minute regretted or resented you. If I ever said or did anything to make you feel like that-"

"You didn't," she said quickly. She bit her lip for a moment, skewing her mouth to the side. "I just know you and know if you had the chance to do what you really wanted, you could do it and be happier than maybe you ever thought. What do you want to do?"

I let my hands fall from her shoulders and shoved them into my jeans pockets. "I don't know. I don't even know what I'd be good at."

She nodded, her face sympathetic. "All you've done is work."

I thought about it as she set dinner out. It was a Moroccan stew in the skillet, it turned out, and I'd never tasted anything like it so I got distracted. "This is incredible. Where'd you learn this?"

"That same roommate was from Morocco. She taught me. I'm glad you like it."

"I love it. Compliments to both of you," I said. We'd both been avoiding it, why she'd left, what she'd said to me, but it was there, waiting. "Look, honey, we need to talk about what happened before you left. Can we do that?"

She took a drink of a dark burgundy, looking at me steadily. I had a Buckley dark because she had a bunch of them in her refrigerator. "I guess that depends on what you want to tell me."

"I don't know what I want to tell you. I want to talk about it because I'm having a hard time making sense of it and I'm hoping you feel differently now."

Another long look over the rim of her glass, and then she set it down. "I don't. And I know how I feel."

"You can't feel like this, Savannah. It's not healthy. And if you've felt like this for a long time, I would love it if you use all my money to talk to somebody about why."

Her jaw tightened for a moment. "Do you remember when you came home from work and you brought your coworker Tamara with you and we had dinner?"

I did, and my heart stopped. I didn't know she'd known. She'd been 18, just after she graduated high school.

"You were quiet. You both were. But I woke up to use the bathroom and I saw her shoes were still at the door but the living room was dark and I knew what was happening. And I was curious, so I went to your bedroom door and listened. I heard you with her. I heard how good you made her feel. And then I heard you. I remember it so well," Savannah said, and she stared at me, intent, for a long beat. "'You feel so good, Tam. Jesus, I love your pussy around my cock.'"

My face got hot, immediately, and I stood abruptly. "I never, ever meant for you to hear me."

"I wanted to. I wanted to hear you, and when I did, I was so angry that she got this part of you - no pun intended - and I didn't."

"Honey, you were confronted suddenly with some real intimate information about your father and what his sex life was like. That would confuse the hell out of anyone."

She shook her head. "I wasn't confused. I was already in love with you. It was like this fledgling desire in me for you matured at once. I wasn't jealous of her. I was mad that you were looking at a woman like that who wasn't me. I don't want to be with you because you're my dad. I just want to fuck you because you're you. Can you sit down, please? You wanted to talk."

After a moment, I did, and I'm still not sure why.

"I love Grandma and Grandpa. I even love my stepdad, kind of. But when I was growing up, watching these relationships...have you seen how Grandma and Grandpa are together? They try, and they love each other, but it's like they're speaking to two different parts of each other that barely ever match up. And watching Mom with Brandon, I mean. I'd go visit you and I think I was about 12 when I first thought, 'Jesus, no wonder Mom liked Dad so much.'"

"Savannah, I was a shitty father who was never there. Don't idolize me."

"I don't, trust me," she said. "I've never thought it was my fault you weren't around. Like if you weren't around, it wasn't because there was something wrong with me. And I knew you were good. So I've never hated you. I couldn't, not when every time I did get to see you it was like the world just felt right. You're special. No one's ever treated me like you do."

"I'm your dad. Of course I'm going to treat you differently than other men. It takes a long time to find a man who can treat you with the same regard that I do. But it's not your dad that you find."

She thought about responding to that and I guess decided she didn't need to because she said, "Anyway, ever since that night, it's what I've wanted. I've been to therapists. I've had a lot of boyfriends and even one girlfriend and I've even prayed that I didn't really feel this way, but I do."

"Well, I can't imagine your therapists signed off on this."

"They did when I described everything except who you are. They said I wasn't letting this fixation rule my life. They gave me tools to deal with it and I tried. But I never really stopped wanting what I wanted. They said, 'Why can't you be with this person?' and I said 'You'll have to trust me that I just can't,' and they said all I could do was keep deciding not to be with you and focus on other things, so I did. And I hated it. And I want to try something different."

It didn't make any fucking sense. "Savannah, do you think I could do something like that to my own daughter?"

"Well, I'm hoping," she said, with another wry smile. "I know it's not likely. But I have to do something. Either to get what I want or to know, for sure, that I can never have it."

I should've told her right then and there that she could never have it. But I didn't. I look back and try to pinpoint the moment I was for sure a goner, and that's a top contender.

I finished dinner but I didn't stay very long after. It was all too fucking weird and disturbing and when I got home - still the crappy two-bedroom, but in the midst of packing it all up - it felt sad and lonely and I summoned Jack Daniels from the cabinet to keep me company. And even he wasn't enough, so I walked to the Shanty, found Julia playing pool. She'd been the kind of friend I needed late at night more than once, and it wasn't long before we were back at my place.

"You moving in?" she asked.

"Out, actually," I said. "Had my daughter staying with me for a while, but she's got her own place now. Don't need two bedrooms."

"Hold up," Julia said. "You have a daughter? Chris, how long have we known each other and I didn't know you had a daughter? And she's old enough to live on her own?"

I shrugged and took two shot glasses from the cabinet. "She's been at school a long, long time. I had her when I was 14. It's been a real strange journey and now she's making all this money, about to go to med school, and I just...yeah, I have a daughter. She's a wonder."

Julia raised her eyebrows and hooked her fingers through the belt loops on my jeans and tugged me closer. I liked being with Julia for a lot of reasons, including how soft her round parts were when I held her, like they were happy to make room for me to hold her tight, and I put my hands on her hips. "All right. Chris has a daughter who's somehow making bank in med school. Got it."

I smiled. "Thank you for coming back here with me, Julia. I really appreciate the company tonight."

She was looking at my jeans, unbuttoning the fly. "Why, did something happen?"

"Just had a weird night and being with you is making it a lot better."

"Okay, Tiger. How about you start making my night a lot better with your mouth?"

I didn't see Savannah for a while. I wasn't trying to punish her. She didn't call me and I didn't call her for two weeks, and then I did call her. She picked up quick.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi, honey. Been a while. How you doing?" I said. I was on a break at work. It gave me a good reason to keep the call short.

"I'm okay. How are you?"

"Oh, you know, I'm good. It's good to talk to you."

A pause. "I miss you."

"I miss you, too." And then I didn't know what to say.

"Can we get together? I could meet you at the Shanty or something, we could have a drink. Or we could go to a bar by my place. Lot more options over here."

I paused this time. It was just a drink. Neither of us were heavy drinkers, it wasn't like we got blitzed together on the regular. I wanted to say yes, and it felt like I was agreeing to something we hadn't named. I don't think she meant it that way. But she'd spoken to something deep inside me before, and it was listening now. "All right. I could do that. Let's go to your favorite spot in your new town."

"Tonight?" She was hopeful.

"Sure, honey. Just tell me where."

I procrastinated before leaving the apartment. I took a long time to shower and a long time to have dinner and by the time I parked in front of Lavender, this bar she liked, I was 30 minutes late. She knew I was coming, I texted her I was running late because I'm only a half dick, not a full dick.

Lavender was aptly named. It was sleek and contemporary like her townhouse. It felt right in there, comfortable and easy and not pretentious in a palette of lavender, wheat, cream, and a deep gray blue. And they had lavender growing in these rectangular planters along the walls, and many a drink infused with lavender, just to really drive it home, I guess.

Savannah was waiting for me at the bar, in a thin yellow crepe sundress with a pastel floral print and flushed cheeks and no one could tell you she didn't look gorgeous. It seemed to be a good place for people like her, put together and classy and beautiful, and I'd showed up in a worn baseball hat and a rust-colored flannel.