I turn off the shower, and towel her off. I look into her eyes and can’t believe I’m about to say. “I love you, Daphne,” I say.
Fuck me. Who ever thought this day would come?
She looks me in the eyes as I look at her. Fuck, if anything happened to her, I don’t know what I’d do. I wouldn’t be able to go on.
She looks at me for a long moment. A very long moment. “I need you to come with me, Derrick.”
She wraps the towel around her and ties it in the front, and walks out of the bathroom. I stare at her ass and her shapely fucking legs as she walks off.
I gotta say one thing. This is not the response I expected to me declaring that I loved her.
I follow Daphne into her room and she sits down on the bed.
I throw my towel over my shoulder. Daphne looks at me and scrunches her nose.
“You’re not feeling the towel?” she asks me with a smirk. This girl is starting to get some sass in her.
Just looking at Daphne sitting on her bed is getting my cock hard. I grin at her, and walk over to the bed. But as I get close, she pulls out her laptop and turns it my direction.
“If you’ve fallen in love with me Derrick,” she says and I stop short. “If you’ve really fallen in love with me, then…I can’t keep this to myself any longer.”
What the fuck is this? I actually put my towel down and sit down on the bed.
“You need to know the truth,” Daphne says and hands me her tablet as well.
I look through it. The headline is from the St. Livy Register - the newspaper of record in my kingdom. It simply reads, “Queen Dies From Drug Overdose in New York.”
I look up at Daphne. “What the fuck is this?” I ask, my heart starting to beat.
She looks at me firmly. “The truth,” she says. “Read.”
And read I fucking do.
It rocks my fucking world.
My mother never had cancer. She had several, and I’m talking about upwards of ten times she checked into rehab for drugs. For alcohol.
Article after article. Government records. Foreign newspapers and gossip columns. All painting a picture far more different than I ever knew.
My parents being married in an arranged marriage. My mother getting caught cheating on my father, the King at least five times. Her struggles with alcoholism. Her passing out drunk and high at state functions. Embezzlement of monies from the Royal Treasury. Being picked up in Amsterdam in the Red Light District - high on methamphetamines.
Finally, internal documents that were declassified by the St. Livy Royal Office showing my father taking my mother for treatment all around the world. Taking her to St. Penares for therapy. To Australia to get away from the press. And finally to bring her to New York City for intensive therapy - after a particularly heinous episode where she was caught fucking two guys in the Royal Palace with cocaine in her system and a Blood Alcohol Level around 0.15.
Apparently New York City was the last straw. A sum of $2.5 million dollars was found to have been embezzled by my mother and the Parliament of St. Livy had demanded that the King do something about his wayward wife or abdicate the throne until the matter was resolved.
Rather than throw his country into chaos, he brought her to treatment here.
But it didn't work.
I read a News of the Times article that talks about how the Queen of St. Livy was checked into rehab and left one night. She went partying, and died of alcohol poisoning and a drug overdose.
The heroin was too pure apparently.
Pictures of my father at the funeral. Despite everything that she’d done to him - all the times he could have divorced her - he stayed by her side until she took her life. I look at shots of my father, his head bowed and sad, holding me.
“Where did you get all this?” I ask Daphne, awed that she could put this all together. “How did you get all this?”
“I’ve been digging Derrick,” she says. “You talk about your father so much, but he doesn’t deserve your hate. He deserves…”
I don’t let her finish. “Sympathy,” I say out loud.
Oh my fucking God. What the fuck have I done? All my father wanted was to preserve for me the sweet and innocent image of my mother that I had. He let me continue thinking that. He let me stay angry at him. He let me turn into the prodigal son, the embarrassment to the throne. Everything I ever did to hurt him, he took without question because he wanted me to have a mother.
And I twisted it, to where he no longer had a son.
Daphne coms over and wraps her arms around me.
Fuck, I’ve never cried in my life. But if there were any time that I would, now would be it.
I look over at my angel.
She looks at me as she speaks. “I love you, Derrick Blaine,” she says to me, a single tear falling from her eye.