The Daddy P.I. Casefiles: The First Collection by Frost, J (great novels .txt) 📕

a profound fucking relief. Funny that what felt strange just a few days ago now feels like the world’s been set to rights. Grinning, I survey the wreckage. She’s eaten every piece of tuna except one forlorn piece of sashimi.

“Yes, since you asked, monkey.”

She pounces on it, spears it with her chopsticks, and, grinning, pops it in her mouth.

“So, you read comics for the heroic storylines, huh?”

She shrugs and suddenly draws into herself.

What the fuck? My twisted obsession with my sister didn’t faze her, making her role-play a widow while I beat the shit out of her gave her a huge catharsis, but asking her about her motivation for reading comic books makes her recoil?

I try to restore the light atmosphere. “I read them for the hot chicks.”

She smiles, but it’s not the grin she was wearing a minute ago. Did she read them for masturbatory material, too? Is she ashamed of that? Or is it something else?

“I read them because they were cheap,” she admits after a long silence. “I only had ten dollars a week from babysitting. There was a used book and comic store near where we lived. I’d cycle there every day after school. They’d let me stay all afternoon and read anything I wanted as long as I bought something. The comics were the cheapest. I could go every day after school if I bought one comic a day.”

“You must have a huge collection,” I say, watching her. She’s drawn into a ball. Everything about her body language is projecting pain. Is she ashamed of being poor? Of not having enough money to buy books? Or is it something else?

She shakes her head. “Just the EQ. I had more, but, um, my mother got rid of them. I took the EQ with me to college, so she missed those.”

“She threw out your comic collection?” I ask, trying to keep my tone neutral. I don’t want Emily to think I’m criticizing her mother, particularly since she’s told me the woman has dementia.

Emily nods. “She’d kill herself if she knew how much some of those are worth now. I mean, I didn’t have any Action Comics or anything, but I loved Batman, so I had a really good collection of Dark Knight. Once the owner of the bookstore realized I was collecting, he sold me an entire box of New Mutants from the eighties for a month’s worth of babysitting money. That was when Chris Claremont was writing. Some of those have become valuable. I loved my comics so I took good care of them. I made myself sick a while back looking up their values. One of the X-Men I had sold for four hundred dollars. I figured she threw away over five thousand in comics.”

“Fuck, baby doll.”

She shrugs and, when I hold my arm out for her again, tucks herself against my side. “She didn’t know.”

If she was in her right mind, she knew she was destroying part of her daughter’s childhood, whether or not she knew the material value attached to it.

“Was this when she got sick?” I ask gently.

“No, it was before that, when I split up from my ex. I, uh, I didn’t have anywhere to go so I asked if I could move back in with her. Just for a couple of weeks until I found my own place. She told me I needed to grow up, go back to my husband, and make the best of my marriage. She threw out everything I’d left at home. All my clothes, my books, my comics, to make her point.”

I control my reaction tightly and stroke her hair. “Did you?”

“Go back to the man who gave me a sexually transmitted disease? No, I did not. My college roommate and her husband let me crash on their couch until I found an apartment.”

Oh, fuck. “That’s why you left your husband?”

She nods against my shoulder. “I’d been bleeding on and off for weeks. I thought I had cancer. When the doctor told me it was chlamydia, I almost wished it had been.”

“No, sweetheart.” I stroke her hair.

“No, I don’t mean that. It’s just that cancer, you know, it would have been something wrong with me, instead of something wrong with my marriage. I could have dealt with it. Chlamydia, I couldn’t deal with.”

“So, he cheated on you?”

What am I doing with the stupid questions tonight? I know how to interview people without sticking my foot in my mouth. I’m still rattled.

She doesn’t seem phased by my stupidity. “He said it was only the one time, but I knew when it started, and it was years before. Our sex life was never very good. Ash was the first man I was with, and I guess I just accepted that sex was a non-event for me.”

A non-event? For the woman who just had two howling orgasms on the rug we’re now sitting on? Could her husband not be bothered to figure out what aroused her?

“After a couple of years,” she continues, “he really lost interest. We’d have sex once a week for like ten minutes. He didn’t even try to involve me. I finally understood all that Victorian crap about conjugal duty. And I knew he was getting it elsewhere. I knew, even though I couldn’t admit it to myself. At the time, it was a relief that he’d stopped demanding sex more often. But when it slapped me in the face in that doctor’s office, it wasn’t a relief.” She takes a deep breath. “It hurt so much.”

I kiss her temple. “I’m sorry, baby doll.”

“I don’t love him anymore.” She turns those big, hazel eyes up to me. “I was telling the truth when you asked me those questions. But I still feel betrayed.”

“I can understand that.” I heard it in her voice during the spanking. The careless bastard had her love and let it die, as much as from neglect as from infidelity. “Thank you for trusting me with that, Emmy. I know it wasn’t