TornByLove by Marilyn Lee

Chapter One
     
    From an early age, I’d always known what I wanted out of life and did my best to make decisions that would make reaching my goals possible. Yet somehow I ended up in the worst situation possible when I found myself torn between love and desire and knew one of the two people I loved most in the world would end up hurt—and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do to change that.
    As a rebellious teenager giving my parents sleepless nights as I broke curfew, drank, and experimented with drugs, I never listened when my grandmother warned me to show more concern for my parents because I’d reap what I sowed. Yeah. Right. Like such nonsense warnings were going to make an impact on me.
    Years later, I found myself struggling to keep an angry, rebellious teenager from making all the mistakes I’d made at his age and wishing I’d been kinder to my parents. They died in a car accident just after Brenda lost the baby and before they got a chance to see that I’d finally straightened up my life.
    As a teenager, relishing in triumph each time I outsmarted my parents, I promised myself that I’d never allow some ungrateful little crumb snatcher to do the same to me. Once I started having sex, I made it clear to every female I slept with that I wasn’t interested in being anyone’s baby’s daddy. Of course that was before I made one of the biggest mistakes of my own life, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
    My best friend Dan, who had struggled with drugs since junior high and had unprotected sex once too often and ended up a father by the time he was fifteen, was forever going on about how wrong I was to write off fatherhood. But I was too busy enjoying being single and kid–free to listen to him. Still, it did seem to bring out the best in him. When his baby’s mother took off with another guy and left him to struggle alone as a single father, he buckled down and devoted himself to his son, Mark.
    I was at the hospital when Mark was born and often thought of him as a somewhat annoying pain in the ass. Dan made so many sacrifices for Mark, I often joked about his being the father of the decade.
    Imagine how shell-shocked I was when Dan asked if Mark could stay with me while he headed to L.A. for his first vacation in four years. When I reluctantly agreed, I had no idea of his real intent. Four weeks later, after ignoring all my attempts to contact him, Dan sent a terse email telling me he couldn’t cope with being a single father anymore and he needed me to take care of Mark until he recharged his energy.
    I protested but he said the alternative was to stick Mark in a home since none of his relatives were willing to help. I couldn’t see Mark alone with strangers. So I settled down to play dad for a few more weeks.
    Three months later, Dan had cut off all communication and I realized I was stuck with Mark until he came to his senses. Although royally fucked off, I did the best I could. At first Mark took every opportunity to piss me off as if I were the one who’d deserted him. I lost track of the number of times I felt like tossing him out on his ungrateful ass.
    That first year was rougher than anything I’d ever endured. Mark was surly, rebellious, and fond of reminding me that I wasn’t his father every time I told him to do something he didn’t want to do. Hell, he pissed me off when he did that and I wasn’t above reminding him that father or not, I was the one keeping a roof over his rowdy head and spending a small fortune to feed his ungrateful, dumb ass.
    I was determined to see that he didn’t do any of the things in my house that I’d done to make my parents’ lives so miserable. That included skipping school, drinking, smoke weed, and blowing off his curfew. Not in my damned house.
    When he was nearly seventeen, I came home early to a marijuana-filled house and found him and his loser “best-friend” double fucking a drunken woman old enough to be their mother. That resulted in our