“He can sleep with you over my dead body”: An Excerpt From Crystal Whisperer

I trotted to the upper deck. As agreed, Dries was there, leaning on the bow railing, gazing down at the dark waves and enjoying the night breeze. I approached him slowly, and rested my back against the railing, arms crossed.

Until I met Dries, I always thought I had inherited my ability to settle in angry and uncomfortable silence from my dad, who’d be in the Guinness World Records if they actually had a category for that. But I was now considering the possibility that genetics were involved: Dries was a passive aggressive black belt, masterfully building a stifling, nerve-racking atmosphere, rhythmed by his occasional intakes of air and the rolls crashing against the hull.

He won. I eventually spoke because it was either this or trying to push him over the railing. “Look, this needs to stop: You . . . treating me like I’m sixteen, and the way you barged in back there, it was unacceptable. And also completely creepy. Whatever your problem is, let’s talk it though. Like adults.”

It took him a good minute to answer. When he did, his voice held an unfamiliar edge: not just cold anger, or even exasperation, but perhaps an itsy tiny bit of hurt. “I dragged that little punk out of the dumpster he lived in. I trained him, I gave him everything . . . and he took off, cost me two billion dollars, and hooked up with my daughter.”

Lots of shortcuts and self-victimization there . . . I turned around to rest my elbows on the railing, much in the same fashion he was. “And so what?”

“He can sleep with you over my dead body.”