Dad had been a professional boxer back in the day, until he’d killed a man in the ring. He’d given up the profession after that, but he’d still fought regularly in pop-up street fights and bare-knuckle leagues, adding MMA-style moves to his boxer’s toolbox.
He’d been forced to fight a lot while he’d been in prison, before Duncan’s time. The guards at McAlester had a ring going while Dad was there. Probably still had it going even now. The guards had not been overly concerned with the health and safety of their inmate gladiators.
Though Dad was broken down after all that, with long list of permanently damaged parts, like deafness in one ear, diminished sight in one eye, nearly crippling arthritis in his hands, and more, he still loved the sport, and Duncan had grown up watching UFC with him. When he was in middle school, when Mom finally gave in, Dad started training him. By the time he graduated high school, he was fighting in underground matches and bare-knuckle street fights, and winning significantly more than he lost. He’d made some decent money at it.
If Dad had succeeded in keeping the Bull off Duncan’s back, his Plan B had been to try to go pro.
But the Bull was on his back now, and he no longer had much time for fighting. Besides, Eight wanted the patches to keep their recreational violence in their own ring. Though he’d apparently been a loose cannon as a soldier in the club, stirring up trouble wherever he could, as president he was all about keeping their shit low-pro and not catching the notice of Mr. and Mrs. Normie or John Q. Law.
The fight he’d wanted to see again was over, so he turned off the television. As he headed to the bathroom to brush his teeth, he heard his father laugh at something Mom must have said.
That laugh was specific, and for Duncan it carried a load of feelings and associations. Only Mom got that laugh, and only when they were private together. It was an intimate, secret thing, a lover’s laugh, and any time Duncan had ever heard it, he knew he’d caught something not meant for him.
His parents’ marriage was the model for what he wanted himself, when he was ready to want it. His father and mother loved each other, and it showed every day. They’d been married almost thirty years, they’d been together years longer than that, and they were still completely in love and completely horny for each other.
They argued, sure, and sometimes those arguments were loud and intense. Dad wasn’t just a control freak with the kids, and Mom tended to react to trouble with big emotions before she calmed and started trying to solve the problem. That combination sometimes produced an explosion. But they always worked it out, always apologized when they were wrong, always smoothed the path between them. They didn’t hide any of it from the kids, either. If they blew up at each other in front of them, they explained why, and how they’d made it better.
Because for them love was more than attraction, more than passion. It was respect.
Duncan knew more than a few people who thought real love had to hurt, that passion meant fighting, that the best sex was angry sex. But he’d learned that passion was what healed the pain. Real love meant trying not to cause pain in the first place and soothing it when it happened. People fucked up; good or bad, they fucked up. But good people, loving people, owned it and fixed it when they did.
That was the lesson Duncan’s parents had taught him about romance and relationships.
Hearing that quiet sound of his father’s love for his mother, Duncan felt a weird weight in his chest. He went back to his bed and grabbed his phone.
The last text exchange between him and Phoebe was from a few days earlier. He’d explained that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get the engine in shape before he had to leave town, and she’d replied: Understood. Whenever you can get to it. I’m just so grateful for this help. It is HUGE, and I will never be able to repay you adequately. But I do intend to try. Really, Duncan. Thank you.
Happy to do it was all he’d replied.
Now that seemed a stupidly half-assed response. He’d improved on that, certainly, by bringing the repaired truck down to her ranch, but he’d fucked that up in the end by not being able to just say yes, he’d text her while he was away.
Could he do it now? After the way they’d left things this morning?
Maybe he could start by apologizing for that.
Hey, he typed. I’m sorry about this morning.
As he tried to think what more he should say, and wanted to say, his father came into the room. As Duncan looked up, his thumb grazed the send button.
Shit.
He stared at his phone. Should he send another message? Add the thought he’d been trying to think? Or would a second message seem like an afterthought—or make him look like a simp?
He set his phone down. Maybe it was better for that apology to stand on its own for now.
CHAPTER TEN
Late in the morning, Phoebe sat at the desk in the living room and worked on her Patreon. She tried to provide ‘exclusive content’ of some sort once a week. It had taken her a while to figure out what her patrons wanted that was special enough to feel like a real exclusive, but it turned out they basically wanted more of the same—longer videos of the animals, more information about their health and welfare. They loved content about vet and farrier visits almost as much as cute and/or silly animal antics.
Some of her most popular videos, on social media and Patreon both, were just closeups of the horses getting their hooves trimmed. People were fascinated—and some commenters even called it their ‘ASMR.’ Phoebe didn’t get it, but hey—whatever brought the donations in.
The end of the month was coming up, and she always did a recap post, like a big journal entry summarizing everything she and the animals had done on the ranch over the previous four weeks or so. Since Afghanistan, staring at words on a screen gave her a migraine after about twenty or thirty minutes, so it took her several days to write a long post like that.
It would be better if she started drafting the recap at the beginning of the month and added to it daily like an actual journal, so she’d have all the details fresh in her mind and could spend only five or ten minutes each day. But she hadn’t started out that way, and the drag of spending several days working on it at the end of the month made her procrastinate starting the next one right away, so Phoebe was caught in a dysfunction cycle of her own making.
Right now, the words were starting to make ghosts in her vision, the code-red sign for ‘get the fuck off the computer or else,’ so she saved her draft and prepared to get the fuck off the computer. Maybe she’d put a few more minutes into the draft after dinner.
On her way to close out of Patreon, she noticed that her number of top-tier patrons had dropped by two—actually, when she got a closer view, she saw that she’d lost three patrons at that level, including her two biggest patrons, but had gained one at the exact same donation amount of one of those she’d lost, the biggest donor by far. That struck her notice because her biggest donor was someone she knew in the real world: Evelyn Hanover, an elderly widow and well-known philanthropist in the Oklahoma animal rescue world. Her monthly donation was a custom $1978—the year she’d married her husband. She donated the same amount to all her favored rescuers.
The new patron, with an anonymized username (allsoulshavesouls) had set their donation at that exact same amount: $1978.