Not for Tobias Easton and Truth Steel.
“Lay with me?”
“Until you fall asleep, yeah.”
I lie on top of the comforter and her underneath. I pull her close and hate the fact that we fit fucking perfectly together.
But, for just a few hours, we can both pretend.
Chapter Twenty Three
Tobias
I never sleep well. A couple hours is all I ever get at a stretch, so the fact I slept for four straight hours is amazing.
Four hours with her, and I am now standing here, feeling like a fucking hurricane is coming, and it’s not even hurricane season. I force down my protein shake and try to get my shit together.
Some fucked-up feeling pulls me to my front porch with a cup of coffee, thinking maybe it’s just instinctual to want to piss all over the porch when you have a woman you actually give a fuck about in your bed. But when a big black Denali rolls down my street, parks in front of my place, and the father of the soon-to-be wrongfully accused steps out, I know it wasn’t a hurricane I was feeling. It was Cyrus Steel. The man, the myth, the legend.
“My girl here?”
I nod. “She’s sleeping, she’s safe, and I didn’t touch her.”
“Now, why the fuck would you think I would even have that thought in my head? Do you think I’d truly believe my girl would give it up to a guy who pisses his pants?”
I sigh and sit down. “I wouldn’t think you’d be too happy about it, but I wanted to spare you the worry.”
“Worrying stopped after we picked Patrick up from the police station, wondering where my daughter was for five fucking minutes,” he spits. “That five minutes was like a fucking lifetime, kid.”
“I can understand.”
Through his teeth, he sneers, “The fuck you can.”
I nod, knowing there’s no way in hell to argue it. I’m not a father. And there’s no way in fuck I’m going to tell him I never will be because, in the past few months, I’ve mourned the loss of the girl I knew immediately would one day be my wife and the children we will never have.
“The other night, after our little ride, I looked into you.” He takes off his sunglasses, pulls a chair up close enough that we’re almost knee to knee, sits down, and pops his pecs. “You know the loss of a parent, and I can look you straight in the eyes and say I get that. Lost my father due to the fact he was the kind of man who would follow his son to save someone’s life, and he ended up dead because of me. So, I get that you get loss. But when, for even five minutes, you think your girl can be in the woods dead, lost, being hurt, you don’t get to tell me you know or understand that feeling. You don’t get to tell me you know or understand what it would be like to tell the woman who made you forgive yourself for an accident you couldn’t have foreseen that her baby was missing or worse.”
I nod. “I did what was asked of me for a girl I’ve been falling for but will never be able to have. A girl who has fallen for me, and I have to push away because we can never be together. So, I may not get exactly how twisted your guts might have been for those five minutes, but you will never know what it’s like to have to do what I’ve been doing either.”
His eyebrows shoot up, and he’s borderline raging when he asks, “You talking about my little bird?”
“Before you flip on me, which I get you want to, I’d appreciate it if you’d hear me out.”
“You got three minutes, punk,” he sneers.
“Guess that will have to do.”
“Time’s ticking,” he says as he sits back, his muscles flexing as he tries to hold himself back from tearing me a new asshole.
“My mother—”
“Hope Easton.”
I nod. “She had me—”
“At fifteen.”
Again, I nod. Then I lean back, rub my hand up and down my face, and whisper, “Fuck.”
“Keep your shit together. You got two and a half minutes, kid.”
“She worked—”
“A nurse, and for the US Navy.”
“After years of stripping.” I look at him and see his body stiffen. “She started when she was fifteen, obviously didn’t go by Hope, but I don’t know her stripper name.”
“Where did she work?”
“I’m pretty sure you already know the answer to that.”
“She know my Tara?”
I shrug. “Never heard mention of her. I was five when she quit because of some shitty babysitter who almost burned our place down with a crackpipe, with me in it.”
He lets out a deep breath and sits back.
“Your kids don’t know. No one but Frank does.”
“Your boss at the jewelry place?”
I nod then shrug. “Something like that.”
“Meaning?”
“He and Mom were tight on and off. When she died, he got custody. When he almost lost this place, I threatened him with some shit if he didn’t help me get emancipated so I could handle the finances and make sure I kept the place we were happiest.”
“Bad ass move. Go on.”
“Got me a scholarship to Seashore before I did that, but I got like three minutes and thirty seconds, so I’ll leave that and my criminal record alone and continue.” I’m fucking rambling and feel like I’m going to be sick.
“May ask you to revisit, but go on.”
I scrub my hand up my face and tell myself to get it together.
“A friend knew I was struggling and thought, hey, let’s find your daddy. I did one of those DNA tests, found my closest relative on a website, stalked a little, found pictures of my mom on his social media, found pictures of him in my mom’s shit, and boom, I have a father. Ninety-nine point nine percent. Pictures aren’t the greatest, but who the fuck am I to judge how the man lived? I’m the son of a fifteen-year-old girl who got knocked up while working at a strip club under an assumed name and a fake ID.”
“Ease up on the stripper bit. You know my wife had the same beginning. No one there to help them get by, and shitbags everywhere leading them in the …” He stops talking, and I realize my knee is bouncing, chest is tight, eyes are fucking filling up, and I want to crawl out of my skin, but I’ve got nowhere to go.
Nowhere.
I finally look at him. His eyes are wide, his chest rising and falling. He’s not feeling any more at ease than me.
I shake my head and look down, unable to watch him look me over, knowing I’m going to get sick if he sees something about me that reminds him of the man he literally saved his wife from, the same man who knocked up a girl who was still a kid, the same man that I share DNA with.
“He’s dead, if that makes it any easier. Died after I sent him money like I had been for the couple months we’d been messaging. Used it to buy meth.” I look up at him.
His face is unreadable, and he’s not saying anything, but he’s doing it—looking me over.
“Look, you and Frank are the only ones who know. Tony—whatever he went by then—never mentioned it. Wasn’t until I saw Truth at the shop that Frank put two and two together. He told me the story Mom had told him about that piece of shit.”