“Cheers to that.”
It was sarcastic but she touched her glass to mine. “So this is finally it, right? You’re calling it? Giving up the futile fight?” she smirked. “Oh, don’t make that face, Callum. You’re insanely fucking sexy when you’re mad but I like it so much better when those pretty lips are smiling.” She pushed my hand off the armrest and sat her ass on it. “Though what I prefer most,” she sipped slowly on her drink, “is when those lips are somewhere on my body. Preferably starting here.” She fingered a line across her tits. “And then moving down to… oh, I think right around here.” Her hand trailed to her stomach and then down to her lap, settling between her thighs.
I said nothing. I’d hoped that drinking this much would erase the furious tornado spinning in my brain. Of course, all it did was give it the energy to bounce off the walls of my head like an inmate in an asylum, raving incoherently in his straitjacket. My mind still spun with activity – it was just completely fucking useless aside from driving me quietly insane.
Ana swung her long legs over and rested them onto my lap. “Someone needs to relax.”
“You’re observant.”
“I am. And I’m actually not sure why I asked if there was anything I could do to make you feel better. I know there are lots of things I could do.” The rest of the guys were too hammered to pay attention to us. Probably a good thing because Ana’s skirt was hiking all the way up as she crossed one leg over the other. The bartender caught my heavy-lidded gaze from across the room. He raised his eyebrows, gave me two thumbs up and then went on with his business.
I was slow to respond to Ana. “Yeah?”
“Oh yeah.” She took my hand and ran it up her naked thigh. She held it there, took my glass and drank from it. “Mm.” She sighed. Half-moaned. “You know, hotel bars are always my favorite.”
“And why’s that.”
Her hand slid mine up her skirt till I was far enough to feel nothing underneath. She whispered in my ear. “Because it’s so easy to get a room the second you need it.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Lake
The same nausea that churned my stomach the day I found Trish and Hunt was making its return years later, across the ocean, with new life. It asked me what Callum would think about the fact that I cared and sometimes ached for a man who had sex with his stepmom, my mother. How Callum would feel about the fact that the relationship with Trish, it turned out, was the very least of Hunt’s faults. Just the tip of the iceberg. I’d been merely too stupid to see it.
I was in Scotland for God’s sake. My eyes stared out vacantly at the sea of blue before me but my nails clawed desperately at my skin, trying to get rid of every time Hunt had ever touched me, made me the same as my mom. My mind wasn’t relenting. It refused to stop dragging me by the legs through the dirt, the gravel and the filthy memories of Sunstone.
I threw up outside after I saw Trish and Hunt in bed together. Shanna came running. I don’t remember what I did to make her worry so much that she went to get Dean from the management office. I protested weakly for her to stop but eventually, I was on my hands and knees, hovering over my own vomit and too weak to say or do anything. I didn’t move or make a single noise when Dean came along, threw me over his shoulder and took me to where he now spent most of his time. Over the course of my fifteen months there, he’d gone from living one or two nights to almost full-time in the office. Trish said it was because he used the money I brought to spruce up the place real nice and he was having an affair with some girl. She said she didn’t care as long as it kept his hands off of her. Hunt agreed. So did I. He checked on her once a week, I heard a fight every time and after he left, Trish would come to me shaking, brushing back my hair and saying, “It’s okay. He’s gone. He’s crazy but he’s gone.”
But now I wondered about every last thing she and Hunt had ever told me.
Dean dropped me like a ragdoll into the chair across his desk. I heard the sound of him ripping a paper towel off a roll. When he came back to me, he shoved his hand in my hair, held my head up and wiped the bile off my mouth and the collar of my shirt. “What happened.” There was no inflection in his question. I know I took too long to answer because he barked it at me again. My thoughts scrambled back together fast.
“My mom with Hunt.” And her sling wasn’t on. Her shattered elbow was working fine, I realized. It was reaching for the ceiling and plopped back to the mattress with a bounce when she noticed me. It was never broken. And I was an unforgivable idiot. “They were in bed. Together.”
“That ain’t nothing new.”
Still panting, I stared. “I didn’t know.”
“Whole lot you don’t.”
He sat down behind his desk. I finally got the chance to look up and around. I always imagined that inside his office, he had a big screen TV and calendars with fast cars and naked women on them. I imagined nice furniture – nicer, at least – and a permanent group of friends hanging out on the couch drinking beer. But there was none of that. There was his desk, his chair, the one across that I sat on and a torn couch on which a cardboard box rested. It was bursting with multicolored files and papers. His desk was no different. There was no excess and it wasn’t the bachelor’s pad that I imagined. It was a workspace. The telephone rang. He answered it, said something about how he’d have it fixed, and then hung up to return his irritated attention to me.
“I guess you don’t realize I ain’t really with your mom no more.”
My face crinkled. “What are you talking about?”
“Legally, we are together. The church says we’re together. But as far as I’m concerned, Trisha ain’t my wife or my family. Same with Hunt.”
My throat was raw. “Because of the affair?” My every word was a broken rasp.
“I confirmed my decision when I found out about that.” Dean dragged his hand over his face and tugged on his beard. He moved some papers around on his desk and didn’t look at me. His voice was casual, tinged only with annoyance as he proceeded to reveal all the truths that splintered me straight through my stomach. “Your ma’s been after your money since before I met her. She just didn’t talk about it much when we were dating. I didn’t want to hear about it. You weren’t nobody to me. But I didn’t have no choice once your grandma died. Trish was nonstop then. Real excited. She found you online and she looked at all the nice things you had and showed Hunt. He got excited, too. I guess he was seventeen then. He wanted a car real bad and Trisha said he could get a nice one if we got you to send some money.”
I was an even bigger idiot than I thought. The bile rose again in my throat.
“I didn’t like when they started getting it. I didn’t touch the things they bought with it. Not the booze or the toys or the drugs. She was off that shit for awhile but not after she had all that cash in her hands.”
God. I’d been fueling drug habits the whole time. My lips went dry. “Did you ever hurt her?”
He paused. His frown deepened as he looked at me. “I push her when she hits me.”
“Did you threaten her,” I clarified. “Or make her feel like you might hurt her? Or… she said there was… I thought there was a story with…” I tried to remember that article Trish sent me about war veteran Dean Casey whose episode of PTSD had him attacking a man with a bat, leaving him brain dead in the hospital.
“I got a domestic abuse call. We get them here. Cops weren’t coming so I went and he was rabid, foaming at the mouth. Had his girl duct-taped to her chair and came at me with a knife. I took his bat and I started swinging.” Dean drank from his mug. It had Mickey Mouse ears on it. I couldn’t process any of this.