by Brook Greene
“You know what I have to do about it,” I say flatly. “There isn’t anything else I can do.” I lower my head, digging my fingers in my hair, letting out a low groan. “I’ve fucked this up so bad.”
“Yes, you have,” she agrees, making me jerk my head up, ready to go off on her, but the softness of her features stops me with my mouth hanging open. “But…,” she slides out of her seat to kneel on the floor at my feet. “There’s no one else who has the resources or need to get the request done.” She smiles at me, laying her hand on my knee.
I see in her crystal blue eyes the little girl who used to follow me, Leo, Dalton, and Cowboy around, only wanting to be included, has grown into a strong, opinionated woman.
I stand, taking her up with me and fold my arms around her, holding her tight to me. “I love you, sis. Thank you for always keeping my shit in check and being my biggest cheerleader.”
I feel a little moisture against my bare chest, and I do believe Piper has grown a heart. “If I don’t, then who will?” She sniffs, backing away from me, wiping her eyes as she tries to hide the evidence of the wonderful woman she is.
She tilts her head, and I see in her eyes the same thing I’m thinking. Hollis’s mother had taken so much away from the both of us. Not Hollis, but the woman who had brought her into this world. “Are you okay with this?”
“With what?”
“Me marrying the daughter of the woman who caused our parents’ death?”
She presses her lips into a thin line and backs away from me, tears streaming down her face. “I haven’t thought of Hollis like that in a long time. Is that how you see her?”
I jerk my head back. “No.” I settle back down into the chair and look out the windows across the table, watching the trees in the back yard sway in the light breeze. “She’s my Hollis, the one I got to know in high school.”
She laughs as she wipes the tears from her cheeks. “She was such a bitch in high school.”
I look at her, raising my eyebrows at her. “Uh, Piper?”
She scowls at me. “Shut up.” She smiles, and then falls silent. She lowers herself again, resting her forearms on my legs. “Think about it, Roman. If we had the chance to find a missing relative somewhere, wouldn’t you want to do that too? She’s been alone since she was eighteen years old. We had the blessing of knowing both our parents for most of our lives, she didn’t.” She looks away and sighs. “She had that mother of hers who fucking sucked at parenting. What if she has a father that doesn’t know about her, who could’ve been the functioning parent she needed in her life? The one who could’ve given her a stable home and love?” She takes my hands in hers, giving them a good squeeze. “Find him for her, so that we all know there might be hope out there for us all.”
She reaffirms something that I already knew I was going to do for the woman I love, give her something she’d never had.
I’m ready to end this conversation. “You got some clothes for me?” I sigh, hating to have to borrow Dalton’s digs, but I have no other choice.
She rolls her eyes at me. “Yes.” She disappears up the steps to the second floor that holds all the bedrooms in this massive house. I never thought she wanted it as much as she had, and that makes giving it to her and Dalton all the sweeter. It’s too hard for me to be here for a little while, much less live here. I look around, still feeling the presence of my regal mother and her friends having gin in the parlor, and I hear the laughter of my father and his friends as they smoked cigars and drank their brandy in the library.
I know to most that sounds snobbish, but to me, as a child, it was just regular life. The older I got, the more pompous it became, but I loved my parents and would trade almost anything to have them back.
“Roman?” Piper calls from the top of the steps. “Are you coming?” I take the steps two at a time, assaulted by the memories the slight action stirs. Rounding the top of the banister, I look down the catwalk to the end at my mother and father’s door, finding it closed. I nearly jump out of my skin when Piper darts out of her own room, holding a tee and a pair of swim trunks in her hand. I look at her, confused. She looks behind her, then back at me.
“What the hell, Piper? Your old room?” I say, taking the clothes she hands to me.
“Uh, yeah,” she says a little too sheepishly, and out of her norm. Wringing her hands, she looks nervously around the upper floor of the grand house.
“Can I ask why you’re not in the master bedroom? This is your house now, so why would you sleep in the middle-sized room?” I look back over to my parent’s room and back to her.
She scoffs at me. “It was just a little weird for me to think about fucking Dalton’s brains out in the room my parents used to sleep in.” I wince at the mental imagine and know I’ll never be able to scrub my brain of that gag-inducing image. Her shoulders slump just slightly. “The ghosts follow me around this house too, Roman.” She gives me one last smile before turning, heading for the stairs. When I don’t follow, she turns to me. “What the fuck are you waiting for?” Her carefully fashioned façade is quickly put back into place.
I hold the items in my hands out. “For you to tell me where to change.”
She points past me at the door next to hers. “Your bedroom, dumbass.” She shakes her head and quickly rushes down the steps. I turn looking at one of my ghosts that isn’t making an effort to hide in the shadows of the big house.
Chapter Three
Roman
I stand with my hand resting on the doorknob, trying not to choke on the lump in my throat. It’s been years since I’ve been in this room. After my parents’ death, I paid for a cleaning service to clean the house I was unable to reenter for a very long time. When they’d died, Piper was already off at college and I was already in the service. But that weekend, the weekend I’d been on leave and out drinking with Leo, Cowboy and Dalton, I’d gotten the call.
Nothing like the news of your father’s death to sober your sorry ass up real quick.
I shake my head, freeing it of the thoughts that drive a knife right through my heart, but they remind me of the ache I felt for Hollis when her mother had killed herself. And then I’d gone and done what I did this afternoon, throwing her request to possibly find her only living family back in her face with anger.
I open the door and step into the past, looking around a room that’s exactly the way I’d left it the day I’d packed and left for college, never looking back. My football trophies line the shelves of the bookcase on the far wall. Prom pictures with my various girl Fridays still sit on my desk beside it. The walls are papered with posters of all my teenage athletic idles. I walk over to a certain football poster. Lifting it up, I laugh, finding the collage of Playboy pictures I’d carefully placed so my mother wouldn’t suspect them being hidden there.
“Past jerk off material. Not as good as what I have now, but it did the work in a pinch then,” I say to myself, laughing as I let the top poster fall back into its place. I stop as a picture setting off to the back of all the accolades from my youth catches my eye. Picking it up, I bring it so the light streaming through the bay window to my left lets me see the occupants contained in the frame. I smile and choke back a sob at the same time. It’s the four of us, the Jefferys family, all together and all young. Back when my parents were in love with each other. Don’t get me wrong, my parents always loved each other, but at some point in my youth, they fell out of love with each other. There is a difference.
My childhood had been filled with my father kissing my mother, and my mother always smiling lovingly at my father. Somewhere between puberty and me aging into full-on horny teenager, those gestures of love had stopped between them, and they just existed around each other. Never talking or laughing as they once had, but doing their own things separately, under the same roof.
They played the perfect couple in public because my dad was the fucking mayor. But in private, behind the mansion walls, they moved around as strangers. Two people living in a ho
me together, but not living with each other.
I couldn’t ever imagine falling out of love with Hollis, but I know it happens. I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes, and it’s burned into my memory like a bad smell. I shudder, setting the frame back down on my desk, leaving it to sit with the rest of my past. Because that's where that type of memory belongs, sitting amongst a different life than the one I lead now.
I quickly change, and as I walk to the door, I give the room one last look, saying goodbye because I won’t be back. Pulling the door closed behind me, I glance at the door to my left, and against my better judgement I walk to it, pushing it open, letting it ease back without me following it in. Everything is as it was the day they had died. My mother was big on order, so the bed was made as soon as it was vacated, and no dirty clothes ever littered the floor.
I briefly wonder if Piper has done the same thing I’m doing right now. Standing in the doorway of our parents’ room, seeing it through the eyes of a child. The floral smell of my mother’s perfume haunts the air, and the sound of my father whistling as he would tie his tie at the mirror of his bureau echoes, calling me back to a time when we were a family. A time before Piper had known the truth I’ve lived with since the day our mother had died.
And now, as an adult, I see the lessons my childhood home is trying to teach me. There’s nothing more important than the ones you love, the ones who share your life, and the ones you have created and brought into this world. They’re here for you to protect, provide for, and live to see their smiles and hear their laughter, something my father forgot in his lust for power and his hungry greed. He’d essentially left me, my mother, and Piper behind, but on the other side of the same gold coin, he’d dragged us along with him. Dragged us into the public eye to smile and be the cream cheese carved first family of a town he didn’t give two shits about. It just so happened we were good looking, with our blonde hair and crystal blue eyes, the town fell in love with the family portrait we so efficiently portrayed.
Oh, if they could see me now, mostly my father. My long blond hair, shaved on the sides, styled into a flopping mohawk. The thick beard that covers the face my mother always said was what angel kisses produced, and the tattoos—oh, the tattoos. They cover most of my body now, my penance for what Hollis had done for us. Her body was permanently marked and now, so is mine.
I hold my bare arms out, looking at all the intricate ink, my woman interwoven into every part. A big ‘fuck you’ to the man who wanted me to marry the country club daughter of his best friend. Always told me girls like Hollis were just around to get my dick wet, to satisfy my needs as a man. But never marry one of them, although keeping one on the side was the standard. That was when I’d realized that he was only a man I looked like, no longer the man who loved my mother.
It was pretty clear the old man had been good at covering his tracks when it came to his indiscretions. I shake my head, stepping in just enough to take the doorknob and pull the door to me. “Love you, Mom,” I whisper into the silent room as I click the door closed behind me. Turning to go downstairs, I resign myself to the fact that I will never place a foot upstairs here ever again.
When I reach the landing, the sounds of pots and pans lead me in the direction of the kitchen. I find Piper moving around, finishing up the items she’d promised Emily she would bring to the cookout this afternoon. I clear my throat as I enter the room. She turns to me with a jerk. “Hey. Do they fit?” she asks, pointing a frying pan at me before going back to what she’d been doing.
I look down at the ridiculous Hawaiian print swim trunks only a person like Dalton would wear. I wrinkle my nose a little at the print as I answer. “Yeah, I guess, but I look like your dorky ass boyfriend in these things.” I hold my hands out to my sides.
She stops and turns, resting her hands on her hips. “Hey, you were the one who got your dumbass locked out of your own bedroom, so don’t knock the charity.” She giggles at the sight of me in Dalton’s weird ass clothes.
The shorts look like a tourist threw up all over them, and the sleeveless shirt isn’t any better. By the way Piper’s laughing, I think she chose them for a reason. “Laugh it up, jackass,” I sneer as I slide up onto one of the stools at the island bar. “Hey, you got a beer?” I ask.
“What the fuck do you think this is, a bar?” She looks pointedly at the fridge, and then back at me. “Get your own damn beer.”
I slide back off the stool and go to the fridge. “Dalton still at the garage?”
“Yeah, didn’t you go in today?” she asks as she mixes the mayonnaise into the potato salad she’s making.
Opening the beer, I take a drink before answering. “I was, but I just hung around the house instead.”
“Well, when he gets here, you can head over to Emily and Cowboy’s with him and I’ll go get Hollis.” Her irritation with my behavior is still apparent.
“I doubt she’ll come because I’ll be there, and believe me, I’m the last person she wants to see.”
“Probably so, but I’m not going to let her sit at home and miss a family cookout because you were being an asshole.” I roll my eyes, knowing she isn’t going to let it go, and when she tells the other women, I’ll be living in guilt trip hell.
The front door opening and slamming makes me swallow back the smartass comment I was getting ready to throw at my shithead sister. Dalton comes into the kitchen and stops when he sees me. “I thought you were gonna come down to the garage today?”
I take the last drink of my beer before tossing it in the trash bin beside the bar, then take another one from the fridge. “I was, but—,”
“He fucked up and Hollis is mad at him.” Piper pins me once more with her eyes.
“That was after I was supposed to go to the garage,” I correct, returning her sharp gaze.
“Well, maybe you should’ve gone in and you wouldn’t have pulled the stupid shit you did,” she snaps.
“That had nothing to do with what I did.” I look to Dalton, silently pleading with him to help a brother out, but instead, he crosses the kitchen and takes Piper up in his arms and begins to kiss her. “Hello?” I holler, trying not to throw up in my mouth at the sight of my baby sister getting tongue fucked by one of my best friends.
They stop and come up for air. “Just because your woman won’t touch you, doesn’t mean I can’t love on my woman.” Dalton wrenches Piper into his side.
“Your woman is my little sister,” I deadpan as I stand there drinking the last of my second beer. I toss it in the bin as I move to the door. “I’ll be outside.”
~~~~~~
Hollis
I laid in bed until my back hurt and realized I hadn’t finished the things I was making for the cookout. I’ll take them and drop them off, but I won’t stay. Our family doesn’t need our drama. They would probably have the same reaction Roman did, and that’s something I don’t need right now.
Yes, it’s was stupid for me to ask for what I did, but for some reason, the thoughts of who my father is or was, has consumed me for the past couple of weeks. And I won’t be able to start a new chapter in my life until I know who he is and why he hadn’t stayed with my mother. It’ll be the last part of my past. I need to close the door on that Hollis forever and start fresh with the new Hollis, Roman’s wife, without wondering for the rest of my life about him.
Roman had taken it all wrong when I’d asked him. It’s not that I’m ungrateful for what his family has done for me, it’s just I have to know, if I still have family I belong to on a different level than just loyalty.
I go to his drawers, taking a pair of his swim trunks out, along with one of his tees. I hold them to my nose, and even though they’ve been laundered, they still have the hint of his smell on them. Even if he finds my father, I know I’ll never love another man as much as I love him, and I’ll never again choose that lifestyle over what I have now. I just couldn’t take anymore from him and had reacted the only way I knew how. I closed in on myself, something I’v
e done since I was a child, and shut him out.
It’s not the only argument we’ve been in, but it is by far the worst. I know he’d only been angry because he’s trying his best to keep me safe from the lifestyle I grew up in, and in fear, he’d lashed out. It scares me too. If we do by some chance find my father and he’s a junkie, I have to ask myself if I’ll be able to turn away. But my biggest fear is if I’m around it again, will I be able to turn away from the euphoric high it gives a person?
I shake my head, freeing it of the thoughts of how it used to feel and how I used to crave it. Not anymore, that isn’t me now. And the only point of this morning’s argument that I can’t let go of is that he thinks I would go back to that, or think that I’d want to. I have everything to lose now, unlike then, when I had nothing.
The life I’ve built with Roman and the others isn’t worth the high. Shuddering at the thought of being back in that life, I slam the drawer closed and head down to the kitchen to finish the food for the cookout.
I’m so engrossed in my work, I didn’t hear the door shut and Piper come up behind me.
“Hey, bitch.” I jump and turn, wielding a spatula at the freak who scared the shit out of me. I smirk at her smartass smile and laugh at me for almost pissing myself.
“What the hell, Piper?” I slam the utensil down on the counter dramatically with a loud thwack.
She shrugs and slides up on a stool across the bar from me triumphantly, acting like she’s blowing her nails dry. “Soooo?” She drawls, and I know immediately where Roman had run off to this morning when I’d locked him out of our room.
“So?” I look at her, raising an eyebrow in question, just waiting for her to pounce on me for treating her brother the way I had this morning.
She sees my reaction and holds her hands up in surrender. “Oh no, wait a minute, I think he’s an asshole too. I came over here so we could bitch about him behind his back on the way to Emily’s, where we can get the rest of the girls in on it too.” She smiles a sly grin, just like the bitchy little sister Roman has always claimed her to be.
