Thick & Thin (Thin Love Book 3)

by Eden Butler

  If she was shocked, she didn’t show it. Instead, Aly stood up and made to leave as cool as if our business had been concluded. But before she walked out of the room, she turned to me and said, “Well, whoever you end up with, I hope she knows how to kick your ass.” Then she swept through the door and was gone.

  My mother held stardust underneath her fingernails.

  Sparks of twilight, of distant lives

  Lived over

  And over.

  The same sins visited upon every woman she would ever be.

  Loving men

  Who thought the word was too thick on their tongues.

  Poison they spat out.

  She taught me to hold within my cells the mark of a millions lives.

  Mine, ours.

  Until

  I was whole and I let you feel

  The tremble in my limbs and the thunder of my heart.

  You were the only one to drink that poison

  And lie about how good it tasted.

  Eleven

  “Have you completely lost your mind?”

  My mother was a hurricane flying in front of me, twisting and seething around me so that I would know what a disappointment I was to her. How could I not be? I was pushing away happiness as it came to me. I was deflecting the sweetest bits of my life that had once made me feel like nothing could touch me. But something had. Loss. Loneliness. The abstract solitude that felt like a freezing burn inside my chest. Aly had walked away because I had pushed her away. Mom had heard what I’d said to make her leave.

  There was no way in hell I’d get out of this without being berated and served a mighty dose of that Keira Glare. Still, I had to try to calm her. “Mom…”

  “Don’t you try to pacify me. My God, Ransom, she didn’t have to come here. But I thought it would help. I thought, maybe, you’d get off your ass and stop moping.”

  “I’m not fucking…”

  “Do not talk to your mother like that.” Kona’s look challenged my own and, tired, feeling stupid, I relented, scrubbing my hands over my face.

  Tristian stood next to my mother just within the kitchen doorway, a bottle of OJ in one hand and a ham sandwich in the other. He quirked his eyebrow up and suddenly seemed disinterested in his snack.

  “Ransom, you have got to get yourself together. You are never going to get Aly back if you keep lashing out.” Mom’s voice was softer now, but there was still a bite in her tone.

  “Who the hell says I’m trying to get her back?”

  Mom stared at me, mouth open. “If you don’t, you are a damn fool.” She stepped closer, shaming me with one look. “If you love someone, you don’t intentionally hurt them, no matter how shitty your life gets.” She shot a glance at my father but kept silent, letting that one look topple him. Since we’d returned from Miami, the silence between my parents had doubled. It had happened three nights ago with Kona’s cell going off repeatedly and him outside on the patio. I’d crashed on the sofa with my foot propped up and old episodes of Merlin running in the background. An hour later I’d woken from my doze to hear my parents bickering. It wasn’t a fight, but the hurried, heated conversation had kept me up. “You don’t win battles on your own, Ransom. That’s not how real relationships work.”

  She ignored my hand as I reached for her and looked at my father as though she wanted him to say something. We he didn’t, Mom grabbed Tristian’s arm and they disappeared to the back of the house toward her studio.

  “Are you ever going to tell me what the hell is going on?” I asked my father, not bothering to keep my voice free of the irritation I felt.

  Kona didn’t answer. Instead, he came around the sofa, slouching as he rested his elbows on his knees. “Keiki kane, you are fucking up.”

  “Come again?”

  My father moved his head, squinting as he glanced at me. “Richie Dole. I ever tell you about him?” I shook my head, watching Kona closely. I wondered what NFL war story I’d get now. “Thirteen years I’ve been using my NFL career as some cautionary tale for you, just to get you not to make the same mistakes I did or the same mistakes guys I knew did.”

  “Yeah. And?”

  Kona stared at me, stretching back against the sofa. “Richie Dole was a third round Draft pick. All conference all four years in high school and college. Fastest running back ever to come out of Ohio State. Good dude. Sloppy drunk that ate too much red meat, but he was a good dude.”

  Knowing I’d not be free from his lecture anytime soon, I rested my head against the sofa cushion and looked at Dad, accepting that I was about to hear yet another warning. “What happened to him?”

  He moved his head, popping his neck like he needed to be free from the stiffness there before he leaned back, copying my relaxed slouch. “Four concussions in three seasons. He had a wife and two little girls. But by the end of his career, by the time that fourth concussion had landed, Richie had already displayed some pretty erratic behavior: getting lost in a town he grew up in. Forgetting his name, forgetting to pick his eight-year-old daughter up from school.” Dad shook his head, glancing at me before he continued. “Asshole couldn’t handle his body failing him and he didn’t want to burden his wife with what he was feeling. Started drinking. Started drinking and driving.”

  “He kill anyone?”

  At my question Kona exhaled, head shaking. “Yeah. Himself. Swallowed a bullet two hours before his oldest daughter came home from a sleepover. Eleven years old and she found her dad in the garage with a 9 mm in his mouth.”

  “Jesus.”

  Kona nodded, eyes focused on me. “Yeah. It was a mess. Dole was a good dude, like I said. He practiced hard, he played harder. He had a good woman. He had a beautiful family. And when it was over with, when the autopsy came back, the coroner said it was a miracle he’d survived as long as he had. CTE. There was already so much damage.”

  I’d heard it a thousand times. Aly had done her research before trying to get me to retire. After the first concussion, she wanted the facts. She’d spewed them at me like it was my inevitable future. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy can only be discovered after death. It’s a buildup of protein that spills out of your cells thanks to blunt force trauma. It suffocates your neural pathways, affecting things like memory, judgment and fear. Paranoia can kick in, that’s the worst. Take a 240-pound linebacker who already has a temper and lifetime anger issues, and couple that with irrevocable brain damage, potentially paranoia and the inability to think straight, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Or tragedy.

  It was there, right in front of me. The warnings. Those facts and the idea that I’d let my own goals outweigh the things that really made me happy. The things that mattered. My father had done that. So many times over the years he’d shake his head, thinking about one thing or another and toss a look at my mother or me and my siblings, finally muttering something like “I wasted so much time” or “I don’t deserve you guys.” I was starting to realize why that guilt ate at him. Finally, I started to understand what sacrifices we make to play the game we love and how sometimes in the end those sacrifices mean nothing. Not when the loss outweighs the gain.

  I didn’t want to spend sixteen years in misery like my father had and I damn sure didn’t want to end up like Richie Dole. “Dad…”

  My father looked outside, to Koa and Mack chasing each other, being annoying as only they could and the smallest smile moved his mouth. “This,” he said, waving around the room, nodding toward the sound of Koa and Mack’s laughter, to the music trickling from the studio at the end of the hallway, “this is what I wanted for so long. That first night I met you, out on the patio and you and your Mom sang Dylan, in that exact moment, I knew I wanted you and your mother and conversations about nothing and giving you advice about your life, your woman, anything, all of it. I wanted Koa and Mack before they were even a thought in my head. I wanted all of it because I’d missed so much. I wanted…” he closed his eyes, rubbing them with the palms of his hands before cont
inuing, “I wanted her so much that night. More than I ever had before.”

  Dad looked at me, his smile easy, real. “And I wanted you, my beautiful strong boy who reminded me of my twin. Who was his own man, who was so happy, so full of all that boundless potential. And here you are...I look at you and see what Luka would have been like. I see my blood and it makes me so proud.” Kona reached over to me, grabbing my neck. “Don’t think for a second that you are alone. Don’t you ever think that you weren’t wanted. You were. You are. You always will be.”

  I couldn't make my throat work, or keep the burn from my eyes when he stopped speaking. The only thing I managed to do was blink, nodding at him for fear that speaking would make my voice crack. Dad seemed to understand and he patted my face, resting back against the sofa.

  “I’m not telling you to quit. I’m telling you to figure out what’s important. I’m telling you it’s time to man up and do what you need to do, to be happy and healthy.”

  It just wasn’t that easy. It never had been and I didn’t quite get why he couldn’t see that. “It’s just not…”

  “You have to fight, Ransom.” He interrupted quick, like he’d become a little desperate for me to understand him. “You have to fight for the life you want.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?” I nodded toward the hallway that lead to Mom’s studio. “All this shit you’re keeping from everyone…is that you fighting for the life you want?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing.” He scrubbed his face, exhaling, looking exhausted. “But sometimes focusing on what’s important, on what’s right, means you end up being alone in the fight you have. Sometimes you have to be a man and go to battle for yourself.”

  My father left me on that sofa, watching my little brother out on the patio as he bounced a rubber ball against the side of the house. Dad joined him, then picked up the ball to lead Koa toward the deck. They stood there, watching the water, my Dad with his hand on Koa’s shoulder and my little brother yammering on like he sometimes did. I couldn’t make out my father’s expression but I did notice the small dip of his head, and how he stood taller and straighter than he had in weeks, as though he’d come to some decision that had lifted a weight off his shoulders.

  Sacrifice was our family burden. I’d seen so much of that in the decade that my parents built our family. I’d seen it a lot as a kid being reared by a teenage mother and her two best friends. I’d seen it in the jobs Aly didn’t take, in the plans and goals she pushed aside to be with me.

  Everyone had sacrificed. Everyone, I realized, but me. The sudden realization that my life didn’t begin and end in with football, with Miami, hit me like a sucker punch to the gut. My life had started long ago in New Orleans. And even before that, in Hawaii where so many people who gave me my chin and my thick, stubborn head. It’d had started in a city filled with music and sorrow, and all of those places and the people who lived in them, made up who I was. Places filled with sacrifice. People who gave everything for the ones they loved. My family was made up of fighters and selfless survivors. It was time I fell in line and became one too. I’d be fine, I knew that. My family, all of them, would never leave me without a soft place to fall.

  It begins like a rill

  Slowly

  Sliding

  Then a trickle used to keep from chaffing.

  Tumbling

  Tide

  A sprite dancing over rocky terrain

  Blissful

  Break

  Over the boulder, into the chasm, into the mouth

  Vacated

  Vastness

  Until

  I cannot contain it, it can’t be kept, and I’m swept in the undercurrent

  Drowning.

  Twelve

  There were two framed pictures that rested on top of the fireplace mantel at the center of my condo. The frames were made of beach wood and looked a little worn with cracked edges and splintered corners but the glass was thick and clean. I’d never cared about things matching or looking pristine. Besides, it was the pictures in those frames that mattered to me. My mother was in both.

  The first picture showed her smiling, happy, her face rounded by pregnancy, those crystal blue eyes filled as only blind love can make you. Blind love for my father who had reserved his affection for the Cajun white girl he’d married at eighteen. I liked to think that the other emotion filling my mother’s face in that picture was joy, kontantman she felt as I stretched her small body, growing inside her while she sat for that picture.

  The other picture was of manman on her wedding day. My parents didn’t have any money for a proper dress or much in the way of a wedding at all, but they’d managed to marry at St. Louis Cathedral when they found an Irish priest who cared more about the influence of love than the sentiment of racism that lay as an undercurrent in the city. She’d worn her hair in a soft up-do around her full face and my grann, my father’s mother, had pinned daisies in her soft curls like a crown. That picture was the only evidence that my father had ever smiled or that I had come from a woman more beautiful than a fairytale, braver than the fiercest dragon slayer. At least, that’s what grann had always told me.

  Ethan stared at both pictures, as he usually did during his infrequent visits to my Elysian Fields condo. He didn’t typically like staying with me here. He complained that the traffic was too heavy, that the parking wasn’t safe enough for his Mercedes and there was more room in his Jax Brewery condo. His home was newer, safer, to be sure. But it lacked the homey, welcoming feel I’d managed to invoke in this place.

  “Wine?” I asked him and he nodded, walking away from my mother and the elusive smile my father had never shared with me.

  “It’s funny, baby, I’ve been here over a dozen times and it seems like every time I come around you’ve managed to add to the…”

  “Mess?”

  He laughed, turning from his perusal of my latest acquisition—a hand drawn sketch of the street performers in Jackson’s Square that I’d bought from one of the artists there—before he kissed my forehead. “I was going to say…um…chaos. It’s…eclectic. That’s it. That’s a good word for your style. Eclectic.”

  “That’s a nice way of saying I have no style.”

  “It’s different, a little wild, like you are sometimes.” He walked away from me, holding his glass loosely in his hands as he stood in front of the cluster of art I’d cluttered around the entryway wall, his gaze taking in all that detail and the hodgepodge of scenes and colors.

  I liked my place. There was nothing pretentious, nothing contrived about how I lived. Plaster flaked around the exposed brick walls, it peeled and cracked, but reminded me that this place was old. I was one of a dozen inhabitants over the decades and our shared histories added to the charm. Thick, wool and jute rugs covered the main sitting area in the living room and under the small butcher’s table that served as an island in the modest kitchen. There were pillows and throws, all in vibrant jewel tones, and large medallion tapestries that covered three of the walls.

  I didn’t mention to Ethan that everything in this eclectic place was staged strategically. And, it hadn’t been done alone. Ransom may have never lived here, but his influence was everywhere. There were scarves he’d bought me from Morocco and Peru that lined the windows and covered the lamps in my bedroom. There were baskets I used as end tables that Ransom had found in one of the Cuban markets one Saturday he’d spent wandering Miami.

  “It looks like a gypsy caravan in here, nani. I like it,” Ransom had said during that first visit. That had been nearly two years ago, the last time Ransom had been here; things had changed since. There was more color, less light and I liked it that way. It made me feel like I was in my own world, away from whatever waited for me outside those double pane French doors in the front of the condo.

  The first time he visited from Miami, Ransom had stayed the week. The regular season had just ended and the Dolphins hadn’t played well enough for any conference games. He’d taken
the first flight from Miami to New Orleans and landed at my door with one bag and an eager smile. We’d spent nearly that entire week inside these walls, mostly naked, forgetting that when the time came, he’d have to go back to Miami. He had contract obligations to fill and he’d do that alone.

  The last night we’d lay on my queen-sized mattress with all those thin throws and blankets the color of a Moroccan sunset, spooned against each other, eyes opened, staring at nothing, thinking about everything, still and quiet. His body was a shadow behind me then, the fierce outline that fit around me like a coat—warm and comfortable, and I hadn’t wanted to move or speak or remind him that he’d have to leave. That the distance would remain between us as long as he played in the league. The danger was too great and my heart could not take the worry that consumed me. But that didn’t mean I could stay away from him. It didn’t mean that I could let him go even a little.

  “If I beg…” He’d stopped speaking when I moved my head, seeming to know my answer before I gave it. He’d asked that before and I thought of reminding him, but Ransom knew me. He knew my mind wasn’t easily changed once it was set. He hadn’t pulled away from me. He had, in fact, moved closer, held his arm against my waist tighter. “I’d beg, Aly. ‘Til the grave, I’d beg you to come back to me.”

  The light hairs on his arms had stood on end when I moved my fingernails over them and the soft quiet we’d laid in fractured only a little when I shifted around to face him. I hadn’t expected to see the small drops of tears clinging to his lashes or the shadows deepening under his eyes.

  “I can’t…the game, the distance between us even when I am right by your side there,” I’d tried, sliding closer, holding his face still as I watched him. Ransom’s lips were like wine—sweet, supple and they felt hot against mine, so tempting, so welcomed. “It kills me. Every game, cheri, I die a little bit with each one.”