“Don’t take that tone with me, boy, I didn’t raise you to take that tone with your elders—especially not your father. Don’t forget who’s in charge here—I didn’t ask you to be here.” His face was mutinous, his eyes red and angry. The subtle stench of alcohol sweats filtered across the desk and the hair's width grasp I had on my patience snapped.
“You’re right, Dad,” I said, my tone deadly serious. “You didn’t ask me to come home when Mom passed. You fucking begged me to do it. You stopped paying bills, you stopped taking care of anything. You couldn’t take care of yourself much less this business, so don’t come at me like you have everything under control. I quit the job that I had worked my ass of for years to get. I ignored all those years of school to come lift you out of the gutter. That was two damn years ago and nothing’s changed. Nothing! And don’t tell me how to talk to you, Dad, I know my manners. But don’t stand there and act like you have been some kind of a good example for me. You may have helped raise me, but neither you nor Mom taught me how to take care of a parent who’s acting like a child.” I slammed my hand down again, just because it felt good, the wood of the desk solid and stinging beneath my palm.
“You can leave at any time, Boy. This is my place and I’ll run it how I please, including into the damn ground if that’s what happens. But I won’t stand here and be disrespected by my own blood. I won’t. I think you’ve been spending too much time with that little gold digger. You never acted like this before she came around.” My old man turned to leave but I wasn’t going to let him go without telling him exactly how I felt. Exactly how I saw things through my eyes.
And right now—I saw red.
“If you fucking walk out that door right now I will close this bar down and walk away. I will not look back and you can handle the entire shit show by yourself. Your employees will quit, you won’t be able to stay open and you will drown in bankruptcy. I have fucking had it. Do not test me. And make that the last time you say a single shit word about Harlow. She is a shining fucking example of someone who’s been handed a shit stick and done her best with it. She takes nothing and stretches it to take care of her son, who happens to be a very smart, polite little boy. She has shown me, in just a couple of weeks, what a struggling parent is. The decisions and the sacrifices they have to make for the good of their children. I watched Mom do it my whole life, but it didn’t really make sense to me until I saw it from the outside. Harlow is an angel, and if you crawled out from under your perpetual hangover and pulled your head out of your ass, you would see that too. She doesn’t deserve your anger, especially when you’re just angry at yourself.”
Dad held my gaze for a few seconds and turned towards the door again, saying nothing.
“I am not done talking to you so don’t you fucking move. I want to ask you a question and I want an honest answer. If you can give me that then I’ll sit down and try to figure this latest mess out,” I grabbed the crumpled stack of past due notices and shook the papers roughly. “And you can go on with your breakfast and keep not giving a shit about it. But answer me this—what do you care about? What’s important to you? Is it the bar? Do you even care about me, your son? Or do you care about anything anymore? What is important to you? Because I can’t figure it out. You’ve taught me my whole life that blood—that family— is the most important thing. But all you are showing me, is you don’t care about anything at all. And you’re leaning on me so hard, Dad, that I don’t think I’m strong enough to hold us both up.” My voice cracked on my sentence and I swallowed roughly. “I’m gonna break, Dad. I can’t do this anymore. I feel like I'm just working my hands to the bone while you do your best to try to die.”
I thought for sure he would storm out of the room then. His eyebrows pulled so close together as he frowned they were touching each other. Dark furry caterpillars that were so thick and mottled with gray they obscured his eyes. His face was puffed out and red, from the alcohol or the impending outburst he was brewing I didn’t know, but I wasn’t prepared.
I could handle anger. I could handle him yelling and barging out because that’s what he’d always done. I was even prepared for the guilt trip because that was his MO. What I was not prepared for, and what ultimately was my undoing, was the shaky breath as he sat back down in the chair and dropped his head in his hands. I was not prepared for the sob that wracked his chest or the raspy words, whispered in desperation as he peered at the floor through his fingers.
“I’m so sorry.”
My father had never apologized to me for anything in my life, especially not for anything that had happened in the last two years, where he had spent every waking hour acting like the entire world owed him a favor for existing. I almost thought I was hearing things. Then he spoke again.
“I don’t want to be like this, Jesse. I hate it.”
I didn’t interrupt him, just sat in my chair, holding my breath, waiting to see what else would come from this bizarre behavior I had never before witnessed. Was it a breakthrough? I didn’t know.
He was crying pretty hard now, his face still buried in his hands, tears dripping through his fingers and falling soundlessly into the office carpet. His back was hunched over and his shoulders shaking, who was this broken man?
“I miss your mom so much, Jess, I can’t stand it. It hurts so bad some days I feel like I’m going to die from it. It hurts from the inside out, like my skin is going to split open and my bones are going to break. I can feel my heart cracking into pieces and I can’t make it stop. It hurts, boy. It hurts.”
Yeah, it hurts. I sat there and listened to my father, the man who had taught me how to drive my car, change my oil and talk to girls, describe the very feelings I had felt when I first heard that Mom had passed. I watched the man whose shoulders had seemed so broad and strong when I was younger, shrivel in front of my eyes. I watched my dad disappear inside of himself as he broke apart completely in that chair in front of me—and part of me broke with him.
"I know I've got a problem, boy, and I don't know what to do. I don't even like the taste of whiskey, Jesse, and the smell of it even makes me sick sometimes. But even just being awake just hurts so much that I need something to take the pain away. I don't drink because I like it. But I'll do anything some days just to make it stop."
"Make what stop, Dad?" I asked, fearing the answer I already knew was churning around in my gut.
Dad finally looked up then. Looked up from his hunched over position in the chair and focused his bleary, wet gaze on me like he was seeing me for the very first time. And my heart, which had already been squeezed near to deletion, plummeted like an elevator with a broken cable line as he said with all seriousness—
"Everything."
Time stood still as Dad and I just looked at each other in the wake of his admission. All of the years of being a functional—if binge drinking—alcoholic and this was the first time I had ever witnessed him admitting to having a problem. This was...something. This was huge. I knew that my next actions, my next words even, would be pivotal in how we moved forward from this. It was on my shoulders to lift him up or break him. I would do almost anything to help my dad get back to the man I remembered—way-way back when. But one thing I would not do was enable.
"Is there nothing in your life that's worth making a change for?" I asked the question so quietly it rode its way out of my mouth on a puff of air. Time rewound, the invisible cogs of a clock spinning in reverse until I was no longer a man in his late twenties but a vulnerable young boy, waiting for his dad to notice him and validate his existence.
"This bar is all I've got, Son. I don't know what to do. I want to be better, but I don't know how." His voice was as whisper-thin as mine, and his obvious misunderstanding of what I had meant stung, but I tried not to let it wound me.
"No, Dad. This bar is a lead weight. I am your family. You have me. Not this bar. This bar is a place—I am your blood. And if this place is dragging you down and making you unable to help yourself, then I—your
fucking family—will cut you away from it so you can be you again. You might want to give up on you, but I don't want to. I don't want to watch you do this to yourself anymore. It hurts me to watch you hurt you. Do you understand?"
Dad leaned his head back against the wall, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed and his chest rising as he filled his lungs with a shaky breath.
"Jesse, I don't even know where to start."
I stood and walked around the side of the desk until I was standing in front of his chair. I held my hand out, and he assumed I was holding it out to help him out of the chair but I put it palm up to stop him. "A good start would be handing me the Jack you have stashed in the inside pocket of your jacket," I said, and he nodded and reached into the side pocket for the glass bottle I had heard clinking earlier. "Then, we go in the kitchen and I'll make you something to eat. Then we make a game plan, okay? As long as you want to make the effort, I'm here, Dad."
He gave me a watery smile and stood, ready to follow me out of the office. Taking the first steps to a new sense of self-improvement. "You know, your Mom made the best eggs."
I didn't stop walking, just threw my words over my shoulder. "I know. She taught me how to make them. I miss her too."
13
Harlow
"Are you sure we've never met before?" I asked Dino for probably the third or fourth time since we’d been working together. I was pretty sure I would remember him if I had, but damn his face looked familiar.
"'Fraid not, Low," he mumbled as he sat on the corner of my shiny new desk in our very modern and clean looking home base. The whole building still needed a lot of work, but the front offices were done, and the last month and a half of work we had put in had really paid off. My office, or as I called it, the command center, was practically perfect. Or it would be if Dino would quit sitting on my brand-new desk and scuffing it up with his butt.
"Maybe he met you when he was using one of his other personalities," Jeanette said between the window that separated our offices. The window could be closed and the shade pulled if we needed privacy, but it was nice to have it open to keep the conversation going when it was just us two in the building. It made us both more comfortable, plus it was cool. I'd heard all about Dino's job as a Fed. Man, that guy was something else, living all over the country, pretending to be someone else all the time so he could do his real job—gathering intel.
Dino was a spy at one point in time, and apparently a really good one. But something happened when he met Jeanette, and he gave that life up for good. The whole thing had lit a fire under Gabe though, who'd been a war veteran turned mercenary before he took over the family finance business after the death of his father. He always wanted to go back to the field and the deal that went down with Dino and Jeanette just sealed the deal. They'd told me what all happened, but I still had a hard time keeping it straight and I had only gotten the cliff's notes. What I did retain from the story, was that Jeanette was a supreme badass that I would never, EVER, mess with.
She was also teaching me some sweet self-defense moves a couple of times a week at the office when we had downtime. Jeanette was a bad bitch but in the best kind of way. Not that we had a lot of "down time" in our office. Gabe had a backlist of clients just waiting for him to get his shit together, so we were working double time on getting out equipment operational. It was awesome working with Gabe on tech. He listened to my ideas and took them into consideration. He was no dummy, and I was learning so much from him—from everyone really. For the first time in a long time, I was feeling content—like I actually had a place here. A long-term place.
I swatted Dino's denim-clad backside with a file folder full of recent tech purchase receipts and shooed him off the end of my desk. “I can't think of any time I would be in the presence of an undercover Feeb unless you count the time my baby daddy shot a guy in our front yard. And then they wouldn't need to be undercover cuz the deed was already done. Everyone I met after that wore a specific uniform." My words were flippant but that was okay. Everyone here understood how serious my situation was, but it was still light reading compared to what everyone else had to deal with in their past.
"Please, ladies," Dino said, in that smooth way that never failed to get under my skin and I could not put my finger on why. "If you'd met me when I was undercover you would remember, you just wouldn't know I was me. I, on the other hand, remember every face I've ever met. You're just crazy." And with that, he took my file of papers out of my hand and whopped me gently on the head with it before moving to sit in the chair in the sitting area of the room.
"Do you have nothing to do right now, Dino?" I asked smartly. Gabe's list of clients wanting work was so long that he had actually taken on a couple of simple assignments himself and was out of town working on one currently. Angel was on a deadline of her own making and currently holed up at home until "this shit gets finished or I die," so it was just Jeanette, Dino and I holding down the fort.
“I have things to do, don't you worry. Right now, I need you to help me with something—our new toys came in." He produced a padded envelope from God knows where because I hadn't seen it on him and he'd been in my office for fifteen minutes already.
"Ooh, toys!" I heard Jeanette squeal and come blasting around the corner, skidding to a stop on the brand-new tile floor of my office, her wavy auburn hair floating behind her as she came to an abrupt halt. "Let me see it."
“Easy, grabby hands," Dino laughed and pulled her into his lap, holding her there with one arm while he kept the envelope just out of her reach. Jeanette smiled, but I knew his arm wasn't really holding her anywhere. I had never seen Dino fight, and I had no doubt he was tough. But I had seen Jeanette do some shit when she was showing me how to fend off an attacker, and I would lay down a twenty that she would mess Dino up if she was mad enough.
My suspicions were confirmed as Dino took an elbow to the ribcage, and coughing, released her. She grabbed the envelope out of his hands and tore it open, pulling out two smaller packages. "What are these? Watches? Boring." Losing interest almost immediately she put them on my desk. She sure as shit wasn't going to give them back to Dino, who just grinned and sat on the corner of my desk again, his butt wrinkling the corners of the papers I had sitting there.
"God you are such a butthead," I mumbled and saving my papers from ultimate demise I moved them to the other side of the desk. The one without a booty on it. Picking up the contents of the envelope from where they had spilled all over I examined them closely. "Oh, hey guys, I've been waiting for these. But wait, weren't there supposed to be four of them? There's only two here." Frowning, I shook the envelope and a packing slip fell out, floating softly to land on the desk in front of me. Dino reached for it but I was quicker, and slapped my hand down on top of it before he could snatch it away. I don't know why we picked at each other like this, but I didn't always hate it. Sure, he got on my damn nerves a lot, but he was part of our team, our work family. He would definitely have my back if I needed it. Somehow, I just knew it.
"Oh man, two are on backorder. They won't be coming for a couple of weeks. That kind of sucks, I wanted to play with them."
"So let's play with them," Dino said, one eyebrow raised mischievously. "We have to make sure they work, right? Crack these babies open and let's see what they do."
Dino and I each put a watch on while Jeanette made a face at us that showed exactly how big of nerds she thought we were when my phone rang. It was an unknown number, but that didn't mean much. I had JJ's new daycare programmed into my phone, but every room there had its own line so every time they called me for something it came up as something different. I learned to just answer the phone—I didn't want to miss a call if he had a fever or something. I always needed to be available to them. They were a fantastic daycare with a phenomenal preschool program. I know damn well Gabe had pulled some strings to get me in there, and I knew they wouldn't be calling me without a good reason.
“Hello, this is Harlow Jones, can I h
elp you?” I always answered the phone like that now, because if I just said “hello,” they would ask me if Ms. Jones was around. It was my cell phone, no one else was going to answer it, but they always asked so I just started answering this way. This call was a little different. It wasn’t dead air, I would have been able to tell if there was no connection. Sometimes people call from a number and hang up before you answer. Tech stuff. It could be twitchy. “Hello?” I tried again. Maybe whoever was on the other end of the line just couldn’t hear me. Still no dice. I thought I heard the sound of breathing, but I couldn’t be sure, and after a few seconds of no answer I hung up the phone. If it was important they would call back.
“Who was that?” Dino asked, having no issue about prying into my business.
I shrugged my shoulders and gave him a look. “No idea. Must not have been important. Been getting more and more of those lately.” The phone buzzed in my hand again, this time the ringtone for a text message. Only three people sent me text messages. One was on assignment out of state. One was trying like hell to meet a writing deadline, and as I looked at my phone—yep. The other one was Jesse.
My face flushed a little as I thought about Jesse. I hadn’t had a chance to have anymore alone time since we were intimate, but I’d spent plenty of time with him and JJ. And that was okay too. JJ thought Jesse could do no wrong, and while I was old enough not to entertain such foolish thoughts I had to admit, I was falling head over heels. We’d even been spending a little time with his dad too, which at first was a little awkward, but I could tell he was trying. As someone who had been knocked down a time or two—I could recognize someone giving their best effort. Even though “Papa Ed,” as JJ had taken to calling him, didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, I could tell he was trying to change himself. For Jesse. He knew that JJ’s dad wasn’t a part of his life, but I refrained from saying anything and asked Jesse, whom I had confided to, not to tell him either. That part of our lives was none of his business.
Jesse (Glass City Hearts Book 3) Page 11
