“You’re the only thing, the only person, I’ve ever wanted.” Her voice was clear and truthful. “No matter what, I can’t change the way I feel.”
“I’m a lucky son of a bitch, but you might change the way you feel after I tell you my secret.” He ran a hand over his face.
How the fuck were they going to overcome all of this? Would it be worth it, in the long run? Were they fighting for something that wasn’t going to last?
Chapter Eighteen
Rooster didn’t know if this was a great idea, he was still reeling from what she had told him about their unborn child. That had been the last thing he’d thought she’d tell him when he’d agreed to come here. Of course, he’d had a feeling that whatever it was, it was going to be big. This was much bigger than anything he could have ever imagined.
“Go ahead,” Doc Jones encouraged him. “You get yours out and then we’ll work through it all together. It’s better to just say it, and then we can take the ramifications one by one.”
“I quit the sheriff’s department after some things happened that I didn’t agree with. When I had to go to the camp, things changed and I became the do-gooder extraordinaire of the world because that’s what I had to do. For years, I was a dick to Heaven Hill and I acted like I didn’t even know who Roni was. There’s no doubt in my mind why she didn’t tell me about all this before now. I was trying to be someone I wasn’t.” He ran a hand through his hair. “That’s neither here nor there right now. Anyway, I came back into the Heaven Hill fold this year and got asked to work at the high school doing security because of an anonymous tip that was called in. The tip said that there were steroids being used on the football team.”
He heard the swift intake of breath beside him. Roni had probably already figured it out. This was bad, he was done hurting her.
“Not Drew.” She shook her head. She had hoped their suspicions weren’t founded.
“Yes, Drew and his buddy Dalton. They’re knee-deep in this shit,” he confirmed, dropping his head into his hand that rested on the side of the couch.
“Shit.” She rested her head against the back of the couch cushion.
“So now, I have a dilemma,” he told Doc Jones. “I’ve only been with this group of people for a short amount of time. I’ve just begun to find my foothold and place here, she and I are working on our relationship, and now I have to tell two parents that their teenage son is mixed up in drugs. What do I do? I can’t go back to the way I was livin’. I can’t do it.”
To his complete surprise, Roni reached over and grabbed his hand in hers. “Before you start, Doc Jones, can I remind him of something?”
“Please do, I’m still trying to process all of this and understand everything that’s going on.” She watched the two of them carefully. When a couple came in to see her, this is what she wanted, them to help each other with their problems. It looked like this couple was more than willing to do that.
Roni turned in her seat to face him. “You have to remember that Liam sent you there, he asked you to take a look at this because he’d gotten the tip. He wants to know what’s going on. That doesn’t mean he wants you to sugarcoat anything. Whatever this turns out to be for Drew, we’ll all deal with it. He’s a teenager and he’s going to do stupid shit. Liam’s not going to be pissed because you’ve done what he’s asked you to. He knew there was a chance, and that’s why he asked you to do it. Liam’s not an idiot.”
Doc Jones held up her hand. “Okay, let me make sure that I understand this. You and Roni had a relationship as teenagers and you were best friends with Liam. When the two of you were sent away—you came back different? He went right back to where he was going to go in the first place, and you took the opposite track?”
“Exactly.” Rooster nodded. “My parents…” he trailed off and chuckled, but it was uncomfortable. “Let’s just say, I spent all the time I did with Liam’s family because my home life, it wasn’t great, and even though Liam’s family was as dysfunctional as they came…it was still better than my own house.”
“Shit, you two.” Doc Jones wrote in her tablet.
“I know.” He nodded. “Fucked up, huh?”
“So, things have happened, now you’re back and you and Liam have worked out your friendship. You and Roni are working on your relationship. She’s just admitted to you that she had to have an abortion because of her own father and you’ve just admitted that her nephew, Liam’s son, is knee-deep in a steroid ring at the high school. Am I following this all?” She blew out a breath and ran a hand through her hair.
“You got it,” he told her, running his hands along his jeans.
“God, and here I thought Layne was fucked up. I’m gonna need a drink after you two leave here.” She shook her head.
“Just help us, help us deal with everything we need to so that we can have a normal relationship, I want that more than anything,” Roni told her.
Doc Jones took a couple of minutes to compose herself and make a few more notes on her notepad. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Rooster, you have to tell Liam about Drew. Roni’s right. He wouldn’t have asked you to take a look into it if he didn’t want you to be honest with whatever you find. If you’re not honest, you’re doing your newfound friendship with him a disservice. He needs to know what his son is doing, not to mention the potential fallout once you find the source of the drugs.”
“I kinda knew that’s what you were going to say, and in my heart I knew that’s what I should do, but damn, it sucks,” he sighed. “Out of all the years I was with the sheriff’s office and how many people I took in or had to tell their parents that they were doing drugs, this hurts.”
“It’s because you’re so close to the situation, and if it didn’t hurt, I would worry about you,” Doc Jones assured him. “Now, Roni, my God, girl. How you haven’t had a nervous breakdown before now is a miracle to me.”
“I thought I was going to a few times.” She said it off-handedly but everyone in the room knew that she was telling the truth.
“How do you feel now that you’ve said the words out loud and you’ve told Rooster your secret?”
She was quiet for a moment, searching for the right word to convey what she did feel. “Relieved. This has been hanging over my head for so long—it was something that William could hang over my head, I don’t know what life is like without it. I feel like the weight of the world has been lifted off my shoulders.”
“That’s good, that’s a start.” Doc Jones made more notes in her yellow pad. “Rooster, how do you feel?”
“Shocked and angry, but not at Roni. I’m pissed at William. I knew he was a grade-A asshole. He showed a whole bunch of true colors once we got him behind bars. Things that I’d rather not discuss because it has no bearing on any of this, but suffice it to say, if I were still wearing a badge—he’d be a dead motherfucker.”
In the back of the room, an alarm went off, and Doc Jones got up to turn it off. “I hate to do this to you two, but I worked you in and I have another appointment in ten minutes.”
“I appreciate you doing what you could to get us in,” Roni told her, as she got up from the couch.
“I want to go ahead and make another appointment with both of you. If you feel like it, until then, I want the two of you to talk about the things you’ve told me here today. Not talking about it is what started this to begin with you. It’s time y’all have the hard talks, it’s time you put the effort into the relationship.” She leveled them with a stare. “If you find something come up that you can’t handle, here’s my card, it’s got my number on it. I’ll work you in again if I need to, but let’s go ahead and make a plan to meet at this time next week.”
“Sounds good,” Rooster said as he got up too and stood behind Roni, his hand resting on her hip.
They turned to leave as Doc Jones watched. She hoped they could make this work. They were facing a hard battle, but if they listened to one another and cared about what each other thought, then she kn
ew they could make it. They weren’t young kids, they were adults now, and she hoped she hadn’t misread the looks between the two of them. They wanted this to work, and if they wanted it to work, she had no doubt that they would make it happen.
Chapter Nineteen
They sat in his truck, silence blanketing them for long minutes. They both fidgeted in their seats, neither one sure of what to say or how to put into words the feelings that coursed through their hearts. If either one of them were honest, they were probably in shock about the bombshells they’d both dropped. Roni finally spoke.
“I know the two of us have a lot to talk about. I know I handed you a blow in there, there’s not been time for either of us to process the emotions we’re both feeling, but right now, we have a bigger issue that needs our attention.”
He glanced at her, nodding his head. “Drew.”
“That’s right.” She blew out a deep breath and glanced out the window. “We’ve got to see what we can do to help get him out of this situation. Right now, he’s not over the edge. He’s on the brink, and we’ve got to make sure we pull him back before he does some incredibly stupid shit. I don’t want him to ruin his life before he even gets it started.”
Rooster agreed with her. “So we need to go talk to Liam?”
It was the last thing she wanted to do after opening up such an emotional wound. What she really wanted to do was go home and cry for a week, maybe eat some ice cream and take stock of her life, but it had to be done. If she had been able to be a mom to the child she had carried, she would want to know these things about her child, and it wouldn’t matter about the time table. Even if it was 3 a.m. and someone was calling her, she would want to know. She couldn’t keep this from Liam and Denise. They had a right to know, and while Rooster had been too scared to say anything to her brother—she wasn’t. Honesty was the best policy, and they needed to start practicing that shit. Keeping it to themselves and keeping it in the dark wasn’t helping anyone. They needed to get to Drew before he developed a serious problem. “We do. You take us over there, and I’ll go ahead and give him a call, let him know we’re on our way. I’ll text Tyler too; I think we’ll need him. I don’t think Drew is going to go quietly with this.”
He had a feeling that she was right and they were putting themselves right in the middle of it. That seemed to be what both of them did. They were fixers, always had been, it kept them from their own shit.
Before she could make the call, Rooster’s cell phone rang and he answered, beating his hand on the steering wheel as he listened to what the person on the other end of the phone had to say.
Roni watched as he hung up, throwing the phone down in the cup holder. When he faced her, his was a mask of irritation and frustration.
“I’m dropping you off at the shop.” He pulled the truck into a driveway and turned them around, going the opposite direction so that they could head towards the shop. “I gotta go help Liam with something. Drew got into a fight at football practice. It seems like he couldn’t wait a few hours for us to have a talk with his parents. He had to go ahead and make this ten times harder.”
Her stomach dropped, and the sense of foreboding was palpable between the two of them. Quickly, this was getting worse and worse. They pulled up to the shop, and she noticed that Tyler watched the road, a worried expression on his face. “Please come and get me when you have something figured out. If nothing else, I can take one of the shop cars out to the house or have Tyler bring me when he goes.”
“Will do, but I just want to let you know, I’m worried.” He gripped the steering wheel tightly, and she could see the stiffening of his jaw. He’d seen this many times in his previous life—seen the signs that said it was getting worse. “If he’s fighting, then he’s escalating.”
She reached over and kissed him on the cheek, that small sign of affection was something they both needed. Worry set in as she got out of the truck and watched him turn in the direction that would take him to the school.
Roni kept a close eye on the drive as she sat in the office waiting for Liam or Rooster to come back. Her phone beeped beside her and her heart sped up when she saw that it was Liam.
I need you and Tyler out at the house.
That wasn’t good, couldn’t be good. She immediately saved the file she was working on and went out into the garage to get Tyler. She wouldn’t make her brother wait, not like the way she’d been made to wait when he and Rooster were picked up for the death of the man that she’d killed. This felt all too similar to her, and maybe that was her imagination, but she didn’t have a great feeling about this. She was pulling onto Porter Pike when her phone rang. Seeing Rooster’s name on the ID was all she needed to see to press the accept button on the steering wheel of the shop car.
“How is he?” she asked quickly, not even bothering with niceties.
“It’s not him I’m worried about. He fucked the other kid up,” Rooster told her in a low tone, sighing.
Roni could hear that he was pacing, and she worried that he was taking this too hard. She wondered if he was near Drew and the family. “Are you in the house?”
“No, I’m outside, I just…” He exhaled a deep breath. “I didn’t know Drew had it in him. I don’t know what was said. Drew’s sitting facing down Liam like a stone cold killer. It’s unnerving. This is the shit I saw when I’d bring kids into juvie. I don’t like this,” Rooster told her, his voice still quiet. The words sounded like they had been ripped from his throat. This was hard on him. He’d come to love these people as his own family in such a short amount of time.
Those words sank into her stomach like a stone. “I’m on my way,” she told him, disconnecting the call.
This shit was bringing back all kinds of memories she had hoped were long buried. Buried so far deep that she would never have to unearth them. As she pulled into the drive, she looked behind her and realized for the first time that Tyler was right there. He must have followed her from the shop when she’d gotten him, but it hadn’t even registered in her brain. Driving past the clubhouse, she saw a bunch of cars there and knew they were waiting to hear what was going on with the member of their family. Pulling up to her brother’s house, she saw Rooster sitting on the porch, his head in his hands.
Tyler was gone by the time she got out of the car, and she was happy for that; maybe by the time she got into the house they would know where Drew’s head was at or what happened. Rooster’s head shot up as he heard her car door slam. His eyes followed her as she slowly made her way up the drive and towards the steps.
“What’s going on with him?” She nodded her head towards the house.
“No idea.” Rooster ran his hand over his stubble-covered chin. “When we got there, he wasn’t talking, and none of the other players said they knew what happened. Apparently Drew and this other kid were coming onto the field, walking with each other. They were two of the last ones, and some of them heard some commotion, looked over, and Drew had him on the ground, whaling on him.”
“Is the kid hurt bad?” she asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.
He nodded. “They had to call an ambulance.”
“Shit,” she breathed. It was then that she heard raised voices inside the house. She and Rooster hurried inside, and when she got there, it broke her heart.
“You’re not a man, Drew,” Liam was telling the teenager. “You can’t make fucking adult decisions like putting other teenagers in the hospital. This shit follows you around for the rest of your life. Be honest with us and tell us what the fuck is going on!” He roared.
Roni took in the scene before her. Mandy stood in the corner with Denise, tears streaming down both their faces; she wasn’t sure where Tatum was. Tyler stood in the other corner; she couldn’t tell what he was feeling. His face was expressionless with the mask he used to keep his emotions tucked away. But it was Liam that killed her. She saw the memories etched in the pain on his face. Stepping forward, she wanted to be the person who kept some sense and perh
aps provided calm to the situation.
“Please.” She kneeled down so that she was at eye level with him. When he wouldn’t meet her eyes, she grabbed his chin and forced him to. “Mandy tried to tell me the other day that something was up with you, but I ignored her. If Mandy knows, then you realize it’s only a matter of time before the rest of us find out. Be honest with us and let us help with whatever’s going on.” His eyes finally met hers, and she was surprised by the anger she saw there.
“Y’all think you’ve got it all figured out, right? There must be something wrong with me because I’m being a dick.”
“Stop it right now,” Denise told him from where she stood. She’d found her voice and it was hard and full of authority. “I didn’t raise you to be a punk and I didn’t raise you to talk back. Things have been different the past couple of years, and we should be thankful. Don’t you dare show your ass like this. You need to tell us what’s going on.”
He swallowed roughly, his face softening slightly. “Can I talk to Tyler and Rooster?”
Those two names couldn’t have surprised the rest of them if they’d tried.
“Whoever you need to talk to,” Roni was quick to assure him. If there was anything he needed, it was reassurance, and however he wanted to play this, she would make sure he got to play it. She wasn’t going to fail him the way she’d failed her brother and the man she’d loved for half of her life.
Chapter Twenty
Rooster felt awkward walking up to a teenage boy’s bedroom with Tyler following close behind. If this had been a year ago, he’d think that Drew was luring him in for a beat down. Bad analogy, he knew, but he had to do something to keep from thinking too heavily about the situation at hand. The three of them made their way inside. Rooster stood with his back to the door while Tyler had a seat next to Drew on the bed. The silence was deafening as they waited for him to tell them why he had called them in on this and not his parents.
Second Chance Love (Heaven Hill Book 6) Page 10
