Harder (Stark Ink Book 1)

by Dahlia West

  She was definitely no blue-haired biddy with bifocals and a beak nose, perfect for pecking where it didn’t really belong. Adam came face-to-face with a woman whose hair was not blue, but a deep, chestnut brown. And her chest… well… it wasn’t polite to look for any longer than the split second he already had, but Calla Winslow was no old biddy. She was a young biddy, though probably only a few years younger than Adam himself, which put her—he guessed—in her early thirties.

  No glasses hid her soft, brown eyes. She was wearing the sort of muted skirt, blouse, and blazer that he’d assumed a guidance counselor would wear, but it didn’t fit her. Not that it was too big or too small; far from unflattering, it hinted at long legs and a slight curve of hip, but her hair was kinky-curly and falling to her shoulders in an unruly spray. She gave off the scent of barely-restrained wildness, like Jeannie in her black office-temp trousers. The only suit Calla Winslow should appear in was a birthday suit. Under different circumstances, Adam wouldn’t have minded a game of “Hot for Teacher.”

  He wondered with mild curiosity what she thought of him, standing before her in steel-toed Martens and a black leather jacket, working on a two-day beard and hair only half as long as her own. She stepped back, clearly surprised.

  He smiled at her. “I’m Adam,” he told her and extended his hand.

  Ms. Winslow hesitated only a moment before shaking it. Her hands were small, soft, and clean. He finally placed the scent: Lavender.

  “You’re… Ava’s… brother?” she asked. Her eyebrows knitted together.

  Adam wondered just how much time this woman had spent with his kid sister, because though Ava was blonde, she was a Stark through and through. How surprised could Ms. Winslow be by the leather and tattoos? Or maybe she thought he was too old. At thirty-five, he supposed if one of the Trojans had broken during one of his backseat escapades, he could pass for Ava’s father, though he’d probably be standing here for a lot worse reasons that truancy if he’d actually been the one to raise her. God knew he didn’t know enough about kids to do the job right. How he’d come out of his own childhood unscathed considering what he’d put Mom and Pop through, he’d never know. You had to have patience to raise kids. You had to have the patience of a saint to raise a Stark.

  “Come in. Have a seat,” she said, recovering quickly. Adam expected her to leave the office door open, or at least to consider it, but she shut it swiftly without a moment’s hesitation. Apparently, Calla Winslow lived dangerously.

  As she rounded her desk to her own chair, her features softened into a sympathetic frown. Adam had seen the look on dozens of people in the last few days. He was becoming slightly resentful at this point, but on Calla Winslow it looked so genuine, so heart-felt that he couldn’t find it within himself to be irritated with her.

  “I’m so sorry about your mother,” she said quietly. “Was she ill for a long time? Was Ava possibly missing class because of it?”

  Adam shifted in his chair and shook his head. “No. Mom’s cancer came on suddenly. Or rather, it had been spreading for a while, years maybe, but we didn’t know.”

  Calla nodded and leaned back. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. Then, “One of Ava’s teachers complained to me that she’d stopped attending her class. I checked the attendance record and found the discrepancy.” She took a seat in her chair and picked up some paperwork. She glanced down at it then looked at Adam across the desk. “Do you know what Ava might be doing instead of attending class?”

  Adam leaned back in his chair and shook his head. “No. Other than hanging out with Sienna, I don’t think she’d be anywhere. And you said Sienna never left school.”

  “True. Sienna’s been changing the official record, but Sienna herself hasn’t left school grounds, at least not that I’ve been able to confirm. I take it Ava doesn’t have friends other than Sienna, that you know of?”

  Adam scowled and spread his hands over the arms of the chair. “I… I don’t know,” he admitted. “Dalton—that’s my younger brother, or my middle brother—wouldn’t really know either. My youngest brother is Jonah Stark. Do you know Jonah? He graduated last May. ”

  Calla shook her head. “No. I’m afraid I don’t. I just moved here this year.”

  “Anyway, Dalton and I were grown and out of the house when Mom and Pop adopted Ava. Then they took in Jonah a few years later as a foster kid and adopted him, too.” He rubbed his face. For the first time since he could remember, he felt embarrassed. He pictured Ava, wild blond hair, determined jaw, racing full speed ahead with a semi-wild abandon. He knew how she was but not who she was. “Dalton and I don’t—I,” he corrected because his own behavior was on him, “don’t know them as well as I probably should. We’re not that close.”

  “I see.”

  Adam bristled. He was ashamed and he hated that feeling. “I love them,” he said defensively. “I’d die for them, do anything for them. They’re my family.” Despite his heart-felt declaration, his shoulders sagged. “But…” He sighed. “It is what it is.”

  Time had been lost and he couldn’t get it back. It was easy to dismiss it as he went about his own life, but sitting here with someone else and being forced to confront it was making him uncomfortable. Calla probably couldn’t relate to any of this. She probably had a nice, normal family, surrounded by people who actually gave a shit.

  To his surprise, though, Calla nodded. She wasn’t eyeing him like a complete degenerate brother, which of course he was. She must have been too nice a person to say it to his face. “I understand,” she told him. “How is Ava dealing with your mother’s death? Is she talking about it? Processing it? To lose a parent so young, so suddenly, I can’t imagine anything harder.”

  Adam sat up straighter in his chair, intensely grateful that he had some small chance here to redeem himself a little in this woman’s eyes. “We all need to be together on this. Get through this as a family. I’m trying. I really, really am. We all need to sit down and talk about what happened. But so far it’s been hard just to get them in the same room.”

  Calla twirled her pen in her hand for a moment. “Would you consider family counseling?”

  Adam paused as he mulled over her suggestion. “Jonah…” He drummed his fingers on the chair, considering how much to say about Jonah’s personal business. “Jonah’s not much on counseling. He went once or twice as a kid. I don’t know exactly why he stopped going. He’s still…kind of distant.” Adam frowned again as he realized he’d never pursued Jonah for a real relationship. Jonah had kept Adam, and everyone else, at arm’s length, so Adam mostly left him alone. He wondered now if he had really accepted the estrangement because it was what Jonah wanted, or had Adam just chosen the easiest, and most self-serving, path? He had a feeling that he knew the answer to that one, and it made him look even worse.

  “Jesus,” he muttered. “I’m a dick.” He looked up at Calla, suddenly realizing where he was and that his language was far from appropriate for the setting.

  He was about to apologize when she said, “No, you’re not, Adam.”

  “Yes, I am. I have a brother and a sister who I don’t even know, never bothered to know. They know I love them, but that’s not enough, is it?” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “How have I never realized that it isn’t enough?”

  “We don’t always see what’s right in front of us,” Calla said. “That doesn’t make us bad people. Or I hope it doesn’t. The important thing is that it’s not too late. You can still repair your relationship with them.” She looked at him from across her desk and folded her hands. “Don’t you fix people’s mistakes every day?”

  He sighed. “Not usually. And that’s just covering it up. I don’t think it works with people.” In fact, Adam was fairly certain it didn’t.

  Chapter Seven

  Adam drove across town toward his parent’s house. He slowed, though, as his route took him past Dalton’s place. His brother’s huge diesel pickup was still parked outside his apartment. Adam impuls
ively turned off the road and pulled his Charger in beside it. He frowned as he checked his watch. When Dalton had first been hired on to Midway Construction, he’d worked the swing shift as the low man on the totem pole. That had been years ago, though. Surely he wasn’t going back to it now. Why, then, was he home at noon when he should be at work?

  Adam got out and headed to Dalton’s front door. He knocked, then turned the knob. Inside the darkened apartment, he had to wait for his eyes to adjust a bit. When they did, he saw his brother sprawled out on his couch, eyes closed.

  “What are you doing home?” Adam asked as he surveyed stacks of empty pizza boxes, empty beer cans, and an empty bottle of whiskey on the coffee table. It was impossible to tell how much Dalton had consumed on this latest spree, since apparently it had been quite a while since he’d bothered to clean the place.

  “Taking the day off,” Dalton grumbled.

  Adam made his way to the recliner, but checked it before he sat down—just in case. “Where’s Zoey?” he asked. Surely she hadn’t seen the place looking like a disaster? It had never looked this way when she was around. Dalton didn’t answer him, though. “Why didn’t she come to the funeral?” Adam pressed. Dalton and Zoey had been together for almost two years, Mom had loved her. It hadn’t felt right to have Zoey missing.

  Dalton half-shrugged. “Out of town.”

  “When did she leave?” Adam asked. It was tempting to hold his nose and block out the smell of old pepperoni.

  “A while ago, I guess.”

  Adam sighed. Just another thing he didn’t know about. “Come to the house tonight,” he said. “Get something to eat.” Before seeing the place, Adam would have suggested they call out for pizza, but it seemed that it was all Dalton had been living on for a while.

  “Yeah, okay.” With a groan, Dalton sat up. His white T-shirt had a few holes in it and his jeans had seen better days, at least not the inside of a washing machine, that was for sure. He put one hand on the coffee table to help himself up. A jagged scar between his forefinger and thumb gleamed white against his otherwise tanned skin. “Head,” he mumbled and lurched up.

  “Jesus, D. Are you drunk right now?”

  Dalton ignored him and stumbled down the hall to the bathroom.

  Adam watched his brother wander away then shook his head. He stood up, grabbed a few empty cans and headed for the kitchen. The place was a wreck, Dalton was a wreck. Adam figured the easiest place to start was the apartment. As he piled dishes into the sink, somewhere in the living room, Dalton’s phone chirped. Adam ignored it while the sink was filling, then it chirped a second time. He shut off the water and headed back to the living room to sort through the sea of cardboard and aluminum. He found the damn thing buried between the couch cushions. When he picked it up, the last message still appeared on the screen. “If you don’t show tomorrow, you’re done.”

  Adam checked the sender. Dalton’s boss at Midway. He thumbed the button for the inbox and pulled up the previous messages. The one just a few minutes before had also been from Midway. “This is the last time you’re a no call/no show.” Adam scrolled through the several dozen previous messages, most were from Midway and most of them were as pissy as the last two. Dalton had been missing work for a lot longer than he was letting on. Adam kept scrolling, aware that he was invading his brother’s privacy but not caring anymore. At the end of the list, the first saved message, was a message from Zoey, dated over three months ago. “I don’t want anything else at your place. Just toss it.”

  Adam read it and re-read it, growing angrier by the second. When Dalton emerged from the bathroom, Adam turned and glared at him. “So how many days have you missed work?” he challenged.

  Dalton actually looked surprised, then his eyes narrowed on his phone. “Give me that,” he snapped.

  “Fuck no. You’ve been ditching work for months now,” Adam accused. “So say all the messages in your inbox.” Jesus Christ, Dalton was as bad as Ava. “What the fuck, D?”

  “Give me my damn phone!” Dalton growled and surged forward.

  Adam backed up out of his reach. “And Zoey? She’s not out of town. She dumped your ass!”

  “So fucking what?” Dalton shot back.

  “So what? She was the best thing that’s ever happened to you!”

  Dalton made a face but didn’t reply to that one. He lunged for the phone again.

  “What the hell?” Adam repeated. “You lost your woman, you’re about to lose your job. What in the hell?”

  “Fuck you! How do you think you’d be with a gimpy hand, huh? How many tattoos could you do? And what would happen if you couldn’t anymore? So fuck off!”

  Adam glanced down at Dalton’s hand. The scar had healed at this point, but only after a long battle. Someone had bumped him from behind at work while he was working with a rotary saw. Dalton had lost. Two surgeries and weeks of rehab had gotten him to a point where he could work again, but Dalton’s real love—and real talent—was making furniture. A master carpenter, he’d produced some of the most beautiful pieces Adam had ever seen. Their parents had been proud of his ability, but making a living off it was harder than it should have been. Dalton paid the bills by working for Midway Construction while growing his side business, one customer at a time. Adam hadn’t realized that his injury had interfered with his brother’s ability to keep working.

  “What, never?” he asked Dalton. “I mean, you can’t do more rehab or…?”

  Dalton sighed and all the fight drained out of him. “Yeah. There’s always more rehab. But no guarantee it’ll do much good. Midway put me on shit-work, hanging drywall, running ductwork. Shit any monkey can do.” He sighed again and flopped back onto the couch.

  Adam assumed from the sheer amount of slurring, Dalton had stood on his own two feet for as long as he was going to today. He placed the phone onto the coffee table, the first thing Dalton had ever made for himself, and sat back down in the recliner.

  “So, where’s Zoey?” he asked quietly. “And no bullshit.”

  Dalton was silent a while before he said, “Gone. Left a few months ago. We went to a party, she caught me with my tongue in a blonde’s mouth.”

  Adam frowned at him. Dalton and Zoey had been serious, or as serious as Adam thought Dalton could get at this age. He could see Zoey being pissed at Dalton, but he couldn’t believe it was enough to end their relationship. “And she can’t get over it?”

  Dalton’s eyes remained closed. “Probably,” he admitted. “She probably could have gotten over it. I don’t think it was so much where my tongue was. She was more pissed about where my dick was.”

  “Goddammit, D.” He was pissed at Dalton, too, but Adam could see it. His younger brother, devastated at the severity of his injury, drinking his irritation away as Dalton always did, fucked up royally—in every sense of the word. Now Zoey was gone, and D’s job was on the line, and instead of getting his shit together his life had exploded with shrapnel made of greasy pepperoni and beer to wash it down.

  “Wasn’t gonna work,” Dalton muttered flippantly.

  Adam didn’t bother to respond. Zoey’s family had money. They weren’t filthy rich, but they considered themselves better than the Starks, at any rate. Adam always secretly thought that Zoey had thrown herself at Dalton on a dare, slumming it for a night. But Dalton was a good guy, fun and slightly dangerous, and Zoey’s plan must have crumbled sometime after Dalton had taken her to bed for the first time. They’d been together ever since. Mom had been praying for wedding bells. Hell, Adam had gotten the sense that Mom might have even take a shotgun wedding if she could get it. Zoey was good for Dalton; she kept him grounded.

  Adam surveyed the wreckage one more time and decided that now it fell to him to prop up his brother. He sat silently in the recliner until Dalton began snoring softly, then he stood up and went back to picking up the mess. The garbage disposal gave a whine and a chug. Adam quickly flipped the switch off. Peering down into it, he couldn’t see anything wrong. He ro
lled up his sleeves and greased up his hand with dish soap. It slid in easily but he didn’t really want to think about what he was touching.

  His fingers found something, squeezed, and tugged it out. As it came up through the hole, Adam frowned at it. Shredded and stained with God knew what, it took a few seconds of inspection to realize it was a silk tie.

  “Jesus.”

  Chapter Eight

  Adam took yet another detour on his way to the house. His visit with Dalton had rattled him. It was probably more sensible to wait for Jonah to come home tonight to check in with him, but who knew for sure when that would be? Adam needed to feel like he had something, just one thing, firmly under control. He swung into the parking lot of the hardware store and threw the Charger into park. He considered going inside to find Jonah, but decided nothing was quite that urgent. He leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes. He was tired, so damn tired, and he wondered if he’d ever catch up on sleep at this point. He flicked on the radio and waited for Jonah’s shift to be over, which was soon if he remembered correctly.

  Sure enough, twenty minutes later, Jonah came striding out of the automatic doors. He had the black apron balled up in one hand and almost turned in front of Adam and headed toward the bus stop on the other side of the parking lot. Jonah recognized the Charger and leaned down to see who was driving. Adam gave him a wave. Jonah hesitated for a brief moment but then jogged over to the driver’s side door.

  “What’s wrong?” Jonah asked as Adam rolled down the window.

  Adam shook his head. “Nothing. I just thought I’d give you a ride home.”