Harder (Stark Ink Book 1)

by Dahlia West

  “Well, I’m sorry anyway,” Pop said, because, Adam suspected, he knew that he hadn’t made himself clear enough in Adam’s youth.

  “I’m inviting someone to dinner,” Adam announced to break the tension.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “A woman.”

  Pop rolled down the window of the Charger and stuck his head out.

  “Pop!” Adam shouted. “What the hell? What are you doing?!” He reached out and snagged the old man’s sleeve, yanking him back inside. “Pop!”

  The old man looked at Adam and shrugged. “Sorry. I was just checking.”

  “For what?!” Adam cried.

  “One of the horsemen. Or maybe all of them.”

  Adam stared at him. “One of the what?!”

  “Well, if you’re bringing a woman home to dinner, then surely the Apocalypse is upon us.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Adam sat on the couch, forcing himself to watch SportsCenter with the old man. His instinct was to get up and pace the room, checking the window periodically for Jonah to show up. But if Jonah did come home for dinner, Adam didn’t want it to seem like an ambush the moment he arrived. His hands flexed anyway when he heard the front door open. Jonah came into the living room, toting his backpack. He glanced around the room, cautiously.

  “She’s not here yet,” Adam declared.

  Jonah stiffened. “She.”

  Adam got up off the couch, abandoning the pretext of television. “Calla,” he answered quickly. “Her name is Calla. I invited her to dinner.”

  Jonah frowned. “Is she a social worker? A counselor or something?”

  “She is,” Adam admitted. “A guidance counselor. Ava’s guidance counselor, as a matter of fact.” Adam couldn’t tell if Jonah was relieved at all.

  “So why is she coming to dinner? For Ava”

  “Uh, nope. No. She’s… we’re seeing each other.”

  Jonah paused. “Oh,” he said awkwardly.

  “Yeah, so I just wanted her to meet everyone. Officially.”

  “Okay, then.” Jonah turned away from him. “I’m just going to grab some stuff.” He headed off to his room, but Adam followed him down the hall.

  “We still need to talk.”

  Jonah’s hand hesitated on the knob. “There’s nothing to say.”

  “There is.”

  “You don’t know anything,” Jonah said quietly. “You don’t know.”

  He opened the door and stepped inside. If he thought Adam was going to let him shut the door in his face, though, he was mistaken. Adam was on his heels and now standing in the room that used to belong to him. The wallpaper was different. The carpet, too. But it felt familiar.

  “It’s not going to happen again,” Jonah insisted.

  “Because you’re moving out?”

  It hung between them for a long moment. “Yeah. I have to.”

  “Can we talk about it? We could—”

  “No, I have to leave.”

  “Jonah, I’m not letting this go. This thing with Sienna—”

  “There’s no thing with Sienna, okay? Nothing. Nothing like that ever happened before. I was in my room; she showed up. She was all over me.”

  “Jonah, I don’t know if—”

  “You don’t know if you believe me?” Jonah demanded.

  “It’s not that.”

  Jonah looked unconvinced.

  Adam sighed. “Okay, I believe you. Even so, it doesn’t matter if she came on to you. What I saw was unacceptable. You have to be the bigger person and say—”

  “I’m in love with her.”

  Adam froze. “What?”

  “I’m in love with her. I’ve been in love with her my whole life. She doesn’t know.”

  “I— Jesus.”

  “It’s why I didn’t move out after I graduated. I thought being around her would be enough, just being able to see her every day. But it wasn’t enough for her. She wants more and I can’t give her more.” Jonah sighed and glanced down at the bag. “So I gotta go before something else happens between us. I know I’m supposed to say no, Adam. You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know that? But it’s Sienna. And I can’t.”

  “Come with me,” Adam said suddenly. “I want to show you something.”

  Jonah looked skeptical.

  “After that, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. Just come with me first.”

  Jonah frowned. “I can’t stay here, Adam,” he warned.

  Adam nodded. “I understand,” he said and pulled out his keys.

  Adam took Jonah in through the back even though the front door was newly replaced. He turned on the lights in the lobby and let the kid look around. It didn’t look quite as good without the custom art on the walls, but when Adam had some spare time, he’d re-frame them.

  “It’s nice,” Jonah declared. “It looks good.”

  It occurred to Adam that Jonah had never actually been in the shop before. Ava had wandered in once or twice. Adam had thought it was to satisfy a morbid curiosity about needles; little did he know his younger sister was actually doing recon. Giving her a tattoo would be an interesting milestone in their relationship, to say the least.

  “Dalton put in the floors,” Adam noted. “And rebuilt the stairs. There are extra rooms for another artist and a piercer, but I’ve been putting that on hold. So far it’s just me and my receptionist.”

  Adam looked at Jonah, who balked a little. “I’m not an artist,” Jonah insisted.

  “Nah, but you only need some basic training for piercing. I know another shop where you can apprentice.”

  Jonah looked around slowly. “And what? Work here?”

  Adam nodded. “Yeah. The apartment’s upstairs. I couldn’t afford to pay you more than I am now, at least until we get the piercing up off the ground. But rent’s free. I figure you’re not too squeamish around blood.”

  Surprisingly, Jonah laughed.

  “If you like it and you want to stay on, you could sign on as a partner.”

  Adam knew it was pushing a little. He didn’t want to scare Jonah off, but he wanted the kid to see that he had a future here if he wanted it. Part ownership and a business and a place to live. Adam thought it was a pretty good deal if he did say so himself.

  “You can think about it,” he hedged. “Like I said, after the apprenticeship.”

  Jonah didn’t look outright dismissive, at least. He wasn’t headed for the exit. Adam thought that boded well. “Where will you live?” he asked.

  Adam sighed. “Home.”

  Jonah raised his eyebrows at the suggestion. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. I need to be around, with Pop. And Ava… I need to make sure she stays on the right track.”

  Jonah gave a low whistle. “Moving back home at thirty-five.”

  Adam snorted. “Don’t bust my chops over it.”

  “Wow,” Jonah said quietly. “Family.”

  “You are family, Jonah. You always have been. I’ve sort of… left you to your own devices, pretty much your whole life. Which I guess is a polite way of saying I didn’t know what to do, so I just stayed away. And I think I made the wrong decision. All of this,” Adam said wearily, “Mom’s cancer, Pop’s Alzheimer’s, Dalton’s drinking, if you can say there’s been anything good about it, which is a stretch, but I guess it’d be that now I know. Now I know how much I love my family, and I’d do anything and everything to keep them together.”

  Adam couldn’t tell how much of this was working on Jonah. “Let me take you upstairs, show you the apartment at least. It’s no great shakes, I admit. But it’d be yours. You’d be free to come and go as you please.”

  Adam led Jonah up the sturdy, wooden back stairs to the overhead apartment. Inside, at least he’d thought to make the bed ahead of time. The place was presentable enough, he supposed. Adam wasn’t a neat-freak, but he wasn’t a slob either. He let Jonah take a look at the eat-in kitchen, the bathroom, and the large room that doubled as a bedroom and a livi
ng room. When buying the building for himself, Adam hadn’t thought much about the place in general, not the apartment, at any rate. He’d sleep in a cardboard box if it meant having his own shop to run. Now with Jonah standing in the middle of it, he was struck by just how little he was actually offering.

  “It’s not much,” he admitted, looking around. It was bigger than Jonah’s room, to be sure, but not by a lot. “I’m aware we’ve never been able to give you a lot.”

  Adam knew little about Jonah’s first family other than they’d had money, though Jonah had never said anything about it. Jonah turned from the small kitchen to look at him. “She bought me shoes once.”

  “I remember,” Adam replied awkwardly. Adam’s recollection was that Jonah’s original shoes had fallen apart, and his new shoes had come from the bargain bin. Jonah had gotten into a fight at school about it and Adam’s mother had tried to smooth things over with a pair of Air Jordans that the Starks definitely could not afford. At the time, Adam felt both bad for the kid and mad at the kid, because Jonah had never even said thank you.

  “I always felt weird about those shoes,” Jonah confessed to him.

  “Weird how?”

  “She got called to school after they pulled me off a kid. Some douchebag— I didn’t even know him. In the car, she asked me why. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I told her he’d made fun of my shoes. He didn’t make fun of my shoes. He called me a fag.”

  “Jonah.”

  “He didn’t mean anything by it, other than being a douchebag. We were playing basketball and I missed a shot. He was on my pick-up team. He was pissed. I don’t know how she did it, but she dropped me off at home and came back with a brand new pair of shoes. I knew she couldn’t afford them. But I knew she was only trying to make things easier for me. I couldn’t see a way to give them back without having to tell her the truth about what happened. I felt like shit every time I looked at those shoes. I was so messed up then.”

  Adam didn’t want to say it, but he felt like he had to ask. “What about now?”

  “Now? Now I guess I’m still messed up, just in a different way. I had the Sienna thing under control. Honestly, I did. Up until a few weeks ago, I would have said I was fine. Or as fine as I could get, at least. But then the only people who ever gave a shit about me started going through hell and I couldn’t do a thing about it. I’m sorry for all this, Adam. I really am.”

  “Then will you help me?” Adam asked. “I could use it.”

  As he waited for Jonah’s reply, Adam found that asking for help was a lot like drawing: The more you did it, the easier it became.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  When Adam pulled up to the house again, Calla’s Mustang was parked out front.

  “That your girlfriend’s car?” Jonah asked approvingly.

  Adam grinned. “Yep.”

  Jonah shook his head. “How do you do this?”

  “It’s a Stark trait,” Adam informed him. “If you spent more time outside, you’d have to beat them off with sticks, too.”

  Jonah laughed. “I don’t have to go outside. There are some chicks who hang around the gym.”

  “Well, there you go. They can’t help it. I almost feel sorry for them.”

  Adam couldn’t manage to wipe the grin off his face as he exited the car. He’d already spent more time with Jonah these last few weeks than he had their whole lives and he was ecstatic about the fact that he actually liked the kid. Loving was one thing, loving was required—after all, they were family. But it turned out Jonah actually did have a sense of humor buried under all that black clothing and that was a welcome surprise.

  They headed toward the house where they found Calla, Pop, and Ava sitting in the living room. Calla stood up as they came through the door.

  From his recliner, Pop said, “She claims she’s your girlfriend. I don’t buy it, though. She’s too good for you.”

  “Pop!” Ava chastised.

  Adam didn’t mind. Pop used to say the same thing about himself. For years the man proclaimed loudly and often to anyone who would listen that Mom was too good for him. The observation wasn’t so much Pop disparaging Adam as it was tacit approval of Calla, for which Adam was both relieved and grateful.

  “I know it,” Adam confirmed. “I knew when I met her she was out of my league.” He crossed the room, slid an arm around Calla’s waist, and drew her close. He gave her a quick kiss. “Well, she’s here now,” he told Pop. “But… I do have an announcement to make, of sorts.” He glanced at Jonah then at the rest of them. “Jonah’s moving out.”

  Jonah said nothing, neither did Pop.

  “What?” Ava asked.

  “I need help at the shop,” Adam told them. “And Jonah’s agreed to come work with me. He’s going to move into my place.”

  Ava frowned, clearly worried about the change in the family dynamic. No doubt she was worried about how much she’d have to take on here at the house. “Where are you going to live?” she asked cautiously.

  “Here,” he assured her. Ava visibly relaxed. “I’m moving back into my old room. That way I don’t have to drive all over town on grocery runs.” He winked at his sister. “And I can do the dishes.”

  From across the room, Adam caught Pop giving him a very slight nod. The old man’s advice had been good. There were ways to keep Jonah close without putting the kid in a stranglehold. Adam had found the best way to give Jonah the space he needed while giving the two brothers the perfect opportunity to become closer. Judging by the look on Pop’s face, it was clear the old man approved of Adam’s tactics.

  “I made eggplant Parmesan,” Ava announced and Adam started grinning again. Mom’s old recipe, and his personal favorite, but of course Ava knew that.

  Pop grunted and lurched out of the recliner. “Good. I can take it to the center tomorrow for lunch.”

  “We ate in the cafeteria,” Adam told him. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  Pop shrugged. “It’s better than the slop they gave us when I enlisted. But nothing beats your Mom’s eggplant Parm.”

  As they made their way to the table, Adam took a chance and asked, “How’s it going there?”

  The old man grunted again as he pulled out his chair. “Army Asshole’s still there.”

  “Army Asshole?” Calla asked politely.

  Just the mere question shamed the old man visibly. His shoulders drooped. “Sorry,” he muttered to her. “There’s another geezer like me at the center. Real name’s Charlie. He’s alright, I guess. For an Army Ass—” He coughed suddenly. “Watch my language,” he said quietly. “An Army grunt,” he finished.

  “Something wrong with the Army?” Calla asked innocently as Adam pulled out a chair for her.

  “Well, hell yes!” Pop shot back, clearly forgetting his commitment just seconds ago to clean up his language. Adam forgave him though. Army versus Marines was Serious Business. Marines versus anybody was Serious Business. “You know what Army stands for, young lady?”

  Jonah groaned as he sat down. Pop ignored him.

  Calla glanced at Adam, who merely shrugged. Who could keep her from the Gospel of Pop? Not even Mom could have if she were here.

  “No,” she said cautiously.

  Pop grunted. “Ain’t Ready for the Marines Yet.”

  To her credit, Calla laughed. It actually seemed genuine. “I… haven’t heard that one.”

  “Now you have,” the old man declared. “Now you know.”

  Ava brought out a huge casserole dish and set it in the middle of the table.

  “Ava, this is amazing!” Calla exclaimed.

  The seventeen-year-old beamed with pride.

  They helped themselves, like any other night. While Adam was waiting for his turn, he noticed the two empty place settings. Ava saw him looking.

  “Dalton’s away,” she told Calla.

  Calla’s face softened. “I know. I’m sorry. But he’ll be back.”

  No one mentioned the other one. Pop took a furtive
glance, though, and sighed. “Someone should say grace.”

  Everyone shifted uncomfortably, looking around the table. Instinctively, Adam reached up and fingered the gold cross he’d inherited along with the care of these people around him. “I’ll do it, I guess.” He sat quietly for a moment trying to remember his mother’s words. He’d heard her say the blessing for years but now couldn’t recall the words.

  “Just say something,” Pop prompted gently. “Keep it short.”

  Adam pinched the cross. “Um… Father God, bless the food we’re about to eat… and the people who aren’t here to eat it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  After dinner, Jonah cleared most of the plates and took them to the kitchen.

  “I’m not doing those!” Ava shouted after him.

  Before Jonah could reply, Adam said, “I’ll do them. Tomorrow.”

  Ava grunted in agreement. “Okay. It’s bad enough I had to make dinner.”

  Despite Ava’s indignation, Calla smiled at her. “It was very good. Thank you, Ava.”

  Ava was trying to remain stoic, but Adam could see the slight smile she was trying to downplay. “You’re welcome,” she said tightly.

  Pop set his glass of water down on the table and looked at Calla. “Schoolteacher,” he said. “Don’t see it.”

  “Actually, Mr. Stark, I’m a guidance counselor.”

  The old man leaned back in his chair to consider this. “Guidance counselor,” he said quietly. “Haven’t known many. Adam’s guidance counselor told him he wouldn’t amount to anything without college.”

  Adam grimaced. “He was right.”

  Pop bristled. “The hell he was!” He turned to Calla. “My son’s a good man.”

  Calla smiled. “I know it.”

  “Well,” Pop added, “even with the long hair. How do you stand it?”