by Shey Stahl
Just chill? Who the fuck is this kid?
I look away from her and glace at the screen where Ollie is looking at me with a smirk on his face that makes me want to commit violent acts against this child.
“I’m sorry, did you just say boyfriend?”
She nods, turning the phone back to face her. “I did.”
Oh fuck no!
“Hey, Red? Did you know Nova has a boyfriend she Facetimes with all day?”
It may be immature but I turn back to Nova and stick my tongue out at her, knowing what’s coming. I mustn’t be the only one who knows what’s coming because I can hear Ollie quickly telling Nova he has to go and hangs up.
Red stands in front of Nova, his hands on his hips. “What the fuck does he mean you have a boyfriend?”
“Thanks a lot, asshole,” Nova spits at me through gritted teeth.
I can’t help but laugh because it’s only the beginning for Red, and I’ve never been so grateful to not have a daughter.
“Just leave it alone, Red,” Nova tells him, walking into the house. Only he doesn’t and follows her.
“First off, I’ve repeatedly told you to call me dad, and you’re not going out with Ollie until you’re sixteen.”
As they’re heading inside the house, Tyler sneaks past them and over to where I’m sitting on the deck drinking a beer.
“You and Raven are still okay to watch the boys while we’re gone, right?”
He nods but his face says otherwise. I don’t want to leave them while we’re gone, but we haven’t been on a honeymoon yet, so this is the next best thing.
“Are you sure you can handle this?” I ask Tyler as he’s handing Chevy and Lyric sparklers and a lighter.
My little guy just turned three in February and he’s a spitting image of me still, his hair darker now, brown eyes and always carrying a toy guitar in his hand.
“I’m positive,” Tyler assures me, slapping Raven’s ass when she walks by with a bowl of watermelon in hand for the kids. Our Fourth of July parties are a lot different these days. Where it used to be about getting drunk and shooting off hundreds’ worth of illegal fireworks, it’s now about family.
I point to the boys who are trying to figure out the lighter Tyler handed them. “Really? Because you just gave a lighter to a pair of three-year-olds.”
His eyes widen. “I did? Oh, shit.”
“Ty, can you change Kinsley’s diaper?” Raven asks over her shoulder as she sets the bowl of watermelon on the table.
“Do you even know how to change a diaper?” I ask Tyler, teasing him as I lean back in my chair, taking a long draw from my beer.
“What is this, ‘pick on me’ day? Do you know how to change a diaper?” he counters, glaring at me.
“Yes, but the last time I changed Landon’s diaper, he peed in my mouth.”
Landon’s our four-month-old son. Sophie and I certainly didn’t plan Lyric, though he turned out to be the best thing in our lives. However, we did plan Landon, and I loved being a part of the pregnancy and delivery this time.
True to our situation, Sophie and I did everything backwards. It wasn’t until after Landon was born in late spring, when he was three weeks old, that I asked her to marry me.
For three years we’d been living together in an apartment across town from my mom, raising Lyric. For a while, I put off asking because I didn’t feel like we were ready yet and why mess with something that clearly worked, right? You know the saying, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”
And then, one morning as she was feeding Landon, and I was attempting to get Lyric dressed before I headed to California for a two-month tour, I looked over at her and something just clicked. I had an overwhelming feeling, a need to take the next step. I wanted her to be my wife. I always knew we would eventually get married but at that moment, I knew it was time.
So while our hectic lives unfolded around us, I dropped to my knees with cheerios stuck to my shirt, spit up on hers, and asked her to marry me.
Only she didn’t answer me and moved to set Landon down in his Pack ‘n Play.
I wasn’t really sure what to think. I mean, I just asked her to marry me and she wasn’t saying anything.
And then she started to cry, big emotional “I just gave birth” tears. “How could you wait until I’m such a mess to ask me? It’s been three years since we’ve been back together and this is the moment we’re going to remember for the rest of our lives? You with Cheerios in your hair and me smelling like baby puke? I didn’t get more than three hours sleep last night. I can’t remember the last time I took a shower… I mean, how could you?”
I had to remind myself it was the hormones talking and she wasn’t really mad at me, maybe just that I had bad timing for asking?
And then I started laughing and she glanced up at me. “Oh, so now you’re laughing at me? You’re such a stupid jerk!”
As she tried to push past me into the other room, I captured her against the wall, my hands framing her face. “Sophie.” I let my breath carry over her. “Don’t you see, the moment’s perfect. I want to be with you forever. You and me, the boys, we’re a family. I proposed to you because you’re always beautiful, even with baby puke on you. I’m sorry if this isn’t how you pictured it, but I can’t think of a better moment because this is our life now.”
She was just about to answer me when Lyric walked by and smacked her ass with his hand, something he’d been doing a lot these days. “Pretty mama!”
Laughing, she picked him up and stared at him like she was trying to come up with something to say to me.
“Well…” I dipped my head forward, catching her gaze. “Will you marry me?”
“Yes!” Lyric yelled in her face, causing us both to laugh.
With a heavy sigh, Sophie met my anxious stare. “What he said.”
Two months later, the day I came back from California, I married her in my parents’ backyard. It seemed backyard weddings had become a sort of tradition in our family. First Red and then just a year later, Raven, and now us. I think we all felt this was the only place to do it. It made us all feel closer to our dad and felt like he was a part of it.
“When do you leave for Nevada?” Tyler asks, drawing me from my thoughts.
“In the morning. I think we’ll be back on the eighteenth. Dylan said it’s something like eleven shows in fourteen days.”
After the mess with Sam and Nick, we parted ways with them for good and took Dylan up on his offer to work with him. He’d never been much into managing a band, but we took pride in the fact he wanted the same things from music. We wanted to make music, but on a more intimate level. The heart of where it starts for most bands. Bars and clubs. The smaller venues where the fans are able to hear the music with a more personable experience where we’re literally just feet away from them.
We still played at Murphy’s Friday and Saturday nights and twice a month we were at Bailey’s in Seattle. It was exactly the kind of schedule we wanted. After we released our first album in August, we toured only local stuff and sold out of every bar we played at. It was insane but never once did we consider the world wide tours offered to us.
Beck, Lincoln and me, well, we decided if we were going to do this and remain the same boys of Torque we were when we began, we couldn’t give into the machine of the music industry. We’d say when and how much we’d put ourselves out there and always give the people listening to our music a more personal side.
In turn it allows us to live our lives away from any kind of spotlight and for me to see my kids grow up. I wasn’t there for Lyric’s birth and that’s something I’ll always regret. But I was there for his first birthday and every one of them since. It’s not the same, but it’s the next best thing. And I was there when Landon was born.
“Have you seen Kinsley?” Tyler finally asks, drawing me from my thoughts again when Red takes a seat next to us. Chevy’s on his lap and he’s trying to get what looks to be marshmallow and bark from the flower beds
off his sticky hands. At least he doesn’t have a lighter in his hand anymore. “I can’t change her diaper if I can’t find her.”
I smile at Raven when she eyes Tyler like he’s crazy for losing her. “Why’d you name that kid Kinsley?”
“Because Cinderella was taken. Now have you seen her or not?”
I turn to Tyler, my arm draped over the back of the chair between Red and me. “On any given day, how many times do you lose your daughter?”
Tyler looks under the table where the food is, lifting up the table cloth and then setting it back down. “Truthfully, at least a couple of times.”
It’s true. Once Kinsley started walking two weeks ago, she seems to have a knack for walking away when no one is looking.
“Are you guys going to have more?” I’m trying to provoke the two of them because I’m good at it, so why not. “That way if you have another one, they could find each other.”
“I don’t know about that.” Tyler laughs. “I jerked off in a cup for like two months just to get this one. It was exhausting.”
Red shakes his head, laughter rolling through his shoulders. “I bet it was.”
Tyler and Raven weren’t supposed to be able to have kids. Somehow, the doctors found a way where they took samples of Tyler’s sperm and Raven’s eggs and made the baby in a cup as Nova tells people, and then Raven drank it.
That’s not how it happened, but you get the gist of it. They were able to have one of their own; they just couldn’t do it the old fashion way.
Though Tyler to this day claims he talked the doctor into letting him put the tube in Raven because that’d be the manly thing to do.
And if you ask Raven, she smiles and tells her husband he did good.
Within a few minutes of losing her, they end up finding Kinsley under the deck trying to get the cat to come out. I can’t stop myself from laughing watching Kinsley trying to get the cat out and Tyler trying to get Kinsley out. It’s like watching an awkward game of tug-a-war.
Tyler on the other hand doesn’t quite see the same humor in the situation and glares at me. “Quit your laughing, asshole, and come over here and help me!”
I only laugh harder, shaking my head. “Nah, I’m enjoying the show.”
Sophie approaches me smiling as she holds Landon in her arms. While Lyric may be my mini-me, Landon resembles Sophie with his blue eyes and blond hair. He’s asleep against her shoulder and I can’t manhandle her like I want, but I’m looking forward to the fact I can tomorrow.
“Is it wrong I’m looking forward to a two week break?” she asks, laughing lightly as she sits gently on my lap.
“No, not at all.” I press my lips to her neck and inhale in the smells of barbecued food and fireworks. Over her shoulder my eyes drift to the back gate, the very same place four years ago I attempted to walk out of her life.
“Rawley, please don’t do this,”
“Sophie, this is what I do. I fuck up and I leave. You should know this by now.”
Nothing about our lives resembles the way we were back then, but I can’t stop myself from thinking about it. I used to think forgiveness equaled weakness. I don’t know why, I just did.
But now… I think there’s a love out there strong enough to withstand anything.
“Just remember,” I whisper in her ear, “I’ll be on stage every night, singing, all sweaty and wound up from the show, and I’ll get my wife all to myself… in my dressing room.”
She loves watching me perform live. It’s how I got her pregnant with Landon. She came to a show in Portland, told me to knock her up and we had sex in my dressing room.
Laughing, Sophie pulls back to look at me. “You’re gonna knock me up again, aren’t you?”
I smile. “Maybe.”
Thank you my family for allowing me to write at such odd hours of the night, and Lauren for being up with me during them. I’ll never understand how you can stay up until 2:00 a.m. and still function the next day.
This book was extremely hard for me to write in the sense where for weeks, no words would come to me. I was so upset with Rawley at times I would sit and talk to him as if he was real, wondering why he was being so difficult. I couldn’t put into words what I wanted to say and in a sense, I was just as lost as the characters, struggling to find my way inside their heads.
They wouldn’t talk to me, and when they did, life was in the way and I couldn’t put the words on paper. So for weeks, a blank screen greeted me every morning, sometimes at the oddest hours, like three in the morning.
And then one day while listening to A Perfect Circle, I found my way back inside Rawley’s head and finished the story. He’s such a complex character and I hope you guys found it in your heart to forgive him after those first few chapters where the only moral bone inside him was crushed. I loved writing such a lost soul because with that came honesty and the ugly side of him.
Sometimes those are my favorite characters to write.
I have to thank my wonderful editor, Becky Johnson, for always giving me excellent feedback and pushing me when I need to take the jump and just finish the damn scene the way it needs to be written, not the way I attempt to write it the first time. I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve taught me about writing these last two years and I hope for your sake my grammar has gotten better. Let’s hope so, right?
To the girls in my BETA group and proofreaders, thanks for being patient while I worked through my issues with Rawley. Love you girls!
Shey Stahl is a USA Today best-selling author, a wife, mother, daughter and friend to many. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family in the Pacific Northwest where she was born, and raised around a dirt track. Visit her website for additional information and keep up to date on new releases: www.sheystahl.com.
You can also find her on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/SheyStahlAuthor
Racing on the Edge
Happy Hour
Black Flag
Trading Paint
The Champion
The Legend
Hot Laps
The Rookie
Fast Time
Open Wheel
Pace Laps
Dirt Driven (TBA)
Behind the Wheel (TBA)
The Redemption Series
The Trainer
The Fighter
Stand Alones
Waiting for You
Everything Changes
Deal
All I Have Left
Awakened
Everlasting Light
Bad Blood
Heavy Soul
Bad Husband
Crossing the Line
Delayed Penalty
Delayed Offsides
Delayed Roughing (Release date: TBA)
The Torqued Trilogy
Unsteady
Unbearable
Unbound
