Too Bad So Sad

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  Reagan rolled her eyes and then looked down at the baby in my arms. Her eyes softened. “Oh, so small.”

  I grunted, remembering why I was in the corner and reached for two high chairs.

  “I got one,” Reagan said. “If you take two, you’re going to end up whacking that poor man in the head. He looks kind of beat up already.”

  I had one in my hand when I instinctively turned to see what ‘beat up man’ she was talking about, only to see Rome seated in a booth one down from our own table.

  And I didn’t have to see the woman’s face to know that the person sitting across the booth from him was Tara. I knew her based solely on the color and texture of her hair.

  Always so smooth and sleek and straight, it’d been down to her mid-back when I’d met her—and was left by her. Now, it was a little shorter, but not by much.

  I tightened my hand around the high chair and started walking, knowing I had no choice but to pass by them.

  Rome had probably seen me the moment that I’d sat down, though.

  He’d always had a sixth sense when it’d come to me—as I had him. Though that was long gone now, but when we were kids and we were growing up together—he’d been my best friend in the whole wide world.

  Through high school and then the marines…he was there for me. He was the one person I could always count on.

  Now, not so much.

  “Rome.” I nodded my head at him.

  Rome, eyes wide, said, “Tyler.”

  His eyes went to the woman I could feel at my back, the baby in my arms and then me.

  I knew what he was assuming—that this was our family.

  You couldn’t tell that she was Henley’s—mostly because her kids were at different ages. It was easy to assume.

  I kept walking and set the high chair down next to an open spot where Alana had made room for it and Reagan had done the same over by Henley.

  My sisters didn’t waste time and didn’t care that Reagan was there, they started right in.

  “Oh my God. Did you see that look that Tara gave you?” Henley whispered wide-eyed. “And I thought Rome was going to cry. By the way, Rome is a professional football player. That’s probably why he looks so beat up.”

  That was true. I’d seen the deep-seated sorrow in Rome’s eyes.

  He didn’t want to be where he was. He regretted it.

  Well, I wasn’t the one who left—who did what he did. That was all him.

  And I had no control over his thoughts and actions.

  I shrugged and took a seat, all the while Henley and Alana spoke, not caring that likely Tara and Rome could hear them, or that Reagan was still right there.

  Shit.

  “I mean, he was the one who cheated with your girlfriend. The least he could do is not talk to you. But, every time I see him in town, he asks about you, wants to know how you’re doing. Acting like he didn’t commit the ultimate betrayal as a friend.” Alana shook her head. “I saw them at the bank last week. He did not look happy to be standing next to her and when he got a couple thousand dollars cash out and handed it over to her, he looked like he wanted to throttle her.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  Instead, I studied the woman that was still standing there, looking at me like she was trying to figure me out.

  Good luck.

  Even I couldn’t figure me out.

  Noisily, Reagan pulled out a chair that was guaranteed to draw every single eye in the entire restaurant due to how much racket she made and took a seat at my side.

  Then she leaned forward, placing her mouth near my ear.

  “Don’t think that this makes me like you anymore,” Reagan hissed. “I hate you, but I’m doing this because you look pathetic.”

  I felt my lips twitch as I turned to look at Reagan. Our faces were within inches of each other’s and if I moved forward even a little bit, our lips would be touching.

  Momentarily, I forgot that Rome and Tara were even in the room. Instead, I focused on the woman that was sitting there, all piss and vinegar, looking like she was ready to fight me.

  Her five-foot-three-inch, one-hundred-twenty-pound self thought she could best me?

  That was almost comical.

  And I say almost because she honestly looked like she’d try to take me. She wouldn’t win, of course…but she’d give it her best shot.

  “What makes you think that I want—or even need—your help?” I questioned. “I’ve been doing just fine for thirty-five years, darlin’. I can keep living my life without your haughty input or your glares.”

  Then I leaned forward and pressed my lips to hers.

  She let me and I felt something inside of me zing to life. Something I hadn’t felt since Tara.

  We both pulled back—the lip touch so small and sweet that it might’ve barely registered if I hadn’t felt that spark—and stared at each other.

  She was narrowing her eyes at me and I was grinning like a fool.

  I heard a glass break somewhere in the vicinity of Tara and Rome’s table and I knew that something we’d done had gotten to one or the other—maybe both.

  I didn’t care one goddamn bit about the two of them, though.

  I just wanted my lips back on hers.

  Then the baby in my arms started to squirm and I leaned away from her.

  “That was epic,” Henley breathed. “I can’t believe you did that. Who are you again?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Henley, Alana, this is my trespasser, Reagan. Trespasser, these are my sisters, Henley on your left, with the eighteen children and Alana, right. The little girl in the high chair is Alana’s daughter, Autumn.”

  “And who is this one?” Reagan gestured toward the baby in my arms, ignoring the jab of her being a trespasser.

  “This one is Mellie. The one my sister is holding is Marshall and the one in the car seat is Maddie.” I pointed at each kid.

  I could practically see the wheels in Reagan’s mind turning.

  She wanted to know how all these kids were my sister’s when they were obviously not only close in age but also different ages.

  Maybe if she was nice, I’d tell her later.

  “Well, that’s a handful,” Reagan said. “All those M names will get confusing. My stepmother and dad already get confused and none of our names start with the same letter.”

  I snorted. “I think that’s every parent, though. Our mother still calls us “Alana-Tyler-Henley” until she gets whichever one of us she wanted to answer.”

  Reagan’s lips twitched and she looked up to see if Tara and Rome were still watching. They were. I could see them out of the corner of my eye and Rome was actually turned in his seat, smiling.

  Tara was actually glaring.

  Nice.

  “I was going to just say hi, but now she’s glaring and I feel like I need to prove a point and join y’all…but I don’t really like talking. So, if I could just sit here and y’all ignore me, that’d be cool,” Reagan asked hopefully.

  Henley snickered. “Oh, Tyler. I like her.”

  “That sucks for you,” I said. “Because she hates me. Oh, and you forgot the part about her trespassing. Let’s not forget stealing.”

  Reagan’s gaze burned into the side of my face. “I was looking at moss. I took moss. I don’t think you give a shit about the moss, loser. You care about the fact that I was on your property…which I’m not going to apologize for. It was all in the name of research.”

  My sisters rolled their eyes in unison.

  “Tyler has a thing,” Alana offered. “He doesn’t like people in his space. He’s OCD like that. He also probably will look at that patch of moss you scraped off his tree and feel moved to go scrape the rest off just because of the chunk missing.”

  The hostess came back with the rolls and set them down quickly before leaving, not saying a word.

  Reagan gasped. “You can’t!”

  Alre
ady did.

  Oops.

  “Why not?” I countered.

  I mean, it didn’t matter what she thought because it was already done, but I still wouldn’t mind hearing her opinions on why I shouldn’t.

  What I didn’t expect was for her to go into clinical detail on why moss was good for the environment, what ate the moss, where it grew…and honestly, I was surprised that I actually listened to it all.

  “Wow, I never knew,” Henley said as she reached for a roll.

  I did the same, then tried to figure out how I was going to get butter on it while holding a baby.

  Henley and Alana snickered at my predicament, but neither of those bitches stopped to help me figure out how to make it work.

  Then Reagan snatched the roll out of my hand, slathered it with an insane amount of butter—just how I liked it—and handed it back to me.

  I winked at her. “Keep doing nice things and I’m going to think that you actually like me…”

  She surreptitiously flipped me off.

  I winked at her to let her know I wasn’t offended in the least.

  “Well…” Henley said. “These rolls aren’t going to last very long with all of us eating them.”

  “That’s because they’re God’s gift to mankind…and this butter. MMMM.” Reagan moaned.

  I looked away from her in the throes of a buttergasm and turned to survey the wall, trying to count to ten without allowing my dick to get hard at the sight of her.

  “So…why are you here?” I asked. “Did you come to eat? Are you here with anyone?”

  Reagan shook her head. “I was going to surprise my dad and bring him lunch at work, but then he got a call—he’s a SWAT officer with the Kilgore Police Department—and I decided to use the restroom in hopes that it would be a bogus call. Since he hasn’t called back, I’m assuming it wasn’t one.”

  I pulled out my phone and looked at my messages.

  “It wasn’t. An old lady decided she was going to hold her nurse hostage because she kept stealing her pain meds,” I read the text from a friend.

  Her brows rose.

  “How do you know that?” she questioned.

  I wiggled my phone. “Got a lot of buddies on the force. I’m ex-military and I was on the SWAT team for a few years before I moved to Hostel.”

  Her brows went up even farther.

  Much farther and they’d disappear into her hairline.

  “Who’s your father?” I asked, taking one last bite of roll.

  It was so fuckin’ good.

  “Bennett…”

  “Alvarez?” I confirmed.

  She nodded.

  I moaned. “Shit.”

  Bennett Alvarez was a buddy. A buddy who was a good enough one that I had no right in the world to find his daughter attractive.

  Son of a bitch.

  “I knew that he had his daughter young…”

  “Sixteen,” she confirmed, smiling.

  “But I didn’t realize that you were this old,” I mentioned.

  “Twenty-five.”

  I felt my stomach clench.

  Twenty-five. I’m nearly ten years older than her! I also know her father quite well. This age difference feels huge to me, although it really isn’t.

  Holy balls.

  The baby in my arm started to fuss and I expertly moved her up on my shoulder and started to pat her little bottom.

  My eyes traveled across the table to my sisters who were clearly enraptured by the scene playing out in front of them—the Tyler and Reagan show.

  “What?” I asked them both.

  Alana’s eyes were wide and excited. “I’ve never seen you fight with a woman before,” she murmured. “It’s just surprising to me because you’re always this sweet little Tyler with everyone…and then there’s this girl.”

  Henley added her two cents, too. “Tyler has everyone fooled. See, he puts on this happy face, smiles and acts like everything is perfect. Then BAM! He hits them with the mean. They never see it coming. He plays the good cop really, really well and honestly, I think you’re the first person in a long time that has not only seen through his act but also calls him out on it.”

  Reagan looked over at me, causing me to roll my eyes at my sisters in her direction. “He must’ve been having an off day with me, then. Did I tell you he caused me to fall in the mud?”

  Henley and Alana both gasped. “No!” they both exclaim in unison.

  “Yeah,” Reagan said, then stood up and turned around. “Look at this bruise on my butt. And now I see a scratch, too.”

  It wasn’t exactly on her butt. It was on her thigh.

  But it did look worse today than it had yesterday.

  Shit.

  Now I was trying to ignore how shapely her ass looked and how bad I felt about her falling, even though it wasn’t my fault.

  “Ewww,” Henley said.

  “That’s gonna probably scar,” Alana said as she leaned over the table to get a better look. “But just this part right here,” she touched the outside edge with the tip of one finger.

  It was the part on the curve of her ass cheek and most likely, nobody would ever even see it.

  A throat cleared and instinctively I caught Reagan’s hand and pulled her toward me, almost behind me, so that she was behind my back.

  Unfortunately, she was also staring at the wall, so she had to do some maneuvering to get herself turned around with the limited amount of space between the wall and my chair.

  By the time she situated herself, everyone else was already looking at the two people who were standing in front of our table.

  Tara and Rome.

  “Tara. Romero.” I nodded my head as carefully as I could, hoping not to give any of my emotions away.

  “Rome,” Tara said. “Say what you have to say.”

  Then Tara walked away, leaving Rome standing there, not watching her go.

  Instead, he was staring at me like I was the one who stabbed a knife through his heart and not the other way around.

  “You have a baby?” Rome asked, sounding like that question had been ripped from his soul.

  We’d always said that our children would always be a part of each other’s lives. We’d been that close.

  Now, we were nothing to each other.

  “I…”

  “What does it matter?” Reagan asked, placing her hand on my shoulder.

  I had no idea how much I’d needed her touch until she’d given it. The moment that she laid her hand on me, as innocent as it was, I felt something inside of me settle. Something, somewhere in the vicinity of my heart, my soul, that hadn’t settled in a very long time.

  Rome’s eyes went from me and the baby to Reagan. “Are you his wife?”

  Reagan shook her head. “Girlfriend,” she lied.

  Rome swallowed thickly, then turned his eyes back to me. “Promises are made to be broken.”

  Then he turned on the heel of his boots, ignored the people staring at the local celebrity in awe, and forged his way out of the crowd of people that were milling about at the door waiting to get in only like a linebacker for a professional football team could.

  “Well, that wasn’t awkward or anything,” Henley said, breaking the silence. “I can see why he thought one of these babies was yours, Tyler. One day, these kids are all going to be the same size and I’m going to be able to tell people that they’re all mine without having to explain away the situation I’m in.”

  I snorted. “Good luck with that, sister. You should’ve thought about that before you went and had three babies so close together.”

  Reagan sat down in her seat. “It’d be really nice to know what happened…because from a bystander’s point of view, it does look quite odd. Sometimes it’s easier to explain something if you make your own assumptions. Kind of why everyone thinks she’s yours.”

  That was true. The human mind often finds the easiest explanation for
everything. That was why most of the population didn’t believe in ghosts, because they explained away any instance of paranormal activity as something else—something tangible, something real.

  My smile grew.

  Mostly because I liked that Reagan was spouting off one of my most favorite lines in the world. Making your own assumptions about things is the way of the world. Unless they have concrete facts—like research—they’re not believing it.

  I also noticed that she hadn’t made a move to leave, even though the threat to my person was gone.

  “So, do you believe in ghosts?” I asked, a smile on my face.

  “Oh, Lord,” Alana moaned. “Please don’t.”

  Reagan turned to me. “What do you mean? Actual ghosts? Or unexplainable things happening like objects moving of their own accord? What kinds of ghosts?”

  I grinned. “Anything. Everything.”

  “I believe that there is such a thing as a ghost,” she nodded. “I had this friend and whenever she’d walk into her house, the reception on her cell phone went out. Clocks didn’t work in her house, either. The baby monitor didn’t work and if it did happen to work, it picked up the neighbor’s monitor. It was the strangest thing. But…that was it. It did make me wonder, though and I researched it a little bit when I was seventeen or eighteen. From there, my curiosity grew.”

  I grinned. “If you weren’t such a pain in the ass, I’d ask you out on a date.”

  Henley snorted. “Tyler here is a paranormal freak. He likes to blame things that shouldn’t happen on ghosts.”

  I shrugged unrepentantly.

  There had to be an explanation for the unexplainable. There had to. There was a reason for everything.

  The baby in my hands started to cry and I did what any man would do…I gave her to her mother.

  The moment my hands were free, I reached for the last roll, dipped it deep into the butter and moved it to my mouth.

  My eyes closed as the deliciousness hit my tongue.

  I didn’t eat like this often…but when I did, I did it up.

  I’m talking like eighteen rolls, a huge, forty-ounce steak, some macaroni and cheese, a big ol’ glass of sweet tea—oh and dessert—a big slice of apple pie.

  By the time I’d finished my meal a half an hour later, I was well and truly stuffed—and Reagan was looking at me like I’d just done the impossible.