Before The Dawn
A Hudson Family Series- Prequel
Read How Reece and Synclair’s Story Began!
By Chontelle Brison
Copyright © 2016 by Chontelle Brison
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Prologue
This book is the prequel to Back to You, A Hudson Family Series- Book 1- Synclair and Reece.
It takes place back in college where Reece met Synclair for the first time. Get ready to see the sparks fly as boy meets girl, girl hates boy and boy pulls out all the stops to get her! Synclair’s younger self is definitely sassy, maybe a bit edgier, and Reece is young, arrogant and about to make a mistake that will cost him fifteen years with the woman who was meant to be his!
In addition, after you’ve finished, just in case you’ve never read book 1, I’ve included a preview for you at the end of Before the Dawn!
Enjoy!
15 Years and Some Months before
Back to You- Book 1- Synclair and Reece
(This is where it all started people!)
Synclair
Waiting rooms suck. Okay, I should clarify that. Sitting in a waiting room, waiting for your mother, whom you just bailed out of jail, sucks. Did I forget to mention that I used the money I had allotted for food for the month to get her bony ass out? No?
If that’s not enough sucking, it also sucks to have an 8:00 a.m. English literature class that I am probably going to sleep through. Again. I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but I am pretty sure it’s frowned upon by your college professor when you nod off in class... In the first week, twice! I might add, of the first semester, of your freshman year.
Yep, I was off to a banging start. I would like to say, “It wasn’t always like this.” However, that would be a lie, a big, fat, whopper of a lie. My life has always been exactly like this. I’m not complaining; growing up I learned that no matter how bad you have it, some have it worse.
Yet, somehow, I still couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for myself. I used to walk to school and pass through neighborhoods with lawns, dogs, kids on bicycles and parents, lots of parents. That wasn’t my childhood.
My mother ran away from her family in San Francisco when she got pregnant with me. Apparently, my grandparents didn’t approve of their daughter getting knocked up, and there was the little issue that she was hooked on heroin. Yeah, apparently Gramps threw a huge hissy fit. Naturally, my mother chose to compound one bad decision with another and took off to Vegas with my dad, who by the way was also her drug dealer.
Hey, you can’t choose your parents, trust me, I would have been first in line for that do-over. My drug dealing, father, convinced my mom that she had what it took to be a showgirl in Las Vegas and that all her dreams would come true, and we would all be a family. Those kinds of happy endings are for Disneyland fairytales, my life was more like a Stephen King novel.
No surprise that no sooner had my mother given birth to me, then my father, whose name I still don’t know to this day, took off before my umbilical cord was cut. My mother, ever the optimist, decided on a good Irish name because, apparently, that is where her family was from. She believed a strong name would get me ahead in show business. So, she named me Synclair, and since I didn’t have my father’s last name, I was officially Synclair Patrick. However, no one calls me Synclair. It’s too formal, everyone I know calls me Syn, or, at least, they had before I went to The University of Nevada Las Vegas. But we locals just call it UNLV. Go Rebels!
I leaned my head back against the cold, gray wall and sighed. I looked around. It had to be close to three in the morning. This was not where I wanted to be. It was hard to imagine that five hours ago I was in my own dorm room, in my own bed, worrying about all the homework I had.
It’s not like I haven’t been to the Clark County Detention Center before, I have been, many times. It’s a huge gray building just off Freemont Street, in downtown Vegas. For most tourists, it’s only an ugly building they pass on the way to the glitzy lights of Freemont Street or Las Vegas Boulevard. However, for me, it, it seemed it was the place I did my homework when I was in high school while I waited for my mom to be released. I spent a lot of time on these uncomfortable, unbending plastic chairs. You know the ones. Those horribly cold, plastic chairs that you sat in when you were in the third grade. The kind that tends to get a crack in the plastic seat and when you sit on it, in your shorts, you get pinched! Still, it could be worse; I’ve heard some jails only have cement benches to sit on.
Over the years, I had gotten smarter and started bringing a pillow and a small throw blanket. I know it sounds weird, but this place is always freezing. I asked once, and I was told it kept germs down. Ewww. I definitely didn’t need to be reminded of who came to this place.
I grew up with these people. It was always the same; you had your hookers, your pimps, your druggies, your gangbangers, your local drunks, and, of course, your tourists. I never did understand why people seem to lose their minds as soon as they step off the plane. I’m not sure any state allows people to walk around, in public, nude, drunk or actually having sex. People come to Vegas every day, and no matter what they do in their real lives, they turn into someone else while they’re here. I guess that’s what drew my mother. She wanted to be someone else; she wanted to be free of whatever life she had with my grandparents and came to Vegas to chase her dream. If you hear her tell it, she’s still chasing that dream.
My mother is a dreamer, she is also an addict, a prostitute when need be, and still convinced her big, showbiz break, is right around the next corner, or around the next boyfriend, as the case may be.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my mother. She’s my family and like any child with messed up parents, I still have fantasies about her getting clean and us getting a beautiful house with flowers. I don’t get too lost in that dream anymore. I realized a long time ago that there were those who were on the inside of life and those on the outside. I was definitely on the outside.
I’m sure my mother has her strong points. I don’t always go hungry, sometimes we even get a three-day notice before they kick us out of whatever hotel we are staying in, and she never lets anyone of my “step daddies” touch me. Not for lack of them trying though!
Okay, I’m reaching. However, she is my mom. I don’t want to think about the fact that, at no time, have I ever seen her sober and not on drugs. Or that in my twenty-year existence, I have never had a home or an apartment because we have bounced from hotel to hotel.
I refuse to dwell on the fact that the only person who showed up at my high-school graduation was a famous chef who also owned one of the best restaurants in Las Vegas. It would also be pointless to dwell on the fact that most of the time, my meager wages from Kentucky Fried Chicken go to pay her bail or buy me luxuries like underwear and toothpaste.
However, the huge thing I refuse to dwell on is that fact that my mother never told me I had an uncle. Imagine my surprise when I was at work one day and some man in a hideous green, Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants walked in and announced he was my uncle, Jack. Suddenly, I had a relative who reminded me of a jolly, Jackie Gleason.
I have to admit, life h
as been better with Uncle Jack in it or UJ as I call him. When I brought him home to see mom, I was partly humiliated and somewhat excited. I was humiliated because I had to bring him to our current home, The Stay by the Day Hotel, complete with bedbugs and cockroaches.
Yeah, you haven’t lived until you’ve been dead asleep, and some creepy crawler decides that crawling over your face is the shortest route between you and where it wants to go.
I was excited because I thought, for sure, my mom was going to be thrilled that her brother had moved to Vegas and wanted to be a family. I’m only human, so of course, deep down I dreamed of being part of a family. I also dreamed I’d be a rock star someday, so go figure. However, my mother wasn’t pleased when I brought Uncle Jack home. She asked him for money, and when he shook his head, she screamed, yelled, and told him how much she hated him. It didn't go well. It didn’t matter, though, Uncle Jack, and I stayed in touch, and I have to say, he’s pretty impressive.
He’s actually building a bar, here in Las Vegas. Not just any bar, an Irish bar that he plans to call ‘Top of the Morning.' I guess he wants to get in touch with his Irish roots.
The best part is that he’s building two apartments above it, one for himself and one for my mother and me. I can’t wait. I’d never had a place that was my own before. My life has been filled with cops and black trash bags. Black trash bags are what cops hand you when they evict you from a hotel. Typically, they will lock you out, bag up your stuff and throw it out the door of the hotel room. Basically, while you and everyone in the hotel watches.
Not all cops are like that though. Officer Donny is always helpful when he comes. He lets me bag up my own things and gives us a ride to the shelter, so we have a place to stay. Don’t get me wrong, he's not weird. He once told me he had kids similar to my age, and he would hate to see someone treat his daughter with disrespect. I’m sure he’s a great dad, the kind of father I wish I had. However, there’s no sense in wishing for things you can’t have.
Uncle Jack is probably the closest thing I have now to a father. When he found out I got a full scholarship, including a dorm room, to the University of Nevada, he was ecstatic. He set me up with a bank account, bought me a bed for my dorm room, got me a cell phone, took me shopping for school supplies and gave me a credit card for emergencies. Mom, of course, didn’t see why I needed to live on campus. Actually, she didn’t understand why I was going to college at all. She felt that it would only get in the way of my getting into the Vegas show business. There was no point in trying to argue with her, she had her dreams, and I had mine. I didn’t know what I wanted to major in yet, but none of that mattered. I had taken my first step towards getting off the streets.
It was hard, trying to go to school, do my homework, and keep my grades perfect. Especially since, we were regularly moving, and there was constant drama with my mother. She was either high or drunk, when she was high, she would only lay there and stare at the television, when she was drunk, she would dance around the room or yell about her life. So, quiet time to study was difficult. At one point, I was going to drop out and just get a job. All that changed when I met Max.
Max was the owner of a very expensive restaurant on the Vegas strip. It was the kind of place that didn’t have prices on the menu. When I was sixteen, I would skip school. It was hard to concentrate when you hadn’t eaten the day before. I had started hanging around the strip, mainly wandering the back alleys that ran behind the glitzy hotels and fancy restaurants. I was coming out of an alley when this black Mercedes careened around a corner and thumped me. I was so scared. I wasn’t hurt; the car barely touched me, but I had no idea who was behind the wheel. Suddenly, I was pulled from the ground by this gray-haired man who looked frantic. He was very tall and thin and wore a white smock that I had seen cooks wear in restaurants. He looked me over, saying stuff in French that I didn’t understand. Finally, I had to stop him.
“Enough,” I shouted, louder than I meant to. “I’m fine; I'm fine; it just knocked me on my ass.” I shooed away his hands.
“I am so sorry; I was not focused; I was in my own head, always in my own head,” He muttered in a thick, French accent.
I stepped to one side of the crazy Frenchman and smiled. He was still muttering when I shrugged and moved to leave.
“Wait, my dear, are you hungry? It would be the least I could do,” he said.
“No, I'm all right,” I lied; I totally lied. I was so hungry; I was ready to eat my sock. My stomach chose that moment to out me as a liar as it growled loudly.
I watched him raise one bushy eyebrow at me. I was so busted.
“My name is Max; I own Maxwell’s, and I am a Chef. Let me at least feed you and then you can be off.”
I just stared at him suspiciously. I grew up in Vegas; I knew all the tricks that rich, older guys used to get young girls into their cars. He looked like a sweet old man; his brown eyes seemed kind. However, you could never be too careful; this was Vegas after all. I knew more than anyone did how easy it was to make a mistake; I had seen girls pulled out of dumpsters because they trusted the wrong person. So, I didn’t trust anyone. Call it a survival technique, but I wanted to live.
“No offense Mister, but I don’t know you, so I am not getting in a car with you.” I took another step away, and he followed shaking his head.
“No, no, my restaurant is right here.” He pointed to a cream-colored door with the number 201, written on it. “I’ll tell you what, you take my keys, and if you feel like I am going to do anything odd, you get in my car and drive away. I just want to make amends, my dear.” He held out his keys.
I hoped I wasn’t making a mistake, but I felt like he was genuine. So, letting my stomach make the decision, I ignored his keys and walked toward the door.
It took about two minutes to realize this guy was the real deal. As soon as we walked in the door, “Good Morning Chef” greeted him, repeatedly. It didn’t take a genius to realize he was important. Chef Maxwell was everything he had claimed to be.
He got me settled at a small table in the kitchen and went to work barking orders at his harried staff. I thought it was funny how kind and gentle he was with me and how demanding he was with them. I stayed for hours. Watching the busy kitchen was kind of soothing. I liked the smells, the sounds, and the taste.
The food was fantastic. Throughout the day, I was brought dish after dish of divine yumminess. What had started out as a way to make amends soon became a habit. Chef Maxwell asked why I wasn’t in school. I didn’t hold back; I told him my Vice Principal would let me sleep on the sofa in her office so that I wouldn’t be late. I told him there were days I didn’t eat and doing homework was the last priority, and I told him my mother was a heroin addict, but I left out the part about her selling her body for rent money. I mean, I have some pride!
He didn’t say anything for a long time. I was about to leave. I was embarrassed that I had shared my life with someone only to be judged. I was always being judged, by who my mother was, where I lived, and what I wore. People like me were called Street Rats, mainly because we lived on the streets and scurried around always on the hunt for food or shelter. It wasn't something I was proud of; I just needed to find a way out.
“I’ll make you a deal Synclair.” he looked at me, a somber expression on his face.
“Syn.” I corrected. I was feeling uncomfortable, and I didn’t like it.
“You want a better life? Then you must start with a better you. Your name is Synclair; it is a beautiful, strong name, like you, no?”
Beautiful? Me? Okay, now this was getting weird. Nowhere in my sixteen years had I ever been referred to as beautiful. I was short, all about five feet or so, curvy hips, a little too much in the bust area, and wild red, curly hair. I was pretty confident I didn’t match any of the models in Seventeen Magazine. Not sure, where he was going with this, I asked him, “What do you want from me, Chef?” He smiled when he heard me address him by his title.
“First Synclair, you a
nd I are friends, and you can call me Max. Only my staff needs to call me Chef. I too wanted out. I grew up in a small village in France where I was an apprentice to a Chef there. He gave me a cot to sleep on when my father threw me out because I would not follow him into his profession. I can see a spark there Synclair. So, I am going to do you the same kindness that was done for me. You agree to go to school, every day and come here after. You can do your homework, and when you’re done, you can help me in the kitchen and maybe learn some skills.”
I just stared at him. It took a moment, but I pulled myself together. People just didn’t do nice things for people. There had to be a catch, maybe he was a serial killer who lived under the guise of being a chef?
The thought had me backing up a step. “What’s in it for you Max? You’re a nice man, but I’m not sleeping with you, and I am not about to be chopped up in your kitchen.”
Okay, I sounded a little more scared, then I should have, but I wanted this to be real; I really did. The opportunity to have a safe place to come after school, somewhere I could eat, do my homework and learn all about cooking, was like a dream. It was something that usually would happen to someone else.
“You want to know what’s in it for me? Hmm? I consider it paying back my debt to the Chef who helped me. All I ask is that if you are ever in a situation to give back to the universe by helping someone that you do it.”
It seemed simple, and I immediately agreed.
I spent two years going to that kitchen every day after school. Everyone helped me with my homework and at night, Max taught me all about sauces and cooking. My grades were solid A’s, and my attendance was perfect. I graduated two years later with honors and a scholarship to college. I offered to turn it down and come work for him. After all, I felt like I owed him. He told me I should enjoy college and actually find out who I was.
Chef Max was the only person who had shown up to my graduation. He actually cried, and he shut down the restaurant so he and his staff could throw me a graduation party. I had never had a party in my life. I was lucky if my mother even remembered my birthday, much less being bothered to throw a party or get me a gift!
Before The Dawn: Prequel to Back to You - Synclair and Reece! See Where It All Began! (A Hudson Family Series- PREQUEL to BACK TO YOU! Book 0) Page 1
