“So that’s what this is about?” Keane snorted. “Me hating you? You want the bully to be nice?”
So now he was laughing at her? She’d let down her wall and gotten real with him and tried to be her best self, but all he’d done was sit there behind his wall of outrageously rich and handsome before laughing in her face. “Okay, sue me for custody, Keane. Do whatever you want.”
She scooted forward and tried to get up, but Keane grabbed her arm. “Hey, we’re not done here....”
“Oh, yes, we are.” She snatched her arm back.
“Lena, let me talk…”
“Why? It doesn’t matter, I’m taking Max tomorrow and moving back home. Then I’ll fight you. I’ll fight you with everything I’ve got—”
“Hey! Hey! Don’t fuckin’ threaten me when I’m trying to give in.”
Lena paused in her second attempt to stand up, not quite understanding the never before heard words coming out of Keane’s mouth. “Give in?” she repeated.
“Yeah, you asked for new terms and I’m granting them. Nice Keane, coming right up…why’re you laughing.”
“Stop,” she answered, around her fit of giggles. “Stop trying to make me laugh. I’m serious.”
“You don’t think I can be nice?” he asked, his green eyes heating from amused to serious. “I was nice to you that summer. Real nice.”
She didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. But she did stop laughing. Because, yes, he had been nice. And that summer had haunted her for eleven years.
“I can be nice for you, Lena.” Keane’s voice was low now, husky. “Come here.”
She didn’t come here. She froze, stuck between the vibrating now and the echoing past.
But Keane met her halfway, scooting closer to her on the couch, even as he said, “C’mere,” again and reached around her arm.
The next thing she knew, a rubber band snapped. She felt his hands on her braid, unraveling it, before his fingers nested in her hair. Massaging, pulling her closer, as he once again whispered, “C’mere…”
Eleven years…
Unraveled with just one braid.
Lena surged forward, her lips finding his. Her reasonable brain as disabled, as if only eleven hours had passed between now and that summer. Not eleven years.
He pulled her to him, helped her shove her jeans and panties off. Then he was inside her. So deep…soooo deep.
“I missed you, baby,” he whispered in her ear as he guided her hips in an achingly slow roll over his dick. “Thought about you constantly. You’re still so friggin’ beautiful. Did you know that? Most beautiful woman I ever fucked.”
His words…just pretend…just playing. But also too much. Her eyes teared up remembering that summer. How he’d always made her feel beautiful and cherished. Just like this.
“You coming?” he asked, when her hips began to move faster underneath his guiding hands. “Yes, baby. Fucking come for me. This dick is yours. All yours.” He raised a hand to curve around her neck. Kissed her sweetly. “It don’t want anybody but you.”
Therapist down. She came so hard, lust and need and memories, swirling around her head.
Keane was nice to her all night. On the couch. On top of the bathroom counter right before she insisted on taking her usual shower before bed. Then his niceness rendered that shower useless, three more times before he finally let her go to sleep.
So, so, nice, all through the night.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Being nice to Lena all night, hadn’t been hard. Not at all. It was supposed to be playacting. But allowing himself to do and say all the shit he’d been holding inside had felt like finally being able to breathe after too long holding his breath.
“Mr. Keane! Mr. Keane!”
Other kids be damned. The kid flew into his arms when he saw him standing there with the other parents instead of Lena. “It worked! It worked! B.A.D. Offense totally worked on The Destroyer!”
“What’s B.A.D. Offense?” Con had asked, scrunching his forehead.
“Family secret,” Keane had answered, winking at Max. Hopefully the kid got that telling his coach that Keane had taught an especially annoying brand of ‘Be A Dick Offense’ to deal with that so-called Destroyer, wouldn’t be a smart move.
“Yeah, family secret!” Max repeated, dabbing, like that made it official.
The kid cracked him up. And even though he didn’t understand the real meaning of family secret in this case, Keane’s heart filled up with pride as they walked back to the car.
As Max recapped the game for him on the ride home, it suddenly occurred to Keane that this was something he could have now.
If he manipulated the cards just right, this could be him for the rest of his life. Niceing on Lena all night. Running post-game analysis with his mini-me during the day. Hunger crawled through him and burrowed deep inside his gut, as he let that vision play out.
Since most of the kids at the summer camp were overnighters from far away cities and states, parents weren’t required to attend games. But he knew the Merriweather parents had to take their kids all over.
Keane hadn’t been able to play at the elite level until high school, because he’d never had parents willing to schlep their kid all over the country and sometimes Canada for travel games. And even when he got into his first high school in Connecticut, having no one at his games had eaten up his chest like battery acid. Other Dads came from all over to watch even the sad-ass second stringers play for just a few minutes. But Keane’s hadn’t shown up even once.
“Hey,” he asked. “Your, um…” the word choked in his throat, but there was no way around it… “dad ever come to any of your games in California?”
Max’s shoulder’s slumped. So similar to Lena’s, it made Keane’s heart ache.
“No, he never came,” Max answered, his voice becoming distant and tight. “We couldn’t even tell him I was playing. He didn’t approve. Of hockey. Or me.” The kid’s voice glazed over as if he’d taken a trip back to California in the passenger seat of Keane’s car. “He got angry with me a lot. Once he even started hitting me and he wouldn’t stop until mom got in front of me.”
“He hit you,” Keane repeated. Remembering how that felt to get hit when you were too small to fight back. His hands tightened around the wheel with the urge to kill.
“Yeah,” Max said, still sounding faraway. “That’s why mom and him divorced. She said I came first, and having him around had become too traumatic. Or something like that.”
Potentially traumatic…Keane was starting to put together the full story of Lena’s divorce. And he wasn’t liking it. He wasn’t liking it at all.
“He used to be nicer when I was littler, but now he won’t even visit me,” Max confessed quietly. “I know it’s my fault for not being who he wanted me to be. But still…I miss him sometimes. I wish I still had a father.”
The opportunity shined bright in the air between them. Like a loose puck waiting for Keane to shoot it into the goal.
He could be the dad to Keane never had. He could give Max what he’d never had.
All he had to do was take his shot.
The nice night with Keane was an illusion. She knew it was.
But the next morning she woke up with what she could only be described as a love hangover. Sore and happy, with a sweet feeling throbbing in her chest and between her legs. Maybe she and Keane could get one more “nice” session in before they had to pick up Max, she thought, rolling over to face him….
Only to freeze when she found his side of the bed was empty and saw the digital clock sitting on his nightstand. Crap! It was ten thirty—a full half hour after the scheduled pick up time.
She dove out of bed and grabbed her phone. No calls. Good. Maybe Keane had picked him up, even though she usually did that on Sundays.
“Did you pick up Max?”
She got a driving notification back, but let out a breath of relief when she checked Max’s Find My Friends and saw his little dot headed
this way. It looked like they’d be there in less than ten minutes.
She scrambled back into the bathroom to get in a quick shower, so that she didn’t smell like a night of sex when Max got home. And sure enough just as she came down the stairs, she spotted Keane’s Range Rover pulling in off the public alley from the second floor landing’s back window.
Heart cheering, she rushed downstairs to thank him for picking up Max.
But just as she was reached the bottom stair, Max came storming in from the direction of the parking spaces at the back of the house, his face visibly upset.
“Max! What’s wrong?” she asked.
Instead of answering, he threw down his hockey bag on the floor, even though he knew he was supposed to take it directly to the laundry room.
“Max!” But before she could finish that reprimand, he ran past her, up the stairs.
Leaving her to look back as Keane, who was now coming through the garage door, his face equally stormy.
“I told him,” he informed her, before she could ask what happened. “I told him I was his father. And that’s how he responded.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Hey, Mom, can you drive me to practice today? I don’t want to go with Mr. Keane.”
Keane stopped right outside of the kitchen door when he heard Max complaining to his mother just as he was about to enter the room for his morning post-skate protein shake. Stopped and silently cursed. He’d saved the deal with Lena, but a month later it felt like he was on the verge of losing his biggest asset.
Keane waited, wondering how Lena would respond. Win was his real first name, and Take Fucking Charge might as well have replaced his middle, but in this case, Keane had to admit Lena had been right. He still didn’t know why, but by telling his son who he really was, he had obviously fucked everything up.
Truth was, he wasn’t looking forward to either of their daily car rides himself. The kid had gone monosyllabic on him, and more often than not, Keane ended up defaulting to satellite 70s rock blasting while his son sat like an oversized stone in his front seat.
“Honey, I’m trying to support you here, but this summer is supposed to be about you and Keane getting to know each other before we go back to California.”
“I know him, okay? Everybody does! He’s famous. Why do I have to keep on riding with him to practice?”
Max sounded whinier than usual. Like a little girl, instead of the hockey phenom Keane had been proud to claim as his own. And it pissed him off. But Lena’s voice stayed calm as cotton as she answered, “Honey, I think we need to schedule some time with Francine. Maybe see if we can do a virtual call…”
Keane frowned. Who was Francine? And what did she have to do with any of this?
“I don’t want to talk to Francine! She’s just going to tell me to talk to him. That’s all she ever says.”
So judging from all the “I don’t wannas,” Francine must be a therapist or something. Keane didn’t blame the kid for refusing the suggestion. He never wanted to talk himself when he was pissed off. Just skate. Another thing they had in common. Too bad Max had stopped showing up at their 5am practices.
“Francine always suggests talking because leading with communication is usually the best choice. And you know maybe she can help you figure out how to tell Keane why you responded like you did to discovering he was your birth father.”
“No. I don’t to talk to Francine. I don’t want to talk to Mr. Keane! Why are you always trying to make me do stupid things?”
“I understand this is hard for you, honey,” Lena said, her voice still way calmer than Max’s. It was like they were having two different conversations. “Especially after what happened with Rohan…”
So the kid being so pissed off with him had something to do with the guy he thought was his father? What the hell?
Keane balled his fist at his side, waiting to hear what exactly that ass tool had done to his son, but Max didn’t let her finish that thought either.
“I’m glad I’m going to a tournament this weekend! I hate it here! I hate Keane. I hate you! I wish I’d never been born!”
That was it. Keane burst through the kitchen door. “I don’t know what kind of bug you got up your ass, kid, but you don’t talk to your mother like that.”
Instead of apologizing, like any smart person should do with a six foot four hockey player looming over him, Max screeched, “You were spying on me?”
Then, before Keane could answer, the boy pushed past him and ran out of the kitchen. The next thing Keane heard was the sound of his feet on the stairs.
“What the fuck, Lena?” Keane demanded, turning back around to face her after he ran away.
Lena just shook her head. “He needs more time to adjust to this new reality. What looks like unreasonable anger to you is actually him trying to process having his whole worldview shattered…” she gave him a pointed look. “…without any lead up whatsoever.”
Her words hit Keane like a puck to the chest. He’d been so happy that morning after picking Max up. It had really seemed like Lena’s insistence on waiting to tell Max was only thing standing in the way of them becoming a real family.
Or so he thought. Lena had dropped the understanding mother act and was now regarding him with another disappointed, “you really fucked this all the way up” look.
Her disappointment and Max’s unexpected reaction had been enough to make him back off for the last few weeks and focus all his energy on keeping the deal going with Lena.
But this morning was the last straw. His son had barely said a whole sentence to him in the past week, and now Max was acting like he couldn’t even bear to be in the same car as him? What in the entire fuck?
He ignored Lena’s disappointed look and demanded, “What were you talking about earlier with Max? What happened with that ass tool he thought was his Dad?”
A beat. Then her expression went that particularly placid shade of neutral that Keane despised.
“When he’s ready to talk about that with you, he will.”
“Yeah, you sure about that? Because it doesn’t sound like he wants to talk about shit with anybody right now.”
“Like I keep saying, he’s testing you, Keane.” Lena went over to the tea pot and filled it up with filtered water from the special tap like they were just having a casual conversation about the weather, and not something important, like say, getting frozen the fuck out by his own kid.
She sounded like some kind of Zen master when she concluded, “The only way you can pass the test is by waiting him out.”
“Bullshit, I’ve been waiting him out for weeks, and the only thing colder than the ice rink in my basement is that kid’s fuckin’ attitude towards me,” he told her back. “Do you know how many kids would be psyched to find out the asshole they thought was their father wasn’t? And their hockey hero was? That’s the kind of shit they make TV shows about.”
“Keane, this is real life, not a TV show,” she answered, putting the pot on the stove. “And Max isn’t like other kids.”
“So you’re really not going to tell me?” he asked. “Even though I deserve to know?”
Lena turned back around with a sympathetic smile. “No, I’m not. But when and if you want to start hashing out that shared parenting philosophy I’ve been talking about this weekend, I’m totally down to do that. Especially, since,” she winced. “I’m on my period.”
Fucking Balls. They had stopped counting fucks after striking the “Keane Be Nice” treaty. But they were still tearing up the sheets every night and tournament weekend, trying to make this baby happen. That it hadn’t, felt like this already shitty morning was really piling on.
“Yeah, I’m disappointed, too,” she said, tilting her head to the side. “But, you know, we’ve got one more month until I have to go back to California…”
Her words faded into the background as his mind hockey drilled this Max problem.
A few weeks ago, it had felt like he was so close. Clo
ser than he’d ever been to getting everything he wanted. But this secret of Max’s, whatever it was, was standing in his way.
Win. He had to figure out how to take back this game.
“Hey, you know what, why don’t you take Max to practice,” he said, suddenly cutting her off. “He seemed really upset and he probably won’t be good for shit during today’s game if I make him take that ride with me.”
Lena responded too predictably. Congratulated him in therapyese for a bunch of shit he did not give one fuck about. Like respect for boundaries and being perceptive and caring about Max’s emotions.
As soon as they were gone, he went to Lena’s room and scoured it for her diary. No luck. She might have really burned it like she said or more likely hidden it somewhere at her dad’s house until she could safely bring it with her on that trip back to California she only thought she was still going to take.
Which left him with two choices. One was a little bit of dynamite, and the other was plain nuclear.
And yeah, he could figure out a way to lure Lena’s old man out of the house to search for the diary. Shouldn’t be hard. But the thought of somebody doing something to his son, hurting his son—that made him feel real fucking nuclear.
In the end, he pulled his gray phone and called the guy at the top of the list.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Stone’s number only resided on his gray phone, but the truth was, the guy lived beyond that technically legitimate business area. Totally in the black.
And he looked the part. Taller and a hell of a lot more muscular than most guys, though he never advertised he was the Ferraro Mafia Family’s number one enforcer, Stone didn’t have to. His shaved head and tailored black gorilla suit told anyone who dared to look at him for more than a second or two that he wasn’t exactly about the unicorns and rainbows
People didn’t just step aside when they saw him coming down the lane, they crossed the road to get out of his way.
Keane: Her Ruthless Ex: 50 Loving States, Massachusetts Page 17
