I was also doing my best to show her a good time. Ever since the incident in the backseat of my car, I kept it in the forefront of my mind that she essentially had missed out on all the teenage nonsense that went along with boys figuring out how to get into a girl’s pants. So I took her to the movies and tried to get my hands in her shirt. I took her out for pizza and made out with her on her doorstep when I dropped her off. I tried to get her to go on a double date with Rule and Shaw, but she had balked at the idea, not ready to be that fully ingrained in my life yet, which led to the question of what exactly we were doing together.
I had never spent more than one night or one weekend with the same girl, so to me we were doing something that looked like starting a relationship. To her, though, I just didn’t know. She texted me, called me when she had free time, but never stayed the night at my place when she came over and never asked me to stay when I was at hers. Granted, she never asked me to leave either, but there was just a lot of gray area happening, and I felt like I was navigating all of it blindly since I had never even been interested in starting something with anyone before. I knew she was special. I just didn’t know how to show her that beyond what I was already doing.
The drive to Brookside went quick, mostly because my mind was running over everything and didn’t give me a minute of peace. I pulled into the driveway and breathed out a grateful sigh that at least my idiot stepfather’s SUV wasn’t anywhere to be seen, unless it was in the garage. That was highly unlikely because what good did it do in the garage where the neighbors couldn’t see it, marvel at its awesomeness, and be eaten alive with envy at Grant Loften’s obvious wealth and prestige? Fucker. I would never hate anyone as much as I hated that guy and God willing there would come a time that my fist and his face had a meeting.
My entire childhood had been spent under his disapproving eyes. I could never do anything right, was always treated like a burden by him. One of my clearest memories of his sheer shitheadedness had been when I couldn’t have been more than four or five. I had just discovered crayons. I loved the colors, loved to swirl designs on anything and everything I could get my little, unruly hands on, including the walls. It was just crayon and what little kid didn’t draw on the wall? But to Grant it had been a crime akin to murder. To this day I can see him snapping every single one of the crayons and making me watch. I remembered the acrid smell of bleach as he made me scrub not just my bedroom wall where my art lived, but all the walls in the house. I was just a little kid, but to him that didn’t matter. Just like now, he never thought I did anything right.
What made it worse was the fact that he obviously loved my mom, treated her like she was a queen, and gave her whatever she wanted. He just had no time or use for me. And I would never, ever forgive him for making her choose between the two of us. Of course my mother should have picked me, I was her child, it was her job to love me unconditionally, but she hadn’t, and it was Grant who had made her have to make that call.
He was a man that had always been about appearance, a man all about prestige and perception, so the fact that I looked the way I did, acted how I wanted, had never made my time under his roof pleasant. As an adult … every single time he looked down his nose at me, every time he puckered his lips in disdain at what I was wearing or what I was saying … it took every ounce of self-control I possessed not to knock all his perfectly veneered teeth down his throat.
I jogged up the walkway that had a light dusting of snow on it still and knocked on the door. How sad was it that I was a stranger in the place that was supposed to be where my family lived? I saw my mom’s dark head peek through the window and then it took a solid four minutes for her to decide to open the door. We faced each other through the glass of the storm door and there was no mistaking the look of disappointment that flashed across her eyes when she took in my black hoodie, baseball hat, and jeans. I looked like I looked every other day of the year, and it was always lacking in her eyes. It shouldn’t still sting. I was an adult, had been on my own for way longer than she had ever pretended to raise me, but still there was always a tiny part of me that wanted her to see worth in me even though it always ended up with me feeling like she had drop-kicked my heart.
“What are you doing here? You didn’t call, Nashville.”
God, with the full name. I think she used it mostly because she knew how much it irked me.
“No I didn’t, but I want to talk to you for a minute, and I figured I could catch you at home.”
She played with the diamond necklace at her throat and put a hand on the door. My mom was a fairly tiny woman. I got my dark skin tone and hair from somewhere in her lineage. I could only assume everything else that made me who I was I got from Phil. Thank goodness for small favors.
“Grant will be home shortly. He won’t like that you dropped by unannounced.”
And just like it had always been, what Grant liked always won out over what was right and decent.
“It won’t take too long, Mom. Seriously, just give me five minutes.”
“You drove for two hours just to talk for five minutes, Nashville? That makes no sense.” Always with the censure and disapproval. It was a miracle I had managed to turn out as normal as I had.
“Mom …” I sighed and narrowed my eyes at her. “Phil is getting sicker and sicker. He has around-the-clock help at home, but he’s hardly eating and he sleeps all the time. I see him every day and I ask him every time to explain to me what in the hell happened. Someone needs to give me answers, Mom, and I’m not going anywhere until I get them. If you want me gone before Grant comes home, then you best start talking, otherwise I will hang out in the driveway and gladly have it out with him. No one wants that, I’m sure. What would the neighbors think?”
She looked like she was considering her options, and when one of the neighbors pulled out of their garage and looked over to see what was going on, I snorted at the irony as she finally relented and opened the door to let me in.
I followed her into the kitchen, where she begrudgingly offered me a drink. I turned her down and leaned against the counter while she poured herself a cup of coffee.
“I want to know why you never told me who Phil was. I want to know why you let me think my dad was just some deadbeat that took off on us. I spent my entire childhood thinking you couldn’t deal with me, didn’t love me because I reminded you of a stranger that disappointed you.” I glared at her for all the years of blame and guilt she had needlessly let me carry on my too-young shoulders.
“Phil was here, he took care of me, and he obviously cared for you and would have been in both our lives. I think I deserve to know what happened and why it took him facing death for the truth to come out.”
Her hands curled around the mug and I saw her pale a little under her makeup.
“What difference does any of that make now, Nashville? What purpose does rehashing any of it serve?”
“Stop calling me that. Nash, just Nash, and you know it. The purpose it serves is I want to know why I wasn’t ever good enough, why you still look at me like I’m a disappointment. Phil doesn’t get to pass on, get to die without me understanding why it mattered so much for him to keep your secrets.”
She heaved a sigh like I was annoying her more than anything else and looked at me over the rim of her mug.
“I met Phil when he was on leave from the navy. I was in New York on vacation the same time he was there for Fleet Week. He was good-looking, a handsome and dangerous young man in a uniform. I figured no one would get hurt if we indulged in a harmless fling. I thought it was just temporary, just a young girl sowing her oats, but it turned into something more. I came back home, back here, and when Phil’s service was up he moved out here to be with me. He was always very dedicated and chivalrous, he just wasn’t what I was looking for in a long-term partner.”
She cleared her throat and set the mug down on the counter. She wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“I liked Phil, he was a lot of fun, and for a whil
e the relationship was a great time, but when it came time to settle down, I wanted a life that didn’t fit with a guy who rides a motorcycle and thinks tattooing is a viable career—that was not in my long-term plans. I broke it off with Phil when I met Grant. Grant is the kind of man who could provide a future, could provide the kind of home I always wanted. I knew what the right choice for me was between the two men without a question.”
I scowled at her because hearing her talk about Phil’s life and choices was hearing her belittle my life all over again. Her hands went back to the necklace at her throat and she twisted the ruby around and around.
“I didn’t know I was pregnant when Grant and I started seeing each other. When I figured it out I just assumed the baby was his.”
I choked a little. “Jesus, Mom, you were sleeping with both of them?” That was more than I needed to know for sure.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “I was young and figuring life out, Nashville. Anyway Grant and I got engaged and married before you were born. We were both excited with the prospect of having a little boy, and Phil had opened the shop and started his own kind of life. Everything was going to be perfect.”
She walked to the other side of the kitchen and I realized she had moved as far away from me as she could without leaving the room.
“It was pretty clear the second you were born that you were Phil’s and not Grant’s. You were all brown like me, but the hair was Phil’s and those eyes … even as a baby they were too bright and too unmistakable. They were Donovan eyes. Grant was furious, accused me of having an affair, and told me it was him or my bastard baby. He couldn’t face everyone in Brookside knowing the baby wasn’t his. I thought he was going to leave me for sure.”
I already hated the guy, but now I wanted to pull all his teeth out with rusty pliers.
“I didn’t want to lose him, so I explained about Phil, about the relationship. Grant eventually realized that no one would judge him for taking care of a child that was left by his father. He refused to be on the birth certificate or give you his last name, though.” I could literally feel the temperature of my blood drop.
My hands clenched into fists at my sides. “But Phil didn’t go anywhere. He just didn’t know I existed.”
“No, he didn’t, and, in a perfect world, it would have stayed that way. Grant took care of us, provided for us, and we told you that your dad had abandoned us. But as time went on you just looked more and more like Phil. One of his friends saw you with me at Cherry Creek Mall when you were about four and told Phil. He was furious, threatened to take me to court, to fight for custody. Grant didn’t want that kind of mess, didn’t want the whole sordid tale out in public and we didn’t need child support, so we made a deal. I begged Phil, pleaded with him to keep his real identity and relation to you a secret, to keep it quiet until you were older. He very reluctantly agreed, but only as long as he got to be in your life and only as long as I agreed to let you have his last name. I never put a father on the birth certificate, so making you a Donovan officially was the easiest thing in the world.”
She twisted her hands together and had the nerve to look at me like this was somehow my fault.
“When you got older, you were too much. Too wild, too loud, too hard to handle. You didn’t want to dress nice or play with the right kind of kids, Grant was already resentful that he was raising Phil’s kid, but the way you were, how much you looked like Phil, it was his breaking point. It was just easier to let Phil handle you, try and put you on some kind of path, because where you were going wasn’t any kind of place Grant or I wanted any part of. You were always so much more Phil’s son than mine.”
My back teeth snapped together, and I felt my temper start to surge in an angry torrent under my skin.
“I was a kid. Maybe if you hadn’t constantly been on me about shit I couldn’t change, like my eye color, I would have picked a more acceptable path to you. You never gave me the chance. You were always too busy trying to make Grant happy to worry about what all that vitriol was doing to your kid.”
“You were always too much like your father, even though you didn’t know who he was.”
“He loved you, still does.”
Her mouth tightened and turned white at the corners.
“He loved the idea of me. He never really knew the real me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me when I was older, when I went to live with him permanently?”
“He didn’t want to.”
“Bullshit.”
“Fine, he wanted me to be the one to tell you and I refused. I didn’t think Grant or I needed to deal with the fallout. You had moved on, Phil was a better parent to you than I ever could have been. It was all said and done.”
I wanted to throw something heavy at her. I wanted to break every stupid piece of Williams-Sonoma cookware in her fancy kitchen. My fingers curled into fists at my sides.
“But I’m still here, Mom. Still trying to live my life, and now the only father I’m ever going to have is dying and there is nothing I can do about it. You robbed me of that relationship because you didn’t want to deal with the fallout, because you didn’t want to inconvenience that dipshit husband of yours? How does any of that sound right to you?”
“What’s right for me has never been what’s right for you, Nashville. You don’t even use the name I gave you.”
“Because it’s ridiculous … all of it. What’s right for me isn’t what’s right for you because I’m an actual human being with feelings and emotions, and you, Mom … you’re a goddamn monster.”
I had always longed for her attention, thirsted for her love and approval, but now looking at her, seeing the absolute lack of remorse or regret in her eyes, I was thankful she had simply let me go. If I had tried any harder, worked any more to make her love me, who knew what kind of miserable, unfeeling robot I would have become at her hands. As an adult, I was still pissed at her, still resentful she had such an easy time letting me go, but I was also overwhelmingly grateful that I wasn’t anything like her and her people.
“I’m not a monster, Nash.” Finally, my name. “I’m just not the mother you wanted or needed, and frankly you were never the son I wanted or needed. Having you made it pretty clear I was never cut out to be someone’s mother. Why do you think Grant and I never had any more kids? We wanted it to just be us.”
“Thank God for that.”
I pushed off the counter and headed toward the door. I knew once I walked out I had no reason to ever come back. This solidified it for me, it was why Phil had pushed and pushed me to make her be the one and tell me the entire sordid tale. I was finally free of any chains to the past that she might have held. I didn’t need her approval. I was a good man, had a good life, had the best friends in the entire world, and I was working really hard on figuring out how to have a good woman on a permanent basis. There was no need for my mother to be proud of me or find worth in what I was doing, because I was proud of myself, and Phil had given me that.
It didn’t matter that I had no idea what to do with the new shop, or that Saint had me spinning in circles. I would figure it all out, and there was no way I was going to let him or anyone else down while doing it, not because I needed validation or appreciation, but because that was just the kind of guy I was. The kind of guy my father had raised me to be.
CHAPTER 12
Saint
I knew his visit with his mom was going to have him in a bad mood. He didn’t talk much about her, or why he had been raised mostly by Phil, and the fact he was quiet about it spoke to me more than I think words could. He’d mentioned more than once that the reason he was so quick to anger, so quick to run his mouth when he was younger, was because of how unhappy he was with his mom, that he acted out for attention and to rile her up, so I knew his visit was going to have him feeling raw and out of sorts. I wanted to do something to make him feel better.
He had gone out of his way to show me a good time, to take me out and keep things between us fun and p
layful, but always keeping a sexy edge to it all so that I knew he wanted me. I felt like it was time I returned the favor.
He showed up at my apartment sulking, thunderous, and in a full-on bad mood. His eyes were all dark and swirly, and no matter how much I tried to get him to talk about it, he just grunted one-syllable answers at me and scowled at nothing and no one in particular. I couldn’t really shake him out of it, and when I suggested we get out of the apartment, he just looked at me like I had lost my mind. Really he wasn’t fit to be around other people, but I couldn’t stand to see him so unhappy, so I was going to drag him into a better mood kicking and screaming if I had to.
It was a testament as to how much he wanted to please me, wanted me to have a good time, that he agreed to leave the apartment with me in the first place when clearly he would have been content to sit and wallow in his awful mood for the rest of the night. I could have kissed him all over his shaved head for that alone. When we got into the Jetta and he didn’t ask any questions as I drove downtown, I could only hope my plan didn’t backfire and end up with him in an even more sour state of mind.
I had to find a place to park and he gave me a questioning look as I took his hand and guided him toward the ice-skating rink that was located right in the heart of Denver’s downtown at Skyline Park. It was only open a few months out of the year, in the winter, and you could skate for free if you brought your own skates. It had always been one of my favorite parts of growing up in a cold-weather state. There was nothing like gliding around the ice in the dark while white lights twinkled over your head. There was something so fun about doing something so quaint right in the middle of such a metropolitan area … I hoped Nash felt the same way.