steel gray eyebrow at me.
“Seems like a lost soul,” he said carefully. “Seems like a good girl.” He eyed me equally carefully as when he’d spoken. When I didn’t say anything, he asked me, “Why, what you thinkin’?”
“Nothing, Pops. I don’t know…”
He harrumphed and shook his head, “Your mom was a good girl when I met her and I broke her damn heart.” He slid up onto one of the breakfast bar’s tall chairs and wrapped his hands around the big mug he’d pilfered from the pile before I could even get a look at all of it.
“You went to prison,” I said with a sigh. “Mom knew what she was signing up for when she married you,” I reminded him.
“Did she, though?” he asked and stared off into nothingness.
“Do I think she had herself convinced you’d never get pinched for nothing? Yes. Do I think she fell apart when you did?” I remembered. I’d been about seven, my sister nine or ten. It’d been ugly – Mom left scrambling, but a lot of that had been her fault. The club had tried to take care of us, but she’d blamed them as much as she’d blamed my pops, so she wouldn’t take their money.
“Shit fell apart,” my dad said in a tone that brooked no argument.
“Yeah.” I nodded a little sadly. “Yeah, they did.”
My dad had served eight years, and my sister had headed off to college right before he’d gotten out. Mom wouldn’t let my ass see him at first, but then Lacy had died and she couldn’t stop me if she wanted to.
My pops had been the path to revenge, but I’d carried most of it out on my own.
“You want my opinion, or don’t you?” he asked, and I shook my head.
“Naw, man, I don’t.”
He nodded carefully and said with a grunt and a sigh getting up, “Then you already know what it is and you know I’m right. You just don’t wanna hear it.”
I hissed out a disgruntled chuckle and carried on washing and rinsing the bowl I had in my hands.
“Either get over here and dry or fuck off,” I told him.
“And away I go,” he said with a shrug, and he fucked off toward the living room. That’s just the way we were. Brothers via the club more than father and son, then again, he hadn’t been around to be a father much after he’d been sent up.
I was just finishing up drying and stacking things in the cupboards when my phone rang. I picked it up from where it was blaring Wardruna on the kitchen counter and answered it, even though it was an unknown number. I had a sneaking suspicion I knew who it was.
“Hello?”
“Hi.” Her voice was soft and nervous at the same time. She cleared her throat and said, “Amber said you called?”
“Yeah, I’m here washing up these dishes, getting ‘em put away. I wanted to say thank you, they’re real nice. Definitely way too much, though. You shouldn’t have.”
“You didn’t have to do what you did either,” she murmured, and I chuckled.
“You’re not the first, baby. You won’t be the last, either. That’s just to say it’s what I do.”
“Oh, well, you’re a kind man, Fenris… consider it a kindness for a kindness.”
“You make these?” I asked abruptly, dying to know.
“Oh, yeah… it didn’t exactly come up in conversation, but it’s what I do.” She laughed a little nervously and said, “It was one of the few things my mom and I could bond over.”
“I know that feeling,” I said and glanced behind me at the open archway into the living room. I couldn’t see my dad seated in his chair with the back of it to the other side of the wall that separated the dining area from the living room. I knew he was listening. I would have been listening too.
“Anyway, I hope you enjoy them,” she said, and I chuckled.
“Dad had his coffee in one of the cups before I could even ride up. The man never met a coffee mug he liked until yours,” I said. “Just nothing out there big enough.”
“I could make a bigger one,” she said laughing, and I laughed with her.
“No, God, please no,” I said.
“Well, alright then. I would have happily taken the challenge.”
Seemed to me she had plenty of those lately, I didn’t want to add any others so as much as I wanted to get to know Ms. Aspen Lawson, I took my dad’s warning to heart