“I mean, we get chicks in here talking deep shit all the time, but I can’t say in all the years I’ve been taking Kincaid money that Kincaid chatter has ever gotten this serious.” He pauses his work, slides a wipe over my chest to clear the excess ink away, then meets my eyes. “Do I need to snitch to your daddies, or what? Because my loyalties lie with them.”
“Jamie?” Bry draws my attention back to him. “Tell me what happened.”
“Nothing. I dunno. I just…” I sigh. “Cam disappeared. She was there, we were together, but then poof! Like she never existed. We didn’t use protection that time, and I just…” I shrug. “I dunno. I guess my period is coming or something.”
Ian snorts and goes back to work.
“You think she’s got your kid?” Bry growls. “Seriously? Because that’s kind of a massive fucking deal. If she has a Kincaid with her somewhere on the other side of the country, we’re not sitting here and allowing her to make you a deadbeat.”
“No. I have no clue,” I admit on a murmur. “It was only one time without protection. The timing was all wrong. The chances are super slim. I’m just thinking deep, I guess. Not about her in particular. Just…” I shrug again. “Thinking.”
“Philosophical as fuck,” he rumbles. “Um… okay. Philosophically, hypothetically, I guess you’re not wrong. We just have to be there for the fun. After that, it’s in a girl’s hands. She could ditch and never tell us. I’d lay good money that there are millions of women who’ve bolted from their man without a word, and raised a baby on their own.”
“I have a baby,” Zelda helpfully adds. “His daddy knows, but that guy is a loser. He doesn’t deserve to know my baby.” Her eyes come up to meet mine. “I wish I’d never told him. And if I could go back, I’d ditch town with Sloan in my belly and never look back.”
“You don’t think a father deserves to know about his child?” I frown. “Hypothetically speaking.”
She smirks and goes back to working on Bry. “I think that it needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis. In my case, Blaze…” She firms her lips. “Yup, that’s seriously his name. He’s a piece of shit. He likes to shoot up, he likes to buy women, and when he gets his monthly visit with Sloan, he almost always brings a chick who is just like him – cooked, loose, and stupid. So now our son has to work through his confusion about where he comes from, why Daddy’s a fuckin’ loser, and why we don’t have a regular family with the mommy and the daddy living in the same home.”
“But if you ran, he’d still have those questions,” Bry counters. “Your logic is flawed.”
“Yeah. I know it’s flawed.” She pulls her pierced bottom lip between her teeth. “But I’d rather the emotional trauma of him having no dad than the one he has. If he has no dad, then the slate is clean, and I could make up some story about how Daddy went to war and died a hero or some shit. Or maybe Daddy is a scientific genius, so he’s off in a lab somewhere, curing something horrible. Instead, he gets ‘Daddy is a meth-head loser’. When Sloan is an adult, standing at a crossroads and wondering what he’ll do with his life, he could have considered being a hero just like Daddy, you know? Instead—”
“He’ll wonder if frying his brain is a good choice,” Bry finishes with a nod. “I get it.”
“Right.” Zelda shrugs and leans closer to her work. “The whole situation is fucked, but I guess there are just better levels of fucked. But we don’t get a choice in this. Blaze is who we get, and that’s on me, because I went to bed with an idiot.”
“But… I’m not an idiot.” I lay back and stare at the ceiling. “Like, if this hypothetical is about me, I’m a decent guy. I work, I take responsibility, I look after those I love.” I turn and meet Zelda’s eyes. “If she took my baby and never told me, that’s on her, right? For not being honest.”
Zelda shrugs. She has no damn clue who I’m talking about.
“You know she ran for a reason, right?” Bry draws my eyes. “Maybe we don’t agree with it, and maybe we don’t like it, but in Cam’s world, her brother is a wanted felon. She couldn’t stick