Then his body turned to me.
“So are you,” he noted back quietly.
“Dad says, a wrong is just wrong no matter who’s doing it or who it’s done to. If you know someone’s doing wrong, you do what you can to right it. If you don’t, you’re no kind of person he’d want to know. And I want to be the kind of person my Dad wants to know.”
“Right,” he replied but said no more.
“So that’s why I’m doing it. Why are you?”
His brows went up slightly and he answered, “Faye, honey, I’m a cop.”
“But you’re going all out,” I reminded him. “Are things, um… slow at the Station or something?”
He grinned, leaned slightly toward me and said, “No. I’ll admit, I’m not goin’ all out for this kid just because I’m a cop. I’m doin’ it because it means somethin’ to the town’s pretty librarian.”
I held my breath as my heart fluttered and Ella Mae started singing in my ear.
“Now,” he continued, “what I’d like to know is what you were really asking.”
Laurie said care, honesty, generosity and forgiveness.
I didn’t know if what I was going to ask fit into any of those except “honesty” but I hoped it also fit into “care”.
“You hate your Dad,” I said gently.
He shook his head, leaned closer and put a hand to my leg, sliding it up so his pinkie pressed against the bend in my hip and I tried to focus on his words and not his warm hand on me or where it was when he spoke.
“My Dad’s a dick. Lookin’ back at my life, he was hard on me, too hard, hard in a way I’d never be to a kid but I was not mentally abused. He’s got a way he sees life and men and how they conduct themselves and we do not see eye to eye on that. That’s okay when you’re a kid. But when your son starts becomin’ a man and he doesn’t do one f**kin’ thing to lose your respect, you should give it to him including respecting the points of view he’s developing and the ways he’s beginning to look at the world. My Dad didn’t do that. He wanted me to be who he wanted me to be and refused to accept anything else. I guess I’m like him in that way because I refused to be anything else but the man I wanted to be. This meant we clashed. I skipped a grade and left for college when I was seventeen. Never went home again for more than a week or two, even for summers, found jobs that would take me away. This was because he never quit pushin’ it. I never quit pushin’ back.”
“That doesn’t sound fun,” I whispered because it really didn’t and I didn’t like it that he grew up like that.
“It wasn’t,” he agreed.
“I’m sorry.” I kept whispering.
“I am too,” he replied then carried on. “Got worse as I got older because he never got over it. He hated me bein’ a cop. Still does. Came to visit in order to tell me just that. Not regular but more than once and once was one time too many. Life happens, shit happens and it came to my attention more of the man he is and it’s not good. He cheats on my Mom. He does it repeatedly. He’s done it since the beginning. I’m not down with that.”
I pressed my lips together to hold back the words that hit the tip of my tongue and Chace, exhibiting again he could read my mind, read it.
I knew this when his hand went away from my leg but only to go under my stool and yank it his way, twisting at the same time so I was facing him. Then he pulled his stool closer to me, his legs splayed wide so they surrounded mine, his hands came to either side of my neck and he pulled me to him so our faces were close.
I put my hands on his (very hard, fraking heck) thighs because I didn’t know what to do with them then I didn’t have to think about it because he spoke. When he did, he did it quiet, gentle, honest, scary and sad.
“Things go good between us, one day I’ll share in full about all the shit that’s gone down with me including me and Misty. But you live in this town, it’s a small town and it is not lost on me that people talk and a lot of that talk the last six years has been about me and Misty. What you have to know now, us startin’ out, knowin’ or thinkin’ what you do about me and her and how I behaved, wonderin’ if you wanna take a chance on me is that I didn’t love her. I married her because I had to and it’s gonna sound whacked and confusing as all f**kin’ hell but I did it to protect my mother. Misty knew, goin’ in, because I told her, that I had no intention of being a husband to her in any way.”
His fingers gave my neck a squeeze and he leaned even closer to me before he kept going.
“Any way, baby. We didn’t sleep in the same bed. I didn’t kiss her good morning or goodnight. We didn’t eat dinner together. I didn’t tell her when I was goin’ or when I’d come home. I didn’t make love to her, not once after we were married. Before it, I had her but what we did was never makin’ love. There’s a difference and she never got that from me. I told her straight up our marriage was a piece of paper. She wanted that out of the deal she bargained for and she got it. But she didn’t get me. As far as I was concerned, she was a roommate I didn’t like much.”
When he stopped talking, I felt it necessary to comment so I did.
“You’re right, Chace, that is confusing.”
He grinned, it wasn’t with humor but something else. Something I didn’t get. Maybe sadness. Maybe bleakness. Whatever it was wasn’t good so my fingers automatically gave his thighs a squeeze.
When they did, he kept talking.
“This isn’t easy to explain. And I gotta tell you, honey, I’m feelin’ both f**kin’ thrilled I got the chance I never thought I’d have to do it and lost because I have no idea how to do it and make you understand somethin’ that, from the outside lookin’ in, did not look good. So I’ll just do it straight up. I didn’t see it as cheatin’ on her because in my heart I wasn’t married to her. She meant nothing to me. She trapped me. She did it willfully. She used a way that was seriously jacked. It put my family in harm’s way and in some f**ked up place in her head, she thought after she could make me fall in love with her once she had me legally bound to her. I knew her before, in town, in bars and in my bed. She knew the man I was. How she could think for one f**kin’ second she could pull that shit and win me, I don’t know. But she did. Then she quickly learned different. I was not nice to her. While she was breathin’, my thoughts were, she bought that. She didn’t want it anymore, she could walk away and demonstrate she had some good in her and give me the gift of lettin’ me be free. But I’ll admit right now, I was not nice to her partly to make her leave me f**kin’ be. When she wasn’t breathin’, the way I treated her f**ked with my head. She was not a good woman. But no woman, good or not, deserves to be shot dead.”