Page 22 of Badd Daddy
She blushed furiously, mouth opening and closing as if trying to come up with a response to that, and couldn’t. After a moment, she just turned away and headed into the kitchen, still dabbing and squeezing sections of hair in the towel.
Once she was out of sight, I bolted across the hallway and into my room—and remembered to make sure the door latched. Dressed, I reemerged from my room and found Liv at my kitchen table, reading something on her smartphone, a pinched expression on her face.
“What’s up?” I asked. “You look like you bit into a lemon.”
She lifted her phone in gesture. “Email from my youngest daughter, Poppy.”
“Not a good one?”
She tipped her head side to side. “Well, it’s tricky with her. She’s not sure what she wants, or that she’s happy where she is, but she’s not sure what to do about it.”
I sighed. “That is tricky. I never had to worry about that—my boys were laser-focused on graduating high school and getting to California to work for the forest service. I think they wanted to get out of Oklahoma so bad that it actually kept ’em out of any real trouble.”
She set the phone down and glanced up at me. “Lucas, I…”
I held up a hand. “I’m sorry, Liv. It was an accident. I forgot that door doesn’t latch. I should’a told you. I may not be the most chivalrous or sophisticated fella in the world, but I’d never do anything like that on purpose.” I shrugged. “If a woman wants me to see her naked, I won’t have to manufacture an accident.”
She smiled faintly. “That is true.”
I tried to stop the next words from tumbling out of my mouth, but couldn’t. “It was an accident, but I ain’t gonna pretend I didn’t see nothin’…and that I didn’t appreciate what I saw.”
Her blush deepened, and she shifted in her chair. “Lucas, I…I honestly don’t know how to respond to that.”
“Don’t need to.”
Her eyes flicked up to mine, taking me in as if for the first time. “Do you happen to have a brush? Or even a comb?”
I nodded. “I think I have a comb somewhere. No brush, though.”
She smiled—that sweet, innocent, unassuming smile that shot straight to my gut every single time. “I just need to get the worst of the tangles out of my hair.” Her smile turned teasing. “You could probably stand to use it yourself.”
When I went into the steamy bathroom to get the comb, I glanced in the mirror and chuckled—my hair was a wild mess, sticking up in every direction, shaggy and unkempt at best, and my beard wasn’t any better. In fact, this was one of the few times I’ve even looked at myself in the mirror in recent memory, I realized I didn’t like what I saw…at all.
Probably why I avoided the mirror, because I knew I wouldn’t, but now, with Liv out there, I suddenly gave a shit about how I appeared…and I knew I was long, long past having let myself go.
I ran the comb through my hair and beard, slicking back the bushy mess of thick gray-brown as well as was possible. Didn’t make much difference, though—I was still a fat, unkempt, gimp-legged old alcoholic with a bad heart and a worse past.
I growled to myself and hobbled out of the bathroom, bringing the comb to Liv. She drew the comb slowly through her glossy, short black hair—not a trace of gray anywhere; she did so absentmindedly, rereading the email from her daughter.
“What would you do, Lucas?” she asked.
I scoffed. “You’re askin’me?” I shook my head slowly. “I sure as hell ain’t one to be givin’ no parenting advice, Olivia. The fact that none of my sons are drug addicts, criminals, in jail, or dead don’t have a single goddamn thing to do with me. They made good in spite of me, not because of me.”
Her expression reflected sadness. “You are far too hard on yourself.”
I snarled. “Ain’t hard enough, babe. You don’t know the half of it.”
“Did you beat them?” she asked, her gaze frank, her tone unapologetic.
“No. God, no.” I paused. “They got brought into this world and then were abandoned by their mother. Even at my worst, I knew they didn’t deserve the life they had…” I swallowed hard. “I didn’t do right by them, I neglected ’em, didn’t know how to…how to love ’em, how to show ’em I loved ’em. But I never hit ’em. Not once.”
“Then you can’t—”
“Being able to say I didn’t beat my boys ain’t exactly an absolution for my sins as a father, Liv. It just means I wasn’t a total monster.”
“You’re not a monster, Lucas,” she whispered.
I gazed at her levelly. “I just wish I was the man you seem to think you see when you look at me.”