Page 53 of Badd Daddy
“The fuck it is,” I snapped, and then sighed. “Sorry. But I been avoiding this shit for decades. And now everyone wants to know everything all at fuckin’ once.”
Bax’s woman, tall end of medium height, incredible body, jet-black hair, green eyes, a gentle expression on her face, spoke up. “This is a lot of pressure to put on him all at once. I don’t think it’s fair.”
I managed a wobbly grin at her. “Thanks. You, I like.”
Zane was an immovable force. “Fair? You want to talk about fair? How about I never fucking knew I even had an uncle or three cousins. My whole life, I thought Dad was an only child. When Mom died, he went to fuckin’ hell. Shut down, willed himself to die. If you had fuckin’beenhere,” he said, stabbing a finger at me, “maybe he would’ve figured out how to go on, how to keep living for hiseightgoddamn kids. Maybe he’d be here to be a grandpa to his grandkids.”
“If you’d been around, maybe when he did die, we would have had you to lean on,” Bast added. “I’m with Zane on this one.”
I found myself staring at the wall over Zane’s shoulder, at the bottles of whiskey lined up. Wishing for a drink. Almost able to taste it. My teeth gritted, and I felt the fork bend in half in my fist.
A small warm hand touched my shoulder. “Lucas? Breathe.”
“I’ve never wanted a drink so bad in my fuckin’ life.” I growled.
“You don’t need it,” Liv said. “Don’t give it another thought. Just face it. Deal with it. Tell the truth.”
“The truth sucks.”
“It sometimes does. But you’ll feel better talking about it.”
I stared at her. “You must be nuts.”
She frowned. “Why would you say that?”
“To be here? Gettin’ tossed in the middle of some seriously heavy baggage of a family you don’t know from Adam?”
“You’re my friend, Lucas. This is what friends do.”
“I ain’t had a lot of experience with friendship, Liv.”
“Never too late to learn,” she said with a smile.
I twisted on my chair, glancing in turn at the many faces watching me . There were twenty-two people surrounding me, not including Liv. All of them listening, waiting.
I felt sick.
“Fuck.” I sucked in a deep breath. “Fine. Here goes. I ain’t told this story in its entirety to anyone—not ever, not once.”
The room quieted and you could hear a pin drop. I paused, thinking back, summoning the painful old memories.
“First thing all ya’ll oughta know is that what I’m gonna tell you ain’t gonna leave your mom and dad squeaky clean. Yeah, I’m a bastard and I got a hell of a lotta skeletons in my closet, but they ain’t innocent in what went down, neither of ’em. You all want to know what happened? Fine. But don’t go jumpin’ down my throat when I tell you shit you won’t want to hear.”
“Just tell us,” Bast growled. “We get it.”
I let my gaze snap up to his, my eyes blazing. “You think you get it. But you don’t. You’re gonna want to take a swing at me before I’m done, I guarantee you.”
“I’ve wanted to take a swing at you since the moment I knew you existed,” Bast said. “Doubt your story will make much of a difference.”
“Shows how much you know,” I muttered. “Anyway, here it goes. You are probably all aware that Liam and I were identical twins, as alike as you two are, Canaan and Corin. Except we never changed our appearance—we came into town once every few months for a haircut, and we got the same thing, so there wasn’t any easy way to tell us apart unless you knew us really well. We were poor, too, so we had basically the same clothes, cheap ones from thrift stores and surplus stores. We grew up by Ward Creek, out in the bush. We hunted for food, and if we missed our shot we went hungry. We pumped water from a well every day of our lives. We shit in outhouses and in the woods more often than not. Life for us was a matter of survival. We grew our own veggies, and the only way for us to stay warm was to chop wood for our fires. No gas, no electric heaters, just a fireplace. It was backwoods rough. We barely ever saw other folks than Gramps and Dad, most of the time. Mom—our mother was a local gal named Tanya. I don’t think she and our dad were ever married, and she passed on of cancer of some kind when Liam and I were three or four. ”
I held up my bent fork, set it aside, and accepted the one Liv had been using and I took a moment to eat a few bites and wash it down with the weird-ass fancy flavored bubbly water shit.
“None of that really matters, though. Just background. We were roughnecks, wild, barely civilized, barely educated, spent more time in the woods than in a building.” I shoved more prime rib into my mouth, and then continued. “Liam and I met Lena when we were…oh god, fifteen, just shy of sixteen? Gramps took us into town for haircuts and some supplies. Usually he’d pay for our haircuts and then give us a couple bucks to spend how we wanted, which was usually on cheeseburgers, fries, and a milkshake, ’cause that shit was a serious treat for backwoods bumpkins like us. Well, we were at our usual place up on Tongass, north o’here a ways. Ain’t there no more, and I don’t remember what it was called, just some greasy spoon kinda place. We were chowin’ down on our food, chattin’ about whatever, and then we saw her. Both of us, at the same time. She was walking past with a group of friends, but I know for me, there weren’t no one else on the street the moment I saw her.”
I stopped, sighed, scrubbed my face with my palm, and then spent a minute eating before continuing.
“Lena Dunfield was goddamned gorgeous.” I glanced at Eva. “She looked a lot like you, matter o’fact. Black hair, green eyes…” I hesitated. “The, um…the same figure.”