Page 15 of Pour Decisions (Stryker Family #3)

KATRINA

“I need something to soak up this booze,” I say as we step into the cool night air. “That wine was so not a flight.”

My limbs have that warm, heavy feeling to them that wine gives me. It’s been a while since I’ve been tipsy and happy at the same time. Recently it’s been wine and pity parties on the couch.

“There’s a diner up the street.” JD nods at a point past my head. “We can walk there.”

“Perfect.”

We start walking, close enough that our arms brush a little bit.

Just that little touch makes my heart flutter all over my chest. It shouldn’t, but I’m giving myself a little grace.

Seeing those glimpses of the old JD—the one with the dry sense of humor who’s so easy to talk to—I forgot how intoxicating being the center of his attention is.

We reach the diner and the host, a teenager with an eyebrow ring, puts us in a booth at the back. The style of the diner is vintage, but it’s too clean to be truly old. Plus, if it were here ten years ago, we would have gone. I love breakfast food.

“Should I get sweet or savory?” I ask him, scanning the menu. There’s standard diner fair, plus some specials like peach cobbler waffles.

“I’m getting sweet,” he says, closing the menu.

Back when we were together, him getting something sweet (which was usually the case when we went out) meant me getting savory so we could taste each other’s food. But eating off his plate feels too intimate, as much as I want just a taste of two different things.

“I guess I’ll get sweet too. The peach cobbler waffles sound super good.” I close my menu too. “With some bacon.”

The waiter comes by and we put in our orders. She fills up our coffee and I take a long sip, immediately burning my tongue.

“Shit.” I wrinkle my nose and pour a small pod of creamer into my drink, as if that’ll cool it down at all. “When will I learn to let it cool down?”

“The coffee here is always super-hot,” he says, adding creamer to his too. “But I think you would have burned yourself either way.”

“And yet you didn’t at least try to warn me.”

“You would have tasted it just to see if I was right.”

I catch the slight teasing lilt in his tone, so subtle that I would have missed it if I hadn’t known him, and it makes me smile despite myself. Experiencing glimpses of the old JD is like looking back in time. My stomach twists and turns, unsure of whether to like that or not.

“You come here a lot?” I ask. “Enough to know the coffee is super-hot?”

“Yeah. I usually come to work with Wes in the mornings we have check-ins for work.” He stirs a packet of sugar into his coffee.

“He works for the company?” JD talks about his brothers sometimes, but he’s not super close to them on a friend level. All I remember about Wes is him driving JD nuts when he was a bar back on JD’s shifts.

“Yeah, he’s the manager now, but he helps his wife, Rose, with our canned drinks. They’ve really taken off.”

“God, he’s married ?” He flirted with basically any woman who was in his vicinity back then. He was charming enough to get a lot of numbers, too, even though he wasn’t even allowed to drink yet at twenty years old. “Wow.”

“Yeah. She’s good for him, though. Keeps him on the straight and narrow.”

JD shrugs, busying himself with straightening the sugar packets. I’ve always gotten the sense that he cares about his brothers—even Ash, who he butted heads with even from afar—but they never hung out or anything.

It doesn’t seem like an age gap thing. JD is four years older than the twins, and two years older than Ash. Maybe he spends more time with them now.

I bite my lip and hold back the barrage of questions I want to ask about the past ten years.

I never thought I’d find out about where he ended up.

A lot of times I wondered about him in a bitter way, thinking about how immersed he must have been in his work to have dumped me for it.

But now that I’m here, I want to know all of it the way I want to know the ending of a TV series I had to stop watching halfway through.

Y’know what? Fuck it. I can ask questions all I want unless he’s not into answering them. Liquid courage.

“What about Waylon?” I ask. I only met him once, when he came to pick up Wes at the bar at shift change. He looks more like JD than Wes does. “And Ash?”

“Waylon is the town’s veterinarian now. He’s engaged. The wedding is next fall, I think,” he says. “And Ash? I don’t know. He was randomly in town for Wes and Waylon’s birthday and then he left.”

“You didn’t talk to him? Or ask him where he’d been?”

JD scoffs. “Nope. The last interaction we had before he showed up for the twins’ birthday was around Christmas when we did the big family Secret Santa. Usually people get gag gifts, but he got me a neon orange t-shirt that said, ‘Live Fast, Eat Ass’ on it. I haven’t quite forgiven him for it.”

I can’t help but laugh at the image of JD holding a shirt like that. “Oh my god.”

“Our mom wasn’t thrilled.” JD runs his hand through his hair. “But she was happy to see him anyway.”

The waiter comes and drops off our food. I made the right choice with the waffles. From the first bite I have to hold in a groan of pleasure—they’re that good. And the bacon is thick and just greasy enough to take the edge off my buzz. We eat in silence for a while.

“I didn’t want to break up back then,” JD says, shattering the silence.

“JD…” I close my eyes, the delicious food churning in my gut. “Now? Really?”

“Please.” His eyes are pleading, almost desperate. I’ve never seen that look on his face before. “I need to get it off my chest because I should have said something back then. And if we’re going to try to clear the air, it needs to be said.”

He’s right. And it’s never going to be comfortable to talk about, so might as well do it with good food to soften the blow.

“You know how things went down with your mom’s husband back then,” he says. “The fight.”

“Yeah.” Unfortunately.

My mom was married to Raymond, who had moved in with her a little before I started my junior year at Crescent Hill. Since the apartment I was going to rent near campus fell through, I moved into Mom’s spare bedroom and commuted.

At first it was fine—he was sort of a snarky jerk who was always “just getting his business started” but never managed to get it off the ground.

I was out a lot for my classes or with JD when we got together and it didn’t matter. He was just another guy in a string of meh guys Mom had.

But then, as his relationship with my mother started going downhill, he started lashing out at me for no good reason.

It got to the point where JD and I were talking about me moving in with him, just so I wouldn’t be barraged with insults every damn day.

Insults about majoring in dance, about my looks.

Things that led to more arguments and fighting.

My mom halfheartedly defended me once and got such a tongue-lashing that she gave up.

She didn't dump him, though, not until years later. She apologized to me and explained her fears, so I’ve tried to move past it. But “moving past it” has meant pretending it didn’t happen.

The yelling every day ground my mental health to dust, and I’d had it. I called JD at one in the morning after a particularly nasty blow up and he drove to pick me up.

JD didn’t take seeing me in that state well.

I’d never seen him lose even a gram of composure, but he lost it at Raymond.

One second they were in each other’s faces, and the next, Raymond was shoving JD onto the ground.

A big mistake on his part, because JD took him down too and beat the shit out of him.

Everything was a blur after that—my mom and I screaming for them to stop, me trying to yank JD off. Raymond saying he’d call the cops if JD didn’t stop. That ended things, and we left for JD’s apartment.

Just remembering when I’ve tried so hard to forget has my hands sweating.

“He ended up making good on his threat of going to the police, so I got arrested the next day after you went to class,” JD says.

“You what?” I drop my fork. “You got arrested and didn’t tell me? It was self-defense!”

He holds up a hand, and I sit back in the booth, biting the inside of my cheek.

“I know it was, but I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to prove. I’m guessing that’s why he didn’t call the cops to begin with—he probably would have been arrested too.” He rakes a hand through his hair, then tugs at his beard. His gaze is unfocused on a point beyond my shoulder.

“He went to the hospital and had a broken rib, so it went from a misdemeanor to a potential felony,” he continues.

“The police in town know of my family, so when I called my dad to bail me out, he came in and was allowed to talk to Raymond. Raymond said he wouldn’t press charges if my dad paid him off, and my dad was more than willing to do that. ”

Raymond would do that, the piece of garbage.

“But Dad said I had to end things with you, or he wouldn’t pay him. He said I got into this shit because I was distracted with our relationship and he used it to pressure me.” JD sighs. “Instead of telling you all of this, I was a coward and just did as my dad asked.”

I freeze. Some parts of that whole time in my life were a blur, and the time between the fight and when JD started distancing himself from me is one of them. But details of that time start to come back and click with what he’s saying.

The breakup conversation where he ended things felt like he was being told to say it at gunpoint.

Though I guess in this case, it was at his father’s urging.

At least Mom had temporarily kicked Raymond out so I was able to go back to her place for a while.

It was awful given everything that had just happened, and we were barely speaking, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go.

I swallow the lump in my throat. It’s like someone flicked on a light switch I didn’t know was there and illuminated all these things that are making me view the world differently.

He really didn’t want to break up. He still loved me. But it’s still complicated.

“I was ashamed. Still am, honestly,” he says, sitting back in the booth. “I can’t believe I even thought letting you go was an option.”

“JD, you would have been a felon,” I say. “I’m not saying I’m glad you chose to do what your father said, but I can see how you got there. He put you in a difficult position. It was all intense and scary.”

He stays quiet as the waiter passes us again. “I should have told you, though. About why. Even years later instead of just waiting.”

He should have. Because then I wouldn’t have spent the past ten years wondering if something was fundamentally wrong with me for him to dump me like that.

Would I have been pissed? Absolutely. I was pissed now, to be honest. He knew I always felt like an afterthought to people like my mom, but he turned around and made me feel the same way.

Knowing I could have moved on without that idea getting ground into my brain would have helped.

But I know JD too. JD never broke the rules. He hardly even bent them. Being faced with serious charges that risked his future would make anyone clam up. And the shame of losing control when he’s all about control?

I hate what he did, but I understand why he did it.

“I’m sorry, Kat,” JD says. “I know they’re just words, but I mean them.”

His words slip right through the walls I’ve put up and hit their target.

“I know you do. I can tell.” I swallow. “I forgive you.”

I’m surprised the words come out as easily as they do. But his sincerity and the way he’s helped me out make it easier. There’s no point in holding onto the old pain if both of us want to move past it.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around all of this. Just when I think I have a handle on it, another question pops up and throws me all over again.

“Did my mom know?” I ask. “About what Raymond did for the money?”

“I don’t know. I was too shaken up to ask my dad that.” He sighs.

I bite my lip. Surely Mom didn’t know. It wasn’t like she was on good terms with Raymond at that time. Maybe I’ll ask her if I ever drum up the courage to. I want to leave that whole incident in the past, but I don’t want this lingering in my head.

We finish our food in silence, my buzz replaced with stone cold sobriety and swirling thoughts.

The waiter picks up the vibe at our table and silently drops off our check once we finish our food. JD pays for it before I can even dig my wallet out of my bag. I still feel so shaken up that I probably would have messed up that simple transaction too.

But once we step outside and start the walk back to our cars, my head starts clearing. I know the truth now. And it’s changed how I’m seeing everything. The future seemed straightforward, but after tonight, I’m not sure.