Page 33 of Pour Decisions (Stryker Family #3)

JD

Dad doesn’t trust Katrina and she hasn’t even spoken a word.

I’m surprised, to be honest. He can’t recognize her, can he? They never met, but maybe Mom told him to expect her. Either way, the look he gives her puts a pit in my stomach.

“Dad, this is my girlfriend, Katrina,” I say, putting a hand on her knee.

“Your mother told me she’d be coming.” He puts his tumbler of bourbon down and groans as he eases into his seat at the head of the table. “Hi.”

No “nice to meet you.” Nothing of the sort.

The awkwardness settles over the room like a thick blanket. Dad says grace and we occupy ourselves with filling our plates. Mom’s food is always good, so it’s a welcome distraction for a while.

“When do you head out of town again, Ash?” Wes asks, grabbing a bottle of wine from the middle of the table and undoing the cap. Mom never buys anything that requires a corkscrew after an incident that stained her favorite tablecloth.

“I’m not.” Ash shifts in his seat, taking a heavy drink of his cocktail. “I moved home. Temporarily.”

Waylon and Wes exchange a glance with each other, then with me.

Ash hates Jepsen, but he hated living at home even more.

Something must have happened with his band.

Dad grumbles and sighs. He doesn’t look thrilled at most things, but he’s clearly even more bothered by his second oldest son being back here.

“Trust me, I’m not happy about it either.” Ash glares at Dad.

“I’m glad you’re here, Ashley,” Mom says in that gentle tone she doesn’t realize is slightly patronizing even if she means well. “It’s been so long since all of my boys have been back in town for more than a few days.”

“If you’d gotten a stable job like John David, you wouldn’t be in this situation,” Dad says, pushing back from the table to grab the bottle of bourbon from the cabinet behind him.

“JD’s not the only one who got a stable job,” Wes points out with a laugh. “Waylon went to school for a billion years for his, and I literally work for you too.”

Dad ignores him and pours himself more bourbon. Like pouring fuel on a fire. Despite being in the liquor business, Dad only really drinks on holidays. The booze can make his good mood better, and his bad mood worse.

This is only going downhill.

“I’d rather die than have a job kissing your ass like JD does every day,” Ash scoffs.

“Why am I being dragged into this? I don’t have anything to do with you moving back here,” I say. “Just because your band finally fell apart doesn’t mean I should be caught up in this.”

The moment I say the words, I wish I could rephrase them, even if they have some truth to them.

Even from afar, I picked up that Ash’s band isn’t the most stable group of people.

He vents about them to Wes and Waylon every year, and as far as I can tell, none of the drama is his fault.

But his band is his life, and I shouldn’t have implied it was doomed like that.

But it’s too late—I struck a nerve, as I always do with him.

“What do you mean by ‘finally’? You were expecting me to fail too?” Ash asks. Katrina puts her hand on my knee, and I put my hand on hers.

“I don’t give a shit,” I lie. I like a lot of his band’s music more than I’d care to admit. But I did get tired of that one song that was used in a car commercial.

Ash reaches across the table to grab the wine that Wes opened, filling one of the goblets in front of him to the rim.

The only thing worse than sober Dad and sober Ash fighting is both of them doing it while drunk.

I glance at Katrina, who looks surprisingly calm. But I can see the tension in her shoulders out of the corner of my eye. The dogs scratch at the back door and one of them whines loudly enough for us to hear them.

“I’m just saying,” Dad continues, despite it all. “You’d have some discipline and a solid path. Though JD seems to be straying from the one I graciously laid out for him.”

“What the fuck, Dad?” I say, even though I try to never swear in front of my mother. “You’re doing this now? It’s Thanksgiving.”

“I can do it whenever I want.”

“Sweetheart,” Mom says, pasting on a nervous smile. “He’s right. It’s Thanksgiving.”

Dad levels me with a stare, then looks at Katrina. I want to throw myself in front of her so he’ll never fucking dare to look at her like that again.

“First it’s all these weird little ideas at the office instead of the plan I made,” Dad says.

“Weird ideas based on everything you taught me. You don’t want your plan—you want to control everything.”

Rage burns me up from the inside out. Why have I been trying to please this man so hard, to show him that I’m worthy of taking over the business and growing it? All he wants is control. He has control. And he can yank the rug out from under me whenever the fuck he wants to.

“Then it’s this woman again who I thought you dumped a decade ago,” Dad says as if I didn’t speak at all.

“Don’t bring Katrina into this,” I hiss.

“She led you astray back then. Is she doing the same now?” Dad asks, spearing a slice of ham.

“Led me astray?” I say, my voice raising despite my attempt at keeping myself under control.

“I’m an adult man. I’m not led astray by having a normal, loving relationship.

And yeah, I messed up by fighting her stepdad, but you have no idea what he was saying.

If anything, you caused more problems by paying that guy off to make the problem go away. ”

“You beat someone up?” Wes asks. “Someone who wasn’t Ash?”

“We beat each other up. It wasn’t one sided,” Ash says, as if what we did as stupid kids matters at all right now.

“Wait, what are you talking about, sweetie?” Mom asks me, frowning. “You’ve never gotten into a fight in your life. Who paid someone off?”

Dad’s intensity wavers, and he avoids Mom’s gaze. My stomach drops and Katrina goes still next to me. I hate that she’s witnessing this, but I can’t stop now that we’ve started.

“You didn’t tell her,” I say to Dad. “You didn’t tell her that you paid off Kat’s stepdad so he wouldn’t press charges against me. You didn’t tell your own wife that you strong-armed me into breaking up with Katrina the first time.”

The whole room goes deathly silent. Duke’s scream-howl outside doesn’t help cut the tension either.

“ What? ” Mom goes pale. “John David, is that true?”

“It’s complicated,” Dad says.

“It’s not that complicated,” I say with a bitter laugh.

“Katrina’s stepdad was verbally abusing her.

I came to get her and lost my temper. Her stepdad said he’d press charges, but Dad said he’d pay him off not to.

Then he used that to strongarm me into breaking up with Katrina to focus on my career. ”

“It wasn’t me who came up with that idea,” Dad says. “It was her mother.”

Katrina’s hand on mine starts trembling immediately. I lace my fingers in hers and squeeze, but her hands tremble harder.

“Her mom was the one who brought up the idea of paying off her husband. At first, I didn’t want to pay it.

I wanted you to suffer the consequences of your own actions,” Dad says, suddenly looking tired.

“But she really wanted that money for whatever reason, and said I could use it to my advantage since you clearly didn’t want to deal with the legal battle.

So I decided to use that to break you two up. Am I proud of that? No, but?—”

Katrina pushes back from the table and I get up with her. But she waves for me to sit down as she passes by me.

“I can’t believe you’d do something to hurt our son like that,” Mom says, heartbroken.

“I’m not proud of it,” he repeats, as if that’s an apology.

“Holy fuck,” Ash says with a dark laugh. “I didn’t think you could be worse, but you are. And for your favorite son.”

His “favorite” son. It’s a dubious title, and it’s not one I want anymore.