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The saddle in his arms, Dad turned and gave her a steady, stony look. “The club is my space, first and foremost. Yeah, family belongs there, but the club is mine. I claim the right to be comfortable there.”
What the fuck was with her family this weekend? Every damn one of them was working overtime to stamp out every ember of contentment that she managed to find. When she replied to her father, she gave her irritation some air, so he’d feel it. “And I claim the right to live my life as I see fit, and fuck who I want to fuck.”
Dad actually flinched at her wording; his expression showed naked shock. “Jesus, Gia.”
The guilt she’d been feeling since they’d shown her their elaborate gift of eviction from the family home flared hot now, and Gia almost apologized. She’d hurt him, saying that so crudely. But also, this fatherly chat was fucked up. Her father did not get to tell her who she could or could not be with because he was squeamish.
She didn’t apologize. She stared back at him with all the stone he’d thrown at her.
For a long time—it felt like years—they stood there, eyes locked, at an impasse. Both hurt and angry, both equally stubborn. Then Dad nodded once, a brusque, dismissive spasm. He dropped the saddle on an empty rack and stalked out of the stable without another word.
Gia watched until he turned toward the house, out of sight. He never looked back.
Tears pricked at the backs of her eyes. She clenched them shut until the risk of crying passed.
She hung the bridle up at the cleaning station and went back out to tend to her horse.
Chapter Thirteen
Doofus woke Zaxx up as usual: around five-thirty, he jumped back up onto the bed (he slept on the bed with him) and bounced until Zaxx opened his eyes, then he dived in for a thorough tonguing of Zaxx’s face.
Usually, Zaxx called that a great way to start a day. On this particular morning, however, he was depressed and hung over, and his sleep had been a mess. Since about three, he’d been trying to go all the way back under but only managing to hover restlessly in the limbo between wakefulness and real sleep.
The past weekend had been a complicated collection of ups and downs, each down completely flattening every up. Looking for leverage on Sergeant Handsy, Dom had come up with a big fat doughnut. The guy was a typical good ol’ boy cop—a few excessive force complaints that never went anywhere, a few ‘inappropriate contact’ complaints that also hadn’t gone anywhere, a restraining order from his ex-wife that had never been enforced. You couldn’t leverage a guy whose secrets weren’t secret and nobody cared. The only remaining recourse was intimidation, but Badger was chilly on that option. At the moment, it looked like there might be nothing Zaxx could do to help his sister.
Zelda was angry at him for not having solved all her problems already—and she’d told Mom and Pop about it, so they were on his back, too. Especially Mom, who was laying on the protect your sister schtick with a fucking trowel.
And then there was Gia. The one bright spot of a shitty weekend, except was it? Her mother was on his ass about it. Badger was on his ass about it. And last night her father came barreling into the Hall to jump on his ass about it. They’d stood chest-to-chest and had a shouting match, until Len and Thumper pulled them back.
And, of course, Isaac wanted him in the ring.
The dude was old. Big and strong, yes. Tough, sure. But old. In his sixties—and riddled with old injuries. Zaxx wasn’t worried about holding his own against the guy. He was more worried where he’d stand with the club if he did real damage to Saint Fucking Isaac.
Worse than all that was his own doubt, its seeds sowed by all the people who thought it was a terrible idea to get with Gia—not terrible for him but for her. He was being rash. Short-sighted. Selfish. He’d hold her back, keep her down, kill her dreams. From the moment they’d first kissed at No Place, virtually everyone he encountered was singing the same bleak tune.
Nobody gave a shit about what being with Gia would do for or to him; everybody was focused on her. And he understood—she was the star. A town darling. Smart and strong and talented, with a real future wide open before her.
That was really the worst part: he agreed with everybody. He was a construction worker who’d struggled to graduate high school. What could he be to someone like her but a weight around her ankle?
Drowning in all that, he hadn’t reached out to her since he’d left her tiny house. She’d texted him, asking about his meeting with Badger, but his only response had been to react to her text. He’d had his phone in his hand probably dozens of times, feeling shitty about leaving her hanging, feeling shitty about what it might mean if he ignored everybody in town and pursued this thing with her, but he’d never done anything but feel shitty and put his phone away. Dozens of times.
She hadn’t texted him again, so maybe that was already that.
He’d spent last night here, bingeing a true-crime series and drinking most of a handle of Jack.
This morning he felt not just like shit but like an overfull port-a-potty left to sit in the sun, and he was not in the mood for his pup’s ebullient energy.
“Doof, back off,” he complained, pushing the dog’s head away.
Seeing that as an invitation for some roughhousing, Doof dropped his front half and gave his rear end a wiggle. Zaxx rolled belligerently out of bed before his dog could tackle him. As he staggered to the bathroom, Doof jumped down, tags jingling, and followed, completely unaware that Zaxx didn’t share his eternally sunny mood.
Zaxx closed him out of the bathroom. He felt guilty when he heard Doof whimper at the other side of the door and then slide to the floor with a dissatisfied groan, but he needed to get his head on straight by himself or he’d end up shouting at his bud out there.
The mirror showed him a stranger—pale, rumpled and barely conscious. Like a peek into an alternate dimension where he’d been living on the streets for a few years.
His need to piss was acute, but before he did anything else, he leaned on the sink, turned the cold tap on full blast, and stuck his face in the stream. The shock of it peeled the top few layers of scum off his brain. When he felt at least well enough to close the portal on that alternate dimension, he pissed, then turned on the shower—cool but not as cold as the sink—and tried to pull himself together. He had to be on the job site by seven.
~oOo~
