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“Is what I wanna know gonna take long?”
“It could.”
He slid to her side. “You still hurtin’?”
“I took some Aleve. It’s helping.”
“You didn’t complain when I had you bent over my sled on the run,” he reminded her.
“It didn’t hurt enough to complain.”
“I’m takin’ that as you sayin’ gettin’ my dick’s worth any discomfort.”
“That’s not what I said. And you just told me you didn’t have an ego.”
“Look, a man likes to hear he gives good dick.”
“Wouldn’t not hearing it motivate you to do better?”
He dug his bent elbow into the mattress and propped his head on his palm. “My dick ain’t good enough for you, either?”
“You’re more than just a dick, Deacon.”
Huh. “Yeah? What else am I?”
“Do you want to hear my story or not?”
Now he was debating whether to hear what she really thought about him first. Not about the sex, he knew she liked that part, but the rest about him. “Yeah, babe, wanna hear your story.”
She turned her head slightly, enough to make eye contact and hold it. Was she thinking twice about telling him? Or was it just so bad, she had a hard time talking about it?
He knew one thing. The woman before him was not broken. Fuck no. She wasn’t even cracked. She was as strong as a damn fifty-year-old oak tree. Her branches extended out with confidence and she wouldn’t let a storm topple her. She’d probably laugh in the face of a hurricane.
He could see why her ex wussed out. He couldn’t stand his wife being the stronger person. She had intimidated him. Strong women were a threat to some men’s manhood.
Fuck that. That part about her turned him on.
If he wanted to wipe his feet on something, he’d buy a doormat. He wanted a woman who’d force him to leave his dirty boots outside. Or else.
He wanted a woman who he could have an argument with and wouldn’t curl up into a ball and cry. No, she’d give as good as she got.
His dick jerked in his underwear.
“Okay, you’re hearing this story once, then we’re never discussing it again. Not ever, Deacon. It’s the past and that’s where it belongs. It’s never to be used against me, either. Promise me that.”
“You mean like a lawyer would?” Damn. Once again, sometimes he said or did dumb things. “Promise.”
With a deep inhale—probably so she wouldn’t clobber him—she began. “My mother was an alcoholic. From what I know, she started drinking heavily after I was born. I’m not sure if it was post-partum depression which started her down that road or what.” She paused and took another deep breath, this one sounding less irritated and more to help brace herself. “She didn’t stop drinking, even when she was pregnant with Reilly. Though, somehow she hid it for most of her pregnancy from everyone else. I guess because, by then, she was a functioning drunk and my father worked a lot, which meant he was gone a lot. Even though my mother also worked, he was the main source of income in our family. The older I got, the more I had to do for myself because she was no longer capable of it and he wasn’t around.”
“Your pop didn’t do nothin’ about her drinkin’?”
“From what I remember, he tried in the beginning, but eventually gave up. Until the day he caught her drinking when she was... Oh, I don’t know, six months pregnant? He hated her drinking as it was. Mostly because it cost a lot of his hard-earned money and she was pretty much useless as a mother when she hit the bottle hard. But that day was the final straw. He started coming home less and less which, of course, made her drink more. The irony was, the more she drank, the less he wanted to be with her. The less he wanted to be with her, the more she drank.”
“Vicious fuckin’ cycle.” Her story wasn’t a new one, unfortunately. He’d heard similar ones before. Most didn’t have a good outcome, which he assumed was the direction her story was going.
“Him avoiding the house turned eventually into him never coming home. He went from being gone from one night to two nights. Then a week, a month. I heard her crying on the phone, promising she’d stop, begging him to come home. Not for me. For her. She didn’t stop hitting the bottle, but she did slow down for a little while. Until Reilly was born. How my sister didn’t have FAS was a miracle.”
“FAS?”
“Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. I was ten when Reilly was born, so, at the time, I didn’t know anything about it. But when I was older, I researched it to make sure she didn’t have any of those lasting issues.”
He had no idea what effect FAS would have on a baby, but if Reilly still had it, he couldn’t tell. She looked and acted like any normal twenty-four-year-old.
