With nothing else in my arsenal to fight this, I pushed into him as deeply as I could get, moaning, “Oh, Knox.”
“Yeah. That was fucked up, but it was one hundred percent my pops. So it also wasn’t surprising.”
“Still.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Still.”
God.
Knox kept at it.
“Before and after my brothers started to make their way into the family business, they were bullies. Mean to the bone. Kids at school were terrified of them. They brought that shit home, turned it on me, Dad egged it on. I think he thought they’d mock and beat the normal out of me. The boy who wanted to play football and hang with his friends and play video games. The only time I made my dad proud was when Crew turned that on Gypsy, and I gave him a black eye, a bloody nose and a loose tooth.”
The only thing in this convo I wasn’t surprised about was that he went to the mat for his sister.
“Is your sister, I hate to use this word because it’s not really you, you’re extraordinary, but since you used it…is she normal too?”
“She was. Then I went away and they got her.”
Crap.
“Oh, Knox,” I repeated, this time it was nearly a whimper.
Lame, but what else could I say?
“Not sure it was them who got her, though. Dad had another guy in his crew. Rocco. Before I left, I’d met him. I’d come to know him. Did not like him. When I was there, he didn’t even glance at Gypsy. After I left, I realized why he didn’t was not because of Dad, but because of me.”
“So…they’re a thing?”
“One thing I learned about Gypsy, or maybe women in general, was, you don’t talk trash about the men in their lives. Maybe, if I was close, she’d listen to me. But I left. She wasn’t happy I left either because I left her to them. Even so, she knew, if I’d stayed, they would keep at me to fold me into their crap. I had to leave, one way or the other. And she was sixteen when I left. I couldn’t take her with me.”
“No,” I agreed.
“I called. I emailed. But my finger was off the pulse.”
Wait up.
Was he…?
“Are you blaming yourself she got hooked up with this guy?”
“I was the only one who looked after her.”
“What about your mom?”
“Long gone.”
One thing I knew from the tone of those two words, the topic of his mother had to wait for a different moonlit conversation. One I wasn’t looking forward to, but still, on another level I was because I wanted to know everything about him.
The good. The bad. And what I was learning was the very ugly.
So I grasped the only straw available to me.
“I know she was young, Knox, but she’s also her own person and responsible for her own decisions,” I said. “She saw you get out. She knew there were paths. She didn’t have to hook up with this Rocco guy.”
“They started dating the day after her eighteenth birthday. He was thirty-two at the time.”
If she were a few years older, not a problem. It wasn’t an age gap I’d want, but it wasn’t skeevy.
