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“Hailee!” Aiden barked.
“Aiden!” I barked back, not willing to fold.
He knew I wouldn’t give in, so he turned back to the man in front of him. “How much did he owe you?”
“Fifty bucks.”
“Seriously?” Aiden grumbled. “You’re kicking a drunk’s ass because he owes you fifty bucks?” He pulled out his wallet and started going through it.
The moment the man saw Aiden’s cash, he narrowed his eyes. “Did I say fifty? I meant two hundred.”
“Excuse me?” Aiden cocked an eyebrow. “It was fifty just two seconds ago.”
“That was before I realized Jake got blood on my sneakers.”
“There wouldn’t be blood if you hadn’t pummeled his face,” Aiden snapped.
“Two hundred bucks and I’m out of your hair.”
Aiden muttered something not so nice under his breath but gave the guy the cash. With a smirk and a bounce to his step, the guy wandered off. Aiden rushed over to Jake and me, and he helped me get Jake up to a somewhat standing position as he leaned against the two of us.
“Jesus, Jake. What the hell are you doing?” Aiden mumbled, irritation in every inch of his voice. Not many things rubbed Aiden wrong, but Jake was one of them. Especially in his current state.
“We gotta get him to the hospital,” I told him. “He’s pretty beat up.”
“No hospital,” Jake muttered.
“Don’t be a dumbass. We have to get you to the hospital,” Aiden explained.
“No hospital!” he said again, this time stern. “Take me to your dad’s.”
Aiden grimaced. “I don’t think he’ll want you there. You were supposed to be clean.”
“I am clean. I am. I just had a bad night. It’s fine. Take me to your dad,” he ordered, coughing up blood.
“I can drive him over,” I offered. “My car’s right around the corner at the bakery. It’s not a big deal.”
“It is a big deal,” Aiden said through gritted teeth, but he agreed.
He helped get Jake into my car, and I drove over to the Walters’s house. As Jake lay in the back of the car, he mumbled, “I didn’t know you were back in town, Aiden. If I did, I would’ve visited.”
Aiden huffed. “Yeah. Just like you did all those other times while I was growing up,” he sarcastically remarked.
I was no stranger to the relationship between Aiden and Jake. Or more so, the lack of a relationship. The Walters, or Samuel, thought it was important to keep Jake in Aiden’s life. Laurie wanted nothing of the sort. From a young age, Aiden felt special enough to have two fathers. That was until he realized that Jake wasn’t the most consistent one in the world. At a young age, Jake would make grand promises about how he’d take Aiden to baseball games. About how he’d always show up for birthdays. About how he’d get sober for Aiden.
Aiden thought it was a big deal—someone wanting to get clean because of him.
Yet Jake always let him down, time and time again.
Some days, when we were kids, I’d show up at Aiden’s house and find him waiting on his front porch with a baseball bat and ball because Jake said he’d take him to the dugout to practice batting.
He’d sit there until the sun went down and his parents made him come inside.
Then he’d do it again another day. And another. And another. Until one day, he realized that Jake’s words were empty promises that would never come true. If there was ever a reason for Aiden to have trust issues, it was because of Jake Walters. I knew that was why it hurt Aiden to his core when he found out that his father was the reason he and I stopped talking five years ago. Samuel was supposed to be to him what Jake never could’ve been—honest.
After parking the car, I helped Aiden walk Jake up the steps and waited for one of Aiden’s parents to answer the door.
When Samuel appeared, he grew alert when he saw his beat up and bruised cousin Jake standing on the porch. “What the hell happened?” he asked, pushing open his screen door.
