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“I beat it. No, correction, I’m still beating it. Life’s too short to go through it fucked up.”
“I guess it is,” I say, staring at the waves crashing on the beach.
He shrugs. “Shit happened. My dad got mixed up with some bad people, which led to doing some time, and I found myself on the street dealing.”
“When you were a teenager?”
He looks at me, eyes guarded. “Yeah. Don’t act so surprised. You do what you got to do to survive. Haven’t talked about this in a very long time, but I promised Bill, my NA sponsor, I would open up to strangers,” he says, his voice hoarse.
“I thought we were friends?” I chuckle, nudging him in the ribs.
“Hey, watch it.” He fakes a wince. “I’m still injured.”
“Right.”
Our gazes meet, and he’s the first to crack a smile. “As I was saying, what was I saying?”
“You were talking about your sponsor,” I tell him.
“Oh, yeah. I used to live with my dad in a trailer park, but it was easy to sneak away. Later when he was doing time, I stayed with his motorcycle buddies at the clubhouse. My dad’s brother got custody of me. But he was a nomad so he was either running shit on the road for the club or partying. There wasn’t a lot of parental supervision, so I took to the streets. The older guys who were dealing liked me because I was fast and I looked rather innocent.” He snorts.
I frown, highly doubting his last remark.
“Wipe that look off your face,” he scoffs, and I laugh. “I didn’t have the tats and the piercings back then,” he mumbles, and grins at the same time. “They asked if I wanted to earn some money. I used to ride a BMX bike at the downtown skate park when I wasn’t going to school, which was a lot. I wanted to get the hell out of Dodge. In order to earn some quick, easy cash, I started trafficking shit all over town, which led to dealing, which led to using when I was thirteen.”
I stare at the darkening sky. In the distance, lightning flashes. “What did you take?”
“Pills, cocaine. When I switched to fentanyl, shit went south,” he admits.
“Wow,” I whisper.
“Man, you’re your father’s daughter with the one-sentence conversations,” he says.
Chuckling, I ask, “How did you come to live with Jay?”
His expression darkens. “I knew what I was doing was fucked up. I’d met Jay a couple times. He came to watch me ride at the park when I wasn’t too strung out, and we sort of became friends. I didn’t turn up one day, and he tracked me down and stepped up. I got busted with too much on hand, and the judge gave me a choice—stay in juvenile detention or Jay could take over custody from Abel, my dad’s brother, and ‘pay my debt to society,’” he says, making quotation marks in the air. “I chose Jay in the end. Hey, doesn’t that make us step-brother and sister?” he asks, winking.
“Hell no,” I laugh shaking my head.
“Probably for the best, shit could get weird very quick.”
“What was it like?” I ask, trying to ignore my beating heart.
“You mean if we would, you know,” he says waggling his eyebrows in slow motion. “Or living with your dad?”
“The last one, asshole.” I nod, and right on que my voice trembles. His ice-blue eyes pierce mine. He doesn’t say anything but as my heartbeat starts hammering in my ears, he casts his eyes down and the right side of his mouth hikes up a little bit.
He slides the pad of his thumb over his plump bottom lip, like he’s debating his answer. “It was hard. Luckily, Drew was already staying there on and off. I helped Jay with the house, even Mac with the fucking garden, and I started dealing with my addiction and anger-management issues.”
“How’s that going?” I ask, staring at the purple coloring next to his nose.
He touches the place below his eye. “I try. Some days are better than others, hence the shiner.”
He makes a face, and I giggle.
“I go to NA meetings every week. I still enjoy my beers, which I should probably fucking cut back on.”
“Jay wrote the textbook on that,” I mumble, remembering the bottles stashed around his trailer when I was still a kid, and the times mom had to help him get inside because he was too drunk to stand on his own two feet.
