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“I thought Appletini’s were green,” she pointed out.
“Try it, beautiful.” He looked pretty damn sure of himself, sparking her curiosity.
Lifting it to her lips, Barbara took a sip. As soon as the liquid hit her tongue, her eyes rolled back in her head as the different flavors hit her taste buds and the slow, warm burn of alcohol slid down her throat. “That’s absolutely fantastic,” she praised, aware that her voice had turned husky with pleasure. “You are drink-mixing god.”
A slight smile curved his lips. “Thanks for sayin’.”
“Do you mind if I ask what Tiffany meant about saving you?”
Leaning over the counter, he casually dropped a bright-red cherry into her glass. “Remember when I told you that I went on a bit of a vendetta after I got out of lockdown?”
“You weren’t thinking straight and were out for revenge over your brother, until you discovered what he’d done,” she recalled.
“Tiffany’s old man, Ryder, was the girl’s brother.”
Barbara’s mouth fell open. “Ryder killed your brother?”
“I suspect, knowing Ryder like I do, he meant to beat the shit out of him. Hell, maybe he intended to kill him, I can’t know for sure. Anyway, my brother pulled a knife, and he wouldn’t stand down. When the smoke cleared, Ryder was standing over my brother’s corpse.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.” She truly meant it. His brother didn’t sound like a good person at all, but she imagined losing family, especially a twin, had to be pretty painful.
“My brother was messed up from the time he was born,” Ace said dismissively. “I couldn’t help him, and the struggle blinded me to how evil he could be.”
Rubbing his arm soothingly, Barbara murmured, “You can’t blame yourself for the things he chose to do.”
“Most of my scars are from him. Did you know that?”
She thought of how many she’d seen on the small amount of skin she’d perused during their one-and-only intimate encounter and was horrified. “Sweet Jesus, I didn’t know that.” Bringing her hand up to caress the long scar running down the side of his temple, over his cheek, and down his neck, she tried to remember where it ended.
“Want to hear the part that I just can’t get over?”
Nodding, she waited for him to speak.
“I was so hypervigilant and worried about what he was going to do to me next, I didn’t see that it wasn’t only me he tormented. He jabbed me, scratched me with things, and burned me with a lighter for fun. When he did shit like that, we’d fight. I thought of it as more of an ongoing minor irritation than something I considered life-threatening.”
Her hand slid down to his shoulder, feeling pain in her chest for what he’d gone through. “No one deserves to be treated that way, especially not someone as nice as you.”
“Well, I ain’t nice, but I was confused back then. You see, because my mother never showed any signs of being hurt by him, I thought it was something that only happened between the two of us. Looking back at it now, I can see that he mentally abused her and physically abused me.”
“You can’t know that for sure.”
“My mother wasn’t strong like you, angel. She was emotionally fragile. My dad was always gone, and the stress of life finally got to be too much for her. One day she just mentally checked out. She’d just sit there day after day with that dead look in her eyes.”
“How is that your brother’s fault?”
Ace sighed. “I believe that every time she got herself together and was coming out of it, he intentionally did something to trigger her. I can remember one time when I thought she was getting better. I came home and he had her sitting outside near the fire pit. He’d gotten her a stick and crammed a marshmallow on the end.”
“That sounds like maybe he was trying to encourage her to participate and be happy,” Barbara said, not understanding where he was going with this. She wasn’t prepared for what he said next.
“He was sitting across from her by the fire pit, skinning our family dog.”
Oh God. Barbara struggled not to display the full range of emotions playing through her mind. “I don’t even have words,” she managed weakly. It was heart-wrenching to hear about Ace’s life growing up. With his father never being around, his mother being emotionally unavailable, and his brother being an abusive psycho, it made her wonder if the man had ever been truly loved a day in his life.
Ace continued, “Even then I didn’t get it. I just thought he was being a little shit. We had the granddaddy of fights that night.”
“Your mother didn’t try to stop you two from fighting?”
“She sat right there roasting that marshmallow with a blank look on her face, until I came back out hours later and put her to bed. Looking back, it kills me to think of what he might have done to keep her like that.”
