In This Life Read online

  My dad and I weren’t talking much but that had been the case for so long I wasn’t bothered. We were just trying to get through the next few months and put this experiment behind us. Someday things might be different between us. We just couldn’t live under the same roof together.

  On Senior Ditch Day I made plans to go up to the mountains overnight with a bunch of my classmates. My dad even gave me his blessing and the keys to the family cabin up there. He just told me to keep the place in one piece if possible.

  There were plenty of hot girls running around and I tried to get interested in them. But even when Amelia Horton started to suck me off as I leaned against a pine tree and smoked a cigarette I couldn’t keep my mind straight. I didn’t want to fuck some random girl. I still wanted Heather. There wasn’t love and marriage on my mind but I felt a connection with her that I hadn’t found with the girls my own age. That had to mean something.

  I left the senior class to do whatever they wanted and drove back down to Hawk Valley after midnight. But Heather didn’t answer when I called and there were no lights on in her apartment. The idea of returning to the party was depressing. I figured I’d be better off just going home to crash in my own bed and jerk off to my fantasies.

  I opened and closed the front door with care, not really caring to have any kind of interaction with my father. He might be out drinking away pieces of his liver or he might be snoring upstairs. Either way I just wanted to be left alone.

  I didn’t hear any noise until I was almost at the top of the stairs.

  There was moaning, the sound of a woman in pain. Or the opposite of pain…

  They’d left the light on and hadn’t bothered to shut the door. She was flat on her back on the bed, shirt and bra pushed all the way up so her perky tits were bare, along with the rest of her. Her legs were spread wide and her body arched, rising and falling to the rhythm of my father’s tongue in her pussy.

  “Oh god, Chris. Oh god!”

  His shirt was off and he was kneeling, his face buried between her legs while Heather moaned his name and clutched the bed sheets as he got her to come.

  I was frozen, staring at the woman I had wanted, the woman I had trusted, getting her pussy licked by the last man on earth I could stand to see her with.

  They didn’t hear me. They didn’t see me. They didn’t know anything was wrong until I picked up an antique crystal decanter that had belonged to my grandparents and threw it against the far wall, shattering it into a thousand unfixable pieces.

  “Nash!”

  Heather wasn’t moaning with pleasure anymore. She was gasping with horror, struggling to cover her body as if it made any fucking difference. I couldn’t look at her. I didn’t want to hurt her. I just wanted to never ever see her fucking face again.

  “Get out.”

  She cried. “Nash I’m sorry.”

  “GET THE FUCK OUT!”

  My father stood. He was pale, wide-eyed. He swallowed, touched the weeping Heather on the arm and nodded.

  “Please go, Heather.”

  We faced off, father and son, listening to the sound of Heather bounding down the stairs and fleeing through the front door.

  My dad swallowed, his face a mask of remorse. “Son, I’m so sorry. We didn’t plan this.”

  I choked out hoarse laughter. “The battle cry of lying fuckers everywhere.”

  “No, I swear it.”

  “You knew,” I accused.

  He lowered his head. And he didn’t deny it.

  “She told you,” I whispered. “Or you guessed. But the bottom line is, you knew about me and her and you went after her anyway.”

  He regretted everything. I could tell from the look in his eyes. I just didn’t care.

  “I didn’t mean to do this,” he said.

  “I get it. Your mouth just kind of fell on her pussy.”

  “I’m sorry! Fuck, I had too much to drink tonight.”

  “Bullshit. What was this, some kind of sick contest to prove that you’re the number one alpha male around here?”

  He looked stricken. “Nash, tell me what I can do. I’m so ashamed. I’ll do anything to make this up to you.”

  “Never see her again.”

  He nodded eagerly. “Yes. Done. I’ll never see her again.”

  I turned to leave the room but I had one more thing to say to him.

  “By the way, Dad, I fucking hate you.”

  While my mind had been preoccupied with the past, I’d crossed a state line and darkness had lifted. I had to add sunglasses to my face to fend off the highway glare.

  My stomach was growling so I stopped at a roadside diner to grab some breakfast and a coffee. The coffee made me think of Kat and her affection for anything caffeinated.

  My legs wanted to stretch for another minute before getting closed into the driver’s seat so I hung out beside the truck. I pulled out my phone and looked again at the photo Kat had sent me last night. She’d turn the lens on herself and captured the serene image of Colin asleep on one shoulder while Emma rested on the other. Kat had a small smile on her face, that wild hair of hers unbound and spilling out beyond the frame. Her beauty was more than sensual. I couldn’t think of a single other woman who could hold a candle to Kathleen Doyle.

  With reluctance I pocketed the phone, wishing it wasn’t too early to call or text. I’d call her the next time I stopped, though I would have liked to hear her voice right now to chase away the brooding gloom that had been consuming my thoughts during the drive. It wasn’t just old hurt feelings that were bothering me.

  “By the way, Dad, I fucking hate you.”

  I was certain I’d said many other things to him after that devastating sentence. I remembered other conversations, other words that were spoken. But for some reason, ever since his funeral the last ones I’d said to him that long ago night were the ones that had remained the loudest in my head.

  The day was shaping up to be a perfect specimen of summer. With Colin babbling in his high chair in the kitchen, Emma chattering to Roxie in the living room and bright sunlight streaming through the window, it seemed impossible that I’d ever been uneasy.

  Then the sharp knock at the side door made me jump. I relaxed when I saw that the shadow outside the door was in the shape of my mother. Usually I tried to consume at least twelve ounces of caffeine before dealing with my mother’s inevitable censure but coffee would have to wait.

  “I wasn’t expecting you, Mom,” I said with as much cheer as I could muster.

  She stared at me through her dark oversized sunglasses. They added a bug-like quality to her face. “I told you last night that I needed to talk to you, Kat.”

  I sighed. “All right.”

  She was about to step into the house when she suddenly frowned. “What’s that?”

  “It’s the kitchen door. And I’m holding it open. So please come in before the flies do.”

  “No.” She touched the door right beneath the rectangular glass pane to show me something I hadn’t seen before.

  When I did see it my blood froze.

  “I meant that.”

  It was a small miracle my fingers didn’t shake when I plucked an item off the door that had been affixed with a blue square of masking tape. It was nothing, just a piece of paper. And yet it rattled me to depths of my soul. The photo had been printed out on regular computer paper and I was confronted by my smiling eighteen-year-old self, flanked between two impossibly good looking guys. I remembered exactly when it was taken, at a party right after a winning homecoming game. My life had felt like a fairy tale at the time; small town ugly duckling goes to big city university and attracts the interest of one of the football gods. He was a king in that world, he and his brother, both players on a champion college football team. He could have had any girl he wanted and I was in awe. In the beginning anyway.

  Due to my early academic successes I was only sixteen when I started college. After two years of constant study I finally lifted my head out of my books
and wondered what I was missing. At the start of a brand new semester I allowed myself to be dragged to my first college party where I kept to the sidelines and sipped warm beer until something unexpected happened.

  “Come out of the corner, little mouse. You’re with me now.”

  He was hot and fun and exciting. I’d never even had a real boyfriend and there I was, eighteen and claimed by the twenty-one year old golden gold of college sports. He and his brother were only a year apart, equally gorgeous and talented. They were royalty. Everywhere we went other girls examined me with thinly disguised jealousy, wondering what the hell I had that they didn’t. And I enjoyed it. Worse, I thought I loved him. I thought so even when he suggested that I change the way I dress, the way I speak. I thought so even when he insisted that I spend less time on my studies and laughed when I grew distraught over my falling grades. I thought so right up until I learned he wasn’t faithful. In the year we were together he had never been faithful and when I assumed otherwise I’d just been kidding myself. What I did next might have been partly revenge. It didn’t occur to me at the time. I thought I was trying to help a friend. But later I wondered if a much uglier motivation was there beneath the surface.

  “Kathleen?” My mother was standing in the kitchen now and she was wearing a rare expression of worry on her face. “Isn’t that a picture of-“

  “Grandma!” Emma had been lured away from her cartoons by the sound of her grandmother’s voice and ran into the kitchen, colliding with my mother’s legs.

  “Hello my sweet girl.” My mother smoothed her hair and held out a small paper bag. “Look what your grandma brought you for breakfast.”

  “A chocolate cupcake!” Emma squealed as she peered into the bag.

  Normally I would have been irritated but my head was still spinning. I balled up the piece of paper in my fist.

  “Ems,” I said, surprised that my voice sounded so calm, “here’s a plate. You can take that in the living room and watch cartoons with Roxie.”

  Emma didn’t question what strange turn of events prompted me to encourage her to eat in front of the television. She scuttled out of the room.

  My mother was staring down at Colin as he kicked his legs in his high chair and played with a teething toy. “He looks more like his mother every day,” she said sadly.

  “I know,” I said, sinking into the nearest chair. The picture was still crumpled up in my hand but the image was seared into my mind. It depicted a moment when everything had seemed perfect, before I learned of betrayal and inflicted it myself, before one of the two brothers at my side would fall into a downward spiral that couldn’t be stopped, before I made a careless mistake that would alter my life irrevocably and yet gave me the best thing that would ever happen to me.

  Emma laughed in the next room.

  And I was aware that my mother was talking, saying something that she wanted me to pay attention to, but I was having trouble concentrating on her words.

  “Kathleen Margaret,” she said with some sharpness. “Do you even care about what I’m telling you?”

  “Mom.” I stood up. “I’m not feeling very well. I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “Are you kicking me out?” she huffed.

  “No. But I’m distracted so I’m afraid I’m not a very satisfactory conversational companion right now.”

  She exhaled unhappily. “When are you going to start talking like everyone else?”

  It was an old complaint, one she’d been using since I was six and informed her that she needed to ‘stop projecting your own insecurities on others’. So I repeated the same answer I’d been giving her for years.

  “I didn’t know it was a crime to be smart.”

  “Kat, sit back down. I’m talking to you about something serious.”

  The ball of paper weighed heavily in my hand. As I sat I discreetly dropped it on the floor underneath the table so my mother wouldn’t be reminded of its existence. I definitely couldn’t handle an interrogation right now. As far as my mother knew, Emma’s father was a cheating, emotionally abusive creep and Emma was better off without him in her life. That gave me a reason for opting not to seek child support. It also gave me an excuse to hide from the truth. My own father had taken off when I was two and other than occasionally sending a random check, I hadn’t heard from him much while I was growing up.

  “Can I make another cup of coffee if we’re going to get into serious topics?” I asked.

  “Kat, I don’t care. Drink all the coffee in town if it’ll make you pay attention for five minutes.”

  I sighed and moved to the counter beside the sink to refill my Hawk Valley Happiness mug.

  My mother pounced as soon as I sat down. “So don’t you want to know the details?”

  Emma trotted in with a face full of chocolate cupcake icing, snatched her favorite plastic cup and accepted a kiss on the cheek from her grandmother before she returned to the living room.

  I waited until she was out of earshot to inquire, “What details?”

  “About his record.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Whose?”

  “Nash.”

  Colin was abruptly sick of sitting in his high chair. Or else he didn’t like hearing gossip about his big brother. He let out a wail.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, not really caring to know. Colin rewarded me with a big drooling grin as I pulled the tray away, unsnapped the safety belt and lifted him.

  “An assault charge in college and another one last year. The first time the charge was dropped but the second time he got whatever it’s called where you get a warning and don’t have to go to prison.”

  I frowned. “Probation?”

  She shrugged. “I guess.”

  Nash had gotten into a lot of scrapes in high school. I remembered that clearly. There were always rumors that he was on the brink of expulsion yet somehow he managed to skate through with no lasting consequences. I’d just assumed he’d gotten past his tendency to lash out. I’d certainly never witnessed that kind of aggression from him.

  “I hit someone.”

  No, whatever happened in that scuffle didn’t really count. Travis Hanson was in perpetual need of a good thrashing and I was sure he’d deserved whatever Nash’s reaction had been.

  But there was also the deal with his knuckles, the way they looked bruised and cut the night he came to town and he fed me some nonsense about scraping them during a tire change.

  Still, Nash had never mentioned any legal trouble back in Oregon. On the other hand, there were plenty of things I hadn’t mentioned to him to so it was entirely possible. He wouldn’t have had any reason to mention minor problems with the law. I’d never asked.

  “How did you come by this information?” I wanted to know.

  She was smug. “Retta from church has a son who is a private detective down in Phoenix. His name is Freddie and he can find out anything about anyone.”

  The idea was alarming. My brand new goal in life was to never become one of Freddie’s projects.

  “Why were you looking into Nash anyway?” I asked, bouncing Colin in my lap as he chewed on a teething ring.

  She threw me a knowing look. “I’m your mother, Kathleen. Do you really think I can’t tell what’s going on here?”

  “How about you enlighten me then?”

  Her mouth pursed. “You’re involved with him. You’ve been suckered into taking care of everything. His business, his house and even that baby.”

  I didn’t want to yell. Emma would hear. I kept my voice low but insistent.

  “Colin is Heather’s child. He’s our flesh and blood, your grandnephew. He’s not just ‘that baby’ so don’t refer to him that way.”

  She relented, looked away. “No, of course not. You know I care about what happens to Colin. That’s why I was so concerned about handing him over to a man like Nash Ryan.”

  “That was a decision for Heather and Chris to make,” I said flatly. “They made it.”

 
; “But-“

  “You know,” I said, “you might have come around more often to help instead of digging up dirt behind the scenes. If you had then you would have seen that Nash takes very good care of Colin. What’s even more essential is that he loves Colin with all of his heart.”

  One eyebrow arched. “I noticed you’re not denying having relations with him.”

  My voice was cold. “What do you want to hear, Mom? You want to hear me admit that we have earth-shattering sex? Fine, I admit it.”

  She reddened with embarrassment. “Don’t be vulgar, Kathleen.”

  “Then don’t pry into subjects you don’t want to talk about.”

  She tilted her head and looked a little hurt. “I’m only prying because I care. I care about you and about Emma and Colin too.”

  Emma returned with Roxie at her side. The dog appealed to my mother with a wagging tail but my mother ignored her so she turned to me for a pat on the head.

  “Are you fighting?” Emma asked.

  “No, honey,” I said. “Why do you think that?”

  “You look mad.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “Nobody’s mad,” my mother insisted and held out her hand. “Now come give Grandma one last kiss before I leave.”

  Emma still had some chocolate on her face and she managed to smudge some onto my mother’s cheek.

  My mother blew a kiss to Colin before she left. For me she had only a few stern words of warning.

  “Remember what I told you, Kat.”

  I turned my head and pretended to be looking at something fascinating out the window until she was gone.

  “Me and Roxie are bored,” Emma announced.

  I picked up a napkin and cleaned the chocolate off her face. She resisted, wrinkling her nose and shaking her head.

  “Can we go in the backyard?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “No honey, let’s just play inside today.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s hot out.”

  That wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t the complete truth either. Someone had been watching me, possibly following me, even finding me here at Nash’s house. I knew who it was, the same person who’d called and emailed at least a dozen times this smmer. I’d deleted every message and email, sometimes before listening or reading. He had no place in my life, no place in Emma’s life. But things had escalated and I needed someone to confide in. Steve Brown maybe. Someone who could objectively tell me what my legal options were in case it was time for me to be confronted by my own lies.