“Uncle Chris wants me to call Meggie ‘aunt’.”
Exchanging his empty bottle for a full one, Cash wrestled his temper under control. “I understand.”
“I try not to disappoint him. He might kick me out if I do.”
“He wouldn’t do that,” Cash hurried to reassure him. The kid’s mood was plummeting, all because Cash had been an asshole. “He’d punish you as a warning, before turning you out.”
“Even when I ask Fee to marry me? I mean, I do believe he wouldn’t care as long as she’s happy. But he was disappointed in me today.”
“We all have choices.” Cash drank from his bottle, wanting to get back to the subject of Fee. “We have free will. You exercised yours by coming with me. If Outlaw intended to throw you out, he would’ve told you.”
“Did I make him look bad in front of the guys?”
“It was more about his sons. They’re small boys. He had to try to be a father figure to you but still be a man who could put himself in your place.”
“Did you have sex with older women?”
Older men, too, but Cash wouldn’t mention that. “My mother and I had a staff, thanks to my father. We had some very pretty housekeepers. I got my first hand job, courtesy of someone else’s hand, at fifteen. A week later, we were fucking like rabbits all over the house, until my mother caught us and fired her on the spot. The woman was…” He searched his memory. “Twenty-five. I think,” he added. “Married, with two small kids. No one cared but my mother.”
“And the chick’s husband!”
Cash shrugged. “If he ever found out. My mother tried to stop me. She got older maids. I fucked their daughters. She had her staff around when I was at school. I met them in secret. Then, there was my father’s house. Dad permitted us to have the best alcohol money could buy. I had my first drink at eight. Mom swore she’d call CPS. From then on, my drinking was between men. I could never tell my mother.” He’d started his life of subterfuge and deviousness at a young age. “My excessive lifestyle is responsible for every gray hair my mother has.”
“I wish I could’ve led your life. It sounds awesome.”
“We haven’t even gotten to my college and military years.”
“Oh, man! Wow. Really? Tell me.”
“Some other time,” he promised, steering the conversation back in the direction he wanted. “You plan on proposing to Fee anytime soon?” He stayed casual, feeling like a dickhead for being threatened by a high school kid.
“On my seventeenth birthday. Four months away. Uncle Chris pays me to do certain jobs and I’ve been saving almost every penny for a ring. Ever since I decided to marry her.”
“You might be a little too young for her.”
“She looks so sad sometimes. Alone. Like me. I thought we could be together and we wouldn’t be alone anymore. I’d make sure she’d be happy for the rest of her life.”
A nice sentiment, except…“We’re born alone and we’ll die alone. No one can fill that void in us. Especially a spouse. We have to find our own happiness.”
Diesel cocked his head to the side. “Do you have a void like me and Fee?”
Didn’t everyone? However, Cash didn’t want to remember Fee’s pain. Witnessing it had been enough for him. “Has she told you she has a fucking void?”
“No, but I see her sometimes. Looking at the pictures and crying. She misses her family, Cash. Especially her mom. She’s a little lost. Like me.”
Memories of Fee mourning sickened Cash. Hearing she still grieved, alone, made him long for the days they’d first started hanging out. Nothing had been complicated. It had just been him offering her his shoulder to lean on, and her needing his comfort. He wanted to find the key that opened the door to the laughter he’d witnessed this morning. If they’d allow their relationship to be on Cash’s terms, the three of them could be so good together.
His phone rang just as his doorbell buzzed. Josh’s name flashed across his screen. As the doorbell rang again, Cash answered, concerned that his brother found it necessary to call a second time that day. “Hold on. Let me pay for my food.”
“Get a cook,” Josh said without urgency.
“With what?” Once Cash turned eighteen, his father cut off support, although he did pay all his college expenses. After Cash’s mother remarried, Parnell also stopped alimony, so the huge house Cash had grown up in was no longer viable. “You’re the rich one, not me.”
“That’s why I’m calling,” Josh said as Cash made it to the door.