“I like her, more than I’ve ever been into another chick. I just feel like she’s never going to get past it and that means no going forward.”
“I won’t give you all the gory details, won’t drag my own sordid history into it, but trust me: if my sister can still look at me and find a way to care about me, then you can work yourself into the heart of this girl.”
Man, maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to think Asa was an okay guy. The more he divulged, the more I kind of wanted to knock his perfect teeth out on Ayden’s behalf.
“So what about you? You weren’t a nice guy and now you are?” I asked it questioningly. “How do you convince everyone you’ve really changed?”
When he smiled at me it was full of mischievousness and secrets I didn’t think I wanted to know.
“I haven’t changed. I’m not a new person. Every day I still have to talk myself out of taking the easy way out, out of sliding into old patterns. I am who I am, and it isn’t always an enjoyable person to be. The difference now is I have a life I want to live. I want a relationship with my sister. I want Jet to eventually look at me and not wonder what my next move is. I want to help Rome make this bar a success so he can support his family. I like it here, there is value in this life I never had in Kentucky, and I will fight with myself until I take my last breath to maintain it. I might not deserve it, but it’s mine and I’m keeping it.”
Wow. I hadn’t planned on Asa being so up front about his own history, but his words struck something inside of me. I had been trying to convince Saint I was a different guy from the one she remembered from back in the day. That wasn’t really true. I was less angry, less in need of validation from my mother, but I had never been a bad dude. I was so busy trying to show her the value in the person I was, I forgot that I had always had value, even if I did get busted running my mouth and acting like a typical teenage idiot. Maybe I needed to start asking why she couldn’t see the value and worth in herself.
She was amazing. Smart and funny. She was gentle and completely lovely inside and out. She tore me up in bed, and if I could just get her to let go, quit holding on with both hands to things that would never change, I had a pretty good idea I would tumble head over heels in love with her. I was pretty close to the edge of that precipice as it was. Maybe I needed to stop trying to make her see how great I was and start making her see, reinforcing with her, how great she was.
I jumped off the table and thudded heavily on the wooden floor.
“Thanks, Asa.”
He laughed a little and I followed him back to the bar. “I’ve made enough mistakes for the lot of you to learn from. Something good should come from all my f**kups.”
“I really hope you don’t go back to your old ways. It would suck for more than just Ayden.”
That grin was back, and this time it was tinged with sadness.
“Got a good thing going here, and I know it. It’s not on my agenda to screw it up, though my agendas never really have a way of working out the way I think they will.”
I gathered all the to-go containers Darcey put together and let her kiss me on the cheek. I was walking out when I heard her ask Asa if he had seen her daughter yet. I had a feeling Brite’s favor he was about to lay on the southern playboy was going to involve family. Yikes, that could end up bad because I had heard from Rome that Brite and Darcey’s daughter was a handful, a real wild child.
I didn’t see Saint for the rest of the week. The shop was slammed with early-spring business, Rowdy got a cold and was out for a few days, and Phil’s condition was rapidly deteriorating. It got so bad at the end of the week I wanted to move him back to the hospital, but he refused to go. He couldn’t keep anything down, and his hospice nurse was talking about a feeding tube. It was stressful, I felt like I was walking across a lake that was frozen and I was just waiting for everything to give under my weight. I stayed the night with him for the entire end of the week, which meant I didn’t see anyone else. At some point during the week, as I watched him get sicker and sicker right before my eyes, my brain automatically started switching him from Phil to Dad in my head. It was my dad that was dying, my dad that was trying to put on a brave front for me, my dad that looked at me with sad, periwinkle eyes because he knew our time together was getting shorter and shorter.
I didn’t want anyone to see him like this. The entire group tried to come by, but Phil just wasn’t up to it. I had to bail on the plans I had with Saint on Saturday night, which bummed me out, but I was where I needed to be. When there was a knock on the door a few hours later, I almost fell over when I opened it and saw that it was her. She didn’t ask to come in, just handed me some kind of protein drink and told me to see if Phil could maybe keep it down. She told me she had asked the oncology staff for a solution that might hold off the feeding tube for a while longer.
All I could do was stare at her. Gratitude and something stronger coursed through me. She reached up and wrapped me in a hug that for just a split second made me feel better. She pressed a quick kiss on my mouth and told me that while I was taking care of Phil not to forget to take care of myself. I was exhausted and emotionally drained, but just that little five-minute visit from her, that easy way she had about being in tune with what other people were going through, reached deep down inside of me and didn’t let go.
Maybe it was because my mom had always been so cold and dissatisfied, maybe it was because I had searched for approval that was never coming that when I looked at Saint’s beautiful eyes and saw her empathy and compassion, I knew she was going to be it for me. She was everything I had ever wanted, ever needed. When she looked at me like that, any question I might have had about loving her went out the window. It was more like how could I not love her? She was impossible not to fall in love with.
I kissed her back a hundred times harder than I intended, but I wanted her to feel all the things I knew she would freak out about if I tried to tell her. She told me to call her over the weekend if I got a free minute, and left taking my heart with her.
When I went back inside and offered Phil up the concoction she had brought over, he just looked at me with a knowing gleam in his eyes over the top of the oxygen mask that obscured most of his face. I flipped him off and slumped back in the recliner that I had moved next to his bed. I wasn’t ready to talk about it. Especially when I knew that Saint would run the other way if I tried to tell her how I felt. Not being loved back was something that had hounded me my entire childhood. I didn’t know that I would be able to handle it coming from her.