Ripped (Real Book 5)

Mackenna

Father looks a hundred if he looks a day. He’s just ditched the supermarket and now clambers over to where I stand with my hands jammed into the pockets of my jeans. “Hey, Dad. You look beat.”

Dad grumbles something under his breath. “Packing vegetables all day. It’s killed my soul, it has,” he complains as we walk to the corner cafe.

“Hey, it’s honest work. Honest,” I emphasize.

The guy used to give me a good life. Anything I wanted. I can give that life to myself now, and to him. Any guy worth his salt has gotta take care of his folks.

“See, Dad? Good view. We can eat here without you having to lift a finger, not even for the check.”

He looks at me, and I pull something from my pocket. “Speaking of checks.” I hand it over to him, a check for a hundred thousand. “I’m not sure if I’ll be back to visit you until we’re done with the movie. But I’m trying. I’m trying to get time out to spend with you.”

“Why the fuck you’d want to do that?”

As if on cue, people start whispering and pointing at me, and for the next half hour I’m signing autographs on my table. By the time I’m done, my meal is cold. I push it away and tell him, “Let’s get out of here.”

We ride to his apartment in the hotel car that brought me here. The apartment is a place a guy who bags groceries could not afford, but he’s my dad. He wouldn’t let me get him anything near to what we used to live in, but this place was a compromise that both of us were comfortable with. He’s been laying off the booze, drugs, everything that used to make him a miniature Wolf of Wall Street back in Seattle.

“How the mighty have fallen,” he mumbles as he watches me look at his place.

“You weren’t mighty.” I laugh and slap his back. “And you fell. But the point is you stood up. That’s how a man measures himself, right?”

“I’m standing only because of you, otherwise I’d still be in that . . .” His mind drifts off, and I can only wonder what horrors he saw there, in jail.

“Dad, do you remember the girl . . . the one I used to like?”

“Like?” He snorts. “Mild word for what that was.”

“You remember her?”

“The daughter of that fucking DA? Of course I remember.”

“She’s with the group now. Leo wants her in the movie.” I scrape one hand down my face. I don’t expect any advice, but I guess I just had to talk to someone about her. Someone who’d take it seriously. Not Jax or Lex, who find it amusing, or Lionel, who finds it financially wise. Dad finds it serious. He scowls and explodes.

“Stay away from her, Kenna! She broke you once.”

“She didn’t fucking break me,” I scoff.

“The day you came to see me in prison telling me you were no good for her . . . I don’t ever want to see that hurting boy again. Ever. Joneses don’t do that.”

My pride rears up in me with the urge to defend myself, but I got nothing. Because she did break me. I flex my jaw.

“You still like her,” he gasps.

“Purely sexual. I plan to bang her brains out ’til she can’t walk. Hell, you can’t blame me for that!”

He looks at me like he can see right through me, and with the worst expression possible in his eyes.

Pity.

“I’m sorry, son. I know you lost her because of me.”

“Never lost her. Never had her to lose her, really.” I shrug and stare outside, my mind in the past.

Is this a promise ring?

What are you promising me?

Me.

Fuck, we were so stupid.

What did I think I was promising her? My dad was being tried for dozens of counts of drug trafficking. I had nothing to give her but that ring and a promise she ended up flinging back in my face.

I swing around then. “But that’s over. We’re making changes, you and I. You’re becoming a better man. Let the good things in, right?”

With a dreary sigh, he drops down on a couch and signals to his surroundings. “Don’t know, son. Not sure this life of honesty is for me. It’s so fucking boring.”

“Dad, you be honorable. Let the good in. All right? I’m fucking proud of you, Dad, I really am.” I go slap his back, and he snorts and continues scowling like I’m asking him to shovel shit for the rest of his life.

“I’ll tell you what,” he then says, pointing at me. “I will let the good in, embrace this life of honor . . . if you work her out of your system, then forget you ever laid eyes on her. You want me to stay clear of dealing? Then you stay clear of toxic girls like her. No fucking DA’s daughter bitch is gonna break my son’s heart twice. No such thing as love, remember that. The only love I’ve ever known . . .” He trails off as he looks straight at me. “. . . was my son’s love.” His eyes go red, and, like a pansy, I can’t take it.

“Be good, Dad. I’ll try to visit when the tour’s over. I’m working on Leo to get some time off. We can hang.”

“No such thing as love—remember that! At least, no such thing as a woman’s love.”

I stand by the door, battling with myself. Battling with the memory of a girl, and an angry woman who wants me inside her like she needs to breathe—even if she hates her body for wanting me.

No such thing as love . . .

“I’m a rockstar, Dad,” I say, the words bitter in my mouth. “Clearly, I sing about that shit because I believe in it. I just don’t believe in it for me.”

Outside, though, I’m morose as shit as I pull my cap over my face, slide on my aviators, and slip into the back of the waiting car.

I drum my fingers on my thigh and stare out at the windows of all the buildings outside.

I used to climb to her bedroom window. It’s not as simple as it looks in the movies, but I managed. One particular night, I’d wound through the thorny, spiky bush, up the damn trellis, onto the window ledge, then up to her window—which had the tiniest fucking ledge in the history of ledges—hanging by one arm and knocking until she opened. Then I swept inside, both of us plucking the thorns from my T-shirt.

“Fucking bush,” I growled.

“Shhhh,” she said as she ran to check the lock on her door. “What are you doing here?”

“Can’t sleep. Dad’s drinking. Breaking whatever the hell’s left. Wanted a look at you.” I take her in and holy shit, I never thought she slept in that sort of sleep gear. Tiny shorts. Loose T-shirt hanging over one shoulder.

“And you came to me because . . . you needed a teddy bear?” she asked. “If I were ever to be considered a bear, I’d be more like a grizzly.”

“Then, Grizzly, you’ll have to do.” I kicked off my shoes and slid into her bed, pulling her in with me.

She laughed lightly and tried to stifle the sound. She never laughs, this girl, but she laughs—with me.

“I couldn’t sleep either,” she whispered suddenly up at me, tracing circles on my forearm. Right where I have my tattoo now. Fuck, she killed me. She’s always been a closed little box, Pandora, and not prone to saying much at all about how she feels. She can be bleeding to death and be asked if she’s in pain, and this girl? She’d probably shrug even when it’s killing her.

I get her. Somehow, I get her. And she gets me. That night, I clutched her tight, and within seconds, she dozed off in my arms. She used to trust me enough to do that. Lie asleep, pressed close to me. I set my phone alarm for 5 a.m. so her mother wouldn’t catch us. Then I stared at her ceiling and wondered if she thought of me whenever she stared up at that twirling fan. Or if she thought of me at all the way I thought of her when in bed.

My mother died when I was just three. I remember how she smelled, and felt, but not her face. I kind of hate that I can’t remember her face. Hate even more the fact that my father didn’t cope well and got rid of any pictures before I had a say in it.

When my dad was caught dealing, the government was quick to take the cars, the house. We moved in with Uncle Tom until the trial, and he was worse than Dad. Alcohol is all the man knew. My friends? Interesting to see how they scattered once my dad’s face was plastered on the evening news.

In a day I went from being the most popular little shit in private school to being the loner at the table. Everything, poof, in the wink of an eye.

It felt surreal. Unreal.

Couldn’t sleep, eat, because I somehow knew what would happen next.

I dreaded it, even while I waited for the last shoe to drop. That last drop to spill the glass of water that would drown me. Tighten the last fucking notch of a noose that hanged me. I kept waiting for the one thing I had left—the one I most wanted—to go poof as well.

When your life does a one-eighty on you, you develop fears. And I feared losing her more than I feared anything. Hell, I feared I already had.

At 5:02 a.m. I hadn’t had a wink of sleep, but there she was, and all I wanted was to make sure she was there for me. Digging into my pocket, I curled my fingers around my mother’s ring. The only thing I could save. Because I’d hid it. Legally, I shouldn’t even have had the ring. But it was all I had of my mother, and I wanted my girl to have it. The next day I took her out to the docks and gave it to her before we left the yacht we stole into.

The way she’d kissed me . . .

Guess every time she kissed me back like that, I kidded myself that she loved me too.

One day, months later, the day after Dad was sentenced, it happened.

I found out that the girl I wanted to love me like I wanted to breathe . . . could never be for me.

I had to go. I left, hating every step I took.

No booze, no prostitute, no girl, nothing could numb me enough for me to stop, just fucking stop, needing her.

Not even a song.

Drunk, I poured it out months later, needing to blame someone for my shitty life. So I blamed the source of my pain. And my new friends, the Vikings? Hell, they embraced the anger in it, the irony of mixing it with Mozart. I sing it now, every day it seems, and I could sing it a million times more, but I still won’t believe that I wouldn’t kill for her to love me.

For a fucking minute.

A second even.

To just give me a fucking kiss and tell me that at least back in those days, she loved me.