Epilogue II
Someone taking your parking spot at your own home is a different type of anger.
—Dru’s secret thoughts
DRU
Seventeen years later
“Heaven help me,” I muttered as I walked down the stairs of the cabin we’d rented for the weekend.
We were one of four houses, and we were sharing our cabin with Chevy, Aella, and their three kids.
The adults had gotten the top floor, and the kids had gotten the bottom.
Since we trusted them all, we let them all share the downstairs.
The only thing I’d thought we’d have to worry about was damages in the form of broken walls and or windows—having teenage boys was a ton of fun.
I went down the length of the stairs, picking up wet swimsuits, Dr Pepper cans, and enough empty chip bags to make me want to scream.
When I got down to the bottom, I stuffed all the trash in the overfilling trash bag, emptied it, then set it at the base of the stairs to carry up with me later.
I started a load of laundry, then ventured into the first bedroom where the littler kids—though they were still teens—were staying.
After picking up even more laundry, careful to keep our stuff separated from Chevy and Aella’s kids’ stuff, I ventured to the bigger kid room.
When I got through the door, I stopped, unable to believe what I was seeing.
Then I yelled, “What are you two doing?!”
I would like to say that I’d been really careful about not seeing Jack in a personal situation for a long time, but this time I was able to see all.
Also, there was Tillie.
Naked as a jaybird.
Both of them scrambled to cover up, Tillie grabbing her discarded dress, and Jack grabbing his pants and stepping into them.
“What the fuck?” I cried out. “Couldn’t you have at least closed the door!”
There was a moment of silence and then, “Mom, it’s not what it looked like!”
I shook my head. “What was it that you were doing, if it wasn’t what it looked like?”
Jack cleared his throat. “I was just finger-banging her.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s a sack of shit, and you know it.”
Tillie cleared her throat.
“Are you even using protection?”
It was Tillie’s turn to talk when she said, “I have an IUD.”
An IUD.
Jesus Christ.
“Thank God for the small things.”
A voice cleared beside me, and Aella said, “What’s going on?”
I could see that stupid smirk on her face.
I wanted to slap it off.
I’d given her so much shit last week, and here I was in the same damn situation.
“We’re trying to stop!” Jack cried out as he threw his hands out wide. “But we can’t.”
Aella made a sound in the back of her throat, and I turned to glare at her. “You’re one to talk.”
Aella’s own child had been caught in the middle of certain deeds just last week.
It was that time, I guessed.
I thought I had more.
Sure, Finnian had given Jack the talk, just in case, but Jack’s girlfriend, Tillie, was very quiet and introverted. I hadn’t thought they were at that point in their lives.
“What’s going on here?” Cort arrived at the door, his grin lecherous. “Jack, why are you half naked? And you know better than to let Tillie come in here.”
Jack puffed out a breath and hissed at him. “Fuck. Off.”
“Sorry, no can do.” He laughed. “I can see that you already tried to do that, and I don’t want to make our ma mad at us.”
I slapped him upside the head and snapped, “Get out of here.”
Cort left with a laugh.
Aella didn’t laugh, but she did hurry out as she rushed out of the room.
“How long has this been going on?” I asked.
They both looked at each other. “A little over a month.”
I rolled my eyes. “Tillie, out. Jack, sit.”
Tille left like a bat out of hell and left Jack to fend for himself.
At least she had some brains.
Jack sat, and I looked at him honestly. “You’re too young and inexperienced to know this, but IUDs aren’t one hundred percent effective.”
Jack blanched.
“You can ask your Uncle Gunner and Aunt Sutton. They had an IUD baby,” I promised. “And if you’re not interested in going to play lacrosse collegiately, that’s fine. Having a baby makes a lot of things impossible.”
Jack drew in a deep breath. “We’ll use condoms.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You fucking better.”
“Are we done?” he asked hopefully.
“For now,” I grumbled. “But expect me to let your dad know. He’ll talk to you. I’m too mad to do that right now.”
I left him there, then tossed Tillie an “I’m watching you” look as I passed.
Tillie ducked her head, and I marched past her, right out the door to the communal fire pit.
The silence was deafening.
“Don’t even start,” I grunted as I sat down.
Finnian sighed. “I thought a do-gooder like her would’ve been more convincing.”
“You’ve met your son, right?” Audric snorted. “He’s a Casanova. He’s a good-looking kid with all that auburn wavy hair—my wife’s words, not mine—and he’s a fit and popular athlete. Like someone’s going to be able to say no to him if he puts out even a little bit of his charm.”
Audric had a point.
I knew our kids were good looking.
Hell, look at who his father was.
Remembering how impossible Finnian had been to resist, I knew this was a losing battle.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
Aella snickered. “What was it that you told me last week? Kids will be kids?”
I flipped her off. “Go fuck yourself.”
Aella giggled.
Chevy pulled his wife into his arms and said, “Don’t tease her, dear. You know how out of control you were last week.”
Aella groaned. “I swear to God, I never signed up for this! I feel like these kids are turning into a bunch of sex fiends.”
“And y’all aren’t?” Denny entered the conversation. “I swear to God, we all have to beg to go downstairs when y’all go places because all y’all do is have loud sex. It’s disgusting. You all are disgusting. Mom, can I have ten dollars? I want to walk down to the sugar shack at the corner.”
Finnian pulled out a fifty and said, “Buy everyone some.”
Denny pocketed the fifty and walked away without another word.
“He has a point,” Finnian murmured as he watched his kid walk away. “If the worst thing they’re doing right now is having sex, I can handle it.”
“Well, you’ll handle it even more when you have a talk with him tomorrow night when we get home.”
The group laughed, and conversation topics changed.
But what didn’t change was the fun we had as a group.
I loved hanging out with all the Truth Tellers, their wives, and kids.
I never thought I’d be happy to be in the middle of these men, but there I was, happy as could be.
Later the next night, after we’d arrived home late, I found myself leaning against the counter and staring at the wall where our big calendar hung.
Next to that calendar was the start of our family wall.
But the photo front and center was the last photo that Tavi and Finnian had ever taken together—both of them smiling huge.
That photo never stopped putting a smile on my face.
Tavi may be gone, but he was never forgotten.
His brothers and sister knew all about him, and talked about him constantly as if they’d met him.
“Whatcha lookin’ at?”
“Tavi,” I admitted.
Finnian squeezed my hip and placed a kiss on the side of my head. “He would’ve been twenty-five soon.”
My heart squeezed inside my chest. “He’d have been so handsome.”
“Yeah.”
The silence wasn’t bad.
We were both thinking about that little boy, and what life would’ve looked like had he lived.
The possibilities were endless.
“Ma! Who’s taking me tomorrow?”
I looked back at the calendar and started talking.
“All right,” I said as I looked at our next few days. “You have Jack and Geenie tomorrow.”
Finnian groaned. “What? Why?”
Geenie and Jack were a couple of workaholics both on and off the field. Academically, they were dominating their class, and usually we split them up between us to keep the running around at a minimum.
But this time, that wasn’t possible.
I glared at him as I sat with my hips against the counter, my eyes on the calendar.
“Because I have a parent meeting for Cort because he was an ass to a teacher Friday.” I leveled him with a look. “And I wonder where he got that from?”
Finnian had nothing to say.
The shit.
“You do realize, right, that it’s unacceptable for a fourteen-year-old to be hacking into the school’s email and changing teacher’s email addresses to their provocative last names, right?”
“I think it’s unacceptable that he was caught,” Finnian agreed, “but it really is unfair. Every other teacher and student has to go by their last name in their school email.”
“Yeah, but when you pair it with the first three letters of their first name like everyone else, you don’t get anything provocative. With hers, you do.”
“If she wasn’t such a dick to him, and tried to act like he knew nothing, then he wouldn’t act like that to her.”
The teacher’s email address had read “BigDicks@” for a solid four hours because it’d taken them a while to catch it.
In the meantime, every student in the school had chosen to email her, just to get a rise out of her.
The woman was overly uncomfortable with her name, and I had to question why she would come to a school with that kind of last name and not expect fourteen-year-olds to give her shit about it.
That was what they were majoring in—assholeness.
“And the only reason I was caught,” Cort said as he came into the room. “Was because someone narced on me.”
Cort’s big brother, Jack, walked into the room as he said that, then turned around and walked right back out.
“Ah,” I said as I watched the move. “Come back here, Jack.”
Jack turned and his cheeks flushed. “What happened?”
“It wasn’t me,” he sighed. “It was my girlfriend’s friend. She was failing that class and was trying to earn some bonus points.”
I liked Jack’s girlfriend, Tillie, a lot. Tillie’s best friend? Not so much.
Or I had loved Tillie a lot before this weekend when we’d taken them to Broken Bow, Oklahoma, for the weekend.
“What’s with that face?” Finnian asked. “And bros before hos, Jack. And family above all others.”
Jack looked nervous and glanced over at me.
He didn’t know if Finnian knew, and Finnian wasn’t giving him a thing.
I knew what he was doing.
He was challenging his son to be a man and tell what he’d done wrong.
Jack didn’t surprise me when he admitted to Finnian what I’d caught them doing.
We’d meant to talk about it when we’d gotten home, but you know how it is when you get home from vacation. There was just too much laundry and shit to unpack to get to anything fast.
“Uh, yeah. So about that, Dad…” Jack drawled.
Finnian listened silently, his eyes on his son, and his face completely devoid of any emotion.
Only when Jack was done did he say, “And what lessons did we learn, Jack?”
“To not have sex with the door open,” Cort supplied, having listened to the entire thing while staying silent beside his father.
Jack glared at his brother.
“What?” Cort asked. “That’s entry-level stuff. At least try to hide it.”
The kid sure had a point.
“That I shouldn’t be having sex with my girlfriend,” Jack muttered.
“You can have sex with your girlfriend all you want,” Finnian said.
“Just don’t do it when we’re around, and certainly don’t do it when you can get caught.
We’re not dumb. We know how teenagers are.
Also, just sayin’, but get creative and go do it in your truck.
And for God’s sake, wear a condom. I don’t care if she’s on birth control.
Do you know what kind of STDs you can get nowadays? ”
“Yes, sir.” He looked green. “We remember the slideshow.”
I grinned.
Being a nurse had its perks.
I had plenty of books and articles that shared the dangers of unprotected sex.
They’d all gotten the lecture the moment that I felt they were old enough.
“Okay.” Finnian sighed. “What do you think the proper punishment should be?”
Jack looked resigned. “Grounding?”
“You got it.” Finnian straightened out of his lean against the counter. “A week. No phone.”
Jack gave his phone to Finnian with a grumble.
“Do you think your girlfriend’s mom is going to ask why she’s grounded from you for a week?” I batted my eyes at Jack.
“I sure the fuck hope not,” Finnian muttered. “Like I need some police officer on my ass because my son fucked his daughter.”
I giggled. “Guess we’re about to find out. That man isn’t stupid.”
“No,” Finnian groaned. “He’s not.”
Later that night, Finnian got into bed beside me and showed me his phone.
“What’s that?”
“Read it,” he urged.
I did, finding myself rolling my eyes about halfway through. “He texted her from his brother’s phone, then deleted it?”
“Yep.” Finnian tossed his phone onto the pillow and stripped his tee off, using the collar of the shirt at the back of his neck to lift it.
I watched as his muscles flexed as he removed the shirt and tossed it somewhere in the vicinity of the bottom of the bed.
I wouldn’t know, because after seventeen years, I was still unable to take my eyes off the man that I loved with all my heart.
Who knew we’d end up here?
And with four kids at that.
“What does he think, that I’m some old fuck that can’t figure out when he’s playing the system?” he scoffed as he got into bed. “This kid doesn’t know that I created the system. I’ve forgotten more than he knows. Plus, I wasn’t born yesterday. He hasn’t done anything that I haven’t done.”
I laughed. “You should just be happy that Cort hasn’t figured out to do all the things you do yet, or maybe you’d never have known. He has his brother’s back.”
“He does,” he grumbled. “They all have all of their backs.”
Finnian crawled into bed, but didn’t stop at his side.
No, he came straight over to mine, then yanked me underneath of him, making his shirt that I was wearing hike up to my ribs.
I smiled. “What are you doing?”
“You.”
He did, in fact, do me.
Very, very thoroughly, too.