Chapter 8 #2
“Damn,” I murmured as I patted Lottie on the back. “Well, let’s go.”
He looked at me with startled eyes.
The last thing I wanted to do was admit to more failures today, but seeing the terrified look in Audric’s eyes had me putting my own issues behind me and being there for a man I once called friend.
“I’ll go with you,” I said. “Explain what I know.”
He looked like I’d just offered him a lifeline in the middle of him drowning.
“You will?” he breathed.
“Of course,” I said.
He looked at the door of the office I’d just come out of, reading the nameplate on the door, then looked at me. “A psychiatrist?”
I loosened the tie on my hair, causing a few errant curls to break free.
The relief on my scalp was instantaneous, and the headache that’d been forming at the base of my scalp instantly relented.
“Someone else started sharing their own issues lately, so I thought it was time to face mine.”
His lips twitched. “I’m glad. It’ll be helpful to see someone to talk about your feelings. You have a lot of them.”
I snorted.
That was an understatement.
Then again, he would know better than most about all the shit swirling around in my life.
“Your car or mine?” he asked.
I gestured toward his. “You have the car seat.”
The last time mine had one in it had been three years ago.
And the ache in my chest was still so huge it hurt to breathe.
Audric rounded the truck and opened the door, gesturing for the car seat.
Instead of getting her into it, I handed her off to him.
“That one looks way fancier than the one I had for Damon,” I murmured quietly.
He took her, locked her in, and closed the door before saying, “I just need to make a quick stop at the pharmacy.”
I rounded the hood of his truck and got in, sighing when my ass hit the seat.
“Ahhh,” I said tiredly. “Your seats are like clouds.”
“Had to get a new vehicle when…”
When Laney had died and taken their old vehicle.
I nodded.
“Didn’t want anything like the old one. I’m not saying it’s what killed them, but I’ll never have a small car again. Maybe if they’d been in this, they all would’ve been alive right now,” he murmured quietly.
Laney and Apollo’s son, Tavi, had been stuck in rush hour traffic on I-30 in the middle of Dallas when a senator’s son driving a million miles an hour had lost control and launched himself over the divider wall separating his side from Laney’s.
Laney and Tavi had been killed on impact—though Laney had been given enough life saving measures to help save the baby—as had three other people in three separate vehicles.
Laney had been driving Audric’s old car, a 1998 Camaro that he refused to get rid of because he loved it so much.
“Audric,” I said. “There were several other vehicles in that same wreck. One of which I know was a truck like this.”
“That man survived, though,” he pointed out.
He had.
But…
“Audric, it wasn’t your fault.”
“It kind of was,” he admitted as he put the truck in drive and headed around the side of the building to pull into the drive-through line for the pharmacy. “I was the one who asked her to go get me some supplies.”
“Laney literally did that all the time, Audric. She was your right-hand woman.”
Audric looked slightly sick. “She wanted to go back to work, but I wouldn’t let her. What would be the point when she had a kid on the way?”
I remembered this fight, actually.
Laney had come over, spitting mad, angry that Audric hadn’t wanted her to go back to work.
She’d wanted Audric to watch the baby.
But, as I’d gently pointed out to Laney, that was pretty fucking selfish of her to ask of him.
“Like I told Laney,” I said softly, letting the memory go.
“That wasn’t fair of her to ask you. If you’d let her go back to work like she wanted, she’d have been off for six weeks immediately after.
Then she’d have left the baby for you to deal with at six weeks old.
And let’s be completely honest here. We all knew what she was asking of you was bullshit.
She never would’ve gotten you to act like a father if she was still here. ”
He didn’t say anything.
“I saw it, you know.”
He turned to me just before turning back and getting up to the window.
He gave Lottie’s name.
Lottie Henson.
Not Lottie Ingram.
“Saw what?” he grumbled.
“The way that you acted toward her after she told you she was pregnant with another man’s baby. You had no desire to stay with her anymore after that,” I pointed out. “And she knew that. She would’ve left you.”
He nodded. “She’d drawn up the divorce paperwork already.”
“I helped her,” I said. “I told her that she’d gotten what she wanted. She got her money. You got your medical bills paid. She was prolonging something that was never supposed to be going that long trying to…”
I abruptly cut off my words.
I winced, realizing that I’d fucked up.
“I knew that she wanted me in a way I didn’t want her,” he said softly. “That’s the one and only thing we ever fought about in our entire lives. She wanted to try, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t see her that way. I loved her like a sister, but I didn’t love her like a man should love his wife.”
I sighed. “She was head over heels for you.”
“She was, but I wasn’t,” he agreed. “I made sure she knew that it would never be more than what she said it would be in the very beginning. I didn’t want her to think that we would be having that fake marriage of convenience that turns into love thing that she read in her books.”
“Have a good afternoon, sir!”
He smiled at the lady who sent out Lottie’s medication, and I turned around to see Lottie now sound asleep.
“Maybe she’ll sleep long enough. Let y’all talk about what you need to talk about,” I mused. “Where are we going to talk to Cakes?”
He put the truck into drive and started pulling out of the lot, his eyes on the road.
He was a hypervigilant driver, and had been his whole life, but it definitely looked like he’d gotten more hypervigilant now that he had a young life in the car with him.
“One Love, Dallas,” he murmured as he got into the lane that would take him onto 635. “The veteran’s place downtown. Cakes runs it.”
“I thought I saw him there a few weeks ago,” I mused.
I donated a lot of my dad’s clothes when I’d gone there last week, and I’d seen a flash of familiarity that’d gotten lost in the crowd of men helping me empty the back of my truck.
I had only really noticed that familiarity after the fact, though.
The men that’d been crowding me to get everything out of my car had backed off minutely to allow me away from their group.
I’d gotten inside the car and had locked the door while silently telling myself not to be such a loser and freak out over nothing.
When they’d gotten everything, they’d given me a thumbs up instead of coming up to the window.
I’d been grateful.
And now I knew why they’d backed off the way they had.
“Does everyone know about…” I hesitated to say the words that always seemed to stick in my throat. “Me?”
Audric looked over at me, and his face softened. “Some.”