Chapter 2 - Hayley
TWO
HAYLEY
I wiped the sweat off my brow as I leaned back up.
That was it. The last fucking box for my apartment.
I looked around at the chaotic furniture and the bed frame that still needed to be pieced together and wondered how my box spring and mattress would look sitting on the floor.
I’d forgotten how much of a bullshit fiasco moving was.
Hiring men to help. Paying them to drive the truck.
Having them help unload all my shit and still feel like I was dying.
Sure, most people looked at my size and shook their head.
Figured I could use the movement of hauling boxes up three flights of steps because of how thick my thighs were and how my tits jiggled and how my stomach rolled over the cuff of my jeans that were probably a size too tight.
I didn’t give a damn what they thought. Because I could kick ass with the best of them.
Even though I knew my father was upset with me for not enlisting his help, I didn’t care.
When a girl lost her mother at a young age like I did, they learned to grow up fast. I learned how to grow up fast. My mother passed away in a freak car accident that left her sizzling in the car while the motorcyclist walked away scot free.
You know, other than the manslaughter charge that put him behind bars.
A closed-casket funeral sealed my hatred for bikes, and the memory of it made me wrinkle my nose at anyone around me who drove one of those murder beasts.
I didn’t want to look at them ever again after what they did to my mother.
I walked into the kitchen and turned on the light.
The small one-bedroom apartment was all I could afford in the gaslamp district of San Diego.
Which was fine. If I wanted to cramp the style of my savings account, I could have afforded more.
Somewhere… not here. But I actually wanted to retire instead of always dipping into my 401(k) and my investments like my father always did.
The man was reckless with money and would never retire at the rate he was borrowing against his funds all the time.
First, it was a new car. Said he needed a dependable vehicle other than his police cruiser.
Then, it was a renovation on his bathroom.
His reasoning was because he kept stubbing his toe every time he stepped into the shower.
So, he borrowed against his investments, hired a gutting crew, and ripped apart his en suite bathroom.
Out went the tub-shower combination and in went a gaudy walk-in shower with a waterfall nozzle and a jet tub that I wasn’t even sure he’d used.
New furniture. New clothes. New everything, basically.
It was a habit my father developed after the death of my mother. Retail therapy gone off the rails.
Even though I wasn’t completely ecstatic to be back in San Diego, I had to admit I missed the place.
After getting a community college degree in Los Angeles in some bullshit medical field I had no interest in pursuing, I snagged a job working for the L.A.
Zoo. It wasn’t much. Just enough to pay for the small loans I had to take out to finish my classes.
But I became so attracted to working with the animals that I started researching into things I could do.
Careers I could pursue that had me working with large, exotic animals like this for the rest of my life.
That was what led to the zoology degree.
I ripped open my first box and began putting dishes away.
And as I did, I thought back on my life up until this point.
I’d just graduated with my Master’s in Zoology and ended up snagging a great full-time position with benefits at the San Diego Zoo.
My heart ached at leaving Los Angeles. The place pulsed with energy.
It had an incredible nightlife for single women like myself who wanted to go out on the weekends and splurge a bit of my paycheck on guys and drinks.
My twenty-seventh birthday had come with a new job, a new apartment, and no debt to speak of.
So much better than the medical field.
I ripped open box after box. I heard my alarm go off at nine in the morning and I realized I still hadn’t taken a shower. My father was expecting me at ten in Encinitas. Where he lived. Where I’d grown up. In the same house that delivered me not only my childhood, but the death of my mother.
I still had no idea why the fuck he hadn’t moved yet.
Maybe that was why he renovated. To try and bury her memory.
Maybe that was why he gutted the bathroom they shared and completely redid their bedroom.
Maybe that was why he replaced all the furniture with things he couldn’t afford and tossed out all the plates they’d gotten on the day of their wedding.
To try and erase the scent of her that still poured from the walls of his home.
Our home.
Their home.
After putting together my kitchen, I went and explored the rest of my apartment.
It wasn’t much. Eight hundred square feet of empty space, especially since I didn’t have much furniture.
I had a couch, a recliner, my bed, and a dresser.
That was it in terms of furniture. I didn’t watch enough television to justify having one, and I sure as hell didn’t have the time to sit and read books. I kept myself busy, always.
I’d been that way from a young age.
After tearing through boxes and finding my clothes, I grabbed a new outfit.
The bathroom wasn’t set up to shower, but I figured I could use my father’s beautiful, newly renovated bathroom to clean myself up.
I grabbed the bag of toiletries I had packed up for myself then stuffed everything into a plastic bag.
I locked the apartment door behind me before I started to my car, ready to get across town.
I knew the way by heart. Even though so much about San Diego had changed already, I’d always remember the roads.
The construction. The systemic gridlock of the bustling town.
San Diego was definitely a place for families—for a mother and a father with two and a half kids and a perfectly bred labradoodle that ran around underneath their feet.
I’d never have something like that. It wasn’t my style. Not after tasting the beautiful, thrilling nightlife of Los Angeles.
I’d get back there one day.
I was ripped from my thoughts by a deafening roar. I zoomed down the road, trying to merge so I could turn left at the stoplight. One more left before the entrance to my father’s neighborhood. One more left standing in my way between the stench coming from my armpits and a fucking shower.
Then, I heard a horn honking.
The roar grew and raced around me. Motorcycles ripped by on all sides of me. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw them coming up on my tail, watching as the wimps of San Diego pulled over to let them through.
Pulled over. To let them go.
Like they were fucking driving ambulances.
“Fucking bullshit men,” I murmured.
I didn’t care. They didn’t own me. Even though people who rode bikes thought they owned shit, all they really had were limp dicks they tried to overcompensate for by the loudness of their bikes.
I took the left turn anyway and heard them laying the horn on me.
A couple of them raced by me, eyeing me down as if I was the one in the wrong.
A hulking man with brown hair and dark brown eyes passed by me, flipping me the fucking bird in the process.
“You’re bullshit!” I exclaimed.
I almost ran into the curb with how closely they followed me.
How they tore around that corner like they didn’t give enough of a shit about the other people around them.
I almost ran into one of them as I straightened the wheel of my car and watched them all pour in front of me.
They sped off, easily doing seventy in the forty-five I was cruising in.
“You’ll kill someone like that!” I shrieked.
I drew in a deep breath. Images of my mother’s closed casket bombarded my mind as I eased myself into my father’s neighborhood.
The groaning of the motorcycles fell off into the distance as I inched through the neighborhood.
So many memories dotted my mind. Like the sidewalk where my mother taught me how to ride my first tricycle.
Or the corner she’d always stand with me on while waiting for the bus since I was the only kid picked up there.
I passed by the tree in the yard of the house that used to belong to my best friend, Stacie.
I smiled as I passed it. Her mother and my mother had been the best of friends.
They’d sit on the porch and drink their blackberry lemonade while watching us climb the tree and play hide and seek around the house.
I blinked the tears away as I pulled into my father’s driveway.
“About time!” he called out from the porch.
I pushed myself out of my station wagon and closed the door behind me.
“You look like you haven’t shaved in weeks,” I said.
“Because I haven’t,” my father said.
I walked onto the porch and sat down next to him in the rocking chair my mother used to occupy beside him.
It hurt, sitting in that chair.
“You look like her, you know,” he murmured.
“Don’t do that,” I said.
My father shrugged. “Okay. I’ll do this, then. Why didn’t you want me helping you move?”
“Because you told me you were undercover, and I didn’t want you blowing it just to help me move back home.”
“I always found a way around it when you were younger.”
“And now I’m not younger.”
My father grinned. “No. You’re not.”
“So, Captain Woolf—”
“It’s not Captain.”
“It might be, one day,” I said.
“I don’t want to be Captain. ‘Detective Terry Woolf’ is fine with me.”
“You used to want to be Captain.”
He paused, and I knew why he had given up the good old fight. My mother had always encouraged him to follow his dreams. His passions. He talked about it all the time when I was a teenager. And here he was, giving up on his because he missed her.
Because his heart couldn’t take the loneliness any longer.
“I’m getting too old for this undercover shit,” he grumbled.
“Is the infamous Terry Woolf admitting defeat?” I asked.
“Never.”
I snickered. “I figured as much. I take it the assignment didn’t go well?”
“It did what it needed to do. Just don’t think it’s enough.”
“Why do you go on these assignments, anyway? If you know it’s gonna be too much and you know it’s gonna be too hard on your body, why do them?”
He leaned back into his rocking chair and sighed.
“Your mother,” he said plainly.
“You’re still on that?” I asked.
He didn’t answer me.
“Dad, it was a random motorist. Mom wasn’t killed in some conspiracy with some hometown biker gang. It was a guy who wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing. That’s all.”
“Then, why did he run from the scene? Why did he get back on his bike and get away as fast as he could?” he asked.
“You found him, Dad. He’s in jail. He’s rotting for the rest of his life for what he did.”
My father shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
“What? Did he get parole or something?”
And again, my father didn’t answer me.
I reached over and took his hand. I knew my father had a secret vendetta with what had happened. My fear, however, was that the vendetta was misplaced. I didn’t like bikes. I thought they were unsafe, reckless, and unnecessarily loud.
My father, it seemed, had an issue with the people that rode those bikes.
All of them.
“Why don’t you come inside, and I’ll fix us some food?” I asked.
“A bit early for lunch, don’t you think?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It’s ten thirty. You old guys eat lunch around now, right?”
His eyes slowly panned over toward me. The bright blue eyes I had inherited from him.
It was the only thing I had inherited, though.
Everything else was from my mother. My father had jet black hair, whereas mine was brown with auburn highlights.
Like my mother. He was tall and lean with aged muscle that had seen its time on the streets, whereas I was thick and stout like my mother.
Full, rounded cheeks like my mother. A soft jawline like my mother.
A stern glare like my mother.
“You look like her, you know,” my father said again, softly.
I squeezed his hand and forced back the tears as his words echoed off the corners of my mind. He always said that to me whenever he was thinking about her. He always said that to me whenever he didn’t know how to fill the silence.
I’d grown up with both the haunting of that phrase and the pride from it all my life.
“And I can cook like her too. So, come on. I’m assuming you got stuff to make some sandwiches with,” I said.
“I always do,” he said.
Then, I eased my father’s creaking body out of the rocking chair, and we started inside, my shower completely forgotten about.