Chapter 4
Four
Fucking hamburger, help me.
—Hux’s secret thoughts
Hux
“You’re such an ass,” Harvey said as he leaned on my clean butchering table. “You knew her name.”
I shrugged.
It was good to set the boundaries now.
I didn’t want her to like me.
First, she was a club brother’s sister.
Second, she had trouble written all over her.
That and the fact that trouble and I were best friends. I tried to stay away from my vices if I could help it.
Third, and most importantly, I broke anything that I came into contact with.
I didn’t do the dating life anymore. I didn’t do nice and sweet. I did rough, raw, and didn’t exchange names.
“What are you working on today?” he asked.
I opened up the walk-in freezer and said, “Cow.”
When I was in high school, I’d taken all the meat processing classes that were available to me. When I was done with school, I went into the Marines and didn’t look back at Sawtooth until five years ago when I’d been forced to medically retire thanks to some hearing issues.
With no Marines to keep me company and refusing to work with my mother more than very, very part-time, I decided to go the meat processing route.
Stupidly, I agreed to attach my shop to the back of The Mercantile.
Now I had my mother running over every other hour asking for “a quick spot of help.”
Most of the time I said no.
I mean, it wasn’t exactly easy to get unclothed all the way, go do whatever bullshit job she needed help with, then come back and get re-dressed.
“What’s with that face?” Harvey asked.
I slid the cow out using the chain system above my head, then got it hooked up where I wanted it before fishing out my best knife.
“Just thinking about how many interruptions I’m going to have from Mom today,” I grumbled.
Harvey sighed. “Wish I’d have thought twice about you building so close beforehand. Never thought about how much she’d take your nearness to her advantage.”
I gestured toward the door. “Will you lock that?”
He did, coming back to lean against the table again.
“What is it?” I asked, seeing that he had no plans on leaving any time soon.
“Wanted to let you know that Romina is pregnant.”
I flashed him a grin. “Out of wedlock, you dirty dog?”
Harvey flipped me off. “Fuck all the way off. Mom’s going to lose her shit.”
Mom had lost her shit when Candice, Hampton’s wife, had come up pregnant a couple of weeks after the wedding. Then, eight months to the day of their wedding, their little girl had been born into the world.
Mom was all about appearances, and she hated more than anything “bastards.”
They weren’t a good look on her family name.
“What are you going to do?” I wondered.
“Have the baby.” Harvey rolled his eyes. “Romina and I were thinking about a quick wedding at the courthouse.”
“You’re really going to piss her off if you do that and don’t say your vows in her church,” I pointed out.
“I know,” he sighed. “And it’ll make Mom hate Romina. But I don’t really care. We’ve been tossing around the wedding idea for a while, and neither one of us really want a big one. She wants her sister there. I want you there. Hell, we aren’t even thinking of inviting our parents.”
“She’ll seriously castrate you if you leave her out of that, too.”
“I know, but Romina can’t stand Mom.”
“Don’t blame her.”
“And Romina’s pregnant, and emotional, and can’t stand when Mom gives her shit.” Harvey sighed.
I settled a look on my brother. “One day, you’re going to have to stop caring what your mother thinks, and start thinking about the rest of your life.”
“Is that what you did?” he asked.
I rolled my eyes at him as I sawed one of the front shoulders off and got to work cutting the meat from the bones. “You mean, when I started to get tattoos every time she pissed me off?”
Harvey laughed. “I swear to God, the first couple of times it happened, I thought I was going to pee myself from laughing so hard. The goat was epic.”
My mom had inserted herself into every facet of our lives.
When I’d asked for space and time to do my own thing, she’d inserted herself harder.
That’d been the first tattoo I got.
A goat.
Stubborn as a damn goat, my mother.
And I’d told her that the goat was her.
She had not been happy.
“Now they’re just for me,” I said. “What’s your plan on telling the parentals? I think you should just tell Dad at work.”
Dad worked at Hooten’s Steel Mill along with Harvey.
Dad worked his ass off, but not because he wanted to make better for his family. Because he couldn’t stand being around Mom all the time.
I didn’t blame him.
Mom was hard to be around even when she was at her best.
When she was at her worst?
A soft knock came at the door that separated my butcher shop from The Mercantile.
Knowing that it was for sure not Mom—Mom would’ve pounded on the locked door—Harvey went to open it.
“Hey,” a soft voice that did things to my dick said. “I was asked to come over here and ask you boys for some help with unloading a truck?”
“Tell our mother that I’m not here and that Hux is cutting into a cow. She’ll have to unload it herself.”
“Oh, okay. I’ll do that.”
The door closed, and then Harvey said, “Ten bucks says that Mom makes the new girl do it.”
I grinned. “She’s in for a surprise working there.”
And why did I feel bad that the new girl, who was getting paid, would have to learn how to drive a forklift? I should feel happy. Excited, even. Mostly because I was free.
But, still, that weird feeling inside of me that felt a whole lot like caring was sitting like a rock in my stomach.