Chapter 1 #2
By the time he was hungry again, he decided that dinner at home would be good.
He had his cook make him a sub sandwich, and he had it with a baked potato.
After getting his fill, Brenin sat in the living room with the television on, reading a book.
The game on the set wasn’t as interesting as the book he was reading, and he was all right with that.
Sometimes reading was by far more fun than doing anything else that was going on around the house.
Going up to bed after finishing the book, he was surprised that he’d enjoyed it that much.
Tomorrow, he’d write a review on the book; he’d heard how authors really enjoyed getting feedback on their work, and he seldom read something without giving it a review.
He’d do his best to get it done quickly because he didn’t want to forget.
As he was getting into bed, he thought of Ace and Tank.
Ace had been able to get all kinds of grants of money to help out around town.
There had even been money for the lift being put into the pool for people to use.
Then there was the money that he’d found for small business owners that took care of their broken windows along Main Street when their businesses had collapsed.
He was a wizard at finding money for others to use as well as the town.
It was making things like sidewalks along the main streets to be repaired for little to no money from taxes being raised.
Tank was a great assistant, too, in that he would scope out things that they’d been told about that needed to be improved.
Twice now, things were worse than they thought, and it had to be taken care of right away.
But all in all, the town was looking better than it had before, and everyone loved it.
They loved the two men, too, and that was wonderful.
Brenin was going to be out of town for the next several days and put his phone on the service when he was ready to go.
Calling his brother, he reminded him that he’d be out of town and also reminded him to get his mail.
He could have had it stopped, but since he was going to be gone for only a few days, it was easier just to have Cassian pick it up for him.
There was usually nothing more than advertisements and credit card offers anyway.
He was going to be looking at a business that was thinking about coming to town to bring jobs to the area.
He was going there to see how they would fit in the community.
And whether or not they’d have enough people to work the jobs that the business would create.
It would be a total waste of time and money if they were to be too large for their area and not be able to get enough employees to work the shifts.
There were a lot of people out of work, but if they wanted more than they could handle, it would be a flop.
Brenin had another date tonight. He’d been enjoying himself dating other shifters because they knew that there would be nothing long-term between them. Sometimes they got together just for sex, but most of the time they would go to dinner and see a movie. It was fun, and they would part as friends.
Picking Dana up at six, the two of them had a nice dinner.
They were trying a new place in Zanesville that specialized in Mexican food.
They enjoyed a good appetizer and then dinner.
When it came to having dessert, they both declined in favor of getting an ice cream at Tom’s Ice Cream Bowl, still in the town.
They had the best cherry ice cream in the state as far as he was concerned, and Dana got herself a chocolate malt.
As they were leaving, she said that she had a pounding headache and wanted to go home.
He took her straight home and walked her to the door.
“Are you going to be all right?” She said that she’d be all right, as she got them once in a while. “Well, don’t suffer needlessly. If you have something to take for it, then do it. No one would want you coming to work if you feel that bad.”
“You’re a nice man, Brenin. Why haven’t you found your mate yet? She’d be lucky to have you in her life.” He said that he was looking, but she wasn’t his mate. “Good one. I’ll see you around. Try to find her before she gets married to someone else, then you’ll have a problem.”
He knew that the same thing had happened to Dana’s brother Carl.
He’d been looking for his mate only to find out that she’d been married to another man for years, and she wasn’t willing to give up on a sure thing.
He’d ended up killing himself over it, and she’d never been the same since.
His heart broke for the other woman, and he wondered if she had someone out there for herself.
He hoped so. She was a wonderful person, too.
~*~
Lisa was on her last table when she got a phone call from the school. Nervous about getting a call from anyone at work, she took the call and waited for them to put her on hold. Who did that sort of thing? Call a person about an emergency only to be put on hold so that she could talk to them.
“Mrs. Manchester? There’s been an accident at the school.
Your son is all right, but he’s very upset that his other friend Toby is hurt.
” She asked what had happened. “There was an incident on the play yard, and he was hurt by a bigger boy. He’s going to be fine as well, just needs a few stitches, but it’s your son who is upset the most. He said his best friend in the whole wide world is hurt, and he can’t help him.
I knew your son was tender-hearted, but this about broke all of our hearts.
He wants to go home with him so he can take care of him. ”
“That’s terrible news about Toby.” Again, she was upset about how much information the school and daycare that Davy went to gave out information so freely. “Does he want me to come and get him? I can, it’s no problem here.”
“I think he just needs to talk to you. He is pretty upset.” She told the woman that she’d be more than happy to come and get him. “That might be the best thing. He’s still crying, and I’m fearful that he’s going to make himself sick over this.”
“I’ll leave here in a few minutes. Tell him that I’m coming.
” She said that she’d do that and hung up the phone.
Leaving her last table would be hard, but something that she’d done before when her son got sick.
Davy might only be seven, but he was big hearted when it came to others that he considered friends.
She told her boss what was going on, and they told her to leave.
She was there to get him twenty minutes later and was glad that she’d gone to get him.
He was inconsolable. After taking him home, glad that she didn’t have to work tonight, he laid down on his bed and cried himself to sleep.
He kept going on about the bully not hitting him, but hitting his friend.
She had a feeling that Toby had saved her son from a good beating by stepping in, and it hurt her that there were still bullies around the school.
When he finally fell asleep, she closed his door and worked on grading papers for the local high school until he got up.
Just as she thought, Davy had been the target of the bully’s attempts to hurt someone.
He’d been picking at Davy for the past week, something that she wasn’t aware of, and he’d punched the other little boy in the face.
After knocking him down, apparently, he kicked him in the belly and ribs until he was no longer conscious.
No wonder he was so upset; it sounded to her like little Toby would be hurting for a while.
He’d been sent to the hospital by ambulance, and that had upset her son, too.
An ambulance had meant certain death as far as he was concerned, and that was what had upset him so much.
“We’ll call his mom in the morning to see how he’s doing.” He asked why they couldn’t call her now. “It might be too soon. I promise you I’ll call first thing in the morning and we’ll see how he’s doing. Is that all right with you?”
“Yes, I guess so. There was so much blood, Mom. I couldn’t believe how bad he was being hurt.
It was like he was trying to kill him.” She asked about the bully and was ashamed to find out that he’d been knocking her son around for the past two weeks, and she’d not known anything about it.
“Toby will be my best friend forever because he took the beating for me. I was going to be hurt, Markus said so, when Toby kicked him in the shin, he took it out on him. He said that I was a bastard boy. I don’t know what that means. ”
“It means that your father was never in the picture.” She was going to call the school in the morning, too, and let them know a piece of her mind.
They had to know this was going on, as Davy said that he’d told his teacher every day that he’d be knocked around.
Even Toby had tried to tell the teacher.
“Your father died. He would have loved to have been here for us, but something happened, and he was taken from us too young.”
She held onto Davy for the rest of the night.
Every time she got up to go to the bathroom, he would whimper.
Maybe she was making him a momma’s boy because she was cuddling him so much, but she didn’t care tonight.
He’d had his heart broken, and she knew only one way to make it better, and that was to be there for him.
After sending him to bed, she knew that he was going to have bad dreams. He’d been mostly upset that his friend had been hurt, but the amount of blood that was surrounding the little boy had scared him. As soon as she knew that the school was open, she gave them a call.