“Blue probably tried to get in her pants and got knocked back,” Mom bandied back.
The thought of that made a curl of heat lick through my chest, but I pushed it down.
It wasn’t my business if Blue De Santis tried to fuck Saint McClure. I mean, it wasn’t like he didn’t fuck everyone else. Still, I didn’t think he was that much of an asshole to bad-mouth her for turning his ass down. It had nothing all to do with me anyway. She’d made that abundantly clear when she screwed me over in days gone past.
“Delphine Babin’s divorce just came through,” Jean announced, throwing my mom a sly look. “She’s on the market now. Maybe you should give her a call and see if she wants to go to dinner while you’re here.”
I tipped my head back and looked at the sky, cursing under my breath.
“Woman, leave the boy alone,” Malcom snapped. “He’s told you where he’s at, and you’re still goin’ on at him.”
“I was just sayin’ is all.” Jean raised her glass to her mouth and took a sip. “Allie came to me in a dream and told me Jacob had to find a good woman. She also said she’d give him a sign, and there’s no sign bigger than a pretty lady from a decent family who just came back onto the market.”
Malcolm rolled his eyes. “Allie comes to you in a dream at least four times a week. She must be fucking exhausted from all the flying through Heaven to get to your ass with all these messages about Jacob. The poor kid spends more time with you now she’s dead than when she was alive.” He looked at Dad and made big eyes.
Pop grinned, his eyes sliding toward me, and murmured so only I could hear, “I told ya, Son. They mean well.”
My eyebrow cocked, and I shook my head exasperatedly.
There was a reason I only visited a couple of times a year, and this was it.
I loved that I had a relationship with Allie’s folks where they thought enough of my unworthy ass to look out for me, even if the way they did it bordered on highly inappropriate. The problem was that Jeanie and my mom were like Dobermans with a bone once they got going. Weirdly, though, all the fix-up talk didn’t make me uncomfortable. It was funny, and although it was weird, I knew if Allie were here, she would piss her pants laughing at her mom’s antics. The way my wife found humor in darkness was another reason I loved her so much, ‘cause I was the same way.
It may have seemed strange to some people, but Jean and Mal saw me as the son they never had, and twelve years had gone by since Allie’s passing. They didn’t want me to be lonely, and they thought they were honoring their daughter by giving me the green light to do what Allie would’ve wanted me to do and move the fuck on already.
Except, I had moved on, just not in the way they wanted.
I dated, I fucked, I worked; I had a good time with my brothers and generally whooped it up. The way I honored my wife was by living my life to its fullest in all the ways she couldn’t. Except I hadn’t met the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my days (and nights) with yet.
A memory flashed through the recesses of my mind again of the bluest eyes I’d ever seen, darker than a summer sky but lighter than the oceans.
There’d been nobody who’d piqued my interest since Saint. I’d tried. Recently, I’d gotten to know a girl called Marnie, who turned out to be as much of a bitch as Saint was, though honestly, I kinda had a feeling from the jump that she was a dead end but still forced it anyway. I’d tried to date, but the connections I found never seemed to live up to what came before—first, Allie and then Saint.
As much as I hated to admit it to myself, the cute, curvy singer had me in a chokehold. No other woman since Allie had moved me in a way that made me wish for more.
What a shame the promise of her turned out to be a lie. I thought there was something between us, something pure and honest, except it wasn’t honest at all because she turned her back on me without a word of explanation.
“Remember her twenty-fourth birthday?” Jean asked, leaning down for her plastic cup. “You were deployed, and she was furious with you.”
“I think she was more furious about that damned singing telegram turning up at her office,” Malcom muttered, sipping his beer.
I busted out a laugh. “I thought it was cool as fuck, charming even.”
“I did too,” Malcom agreed with a grin. “But then what do I know? I married her mother.”
My shoulder lifted in a shrug, and I smirked. “Nothing says ‘I love you’ more than a man in a gorilla suit singing “Crazy in Love.”
“I’ve still got the video,” Jean murmured, her eyes taking on a faraway look. “Her face was a picture. I thought she was gonna sink through the floor with embarrassment. She’d only been working at that job for a couple of months, and there’s this big hairy gorilla in her face singing Beyonce at the top of his lungs while doing the dance moves. After she’d calmed down, shecalled me laughing and said, ‘That’s what I get for marrying a fighter pilot. A life that revolves around time zones and gorillas.’”
The best kind of laughter filled the air, the kind that could only come from remembering somebody so well loved. My eyes fell on my wife’s plaque, and for a second, I imagined she was with us, shaking her head and smiling her beautiful smile as she rolled her eyes.
There weren’t words in existence to describe how much I missed Allie or to describe the pain that sliced through me every morning when I woke, and it hit me that she was gone. It was never-ending; I went through the hell of losing my wife on the daily. She was always there in the back of my mind, at least except for one time when I saved another girl from being attacked backstage at a rock gig. That was the only time Allie had ever taken a back seat, and probably why I was so fucking obsessed with Saint McClure when really, she should’ve faded into obscurity a long-damned time ago.
Girls were easy come, easy go, especially in my lifestyle, but one in particular refused to fade into the background. In a single night, Saint showed me I was still vital, still alive, and that I wasn’t as broken as I’d thought.
For one night, she made me feel whole again.
Then, days later, she turned into a ghost, and it was like she’d died too, to the point where, for a while there, I spiraled. The club was just getting off its feet. Our brother, Ace, was still in the picture, and there wasn’t much in the way of discipline to pull me back from the brink of self-destruction. I drank, I fought, I fucked, I caroused and generally acted the fool until a few months later when our new VP Blade turned up, sat me down, and told me if I didn’t pull my shit together, he’d have to demote me from the enforcer role.
