Popping them into my mouth, I down them with the glass of orange juice, partly to get her off my ass, and grab a biscuit and a few slices of bacon, putting them together before I walk to the back door.
“That can’t be all you’re going to eat, it’s not enough.” Marley’s eyes are narrowed at me as she hands a tippy cup to Niki.
Pinning her with my own glare that’s probably a little too heated, I clip, “I’ll be fine.” As I’m walking out the door, I see Jax get up from the breakfast nook and walk to Marley. I probably hurt her feelings. She’s been emotional from pregnancy hormones, and it doesn’t take much.
The familiar feeling of being the biggest fucking asshole in the room washes over me, and I slap my ball cap on my head and walk out the door to go to the barn. All the fucking pregnancy hormones are like walking through a field of emotion landmines. I never know what’s going to blow up in my face.
Somehow Marley, Kinley, and Sloane, who is Mason’s wife, managed to get pregnant within months of each other. So, welcome to my own personal hell.
Marley was right, even though I was a dick to her, I needed the pain pills. I tried to hide it, but she saw my limp when I walked into the kitchen. The walk to the barn is on a downhill slope, but each step feels like someone is sticking a hot poker into my thigh.
Just a year ago, I was being dropped into hostile territories, celebrating successful exfils with booze and babes, waking up in different countries regularly, and loving my fucking life. Now I’m going to the barn to load feed and hay onto the tractor to move to the main stables and Marley’s stables.
Woo-fucking-hoo.
The life I gladly walked away from when I turned eighteen has pulled me back. I never wanted to work the farm. I grew up in this barn, helping Dad, Gray, and Mason, looking forward to the day I could fly away.
Sliding the big barn doors open, I grab my leather gloves from the wood rail in front of the pallet of feed and limp to the tractor to get my day started. Even with the fucking pain, and my dislike of working in the barn, I would rather do anything than sit in the house feeling sorry for myself.
That evening, as soon as I see Dad and Gray walking to the house for dinner, I don’t say anything to them, I go right to my truck and head into town. The days I go to PT are always the worst pain-wise, and I try to distance myself from my family asmuch as possible. I hate snapping at them. But I usually end up going a couple of other days through the week as well.
It’s bad enough that I wake up every morning and wonder what purpose my life is possibly serving, or I wonder what that fucking bitch, Karma, is serving me, the last thing I want to do is make my sisters cry and have the added weight of feeling like a complete dick.
All the downtown parking places clear out after five o’clock, and it’s easy to get a spot close to Stony’s Pub. It’s small, old as the town itself, and they offer dinner, so I come here a few nights a week to get away from the crowd at home.
“Evenin’, Tuck,” Stony says as I walk through the door. “You want your usual?”
I nod and sit at my usual table toward the back corner of the room facing the front door. When I see who’s waitressing tonight, I groan inwardly. Trudy and I had a short fling about six years ago. At the time, I thought it was a mutual friend with benefits thing, at least that’s what I told her the first night she eagerly climbed on top of me in her car.
I’m pretty sure she thought she would be able to change my mind and got pissed when she didn’t. She’s hated me since.
What got my attention when I first saw her was her big tits and wide hips. I love an hourglass figure on a woman, and she was eye candy from the first moment I saw her. She was also clingy and jealous right up to the point of demanding. It took weeks to shake her after I nipped it in the bud.
She sets a coaster on the table and puts my beer on it. “Tuck.” The greeting is terse, but at least she’s not calling me a lying bastard anymore. Even though I never lied about anything. She’s just a vindictive bitch who didn’t get what she wanted.
I don’t respond and I don’t look at her, I just nod and take the beer as she turns away. I’m not here to be social, and I don’tgive a fuck anymore who is mad at me and who isn’t, as long as she doesn’t fucking spit in my food.
The beer is cold in my throat as I drink half the mug, and the bitter flavor on my tongue reminds me of the days when I would drink with my team.
Rage starts to bubble in my gut, so I down the rest of the beer to help dull the shards of anger and hate that like to slash open every wound I try to keep closed.
Seven beers, three hours, and a chicken-fried steak dinner later, most everything is comfortably numb, and I set my empty mug on the table. I’m not surprised when my brother, Mason, sits in the chair across from me and Gray stands behind him with his thumbs hooked in his pockets.
He sets his elbows on the table and clasps his hands as we stare at each other. I’m the first to break the silence. “Stony call you?”
He nods. “He was worried about you driving, said you just finished your seventh mug.”
Glancing over Mason’s shoulder with a deep sigh, I look at Stony, but he refuses to look at me as he wipes down the bar. Chicken shit. Sliding my irritated gaze to Gray and then back to Mason, I say, “I don’t need a babysitter.”
“I know you don’t, but we don’t mind giving you a ride.”
Keeping my voice low and even, I pin him with an angry glare. “I don’t need a ride either.”
We sit like that for several minutes, eyes locked in a battle of wills, before he says, “Look, how about we skip the argument, you admit that you probably shouldn’t drive, and we all go home together. Easy-peasy.”
Pride and my buzz are telling me to tell them to fuck off, but my common sense, what’s left of it, says to go peacefully or we’ll end up making a mess of this pub. It’s one of the few places I cango to stew in my shitshow of a life in peace. I like it here, so I don’t want to get banned.
Taking my wallet out of my pocket, I toss a few bills on the table and scoot my chair away as I stand. The beer has taken the edge off the usual throbbing pain that happens when I stand after sitting for a while, but even if it had felt like my leg was being cut in two, I wouldn’t let my face betray that to my brothers.
