“What?”
“A rabid dog.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Thanks, Pete. I feel much better now. I’m glad I came.”
“Good, because you are. You’re like a vicious wild animal that bites the hand that dares to pet you. Because that’s all you’ve ever known. Biting and snapping your teeth at the world. But as Mimi would say, it’s not your fault. It’s the world’s fault. Because the world has bitten you back.”
I clench my teeth. “Are we done here? Because I’ve got a fucking problem.”
“What is your problem, boy?”
“Myproblem,old man,is what if it happens again?”
“What happens again?”
I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I don’t even know why I came.
I don’t know why I keep coming to Pete whenever I’ve got a problem. I went to him when my father fucked her over two years ago. I went to him when I found out I fucked her over again and got her pregnant.
And I’m here tonight too.
He never helps.
But the thing is that I’ve got no place to go. And if that doesn’t burn, that the only place Icango to is a fucking garage and the only person I can talk to is a fucking old man who’s still in love with his wife and needs a beard trim, then I don’t know what will.
I swallow, curling my fingers into the chair. “What if she falls in love with me again?”
“Why’s loving you such a bad thing?”
“Aside from the fact that one time she did, and I broke her heart because I was too wrapped up in my shit?” I swallow, my throat feeling tight. “And then my father used her to get back at me. In case you didn’t know, my father is still alive. As much as I’d like to kill him, I’m not going to do that because that might also kill my mother. Who somehow still loves that sick fuck. So nothing’s changed. She needs to stay away from me, from us. From Jackson men. We don’t know a thing about love or being decent human beings.”
Pete stares at me for a moment, rubbing his bushy white moustache, before muttering, “You know why your father used her to get to you?”
“Because he’s a psychopath who only cares about what he wants and because he saw it as an opportunity.”
“Yes. But he’s also smart,” Pete tells me. “He was smart enough to know that you’d do anything for that girl. You’d give up soccer. You’d give up your scholarship, your whole plan of getting into the pros to stick it to him. He knew that.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So you’d give up your fucking soul for that girl. And your father knew that. So what does that tell you?”
I raise my eyebrows at him. “Why don’t you explain it to me?”
Pete smiles. “It tells you that you might know a thing or two about love after all, you clueless bastard.”
My chest contracts again. Like a boulder is sitting on it.
A giant fucking wrecking ball. A ticking time bomb that’s going to explode.
But I ignore it. I ignore it all and scoff at Pete. “I made that deal with my father because she didn’t deserve to be used. Not again. She didn’t deserve to be punished for something that she did because she was hurting. BecauseIhurt her. Not everything is about love.”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night, kid.”
You love her, don’t you? You love our baby.
The pressure on my chest increases at her words but I ignore that too.
It doesn’t matter if I love our baby or not.
