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Ryder - Denise > Super Mario
“Hey man, what’re you doing here? I thought you were staying with Denise today?” Aiden greets me as he opens his door. I clearly woke him; he’s still wiping sleep from his eyes. “Come on in. Want coffee?”
Turning without even waiting for me to answer, he heads back into his house, going straight to the kitchen. He busies himself getting the coffee going while I look around. I haven’t been in Aiden’s place in a while, but it’s the same as it always was. Family pictures on the walls, comfortable furniture, big ass TV taking up almost the entire wall, and tons of video games. Aiden has every console you can imagine. It’s the only thing he’ll rush to buy when the latest version comes out. He’ll keep his old phone until his screen is so cracked he can’t even see through it, but as soon as the latest Xbox is available he has one. Everyone has their thing I guess.
Can’t say I wouldn’t be happy playing some old school Super Mario World on SNES sometime. It makes me feel like I’m really a kid again, instead of just acting like one all the time.
“So, tell me what’s happened since I left last night.” Aiden comes back into the living with a cup of coffee for each of us. I take a spot on the couch while he sits in a well-worn recliner. I guess I know where he sits when he games, if the looks of that chair say anything about it. “How is Denise doing?”
Aiden doesn’t like to talk about it, but he is very familiar with domestic violence. When he was younger, before he met the rest of the guys, his dad would beat him and his mom. He never hit his five-year-old sister, Ava, though. When Aiden turned eighteen, he moved out, and within three months, the rest of his family was gone. They were in a horrible car accident and no one survived.
I didn’t know Aiden before that, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that it changed him. He’s volunteered with local women’s shelters for as long as I’ve known him. And since we started making real money with the band, I know he donates sizeable sums of money to domestic violence initiatives in the city. He takes any hint of violence or aggression against women and children very seriously, almost personally. He’s never said it to me, but I sometimes wonder if he blames himself. Not that he should, of course. I just know that if it were me, I probably would feel guilty.
“She’s doing OK, considering.” I finally answer. I’ve been staring off into space, thinking about Aiden’s family for so long that he probably thought I fell asleep with my eyes open. “Her friend Xena, you know, the chick who owns Bump & Grind? She’s over there visiting with Denise right now. I accidentally on purpose let slip that Denise is pregnant when I went to grab coffee and breakfast this morning so I could invite her tonight. Anyway, Xena went over to give Denise the third degree. I figured I’d come see you, and check if you’d made any progress on my request from last night, and leave them to their girl talk.”
“Good thinking. At least some of that conversation is going to be about you, you know.”
“Yeah, I’m well aware of that. Yet another reason I needed to get out of there and leave them to it. Plus, I really wanted to talk about this Andrew thing with you. I know you have contacts experienced with this type of situation, so I thought you might have some ideas of what Denise can do about this.”
Aiden puts his cup down on the end table beside the couch and gets up to grab his phone from the kitchen counter.
“I texted some people last night before I went to sleep, but I haven’t checked if anyone got back to me yet. Some asshole woke me up and forced me to make him coffee.”
“Yeah, yeah, fuck you too. And thanks for the coffee.”
“You’re welcome.”
Aiden swipes through screens on his phone, the look on his face alternating between small smiles and outright grimaces. So good news and bad news.
“OK, well, it looks like it’s going to be just like we thought. There’s not much that can be done about Andrew, legally, since this is the first incident. They’re not together and they never lived together so this situation sort of straddles a line between domestic violence and stalking. And either way, the laws don’t really work in favour of the victims. I mentioned how he showed up at the party when Denise told him not to, which is what made my friend think of the stalking aspect. But for the other stuff, for tonight, that is all taken care of. Alex texted me too, and she has her part under control.”
I think that over while I sip my coffee. At least tonight is squared away. That’s one less thing to worry about today.
“So, if we can’t do anything legally…?”
“We might have to look at our illegal options.” Aiden shrugs, giving no indication that he is concerned about being involved in illegal activity. Which is a relief, because I would hate to be committing crimes alone. At least this way, if we get caught, we can bunk together in prison. Silver linings, and all that.
“What kind of illegal options are we talking about here?”
“Well, I don’t think Andrew needs killing, at least not yet, so we can take that off the table. Wait, let me grab some paper to write this down. Denise has a good point about list making. It really helps you organize your thoughts.” Aiden gets up and rummages around in some drawers in the kitchen, coming back with a pen and a notebook.
He sits back down and flips open the notebook and looks at me, waiting for a suggestion. Good thing we’ve already taken killing Andrew off the table. It wouldn’t do to have it in an itemized list of options on how to deal with him. It would certainly be a damning piece of evidence.
“OK, so when Alex had a problem with her ex-boyfriend, Devon and I took him for a walk and beat some sense into him. That could be an option. Maybe beating the shit out of Andrew would convince him to stay away from Denise?”
“I’ll write it down,” Aiden says, scribbling on the notepad, “but the fact that Denise is having his baby complicates things a bit.”
“Yeah, you’re right. We’ll all have to be around each other for a long time if he ever gets his head out of his ass and acknowledges that the kid is his.”
“Wait.” Aiden’s face splits into a huge grin. “What if he doesn’t have a reason to get his head out of his ass?”
Great, now he’s speaking in code. Like that’s helpful.
“OK,” I drawl. “Now try that again. But this time, make sense.”
“Ugh, sometimes you are just as dumb as you look, man,” he teases. Apparently I’m ridiculously good looking or something, so people often assume I’m dumb. I’ll take it, though. Makes it easier to fuck with them when they think I’m too dumb to do anything.
