“What about your dad?”
He let out a silent laugh. “Dad’s a whole other story.”
“I’ve got time.” She removed the hand from his leg. “Plus, I’ve been told I’m a pretty good listener.”
One corner of his mouth rose. Damn, the man was even more gorgeous when that happened. She couldn’t imagine what he’d look like with a full-blown smile spread across his face.
With a deep breath, he opened up some. “Not much to tell. He’s a truck driver. Or, at least he was. I don’t really know.”
“You don’t know what your father does for a living?”
“He never was much of a father. As in, at all.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. When mom found out she was pregnant with me, he denied I was his and took off. I saw him a handful of times growing up, but he married someone else who already had two kids, and that became his only family.”
“Do you two ever talk?”
Grant tossed his empty paper plate onto the coffee table and shook his head. “Haven’t spoken to the man in over twenty years.”
That broke Brynnon’s heart and pissed her off, all at the same time. “What a gigantic asshole.” She quickly added, “Him. Not you.”
A low chuckle escaped the back of his throat. “Pretty much.”
She thought for a moment. “He didn’t even reach out to you after your mom passed away?”
“Nope.”
Brynnon pictured Grant as a young man. A boy who’d lost everything just as he was preparing for his future.
“Did your mother ever marry?”
“Once. When I was about nine. Jack was an abusive asshole, though. At the time, I was too young and too small to do anything to stop it. Mom put up with it for a while.”
“Oh, God. What happened? How did she get away?”
“One night, the bastard came home drunk and decided to lay into me.” Pain from the heart-wrenching memory was crystal clear in his eyes. “The next morning, after Jack went to work, Mom packed up what little stuff was ours, and we left. We stayed with her parents for a while until she could afford an apartment of her own. Grandma and Grandpa helped us out as much as they could, but it was still hard for mom. Being a single mother, especially back then, was tough. There was more of a stigma those days, which made it even harder.”
“Where are your grandparents now?”
“Buried in the cemetery next to my mom.”
“I’m sorry.”
For the next several minutes, the two sat in silence. Grant lost in his memories, Brynnon absorbing everything she’d just learned. When her thoughts returned to his dick of a father, renewed anger against a man she’d never met began to boil over.
“How could your dad abandon you like that? I don’t understand howanyparent could do that. And he’s even worse because he denied his own son his love but then turned around and gave it all to someone else’s kids.”
Typical Grant, he just blew it off. “It’s no big deal, Bryn. It doesn’t matter.”
Brynnon loved hearing him use the shortened version of her name, but ignored it. She needed him to see she could feel his pain. That the anger and resentment he kept buried inside wasn’t his to bear alone.
“Like hell, it doesn’t. It’s obvious it still bothers you, and it should.”
Brynnon slid closer to him. So close, in fact, her crossed feet were now touching his outer thigh.
“You said it was mainly just you and your mom growing up, right? And you were, what, eighteen when she died? I can’t imagine how hard that must have been. How did you get through it?” She asked.
