I quickly opened the door, and she grinned as soon as she saw me.“Leandra, I’m so glad to catch you at home, dear.”
“What can I do for you, Ms.Elena?”
“Ruben is talking about getting serious again, and I just need a break,” she sighed, making my lips twitch.
Now, I could only imagine that you didn’t really have much left to lose when you were in your eighties, and so that’s why older folks were always getting into something.If they had even a little pep in their step, they were making the most out of it, and bingo at the recreational center was no joke.
At any rate, Ms.Elena Ruiz had been widowed ten years ago, and after mourning her beloved Justin for almost every day of those ten years, she had finally decided to get back out there last year, and that’s when she’d met Ruben.Ruben was eighty-seven, a widower as well, and he’d made quite a bit in the stock market way back when, so he was comfortable in life.However, where Elena was just looking for a good time, Ruben was in love and giving her a hard time about it.
“What’s got his boxers in a tangle now?”I asked as I opened the door to let her in.
“Trent Tutelage sat next to me on the bus today, and Ruben didn’t take to it at all,” she sighed as she made her way over to my couch.“As if I control who the bus driver lets on the bus.”
“Well, that certainly isn’t your fault,” I agreed as I shut the door to go join her.
“That’s what I tried to tell him,” she huffed.“But he just wasn’t listening at all.”Her big blue eyes widened as she looked over at me.“He said that he hopes Trent breaks a hip...can you imagine?”
“Completely uncalled for, I agree,” I said as I pointed towards the kitchen.“Would you like something to drink?”
“Yes, dear,” she answered as she got comfortable.
Just then, my phone chimed with an incoming group text, and once again, I silently prayed that it wasn’t my mother.
Rya:Drinks @ DH Thursday?
I wasn’t sure what all Dalton had going on at the tattoo shop, but we didn’t have set schedules at Precious Pets, so it wasn’t often that we all had the same days off together.However, when we did, Rya liked to make plans involving all of us.Still, I waited until Dalton replied to answer her.
Dalton:Sure
My fingers hovered over the screen as Elena said, “Men really aren’t worth the headache.”
The woman wasn’t wrong.
Chapter 2
Dalton~
The buzzing sound of the tattoo gun had to be the most soothing thing in the world.It was so easy to block out the world when the machine was running, and while most people would call this work, it didn’t feel like that to me.
Growing up in Louisa County, it’d been a hit or miss for the children of Ripton.There were only two sides of town, and if you weren’t lucky enough to live on the south side, then you were living in hell on the north side.
I ought to know.
Unfortunately for me, my parents, Jeremy and Beverly Summit, had been the perfect drug addicts in love, and if it hadn’t been for my grandparents on my father’s side, who knows where I might have ended up.Granted, by the time that they had stepped in, I had witnessed enough to disillusion me forever, but I had stopped wallowing in that part of my past a long time ago.
Anyway, it hadn’t been until I’d been around ten-years-old that a teacher had noticed how I’d been losing weight rather rapidly.She had called social services to conduct a home visit, and that’s when they had discovered me living in a home filled with drugs, filth, and two strung-out addicts.
Luckily for me, CPS and the police had called my grandparents, Trevor and Adelaine Summit, and when they’d been more than willing to take me in, being blood relatives, it had cut out all the red tape that most kids in the system had to deal with.My grandparents had also lived in Cromwell, which was how I’d ended up here, thank God.
As for my parents, my grandfather had been so disgusted with my father that he had cut him off completely, and to this day, none of us had any idea of what had ever happened to my parents, and though I should feel something about that, I didn’t.My grandparents had tried their best to raise me well and undo some of the damage that had already happened, and I hadn’t wanted to insult their efforts by caring about two people who’d only seen me as a free check.
I also hadn’t had any maternal grandparents to consider.From what I could remember, they had lived out east somewhere, not really having anything to do with my mother, which I could hardly blame them.Besides, even if they’d been in the picture, I honestly couldn’t see how my life could have turned out any better than it was right now.After all, in addition to being a tattoo artist, I also worked at Precious Pets, and who in the fuck didn’t love working with animals?
Now, even though I’d started tattooing at twenty-one, a few years later, I’d needed something to balance out the darkness that sometimes came with inking someone’s story.More often than not, people’s reasons for getting a tattoo were more depressing than they were happy, and so when a customer had remarked on Precious Pets hiring, I had applied, and I’d been hired almost immediately.Honestly, since most of the employees at Precious Pets were female, I’d suspected that I’d gotten hired just to have a man around when needed.Nonetheless, whatever the reason, I was grateful for the job, and I actually enjoyed it.
At any rate, even though I made good money from both jobs, I lived in a two-bedroom apartment and drove a truck that was a few years old already.While my grandparents weren’t wealthy, they did own their own home, and they’d made it clear that I was their only heir, and so it made no sense for me to purchase a house when I was going to end up with one eventually.Now, while that might sound cold and as if I was just waiting around for my grandparents to die, that wasn’t the case at all.I’d just rather live in the home where they loved me than buy some brick and mortar that I couldn’t care less about.
Besides, while I might be an asshole, nothing was more important to me than making sure that my grandparents were well and doing fine.Though we spoke on the phone often, I also made it a point to visit them at least once a week, and I took care of everything that I felt they might be too old to handle themselves.
