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“I’m so sorry. I totally forgot to bring these to y’all earlier. Can I get you anything else?”
“No, he’s good,” Carly snaps and I drop my head down to hide my smile. I fucking love that she’s getting territorial and at this point, this chick is just asking for it. The waitress leaves and I start laughing. “Not a word.”
“Okay, why did you think it would be hard to answer my questions?” I ask when my laughter fades, curious why it’s so hard for her to talk about her past. I’ve never met anyone as closed off as her before and sometimes I wonder how I’m ever going to break down those walls.
“Because I’ve never done this before, Chance. I haven’t let anyone see me for twelve very long years and then you just bulldozed into my life.”
“I’m not going to apologize for that,” I tell her, completely serious and she nods.
“I wasn’t going to ask you to.”
“Let’s see, what’s my next question?” I muse and she scoffs, giving me some more of that fire I love.
“Why don’t I get to ask you anything?”
“Baby, you’ve always been able to ask me anything. You just haven’t wanted to.”
She bites her lip. “You may be right about that.”
“Can I get back to my questions now?”
“No, I actually have a question for you.”
I nod. “Okay, shoot.”
“Will you tell me how you met Trixie and ended up married to her?”
Shit…
I take a deep breath and nod again. “Uh…yeah. Well, I met her at a strip club where she was working. I had been starting to wonder if I was ever going to find you and I was tired of being alone, so I thought I could force things along. We ran off to Vegas and got married on a whim. We were terrible for each other and things went downhill pretty fast. I wanted to have kids, but she wouldn’t stop stripping and when I found out that she’d been sleeping with anyone that would give her a second look, I left.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers and I shake my head.
“I’m not. It wasn’t a fun time in my life but it taught me what it was that I really wanted and I finally found you so all things considered, I think it worked out pretty well.”
A deep blush stains her cheeks as she stares down at her plate.
“Can I get back to my questions now?” I ask with a laugh.
She gestures for me to continue as she stabs her pasta with her fork. “By all means.”
“Will you tell me about your dad?” I ask softly. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot since she first talked to me about it and I’m dying to know what she was like as a kid. I expected her to be upset by my question but a soft smile spreads across her face.
“He was… everything you could want in a dad. I’ve never met a more understanding, compassionate, friendly man in my life and he was so strong, too. He worked two, sometimes three, jobs just to give us the life he felt we deserved but he was never absent from our lives. It was always a priority of his to carve time out of his schedule for his family.”
She’s smiling but I can hear the pain in her voice and I reach across the table, grabbing her hand. “He sounds really great.”
“He was,” she agrees, her voice cracking.
“What happened between him and your mother?”
The tears shining in her eyes quickly vanish and she scoffs. “What happened is my mother became obsessed with all the things she didn’t have instead of focusing on the beautiful family and home my father had built for her.”
“She cheated on him?”
She nods. “Yeah. They started fighting a lot and even as a kid, I could see that it was tearing my dad apart. One day, I came home from school and she was shoving all our clothes into suitcases. He came home to find her loading up the car and he started crying, begging her not to take his family away. She was so cold…” Her voice trails off and my chest constricts for her as anger simmers in my veins. I didn’t like her mother when I met her but seeing the pain in Carly’s eyes, I know I won’t hold back if I ever see her again.
“Mom shoved Ivy and I into the back of the car and as we pulled away from the house, I stared out of the back window, watching my dad fall to his knees in the front yard. That was the last time I ever saw him.”
