She scrunched up her nose.
I gestured toward the gazebo that was in my parents’ back yard and offered her my hand.
She took it, keeping hold of King on the way up.
“She’s sweet,” she said as she turned my dog over like a baby in her lap and started to scratch her belly. “I’m in love with your dog. Can I come visit with her tomorrow?”
I grinned. “Just my dog?”
She pursed her lips. “If I say yes?”
“Then I’ll say no,” I taunted.
She grinned and looked toward the back door of my parents’ place.
“I can’t believe that we knew each other after all,” she said softly. “I’m sure you know all of my dirty little secrets now.”
I looked at her with amusement on my face.
“I was too busy being a bad kid on my own to worry about everyone else,” I admitted, smiling all out. “I’m sure you were great.”
She laughed then, taking my heart rate from manageable levels to I should probably see a physician levels.
“I did everything and anything that I could to put gray hair on my father’s and brothers’ heads,” she admitted. “Hence the job at the strip club, and the job before that. And the volunteering where I did.”
Just as she admitted that, Sam, Silas and my parents came out the door.
My mom had a platter of food in her hands and my dad had a couple extra bottles of beer.
When they got close, my mom put the platter of food down onto the table in between the swings and took a seat on the one opposite of us, her eyes missing nothing about Amelia and my closeness.
My dad handed off two of the beers, but paused when Amelia’s hands closed on one.
“Are you old enough to drink?” he teased. “I don’t want to corrupt you.”
“Don’t worry,” Silas said. “She’s long past being corrupted. She was an atrocious teenager.”
“I was the perfect child,” Amelia said with a straight face.
Sam and Silas both burst out laughing, their mirth more than obvious with their boisterous laughter.
“You?” Silas’ laughter died down to chuckles. “Amelia Rose, you were an awful child. I swear to God, if you’d been my first child, I would’ve never had any more.”
Sam snorted.
“You remember that time that she snuck out when she was fifteen and got a tattoo from that tattoo shop in town? It’d just opened. Had some guy named Earthquake doing the tattoos. He didn’t know y’all yet, and so he just saw this well-developed girl, thought he was going to get some, and did her a pretty little tattoo on the small of her back.”
I’d seen that tattoo.
It wasn’t small, and it wasn’t what I would call ‘pretty’ either.
It was actually really beautiful and well done.
“I pulled up on my bike and found her there.” Silas shook his head. “And I’m about to lose my shit on this man, but Amelia throws a fuckin’ fit because she wants the piece finished. So I allow it, even though I know that her mother is going to fuckin’ kill me. I thought she was getting like a fairy or a fuckin’ butterfly or something. It was a motherfuckin’ snake. Her mother hated it.”
It wasn’t a little snake, either.
It was a motherfuckin’ big one.
“What is it?” my mother asked curiously.
Amelia, obviously not shy at all, stood up with King still in her arms.
She turned her back to us all and then looked at me for help. “Can you lift my shirt up?”
I offered to take the dog instead. I mean, her father and brother were standing right there.
And, yes, Sam probably wouldn’t kill me because he and my dad were best friends. But I didn’t know Silas all that well other than a handful of times seeing him here and there. Also, from the one time that I can ever remember seeing Silas pissed, I knew damn well that I didn’t want to piss him off.
“You know,” I said later as I watched my family and hers walked to the back porch to start the barbeque up. “I remember your dad being really pissed once.”
Her brows rose. “When?”
It was as if her dad being scary was a foreign concept to her.
“One time when he’d heard about one of his helicopters being tampered with,” I said. “I was there getting some flight hours since I was home. He’d said that I could use one of his birds. I was doing a pre-flight checklist with one of the men he has as a supervisor there. He came storming in, mad as hell, because the supervisor had found something that he’d needed to see. When he arrived, after riding here however long it takes to get from Benton to Kilgore, he’d walked right up to the bird and demanded to see who’d ridden in it, been around it, and looked at it all week. It was found out that a vengeful ex-employee had decided to do some tampering with some mechanical lines. It’d almost killed the pilot and the flight nurse.”