“From my understanding she loved it.” I shrug.
“She’s definitely one of a kind.”
“Enough about him. I need help fixing my own problems.”
“She’s terrified you’re going to hurt her.”
“Comes up in every single conversation.”
“You hurt her in the past.”
“I was fucking horrible, man, but I did it to protect her.”
“Nonetheless, you hurt her. It’s just going to take time.”
“I’ll spend a lifetime, man. Every second of every day, but she makes it damn hard. She’s fucking adorable, like a little chihuahua, snarling and baring her teeth.”
“You could start by not thinking of her like a dog,” he mutters before draining his still piping-hot coffee. “I need to jet.”
“We didn’t solve shit. You’re supposed to solve shit.”
“These aren’t the types of messes I normally clean up,” he says, placing his empty cup in my kitchen sink. “Matters of the heart, man. There’s so much in play, it’s hard to determine an outcome, and even the outcome you get now may change in a month, a year, a decade. It’s a fucking gamble, and not one I’ll ever take.”
He gives me a quick salute and a you poor fucker smile before leaving.
He didn’t help a damn bit.
It’s an hour later and I’m buried in the very back of my closet clearing shit out when there’s a knock on my door. I take my time answering, certain that it’s one of the guys from work. I get no other visitors, and I’m sure Quinten went back to the office and gossiped about the shit going on in my life. Knowing Wren, he’s bugged my damn house and knew before Quinten even rode up on the elevator.
But when I pull my door open, it’s not a guy from work.
I should be ecstatic that Tinley and Alex are standing there, but my son is covered in bruises, his right eye swollen so badly I can’t see the white part of his eye.
“What the hell happened?” I snap, anger my first response to knowing someone hurt my child.
She hasn’t answered my call in the last three days, and that’s why I’ve been rushing around packing up my damn condo. I needed to get back to Texas. I knew she was ignoring me, and that pettiness was killing me. I wanted to speak with her and Alex, but she wasn’t allowing either.
I clear my throat.
“What happened?”
“Can we come in?” Tinley darts her eyes around me as if she expects me not to be alone, and I step out of the way immediately.
Does she really think I’d have someone here? Then I recall me telling her that I’d fuck her even if I did have someone else significant in my life, making me realize I acted like a dick more recently than I thought.
“Have a seat and explain.” I urge them toward the matching sofas in the living room. “I’m losing my sh—my mind right now.”
“Cedric,” Alex says the second he takes a seat. “When you left a couple days ago, he caught me walking to school.”
“You catch the bus in the mornings.”
“There’s a girl—”
“Mooommm,” Alex says with a roll of his good eye.
His neck is stiff when he tries to look at her, but he refocuses on me. “Cedric stopped me and wanted me to keep working for him.”
“Selling drugs,” I clarify, because even though me saying it tells her that I knew it had happened in the past, I need her to hear all of it.
“Yeah. He wanted me to keep working for him, but I told him no.” He points to his face. “This is how he showed me he wasn’t happy about my decision.”
I’ll kill him. I’ll round up all the guys, and I’ll fucking murder him.
“And you didn’t think I needed to know about this?”
Tinley sighs, looking more exhausted than I’ve ever seen her, and that’s saying a lot because losing her mother nearly took everything she had.
“I had to get out of there. Alex came home looking like this, and I freaked. We packed our bags and left. My cell phone is somewhere in the house.”
“We took the bus. It took two days to get here,” Alex adds.
“The bus? Tinley, I bought you a car.”
“He slashed the tires.”
I look at Tinley to confirm.
“I don’t know if it was Cedric but three of the tires on the car were slashed while I was at the grocery store. I didn’t have the money to get it towed much less pay for new tires. It’s still sitting in the lot or it’s been towed. I don’t know.”
“Have you taken him to the hospital to be examined?”
Her eyes flash with hurt, and I know it came out as an accusation, can see in her eyes that she thinks I’m judging her.
“Let’s go. You got yourselves to safety first, and that’s important. Now let’s go make sure everything else is okay.”