I blushed. “Aunt V, you can’t call my serious, badass and macho boyfriend succulent.”
She scowled at me. “I’m old, I can say whatever the heck I want.” She returned her focus to Hades. “You’re the young man who’s been taking care of my Freya?”
Hades nodded again. “Yeah,” he confirmed. “And you’re the reason why she’s Freya.”
I blinked, tears suddenly welling up in my eyes.
Even Aunt V looked dumbstruck.
My hand immediately found Hades’s. I knew he wasn’t a hand holder, but I needed to touch him at that moment, and it was the best I could do. He didn’t let go of my hand, he squeezed it hard.
Aunt V took a couple of seconds to recover. “I love him already,” she told me, her voice shaking just a little. “Now!” She clapped her hands. “Put those muscles to work and get my bags.”
Hades was not a man you asked to fetch your bags. Kill a guy? Sure. Steal nuclear codes? Definitely. But bring in bags? No.
Hades squeezed my hand once before letting it go. Then he went to get my aunt’s bags.
“He’s a keeper,” she winked, linking my arm in hers before walking us into the house.
“Yeah,” I smiled my heart feeling close to bursting. “He is.”
The subject of my father didn’t come up immediately. Aunt V was busy.
Talking to Hades. Gawking at him, not hiding the fact that she was gawking at him. Cooking dinner. Going for walks with Sirius and me. Having lunch with Marilyn. Going with us to a club party—which she fucking loved and where she also didn’t hide her gawking over every sexy man—making and drinking margaritas. She was busy catching up with me, immersing herself in the life I’d built here. A real life. The kind I’d never had. She was busy distracting me from the knowledge that my father had died serving a prison sentence that everyone in my extended family blamed me for. Apart from her, of course.
The topic had to come up at some point. It was bubbling inside of me, and there was no one else in this world I could talk to about this. Hades would listen without any kind of judgement, with his quiet strength, but I didn’t want him to see that part of me.
Which was why, while he was at ‘church’, Aunt V and I settled outside with the outdoor fire roaring and fresh margaritas, and I readied myself to open those wounds. The ones that would sting like the salt on the rim of my drink was rubbing into them.
“Why didn’t he want to see me?” My question came out as a whisper, the words leaving my mouth in a puff of frigid air. “Not even in the end? When he knew that he was never going to get out? Why didn’t he want to see me before he died?” I had tried to verbalize the words with strength, but it was impossible to utter such things without exhuming the pathetic and desperate longing I’d had for my father’s love that had been buried inside of me for all of these years.
“Because he made a mistake,” Aunt V replied, the reflection of the fire dancing in her eyes. “There are men, very rare men, who can handle their mistakes, can face them and learn from them. Then there are the more common ones, like your father, who are delicate and dangerous when it comes to three things: when they’re rejected, when they’re bested and when they make a mistake.”
She sighed. “And he didn’t just make one mistake with you, he made many. What happened to you, that was the culmination of all of his failures as a father, as a man. He was too weak to face them, so he couldn’t face you. Not because he didn’t love you. Because he hated himself.”
She squeezed my hand. “Honey, I hate this for you, but the one and only half-decent thing your father ever did was what landed him in that prison. The three meals a day, the place to sleep, that was his only reward.”
She sipped her drink, and I did the same, licking at the salt while all the open nerves inside of me stung.
“The years he spent there, the likelihood that a man named ‘Big Jim’ made him his girlfriend, the illness that crept into his blood and killed him, that was all punishment for everything else he did,” she continued, fury fresh in her voice. “For the way he failed you. Mourn what you should’ve had in a father. Mourn that you never got what you deserved. But never mourn for him, sweetheart.”
She cleared her throat, staring out at the desert.
“I’ll always blame myself,” she admitted quietly. “For not seeing it. For not getting you out of there. For not fighting for you.” Her voice cracked toward the end, with a thinness that I’d never heard from the woman who had always seemed so solid to me.