“Your eagerness is suspicious,” Brooks declared, giving me a hard look as we stood in the kitchen.
Everyone else was still out cold after the events of the night before.
There’d been a group effort that ended up with Cary’s girl getting saved, even if the situation wasn’t exactly over yet, since the guy who had fucked up her life was still on the loose.
It wouldn’t take long for that to be all cleaned up, though, if I knew anything about this club and their tenacity, it wouldn’t be long until she was free and clear to live her life.
So I was free to worry about my own problems.
A poisons expert who had a bone to pick with me.
“I’m just up early and bored,” I lied.
“Yeah, sure,” Brooks said, unconvinced. “Well, Louana is laid up. So why don’t you cook breakfast?” Brooks suggested, not giving me the out I wanted. And I was pretty sure he knew that.
“I’m not a great cook.”
“Even a bad cook can whip up some eggs,” he said, shrugging. “Don’t know how, watch a video,” he told me, giving me a slap on the back as he made his way out of the kitchen.
Well, it could be worse, I guess. He could have tasked me with washing the bikes or cars, or doing yard work, which would have meant that Evangeline would have had to pass by me on her way into the club.
At least if I was in the kitchen, she wouldn’t immediately see me if she was coming inside to see her daughter.
I could be a real pussy and make Voss bring them their share of breakfast once he got up.
Decision made, I set to making breakfast.
I wasn’t lying to Brooks. I wasn’t a great cook. But that didn’t mean I didn’t know how to feed myself. A fair chunk of my travels had involved a lot of camping. Camping meant you had to figure out some way to eat.
I’d gotten good at one-pot meals, and learning how to season shit to make even plain food more palatable.
So I decided on eggs and some breakfast potatoes. Keep it simple.
Louana was a fan of making omelets, mixing whatever meats, cheeses, and vegetables we had lying around into it. And every single time, they were fucking banging.
I had to stop myself from imagining how she might have made them for the two of us every day had I not ran out like I did. Or thinking about what other kinds of meals she might have cooked up for dinners that we’d eat across from each other at a table while we talked about our days… and helped feed our kids.
Louana, having grown up as an only child, had once told me that she’d like to have several herself. I’d never given it much thought before her, being so young, but I figured that if they were part me, and part her, that I would like a bunch of them too.
My mind was on exactly those things still as I beat the eggs and milk together.
It was right then, also, that I sensed I wasn’t alone.
Don’t tell me how I knew, but I knew.
The tensing of my stomach was the only sign I needed.
Louana’s mom had arrived.
And found me.
She was a gorgeous woman, a vision of what her little girl would look like in a couple decades. If maybe Evangeline had slightly different eyes than her daughter.
“You know, I’m conflicted with you,” she said, sighing a bit as she looked at me. “On the one hand, you treated my little girl like gold. And you stepped up last night when she needed you. But on the other, I watched that girl crumble and fall to pieces when you left her, crying so hard and for so long that I almost took her to a therapist, we were so worried about her.
“And the next thing we knew, she was packing up and telling us she just couldn’t be in this town anymore. And so she wasn’t. Not for more than a week or two at a time. For years, Valen. Years. Your selfishness and caprice took my girl from me. I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for that.”
Her words were like hot knives to the gut, one after the other after the other. I damn near doubled over at the sensation.
Because I didn’t know.
How could I?
I’d left.
I hadn’t looked back.
I hadn’t even asked around, even when it was killing me not to know how she was.
Maybe a part of me didn’t want to know, didn’t want to see the damage I had done to a girl who had been nothing but fucking amazing to me.
It was hard even to imagine that girl she’d been—confident, headstrong, unshakable—crying, let alone “crumble to pieces.”
Maybe I had convinced myself that I didn’t have to be racked with guilt every moment of every day because a girl like Louana, she landed on her feet. She didn’t cry. She got pissed.