Thaddeus (Heartbreakers & Troublemakers Book 2)

by Hope Hitchens

  “I mean, you fought hard enough for it,” I said, teasing him, “I might as well let you hit it.”

  “Like you haven’t wanted me to fuck you since we met,” he shot back. It wasn’t a lie, but I wasn’t going to let him know that.

  “As long as I’m the only one. Do we have a deal?”

  “Deal.”

  We clinked our coffee mugs and ended up having sex again as the sun came up.

  18

  Thaddeus

  Today was the day.

  It was exactly eighteen years to the day that Mom had been murdered.

  ‘Navy SEAL murders wife.’

  ‘Navy SEAL charged with murder of wife.’

  ‘SEAL suspected in murder of wife.’

  The newspaper headlines had been wild.

  Wife. That was what they had called her. The wife of the Navy SEAL who had murdered her. They kept calling him a Navy SEAL, it wasn’t like it was a lie, but SEAL or not, the shitbag had killed my mom. He wasn’t a Navy SEAL who had committed a murder. He was a murderer who happened as well to be a SEAL.

  Good old Dad. He was the reason every single summer since that year had sucked balls. Every summer except this one. I mean, it had still sucked. Mom was still dead, my dad had still killed her, but for once, I wasn’t drowning in booze trying to fight the inevitable depression I sunk into every year.

  I had always wanted to be a SEAL because he had been one. He had the greatest stories, and he had gone on and on about BUD/s being the real test that separated the boys from the men. Fuck it; I wanted to be a man. I wanted to be like him. But then he killed my mother, and I had to wonder whether that was true anymore.

  I had gone through with it eventually, joining the Navy. If I had taken anything from Dad’s stories about the SEALs, it was how brutal it was. It was hard to be a delinquent out in the boonies, but I had found a way. Vandalism got old pretty fast, so drugs took its place. Those got pretty bad pretty fast too. Violence took its place because I wanted someone to punish me for not being able to protect my mom. Dad had described SEAL training like the worst torture he had ever experienced. I had signed up as soon as I could.

  I eventually moved onto bigger if not better things. I had been a SEAL for six years, and I hadn’t murdered anyone. Not aggravated murder, anyway. I couldn’t speak for anyone who had taken a bullet from me in combat. Part of me wanted to see whether the two were connected—killing your wife and being a SEAL—and apparently, they weren’t. My dad was just a monster.

  Maybe he was dead, but the prison would likely tell me if that ever happened. What did he feel when this time of year came around? I knew what I felt. Every year, every fucking year I felt like someone had frozen all my insides and my body just didn’t work anymore. I felt mad and agitated and sad in turn, and all at once. But this year… this year I had gotten that call from Bart, then I had met Ronnie, and the kids and a couple of nights ago we were fucking. This year was… it was good, actually.

  Shit. Things were different. I couldn’t hole up until the clouds parted even if I wanted to. What if Veronica needed me to watch the kids, or to eat her out? I needed to be on my toes. I wasn’t feeling the usual darkness associated with the time, and that was a good thing. A great thing. Was this what it felt like to have dependents? That was giving myself too much; Veronica wasn’t my dependent. She did like having me around though, and I liked it too.

  I waited to feel something. Sadness, or anger or all the rest. Instead, I thought about what Veronica and the kids were doing that day. I didn’t have to sit there and be curious. I could just go. I had shown up unannounced before. She was completely into me; there was no way she would be mad if I showed up. I called first to ask whether they were home, then left.

  I didn’t want to be alone. I could be if I had to, but today, I didn’t have to. Veronica kissed me at the door. The kids were watching television in the living room eating frozen grapes. It was… I don’t know, like, a nice thing to come home to. It wasn’t my home, and they hadn’t been waiting for me, but it was nice, regardless. A full house.

  I hung out in the kitchen with Veronica, watching her prepare dinner. There was a chicken, the whole thing, not just a piece that she was basting in different shit before she put it in the oven. There were three kinds of vegetables that she was peeling and cleaning.

  “Do you need help?” I offered. I liked to watch her, but I had two hands. I could help if she needed me to. We had learned rudimentary medical care in the SEALs; I could handle a blade.

  “Can you slice peppers?” she asked. I stood next to her as she showed me the way she wanted it done; lengthways with the seeds taken out. I was doing great until I sliced my hand open. She handed me a wad of paper towel and took the knife from me.

  “Oh no,” she said about the knife, or the peppers, or my hand, I wasn’t sure. She made me sit at the table while she dug up some iodine. I resisted her. It was fine. I was fine.

  “Ronnie, relax. I’ve had a lot worse,” I assured her. She was adamant that I at least let her clean it. I gritted my teeth, so I didn’t make a sound when the iodine got into the cut. Stung like shit.

  “You okay?” she asked. It was a nick from a kitchen knife. She had been like this after the fight I had with Michael too. All worried and shit. She had nothing to worry about, but maybe I’d keep getting hurt, just so she’d take care of me.

  “It’s gonna take more than that to take me out,” I said. She put some gauze over the cut and wrapped my hand.

  “Did this hurt more than getting tattooed?” she asked.

  “It hurt more than some, less than others. The elbow’s a bitch to get tattooed. This part too,” I said, touching the soft skin on her arm where her upper and lower arms met.

  “Which one is your favorite?” she asked. Her skin was flawless, not even a scar anywhere on her let alone a tattoo. Blank canvas. I pulled my shirt off to show her.

  “The one on my back, my mom’s name.”

  “Is that whose name it is?”

  “Whose did you think it was?”

  “Some girl I replaced,” she said flippantly. She moved, so she was behind me. She traced her fingers over the letters.

  “Kathleen. That’s a beautiful name.”

  “My dad used to call her Katty.”

  “Are they still alive?”

  “He is. She isn’t.”

  “What happened? Do you mind me asking?”

  I didn’t. She was behind me still, so I couldn’t see her face, but even though I wasn’t looking at her, I didn’t want to tell her no.

  “She died, a long time ago, just before I turned twelve. It’s the anniversary of her death, actually.”

  “Was she sick?”

  “She was murdered. My father killed her.”

  Her hand stopped moving on my back. I turned around to face her, standing.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “Besides Bart, you’re the only other person I’ve told.”

  “I can’t imagine how hard that was for you.”

  “I had to testify in court. At least the whole mourning son thing worked out. He was sentenced to life, without parole.”

  “I get so scared sometimes that Chris and Nikki are going to lose Bart. Laurie’s still AWOL. I wouldn’t know what to do. Did you end up in the foster system?”

  “No. I moved in with an aunt and uncle out near Yosemite.”

  “Just like Nikki and Chris.”

  “No. My aunt wasn’t nearly as hot as you. I split for the Navy the minute I turned eighteen.”

  “Do you miss your dad?”

  “Heh, not really.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “I want to beat him with a lamp and break his neck the way he did to my mom.”

  She didn’t even flinch. Her hand touched my face, and she kissed me lightly on the lips. Not the reaction I was expecting, but I wasn’t complaining.

  “You can speak freely around me. I want you to,” she
said.

  “You want me to spill all my secrets? It’s not enough that you have me here slicing peppers and drinking cranapple juice?” I asked.

  “You keep saying you don’t like it but you’re here every time I ask you to come over.”

  “That’s because once the kids are asleep, you take your panties off and you make every agonizing minute of domesticity worth it.” I kissed her. She let me slide my tongue in her mouth. She got into it, running her hands down my abs.

  The doorbell rang.

  “I’ll get it,” I offered, breaking the kiss.

  She continued in the kitchen while I opened the door.

  The woman standing there looked about my age or a little younger. Her hair was blonde and her eyes brown. She looked me up and down and shot me the dirtiest look imaginable.

  “Who the fuck are you?” she asked.

  “You’re joking, right? Who am I? Who the fuck are you? You’re the one who rang the bell.”

  “Thaddeus? Who’s there?” Veronica asked from inside the house.

  “Who is that?” the woman asked. Who was that? Who was she? Why hadn’t she told me who the fuck she was yet? I felt a tug on the door, letting go to let Veronica open it up and stand beside me. Her face dropped.

  “Laurie?”

  Hold up, Laurie? The Laurie? Child deserter and crazy bitch Laurie? I almost laughed right then because I couldn’t believe it. What the fuck was she doing here? For what? Was it the kids? Because she had left them once already. I looked at Veronica. Her arms were crossed across her chest, and she looked completely unimpressed. I wasn’t proud, but I silently hoped one of them would throw a punch.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “A hello would be nice,” Laurie said.

  “It would. So would a phone call, or email or text message telling us where the hell you were this entire time.”

  “I know this looks bad. I’m here to apologize.”

  “To who? To me or to Bart or the kids?”

  “The kids. I want to see them,” she said. Veronica looked at her.

  “No,” she said simply.

  “They’re my kids; you can’t stop me from seeing them.”

  “Are they yours? Are you sure about that? Because you left them like furniture you didn’t want on the fucking curb. Did you really think you could just show up and get them back like nothing happened?”

  “I just want to see them, okay. I’ll explain everything. Just let me talk to them.”

  Veronica, God love her, was a very nice person. Maybe too nice. She let Laurie in and led her to the living room where the kids were. They were surprised to see her, but they both hugged her. I pulled Ronnie from the room and stood in the entryway with her.

  “You want to relax, maybe?” I asked.

  “I don’t trust her,” she said.

  “She’s their mom.”

  “She’s a bitch.”

  “Give her like, half an hour or something with them, then kick her out,” I suggested. We wouldn’t have to wait that long after all. Nicolette came running up to Veronica, crying. Christopher followed, his eyes down. She threw her arms around her and cried.

  “Baby, what happened?” she asked her. She was too upset to talk. Veronica sat on one of the steps and let the kid sit in her lap. Christopher followed them, sitting next to his aunt, quiet. He had that face on like he had had the last time Nikki had been crying, at the hospital. I felt sorry for the kid. He was trying to be brave.

  “Can you tell me what happened, Chris?” she asked gently.

  “Mom... Mom was showing us the gifts she got us, and we were happy to see her. Then I asked her where she went, and she said that she went out to get cigarettes and she was staying with her boyfriend. I asked her why she left us alone and she started getting mad. She pushed me. When Nikki started crying, she told her to shut up.”

  Left to buy cigarettes? What a bitch. First of all, it wasn’t true, no way and even if it was, you didn’t tell a kid that.

  “Did she make you feel scared of her?” I asked the boy. He was sniffling then. He wiped at the tears angrily, like he didn’t want to cry in front of us.

  “Why would she just leave us? Is her boyfriend more important than me and Nikki?”

  Veronica hugged the boy to her side, kissing his head.

  “I’m so sorry baby,” she told him. “I’m kicking her out,” she said to me. I wasn’t even going to fight her on it.

  “I’ll take them, come on guys,” I said. Nikki grasped my hand and Christopher followed behind as we went to the living room, we passed Veronica and Laurie on their way out. The kids didn’t even look up at her. The stuff she had brought them was magic markers and coloring books.

  “You guys wanna use this stuff?” I asked. Nikki just shook her head.

  “It would be a shame to let it go to waste.”

  “She can’t just buy us stuff and make it better,” Chris said angrily.

  “Okay, sit. All of you, sit.”

  We sat on the ground. Nikki sat next to me and rested her head on my arm. Chris picked at the carpet angrily.

  “What could your mom do to make it better?”

  “She could leave us alone,” Chris said.

  “She could let us live here with Aunt Ron and Dad, and you,” Nikki said quietly.

  “How did you feel when she left you guys?”

  “Shitty,” Christopher said. I wanted to laugh but I couldn’t. I had to be the adult.

  “That was pretty shitty what she did to you but not forgiving her would be a shitty thing to do too.”

  Christopher sighed.

  “Is she going to come back?” Nikki asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did your parents ever do something mean to you?” he asked.

  “My dad hurt my mom; I was upset about that.”

  “Did you forgive him?”

  “I should have,” I said. “You can’t stay angry at her forever.”

  “She has to say sorry first,” Nikki said. Her fingers were tracing the outline of one of the tattoos on my forearm, the way Veronica had been.

  “All I’m gonna ask you to do is to promise to listen to her when she comes and wants to say sorry. Okay? You guys can do that, right?”

  “Okay,” they said in turn.

  “Why doesn’t this part have any color?” Nikki asked. She was rubbing her hand over the ink in my arms like she was trying to see whether it would come out. The entire sleeve was black and gray. It featured various combat scenes from sea, air, and land to commemorate the best of times and the worst of times. The SEALs had actually been a fantastic experience; I wanted something permanent to commemorate it. A plain old trident tattoo was too obvious.

  “I asked my artist not to use any.”

  “Can I put some in?” she asked.

  “How are you going to do that?” I asked. She pointed at the magic markers that their mother had brought them.

  That was the way Veronica found us. Sitting on the floor with the kids busy coloring in my black and gray tattoos.

  19

  Veronica

  August third was the first day of school in the Monterey County school district. At the beginning of the summer it had seemed like a lifetime away, but of course, it wasn’t. It had been just over a month or so away and it had finally arrived. It wasn’t like we weren’t ready. I had been fucking ready; I had stayed ready. The summer had been, literally, the one where my life as I had known it fell apart, but you could not say for a second that I hadn’t been killing it in the legal guardian gig. I was made to be a primary caregiver. I was parenting the shit out of my niece and nephew. The kids had been ready too. We had been counting down the days and preparing for this moment.

  We had been doing a running countdown of the days left till school started. We, and by we, I mean they, had also had to go to sleep progressively earlier each night leading up to school. Sort of like sleep training to get them used to normal and expected sleeping hour
s for when school started for real.

  Thad had been taking full advantage of the earlier nights that the kids were having because it meant the adults-only activities could begin; we just had to do our best to keep it quiet. There was also the ever-present danger of the kids coming into my room to sleep, but they had been needing to do it less and less. They probably just liked my bed because it was a California King. I got it. I used to find every excuse to sleep with my parents in their bed when I was a kid too.

  I had checked and double checked all the things that they would need. They had backpacks, they had a weekly lunch menu, I had all the phone numbers, and I had read every single page of their school’s website. I had all the dates, had read all the special announcements and had created an account in the parents’ portal. I was ready. The method by which they would both get to school and get back home from school was me. I would drop them off and pick them up.

  This was very important. Not only would it be a nicer transition for them than just using the bus, it would also be two times every day, five times a week where I would have to leave the house. I was writing my schedule at the same time as theirs. They were my first priority after all, so it was just normal and expected that getting them ready for school and collecting them afterward would be important times of my day. That was what I kept telling myself.

  Was it sad that making a school run every day was not going to be something that took away from time I could have spent doing other things? This was a whole new school and set of people for them to get used to, and it was a whole new schedule of completely free days that I would have to get used to.

  It was at least two hours or so in the morning and what, forty-five minutes in the afternoon? That was something to do with at least three hours of every day. On top of that was the subsequent hours when we would be at the house, doing homework, having snacks, eating dinner, preparing for bed and actually going to bed. So, I was still busy, from three in the afternoon when school let out and before half-past eight in the morning when school started. That was something, and I was clinging to it.