Divine Conspiracy (Divine #1)

by Rose Hudson

  Forgoing my sneak attack in wake of the overtaking of seriousness, I begin walking heavily on the dock, causing both of their attention to turn on me. Not sure who’s gorgeous smile captivates me more, I smile at them both with enormous pride.

  “Look who came Momma!” Her excitement is undeniable and scary as hell for me. Great, she is falling for him too.

  “Well, did you really think I could keep away knowing you were next door.” He smiles and pokes her in the side before standing, looking at me with those silver eyes, taking my breath away like he always does. “And I couldn’t wait one more minute to do this.” Keeping it PG, he leans in and lightly presses his lips to mine for far too short a second, eliciting a barely audible moan of protest from me. It had only been two days. Two days since I had kissed him and my whole body ached for his hands. Like a drug to my addiction, I needed a dose of him. Keeping me from falling forward face first, he wraps his arms around me and pulls me into him. Dear sweet baby Jesus. Have you ever had one of those hugs that feels so good that your entire body relaxes? That you release a moan of pleasure far too erotic for the action, but having no choice because it feels that good? I can feel every hard plane of his muscled torso through this gloriously thin shirt. He makes me feel like such a perv. My grandmother would smack me if she could hear my thoughts, tell me that ladies don’t act this way. But good lord, cut me some slack! Have you seen the man? What feels the best about it though, is that he is hugging me just as hard as I’m hugging him. Reciprocation. It’s been a while.

  Have I mentioned that Patrick makes it hard not to brag on him? Yeah, well, it is. I don’t know what we would’ve done today if he hadn’t come. Chanin and Leelan were supposed to be here and I guess if they were, Leelan would be doing the heavy lifting. But I couldn’t be happier that their flight had been delayed, because we got a two-for-one deal. Not only did Patrick show up unexpectedly, but about an hour after he arrived Dawson had called to see what he was doing and decided to join us. I would give my right foot to have been videoing Mel’s face when he walked in. Oh God, it was priceless. I can already tell there is trouble a’ brewin’ there, but I won’t stick my nose in just yet. She better be glad Chanin wasn’t here because she has been waiting for a chance to get Mel good, and this would’ve been her golden moment for sure. But anyway, since they were there to help us, we got the warehouse completely ready for the guys we hired to come and power wash it inside and out. Give it a couple of days to dry and air out and come Thursday they will be able to move everything in. We may have used our Sunday to get it done, but it will be well worth it to see everything moved in this time next week.

  Watching Ruth slowly slip into love with Patrick just like I have has been tough today. I wish it were as simple as to say ‘hey, let’s all stay together and be happy forever’, but unfortunately relationships don’t work that way. It’s as if we each walk a beam, a line or boundary, and as long as we do everything correct in that person’s eyes, they won’t push us off into the depths of hell. Love causes pain. Pain that I have tried to avoid for all these years, but am trying to reassure myself that it’s worth it this time. Only time will tell.

  Oddly enough, Mel’s comments about not having a father have taken center stage in my mind today. My thoughts started to picture adult Ruth standing where Mel had with tears running down her cheeks, talking about how her life had been consumed with my unwillingness to experience life. Then they drifted to thoughts of adult Ruth dancing with Patrick at her wedding, which a tiny version of me quickly chased out of my brain with a baseball bat. Not quite ready for all that, gun-jumper. But somewhere along the way my mind wandered to thoughts of my own father and how it has been five years since I have even heard his voice. More so, how I strangely want to hear his voice, how right away my brain flew through file after file of archived memory, desperately searching for one good memory of the two of us to hold on to. Of course some were located, I mean lord, my father wasn’t a monster, he was just…mostly absent. Checked-out. In another world. However you want to put it, he was usually somewhere else other than with me. But I have worked so hard to stuff those good memories into deep dark forgotten places in my mind. I mean that little chick in the filing room had to work pretty hard to find the good ones, but she did. Thinking over them, vivid pictures of those days playing on a reel, I see that I have purposefully kept myself mad at him. I mean, that’s why I filed those memories away in a box marked ‘do not open’, right? We all know it’s easier to just be mad about something than it is to work through and process things. To have to go through the forgiveness process and work at rebuilding a relationship. But also, I’ve never really had to worry about my parents saying anything that would warrant forgiveness anyway. The day Garon Presley admits fault and asks for forgiveness, you all better hold on tight because I fear hell will freeze over and crack wide open. Besides, It’s not necessarily an apology I’m looking for anymore, it’s more of an explanation that I want. I want to know how they could make the decisions they did, possibly get to know my parents below the surface.

  Ruth squeals in laughter, the sight of her running from Patrick as he tries to spray her with the water hose breaks through my memory fog. I smile through the pain in my chest, swallowing down the massive feeling of years wasted. Wasted without my parents. Wasted without the love of another person. Wasted because I have purposefully held my daughter captive from experiencing life because of my fear of it. I quickly turn my back to them, breathing deeply and pleading with my emotions to come back together, to not do this here and now. I swear, if I ever fall apart you can guarantee that it will be at the wrong place wrong time. Looking at the water of the bay it seems like it would be so easy to just jump in and swim forever. Maybe that’s why I never go down to the water. Fearful I’ll just jump in and never come back, face my fears and actually handle life as an adult.

  “Hey Mom!” Ruth runs up behind me, excited and out of breath. “Can we go get something to eat with everyone else?” Shit. There is no way in hell that I can go to a restaurant and put on a smile right now. My emotions have hit overload and I really just need a night to unwind. Of course I would love some de-stress time with Patrick, but I feel this overwhelming need to call my mom. I know it’s been five years, but someone has to make the first step. I look over Ruth as Patrick approaches us, his eyes register that he senses something is wrong. Shit shit shit. Straightening and exhaling a deep breath to gain my composure, I smile down at Ruth and push her hair behind her ear.

  “Honey, I’ve got a headache and I would really just like to go home. Not tonight.”

  “Momma, please! Patrick said he’d teach me how to play pool and I’m starvin’,” she pleads and looks over to Patrick for support when he reaches us.

  “What’s up? You okay,” he questions, brows lowered as he rubs my shoulder.

  “Everything’s fine, just a headache. We’ll have to take a rain check on dinner.” Ruth pouts and turns to walk off, knowing that pushing me will only get her embarrassed. As she walks back to Mel and Dawson, Patrick pulls me to him, caressing my back and unconsciously taking away my pain with each gentle circle of his massive hand. His touch always feels like medicine, a cure. I get this weightless feeling when he holds me, like I could float away with the family of clouds above us and be just fine because he’s holding me.

  “Why don’t you let Ruth come with us and I’ll drop her off when we get done?” He pauses and I force my lungs to work and my heart to beat. Really? Taking Ruth out? Without me? Wow. “I have been talking smack about my pool skills all day. It would hurt my street cred if I didn’t get the chance to show her up properly, ya know?” I can’t help but giggle like a little girl at the case he pleads.

  “Is that right? Well, I’d sure hate to stand in the way of you schooling my daughter in pool. That’s a skill that’ll surely come in handy when she sharks people out of money in college.” He chuckles that deep throaty laugh that reverberates through me and I instantly want to tell him I
’m lying about the headache and take him to his loft and have my way with him. Running my hands up the back of his shirt, feeling the taut warm skin, I look up at him with that glint of lust in my eyes. “You sure you don’t want to ditch all these losers and take me to your place?” I wink, scoffing when he doesn’t make one of his usual panty-dropping moves on me. He leans down to my ear, whispering as if someone would hear him or taunting me because he knows nobody can.

  “Oh, don’t you worry. I may look calm, but we’ve already fucked three times in my head today.” He grazes his beard over my jawbone, feathering his lips across mine as he moves.

  “Now you’re just making stuff up.”

  “I showed up didn’t I? I couldn’t stand being home and knowing you were next door. You’re driving me crazy, you know that?”

  Deciding to let Ruth grab something to eat with Patrick and the other two goons, I decided to call my mother on the way home. Nervous, not sure what to expect, and wondering what I would be met with on the other line, I connect my phone to the Bluetooth in my SUV and listen to it ring three times before she answers.

  “Hello?” I can tell she doesn’t recognize the number by the way she says it so curiously.

  “Mom, hi, it’s Erin.” I wait for her to say something, but nothing comes. I know she is still there because I can hear muffled background noise. “I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time, I just really wanted to call and check on you guys.” She clears her throat and I can hear the emotion in it. My throat becomes thick and pained with powerful emotions as well, and I force myself to stifle a sob.

  “I’m really glad you called Darlin’. I sure have been thinking about you a lot lately. Your daddy has too.” Unable to force them down anymore, the tears fall freely. I hear mom talking to someone in the background, but it’s a woman’s voice that replies.

  “Do I need to call you back Mom? Do you have company?”

  “No, just the nurse leaving. She has been here doing her weekly check on your father.”

  “Weekly check? For what?” My heart twists and squeezes and I almost wish I’d never have called because I know that for my father to have a nurse coming to the house, something is bad wrong. Bad wrong.

  “Your daddy isn’t doing good, Honey. The cancer is…his body is failing.”

  With that simple, life changing statement, my world started to spin out of control and I had to force air in and out of my lungs. It’s funny how you think you can live without someone until you are faced with just that. That tough exterior quickly disappears and you revert back to a time before there was anything to hate that person for, or what you thought was hate anyway. At once, all those good memories that I struggled to remember earlier came flooding over me and the tears started to come.

  “DAD, WHAT’S THE MATTER with you?”

  “Go on. Leave me be.” I grab his feet and begin to pull him out of his truck. He is long at six-foot-four inches. He is heavy.

  “Dad! Come on!” I tug harder, bringing his lower body outside the truck, feet on the ground, torso in the floorboard. I look around to see if anyone is watching the shit-show that’s now just a regular occurrence at our house. Resigning to comfort, knowing that being harsh and trying to pull his big ass across the lawn isn’t going to get him inside, I kneel down and try to talk to him. “You can’t sleep in the driveway, Dad. Let me help you inside before someone sees.”

  “Let them see! All they’ll see is a miserable drunk!” His sudden flare of anger causing him to push himself upright, out of the truck and stumble across the driveway before landing in the grass. “What? Never seen a broken heart before,” he yells to the neighborhood. Mortified I look around again, but thankfully it’s a weeknight and most normal families are eating dinner and getting ready for the next day of work and school. Knowing the tears were falling, I make my way over and I lean down.

  “We gotta’ fix your heart, and drinking yourself to death ain’t gonna’ do it, Dad.” He grabs my hand, pulling me down to the grass beside him.

  “Look at that, Son,” he points to the sky above us, bringing my attention to the first shooting star I’d ever seen. Well hell, I thought this would happen when I was trying to win over a girl, not laying in the grass with my drunk dad. “Your Mother used to lay a blanket out and we’d watch, hoping to see a shooting star, but we never did. Maybe that’s her, waving to us.” I want to leave him here, run inside and let him sleep this off in the front yard. Mom died four months ago and this has been an every night ordeal since. But seeing him like this and remembering how they were together, how totally in love they were, keeps me here, lying in the wet grass with him, talking about how wonderful she was.

  “Maybe. Or maybe she just wanted to make sure we got to see one, so she asked God to make it happen.” Like always, I entertain the notion that Mom somehow continues to play a role in our lives. My chest begins to tighten and I feel the pain trying to surface. I squeeze my fists, hard. Forcing down the emotion. My entire body like a balloon floating through a rose garden, the slightest wrong word spoken or failure to keep memories of her at bay will cause a strong wind to blow me into the sharp, jagged thorns, deflating me, destroying me. I sit up and look down at my father, flat of his back, staring up at the evening sky, tears falling from his eyes and watering the already wet grass. “Dad. Let’s not do this tonight, okay? I’m tired. I just want to go to bed.” Dad pulls Mom’s handkerchief from his pants pocket and wipes his nose and face, breathing it in, hopeful of a particle of her smell left untouched, causing more tears to fall when there isn’t. My fourteen-year-old heart unable to bear the sight of this giant of a man so lost without my mother, a crack starts to form in its exterior, painfully growing, dangerously darkening my soul and my spirit.

  “You’re right, Son. Let’s call it a night.” Usually he fights me, demands that he should stay here in the grass watching for Mom to wave again. Surprisingly, he stands on his own, suddenly lacking the previous hindrances of the alcohol. He returns to a sober state, agile, straightens his towering form and puts his arm around me, leading us into the house. My face has to be covered in shock, because just seconds ago he was drunk, slurring and his usual basket-case self. Suddenly his appearance even changes and he is bright and cheerful and back to himself; the Wesley Broussard he was before mom got sick, before cancer started to eat away at her body and destroy my family.

  Strangely, without reason or possibility since Dad and I live alone, a young attractive blonde opens the front door and steps out, walking toward us carrying two crystal tumblers containing a dark liquid. As she gets closer, I know who she is. Evil. Death. Satan’s right hand. But how do I know her? Why do I know her? I’m only fourteen and I shouldn’t know this woman, but I do. When I look back to my father, he’s changed, hair falling over his miserably sunken face, dress shirt wrinkled and half untucked from his now bulging belly.

  “Josephine,” the words come from his lips like a love song laced with hatred and resentment. Her name, like a trigger, causing a small thin line of black liquid to run from his nose. Approaching us, she takes the handkerchief from Dad’s hand and wipes his nose, patting his cheek with her palm before suddenly taking his antique cigar lighter from his shirt pocket and lighting the handkerchief on fire. “Thank you, Jo. I’d been looking to get rid of that.”

  My lips suddenly won’t part. That fucking Bitch! She just set fire to my mother’s handkerchief and I can’t even tell her to leave, to go and never come back. What the fuck is going on? My entire body is still and I am watching her hand each of us a glass, but my insides are complete chaos, screaming and running and breaking and hurting. Hurting. Pain. Excruciating pain.

  “Drink this. It’s my own special recipe,” Jo says, patting us both on the cheeks. Don’t touch me you fucking cunt. God, why can’t I scream at her? Work mouth! Tell this bitch to go back to hell where she came from!

  “What is it,” Dad asks as we simultaneously lift the glasses to our lips and drink the thick, black, foul liqui
d without hesitation. She cackles. Why are we drinking this? It’s awful. I could smell it coming a mile away. I knew not to, but I couldn’t stop myself… Why did I trust her?

  “Death.” Her voice echoes… Dark… Empty… Black…

  My eyes open and I hear the sharp ragged breaths heaving from my chest, but I don’t register that it’s me right away. I don’t move, don’t even tilt my head in any direction as my eyes struggle to look around the room. My bedroom. My loft. I lift my hands. Larger. Older. Rougher. It’s me. Thirty-two-year-old me, not fourteen-year-old me. Relieved to be out of the black hole of my dream, I sit up on the side of the bed, noting the still darkness of the night laying over the surface of the water through my window. I look over to the bedside clock; 3:00 a.m.

  With no chance of sleep, I stand and walk cautiously toward the kitchen. I think I’ll make coffee up here this morning instead of downstairs like I normally do. That dream has haunted me for years, along with others, but that one holds significance. When that one comes, darkness in my reality usually follows. I place my palms on the counter as I approach, forcing my eyes closed and feeling like I could destroy something. Instead, I grit my teeth and pull the coffee and filters down from the cabinet. Willing my mind to quit racing, to go about my day as normal. Somewhere in this world, the bitch is sleeping. Soundly breathing in and out, while I’m conducting my regular three a.m. routine; forcing my heart not to beat out of my chest and my hands not to break everything they touch. But she sleeps. Sociopath’s usually do.

  Have you ever heard the term ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’? Of course you have. So that means you know what it means, and unless you’re perfect, you’ve probably experienced it a time or two in your life. If I didn’t work in a metal building, I would constantly be looking up today because I just know shit is about to hit the fan. There have only been a select number of times that I have had that dream and I learned about the second time I had it, that I better start looking around for hell to break loose somewhere. But it’s already just about quitting time and….nothing. Yet, I just can’t come down from this feeling.