Built

by Jay Crownover

  His eyes that were an identical match to my own widened and he set his beer down on the table with a thunk. He leaned closer to me and bit out, “That’s bullshit, Sayer. It’s utter bullshit and you know it.”

  I blinked in surprise at the vehemence in his tone. It went completely against his laid-back personality to get so heated, especially at me. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because as soon as you found out about me you dropped everything and moved your life here. You had no idea how I would react, if I was a nice guy or a complete asshole, and yet you took that leap blindly. You didn’t know a thing about me or my life and yet you were determined to be my family even when I acted like a dipshit when we first met.”

  I sucked in a sharp breath and sat back in my chair a little bit as his words sank in. He wasn’t finished leveling the hard and uncomfortable truth as he saw it at me, though.

  “Then you helped Asa out for me without blinking an eye. That fancy-ass lawyer friend of yours wouldn’t have even looked at his case if it wasn’t for you, and then not even a month later you took in a stranger. You moved a scared, broken girl into your home simply because I love her. You have done more for Poppy than either Salem or I have been able to do, so don’t try and tell me you don’t invest in people as passionately or as wholeheartedly as Zeb does because it’s bullshit.”

  I couldn’t think of a valid rebuttal, which annoyed me to no end, so I sat back in my chair and glared at him. “Are you sure you didn’t take any law classes while you were in college?”

  He wiggled his eyebrows up and down at me in his usual cavalier way, and I fought the urge to throw a chip at him. Going after Rowdy was the first completely out-of-character thing I had ever done. It was a compulsion, a craving for family and a place to belong and be loved, which was something I never had before. I couldn’t resist the pull any more than I could resist the draw and tug of endless attraction between me and Zeb. When I took Poppy in it wasn’t just because she was important to Rowdy, and he had become so very important to me . . . no, it was because I saw so much of myself inside the broken shell of the young woman. I knew exactly what it felt like to have someone try to strip you of your value and humanity. I knew all too well what it felt like to never measure up to someone who was supposed to love you unconditionally and yet all they did was tear you down. My father had never been uncouth or out of control enough to raise his hand to me or to my mother . . . but his words and his pitiless, dismissive actions . . . those nasty suckers had fallen just as heavily as the mightiest of blows. Poppy had her whole life ahead of her. I didn’t want her stuck in place and stuck unmoving from the past’s embrace like I was. I didn’t want her to shut off her heart. It was too beautiful and needed to be shared with someone who would cherish it. She deserved that.

  “If you don’t put yourself out there to risk the hurt, then you won’t ever feel the pleasure either. There is no good without the bad, Sayer. Just look at the way I came into this world.”

  We both got quiet for a second as he sucked in a sharp breath. “My mom was young, too young, when she had me. Your dad was older, knew better, and was married, with you at home when she got knocked up. The only two people that can tell

  us what actually happened between the two of them are gone, but we both know that whatever the circumstances were, my mom was taken advantage of and left to deal with the consequences on her own.”

  I gulped a little because I never wanted to admit to him just how manipulative and hateful my father could be. I didn’t want to think about the man who had raised me taking advantage of a helpless teenage girl, but it was impossible not to when the proof was sitting across from me sipping a beer.

  “Regardless of the hurt my mom may have suffered, she loved me. She took amazing care of me and never let me go a single second without knowing I was loved and the center of her entire world. She focused on the joy I brought her, not on the pain that she had to go through to end up with me in her life. You have to be wounded in order to heal.”

  Rowdy’s mom had been killed during an armed robbery when he was just a little boy, so I was surprised he had such bright and clear memories of her. My mother had killed herself when I was slightly older and yet most of the things I remembered about her were fuzzy and covered in a tint of gray and sorrow. There was no joy and pleasure when I thought about her, only sadness and resentment. I wanted her to be stronger for herself, but more than that I had longed for her to be stronger for me.

  “Some wounds go so deep and reach so far down into the basic parts of who we are that they can never be healed, Rowdy. They just bleed, fester, and trickle really nasty stuff out of the person bearing them forever.”

  He shook his head and I was amazed that the styled front of his hair didn’t move so much as an inch. I guess it took a lot of skill and a lot of product to keep that modern-day James Dean look in place.

  “You’re wrong. You know how I know that you’re wrong? Because I used to think the same thing. I had a heart that was broken and, I’d thought, beyond repair. I was hung up on what I thought I always wanted instead of what I actually deserved. The wound might be deep, so deep that you feel it all the way to your bones, and that means you get comfortable with the pain, the hurt becomes familiar, and you don’t know what to do without it. But then someone else comes along and sees you suffering and it hurts them to watch you ache within the walls of that pain. Your wound wounds them and you realize really fast that maybe you weren’t able to heal the hurt on your own, maybe you are, in fact, immune to how shitty it feels, but for them and with them you work to get better because that person makes you realize that you shouldn’t be comfortable or complacent with something that feels awful no matter how used to it you are. It just takes the right person to see it. No one except for Salem was able to put my heart back together and she had to fight to position each and every single piece in the place it was supposed to be. She healed me not only for me but for her as well.”

  The sentiment was so sweet, so brutally honest about how he felt about his girlfriend, that it made a heavy ball of emotion form in my throat. Mostly to break some of the feelings that were sneaking up on me that I wasn’t sure what to do with, I lifted an eyebrow and jokingly asked him, “Aren’t you supposed to be doing the brotherly duty thing and warning me away from a guy with a criminal record and a history of sleeping around? Isn’t he the last kind of guy who we should be talking about fixing what’s broken inside of me?” It was a silly question to ask considering Zeb fixed broken things for a living, but houses weren’t people and it would take more than some new paint and refinished floors for the ice that surrounded my insides to fissure and thaw.

  “If Zeb is the right guy then he’s the right guy and none of that other shit matters. At first when I saw him watching you it made me really uncomfortable, but not because I don’t trust him or think he’s a good dude. I’d just gotten you and I don’t think I was ready to share you with anyone else yet, but now that you’re obviously here to stay and I get to keep you forever, I want you to be happy, Sayer.”

  Deciding to change the subject because I wasn’t sure what happiness really looked like or how I went about getting it for myself, with or without Zeb in the picture, I asked him when the baby was due and when they would know if it was a little boy or girl. His excitement over impending fatherhood was contagious. I knew he and Salem would make wonderful parents, and when the sisters joined us a few minutes later, both looking emotionally wrung out but finally at peace with one another, the weekend that was meant to be a celebration finally started.

  None of us came from families that taught us to love and to care about others. All of our backgrounds were fractured and cracked. It was a flat-out miracle we had all found one another and through fight and persistence now had a solid foundation of real family and love to rebuild on. My niece or nephew would never know what it felt like to be unwanted or unloved. He or she would never have to worry about living up to unrealistic expectations and being
judged harshly for any of the struggles and failures life liked to test us all with. That baby would know what a real family and what a real home was like, and just like that, I felt the edges of that wound I pretended I didn’t have, and had told Rowdy would never heal, start to tug themselves closed somewhere deep inside of me.

  CHAPTER 10

  Zeb

  I wasn’t this nervous when the cops slapped cuffs on me and hauled me off to lockup.

  I wasn’t this nervous when the judge issued my sentence and I learned that I was going to be locked up for a minimum of two and a half years of my life.

  I wasn’t this nervous when my high school girlfriend, who had eventually become my fiancée and then ex-fiancée after I had gone away, told me that she thought she might be knocked up when I was only sixteen. It was a false alarm, one that you would have thought taught me a valuable lesson about birth control, but no, it was another lapse in judgment when it came to women and sex that had me walking into the massive Denver court building with Sayer looking serious and ready to fight tooth and nail at my side.

  In fact the only other time I had been this nervous was that first day I got to meet my son. It was overwhelming how important someone I had just met could be and how vital that little boy had become to not only my future but my happiness as well. Every chance I got to see him I took it. It was tricky scheduling visits around his current foster-care situation and my work schedule, but I did it, and so far I had been fortunate enough to get a few hours each week with the little boy. Every time I saw him he took a bigger chunk of my heart with him when I had to say good-bye, and I could tell he was getting more and more attached to me as well. After our last visit he had wrapped himself around my legs and refused to let go. It took both me and Maria, plus a promise of an extra visit, to talk him into letting go.

  The pep talk Sayer had given me for an hour in her office had done little to settle my jangling nerves. She was the perfect mix of feminine and fierce in a black pants suit that was tailored to her long and lean frame perfectly with some kind of pale pink lacy thing poking out behind the lapels, but the more she told me that it was all going to be fine, the less I wanted to believe her. She was trying to be confident and reassuring, but we both knew what was at stake. She kept telling me to answer the judge’s questions honestly, that I needed to keep my cool if they asked about my prison sentence, and that I simply needed to show the court how much I wanted to have Hyde in my life. I needed to convince the judge I had what it took to be a father. Over and over again she told me nothing was going to be off-limits, so if I had any skeletons hidden deep in my closet she needed to know. They were going to judge me, my biggest sore spot, but she told me repeatedly they wouldn’t find me lacking. It was nice to hear coming from the woman I wanted more than almost anything but it didn’t make my nerves any less taut.

  Sayer mentioned that she had been before this particular judge in the past and that he was stern but ultimately fair. She told me he was going to grill me about anything and everything and that all I had to do was give him factual and succinct answers. I reminded her that I was an open book and had hidden nothing from her since the beginning. Telling the truth about who I was and where I had been sounded so easy because I never tried to hide it. Declaring all my faults and putting every mistake I had ever made on display in front of the person that would ultimately decide if I should be a father or not amplified every insecurity I had. Sayer tried to tell me over and over that it would all be fine and I wanted to believe her, but I could see that she was just as nervous as I was in the way she couldn’t stop fiddling with things in front of her and the way her toes kept tapping under her fancy desk.

  All I could do was nod at her and assure her that I understood how much was riding on what happened today and how I presented myself to the judge. For this initial meeting, it was only me and Sayer, plus Maria from CASA, going before the judge. She told me that moving forward she would also plan on involving my mom as well as Beryl in the proceedings if the court needed any kind of character witnesses on my behalf. She was hoping it wasn’t going to come to that, but I wasn’t so sure. I had cleaned myself up but there was no hiding some of the outward trappings that would always mark me as a man that had done and paid for things that would never make a good impression on anyone. I could have shaved my beard off, put on a suit and tie, found some fancy wing tips, and made a big production about how hard I had worked to turn my life around since getting out of jail, but I decided that I needed to be truthful not only with the court but with myself. There was no getting around my past, it had made me who I was today, and I was proud of that man. That man would take care of his son to the best of his ability, he would love him, and he would care for him and make sure the boy never wanted for anything. I could do all of that whether or not I was clean-shaven and polished up. Plus I liked the way Sayer’s eyes roved over me and lit up with a spark of hunger when she saw me. She liked the man I was, too, and if I was good enough for her then I was good enough for the judge. She didn’t need me spit-shined, and that made me even more determined to break through those walls she kept stacking back up around herself whenever we spent time apart.

  She hadn’t brought up the other night, and I figured it wasn’t the time or the place to force the issue, so I silently followed her and her fancy, imported sports car across town as we left LoDo and headed toward the courthouse on Capitol Hill. She parked the car and we walked around the massive building toward the front doors. She moved fast on those tall heels she had on, but I didn’t mind bringing up the rear because the view was nothing short of heart-stopping. Pulled together and proper might not work on me, but it sure as hell worked on her and there was no end to all the dirty thoughts that raced through my head as I imagined pulling that suit off of her elegant limbs piece by piece.

  I let out a grunt as I ran into her back as she suddenly came to a stop. I was too busy checking out her ass to notice that she had stopped moving, so I wrapped an arm around her middle to keep my bulk from knocking her over as I plowed into her. I was going to ask her what the deal was when I noticed a tall blond man in a suit and a young woman with bright pink hair having an argument in the center of the sidewalk. It was kind of a funny sight considering how different the two individuals looked until I realized that was exactly how opposite Sayer and I appeared to anyone on the outside watching the two of us walk toward the building.

  Their voices were raised, and the young woman was calling the debonair-looking man every filthy word in the book plus some inventive ones I had never heard before. The guy shook his head as the petite young woman, who I now realized I recognized, took a step forward and poked him in the center of his chest with a finger. The blond man threw his hands up in the air in obvious exasperation before turning in our direction. He knew Sayer, which didn’t surprise me at all, everything about the guy screamed litigation and prestige. He made his way over to where we were standing without saying good-bye to his colorful and agitated companion. When he reached us his gaze purposely dropped to where my arm was still wrapped around Sayer. She made a little noise in her throat and stepped out of my hold, which had my hands curling into involuntary fists at my sides. The guy gave me a disinterested once-over and obviously wasn’t impressed with what he saw. He turned his full attention to Sayer, effectively dismissing me.

  He pushed some of his hair off his forehead and flashed a smile in a toothy, smooth way that made me want to cram my fist in his face and knock every one of his perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth down his throat.

  “I thought women liked you. It doesn’t look like that one is very fond of you, Quaid.” There was quiet humor in her tone, a familiarity between the two of them that grated across my nerves.

  The other attorney chuckled. “Yeah, she’s one of my more challenging clients without a doubt. She needs to learn to listen to me or she’s going to have a rough go at it.” His gaze skipped back over to me and I felt my teeth grind together in the back even though I made s
ure to keep my expression bland. It wouldn’t do me any good to beat the man to a bloody pulp steps away from the front doors of the courthouse my first time before the judge who would determine my son’s and my future. “She’s a pain in my ass and a spoiled brat, but I don’t think she deserves to serve hard time. I just did my damnedest to get her charges dismissed.”

  I lifted my hand and ran my thumb down the edge of my mouth and lifted my eyebrows up. “Avett is a good kid; she just fell in with a shitty crowd. She definitely doesn’t deserve to end up in jail for what went down at the Bar. She has a good family that will look out for her. Obviously if they’re paying your bill.”

  The other guy reared back a little and Sayer turned around to look at me with wide eyes. I shrugged. “Avett is Brite Walker’s only child. Brite used to own the bar my buddy Asa Cross works at and Avett worked in the kitchen there for a few months. She hooked up with a junkie and somehow ended up driving him to the bar the night he decided to try and rob the place. She got picked up on an accessory charge, and I know Brite freaked out and has been doing everything in his power to keep her out of jail.”

  Sayer cleared her throat and pointed between the two of us. “Quaid Jackson, this is my client Zeb Fuller.”

  Her client? That was how she introduced me to the slick bastard in the thousand-dollar duds? It made my spine stiffen as I stuck my hand out. It annoyed me even further that the other lawyer had a firm and all-business handshake. I wanted him to be a weasel, mostly because he looked at Sayer the same way I looked at her . . . fascinated and hungry. He wanted under her fancy pants suit as much as I did.