Unbeloved (Undeniable #4)(51)

After sleeping off his hangover, he’d woken up in need of a drink only to find that the remaining liquor in Cage’s truck had mysteriously disappeared, as had his keys. At first he’d been pissed off, storming through his parents’ house, wildly searching through the cupboards and ransacking the closets. And then he’d been desperate, even going as far as to look under beds and in his parents’ dresser drawers for a bottle of anything. Any-f*cking-thing. Only to come up empty. Not only that, he’d ended up with his father’s meaty fist slamming into his face.

While lying on the floor, his vision going in and out, he’d thought he’d heard his father calling him a goddamn drunk and his mother arguing that he wasn’t, but was only in need of a good cleanup.

After that, everything grew a little fuzzy. The next thing he knew he was in his old bed, hanging over the side, puking up whatever was left in his empty stomach into a small trash can his poor mother held beneath his head.

He spent the next few days either in bed sleeping away the physical misery his body was enduring or pacing his room, trying to walk off the constant nausea and the need to make a liquor store run. Which he would have if his father hadn’t been standing guard outside his bedroom with a .22 rifle cradled in his arms. Even Jase’s oldest brother, Daniel, had joined the party, and was taking turns with their father to babysit him.

It was both humiliating and sobering, pun f*cking intended.

And now that he could walk without shaking and speak without retching, his father had a list of chores for him to do. But instead of calling them chores, his dear old dad was fondly referring to them as necessary punishments for being such a dumbass.

Shoveling the driveway and sidewalk had been first on his list of dumbassery punishments, followed by cleaning the windows from the inside, scraping the grime off the old claw-foot tub upstairs, straightening up the holy mess that was the attic, mending a broken log in the backyard fence, and now, God help him, he was chopping wood in the snow. Had been at it all day because, for reasons unknown to him, his parents had a deep-rooted love of wood-burning stoves.

Then, to make already shitty circumstances even worse, his other brother had shown up this morning with his wife and two little kids in tow. One girl, one boy, dressed in the obligatory blue and pink, both cherub-faced, well-behaved little f*ckers who adored their parents and only served to agitate Jase when everyone else was fawning over them. In fact, he almost preferred being outside, freezing his ass off, turning his hands into blister-ridden messes to being cooped up inside the house with the happy f*cking family.

Over and over again he’d continuously asked himself why he’d come here, and he’d still be asking himself at that very moment if he hadn’t already figured out the answer.

As usual, his old man had been right about him. He was a drunk. He’d started drinking heavily the moment he’d found out the baby Dorothy had given birth to wasn’t his, that Hawk had betrayed the bonds of brotherhood, and to top it all off, Dorothy didn’t even remember him and subsequently wanted nothing to do with him.

So he’d kept drinking all through Chrissy’s trial, and throughout the years that followed. He struggled to be a father, but instead ended up as a nuisance to his girls, a motherf*cking embarrassment too caught up in his own bullshit to be able to pay any attention to them.

And then even later, after Dorothy’s memories had returned and he kept trying to speak to her, each time getting rejected, he turned time and time again to the bottle to stave off the pain she caused him with every word she wouldn’t speak, every look she wouldn’t give, every touch she withheld from him.

As the years rolled by, he continued throwing drinks back until drinking had become a part of his daily routine. He could function better with alcohol in his system than he could without it.

But truth be told, hindsight was 20/20. After the surprisingly awful bout of withdrawal he’d just endured, he’d come to the conclusion that his old man, as f*cking usual, was right.

He, Jason Brady, was a goddamn drunk.

And despite his liquor-soaked brain cells, coming home had obviously been an unconscious cry for much-needed help.

So he was chopping wood, or rather he was trying to chop wood. Not an easy task when his muscles felt like jelly, and the sharp smell of cedar wasn’t helping his constant nausea.

Even though he was taller and in much better shape than his father, Jase could barely lift the ax, let alone get enough momentum to split logs in one swing, leaving him feeling like a goddamn little girl. Except a little girl would probably be far more useful to his father than he currently was.

“You thought about whatcha gonna do after this?” Walter asked. Not waiting for Jase’s response, his father swung the ax and the thick log split a good ways down the center. Pausing, his father used the woolen sleeve of his thick flannel jacket to wipe the sweat from his brow before he swung again.

As the wood split into two separate pieces and fell from the chopping block, his father tossed the ax aside and turned to look at Jase.

“So?” he asked. “Whatcha gonna do?”

Jase stared at him, confused by the question. What did he mean, what was he going to do?

“Go home,” he started off slowly. “Go back to—”

“The club,” Walter finished for him. “And sleepin’ around and drinkin’, no doubt.”

Jase paused for a moment, letting his father’s words sink in. And when they did, he couldn’t help but realize that, yeah, that was more than likely exactly what would happen. But what other choice did he have? He couldn’t live with his parents. Men in their forties didn’t live with their parents, not if they could help it, and he damn sure couldn’t stay in this town. Not with the threat of running into Chrissy’s family. If his arrival here was made public, there wasn’t a doubt in Jase’s mind that a lynch mob, complete with pitchforks and shotguns, would be gunning for him with Chrissy’s father in the lead.