Unbreak My Heart (Rough Riders Legacy #1)(96)

“Oh. Hey Dad. One of us has great timing,” I said.

“Unlikely it’s me.” He ran his hand down his beard. “How’s it going?”

“Okay.”

I hadn’t seen Dax West since I’d graduated from boot camp. Looking at him now…there wasn’t a lick of a family resemblance between us. His hair, what was left of it, was an orangey gold shot through with gray. Seven years ago he’d had an inch or two on me. Now, with his shoulders slumped, I towered over him.

“I’m starved. You want to eat at the restaurant here?” I asked.

“That’ll work.”

We walked side by side down the hallway. “You’re checked in?”

“Yep.”

Christ. If this was how our talk would go tonight, I needed alcohol to get through it. Which made me blurt out, “Did you insist on this meeting because you’re in a twelve-step program?”

“Nope.”

Awesome. One-word answer again.

When we got to the restaurant and he reached for the door handle, his hand shook.

That sour feeling in my belly expanded.

The place was empty but he asked for a table in the back anyway. He took the seat in the corner, where he had a full view of the room and no one could look over his shoulder.

I studied the menu without seeing it.

“I ordered beer.”

I glanced up at him.

He aimed his gaze out the dark window. “How pathetic is it that I don’t know if my twenty-six-year-old son likes beer.”

“I like beer just fine.”

He said nothing.

The waitress poured the pale liquid—poorly—into glasses, leaving three inches of foam on top. Next round I’d forego the glass.

Yeah. I figured this would be a multiple-beer conversation.

We both ordered hot beef sandwiches.

That was one meal that reminded me of him. The few times he’d taken me out to eat, it’d always been to a truck stop café because that’s what he knew and where he usually ate.

Neither of us was good at small talk. But we tried.

“While we’re waiting on food, you wanna fill me in with what’s going on in your life?”

I told him about being selected for the army’s experimental program with the VA that resulted in me being in Phoenix to attend school. I talked about Raj, but didn’t mention hanging out with my McKay cousins or my relationship with Sierra. He’d mutter about McKays, just because that’s what the West family did.

He talked about a few of the more unusual items he’d loaded and driven across the country.

The food arrived. We each ordered another beer before we tucked in. I kept shooting glances across the table at him, searching for some familiarity. The harder I tried to rattle those memory banks, the more I realized there wasn’t anything there.

But I did notice he wasn’t shoveling in food like I remembered. He pushed his potatoes around on his plate. Set down his fork. Swigged his beer.

He’s stalling.

As much as I wanted him to get to the f*cking point of this meeting, I wouldn’t push him. Whatever he needed to say…he had to work up to it.

That kicked those alarm bells in until my ears rang from them. I purposely slowed my eating pace to match his.

But he only ended up eating half of it. I hadn’t seen that before either.

The waitress cleared our plates.

Dad turned his focus to picking the soggy label off the previous bottle of beer. When he finally started to speak, his voice was so low I had to lean closer to hear him.

“I don’t gotta tell you I’ve always been a loner. That’s why long haul works well for me.”

“So you asked me here to talk about your career as a truck driver?”

His eyes met mine. Sometimes I forgot I’d inherited the color and shape of his eyes, so it spooked me to see such wariness in them now. “No. It’s just…I don’t know where to start with this.”

“You talking in circles isn’t the way to start. Just rip off the f*cking bandage.”

“You’re right. Lemme get through”—he looked away and cleared his throat—“the worst of it before you start asking questions.”

“Okay.”

Long pause. Then he said, “When I was a kid, I was sexually abused. But being a kid…you don’t really know that it’s wrong if that’s how it’s always been. If it’s just part of the day or night…” He cleared his throat again. “My first memory of it was when I was three years old. And it’s not one of them ‘false’ memories, where you see a picture and convince yourself you were there when you weren’t. I know how old I was because there are pictures of my birthday party—the only birthday party I ever had. A picture of me with the plastic truck someone gave me as a gift, I remember holding it tight that night as he…when…”

I felt hot and cold, then that surreal sense of disbelief that accompanies shock.

“Like I said, I got a little older and I figured what he did to me and expected in return was probably wrong, since it was only just the two of us and he said I couldn’t ever tell anyone.”

I managed to choke out one word. “Who?”

“My dad.”

My food threatened to come back up. I swallowed it back down, taking a healthy drink of beer, praying that helped.