Rough Ride (Chaos #5)(29)

But it was Tack’s head that was through the door.

“All good here?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered quickly and firmly before High could say anything.

Tack looked from me to High to me and back to High.

“Tyra and Lanie are here and they’re not feelin’ wine, they’re feelin’ cosmos. Joke and Carissa didn’t get the shit for that, or any tequila, and Hop doesn’t drink the kind of beer they got so I’m doin’ a run. You two want anything?”

Tyra, Hop, and Lanie were there too.

And Tack was doing a liquor run.

“What kinda beer did Joke get?” High asked before I could process the idea that apparently, Chaos was throwing me a spontaneous housewarming party.

“Fat Tire,” Tack answered.

“Coors,” High grunted.

“Right,” Tack said then looked at me. “Rosie?”

“I, uh…”

“Memory serves, you’re a Corona Light girl,” Tack noted.

His memory served correctly.

But a profound hugeness started weighing on me that he remembered at all.

“That or Blue Moon,” I whispered.

“Get both,” he muttered. “Later.”

With that his head disappeared.

I stared at the pretty French doors that led to the pretty mini-den in a pretty house where I was now living that was currently filled with a lot of really good people.

“Rosalie.”

I did not look at High.

I turned until I was looking in the kitchen window.

Carissa was there, at the sink, with Tyra.

They were both laughing at something.

Beyond them, Joker had his head back, taking a pull from his beer while Hop was throwing Travis in the air with Mom standing, looking on, clearly giggling up at a giggling Travis.

Millie moved through the space, opening a bag of chips, but stopped when she was met by Lanie, who had another child attached to her hip, and Millie did this so she could tickle and smile into the face of the baby on Lanie’s hip.

“Honey,” High murmured.

Slowly, I looked to High.

“Did you know my dad?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Before my time.”

“He was a good guy.”

“Didn’t know him, babe, but heard about him, and everything I heard says you tell it true.”

“I miss him right now.”

“Darlin’,” High whispered.

“He’d be doing the liquor run.”

I knew High had read my mood when he murmured, “C’m’ere.”

I didn’t want to go there. I didn’t want to accept what they were offering. I didn’t want to have it and know for certain how extraordinary it really was only to fear having it torn away.

But I went there.

High’s arms opened before I got there and they closed tight around me the instant I made it there.

Yes.

Just as I feared.

It was extraordinary.

Except for the tears I’d shed into the lining of Snap’s cut, I had not cried once since Bounty did their number on me.

And except for the tears I’d shared with Mom in the weeks that passed after we lost Dad, I had not cried for him either.

So when they tore loose while High held me to his warmth and strength in a courtyard of the pretty little house the man I’d inadvertently fallen in love with had given to me, they tore loose.

I sobbed in his arms, holding on to his leather with fingers clenched deep, and I did it for a long time.

Eventually, High shifted in a way I knew he was going to pass me off and I allowed myself to be passed off, thinking I’d be moving into my mother’s arms.

More of the scent of leather, but mingled now with the fresh marine notes of soap assailed me as Snapper’s arms wrapped around me.

“What?” he asked under his breath.

“Her pa,” High answered. “She misses him.”

“Right,” Snap muttered.

I then heard a door close and knew Snapper and I were alone.

I just kept crying.

After a while, Snap asked, “You want me to take you upstairs so we can lay down?”

He’d said “we.”

Man.

“Th-th-they bought me Sephora,” I spluttered.

“They bought you what?” he asked.

“S-s-sephora.”

“Sephora?”

I nodded, my cheek moving on leather but feeling the threads of the patches on his chest too.

“What’s Sephora?” he asked.

“Only the b-b-best s-s-store in the m-m-mall.”

There was a smile in his voice when he said, “See the old ladies took care of you.”

“I n-n-need Corona,” I told him.

“Good Tack’s back with that for you,” he replied.

He was back?

Jeez.

How long had I been crying?

“And t-tequila,” I added.

“How about you stop crying before you get yourself hammered? You can start bawling again after you’re hammered,” he suggested.

“M-maybe a good idea,” I mumbled into his chest, sniffling and pulling myself together.

Though in doing that, I will note, I did not move from his arms.