Hawk (A Stepbrother Romance #3)(9)

My father steps around me and looks over the bed where I have my clothes laid out. He lifts a shirt and shakes his head, and tosses it back on the bed.

"What are you doing here? What's the point of this?"

"I've got my reasons."

He snorts. "Right. Howard, you're not stupid. You realize this is a mistake. You're not wanted, or needed here."

"I've got nowhere else to go."

He turns and meets my gaze. "You have everywhere else to go."

"I don't think so."

"I thought I made myself clear the last time," he says, a tired edge to his voice. "Boys, step out and give us some air."

The two cops nod and walk out of the room. The door swings shut behind them on its creaky hinges and closes with a soft clap. Inside there's only the now softer rattle of the air conditioner and the drip of the faucet in the bathroom. My father is tall, but not physically imposing or threatening, but there's something off about him and always has been. I never trusted him even when I was little. Feared. Lance too, as much as I hate to admit it. He has a kind of presence that other people shrink from. If there wasn't another political family cemented in charge of this town he'd be running the place. Now they're gone and he is. The whole world here is against me.

"She's mine now," he says, very calmly. "There's nothing for you here. Nevertheless you’re my son, so you have twenty-four hours. If you're not gone by then, I won't be as gentle with you as I was the last time."

"Is that it?"

"That's it," he says.

He turns and steps out without looking at me. The streaked window distorts him and the two cops as they climb into a black Mercedes and drive off, peeling out of the parking lot in a squeal of tires.

Yeah. I remember the last time.





Hawk





Then





Two-thirty in the afternoon and I watched the second hand on the clock stutter a slow circle around and around, waiting for two-forty five, when I'd be free. It was the last senior day-last Friday we went on a quote-unquote field trip to Dorney Park, and now there we were sitting out one final Monday. Graduation in two weeks, the whole world open before us. I was in Mrs. McCarthy's math class. Alex had gym at the same time, her last period of gym ever. I'd already had mine.

Final exams were over, our grades were decided. So there I was sitting there f*cking around on my phone, leaning up against the wall at the back of the room. Four other students sat in the room, doing much the same. It was a kind of quiet anarchy, no more rules, not that anybody cared to break any. Marking time. It should have prepared me for government work. Marking time is an essential skill when you've signed your ass over to Uncle Sam. Lots of boredom.

I last saw Alex in English that morning. I didn't know it would be the last time I'd see her for over four years.

It was almost exactly a year before, on a day much like this one, when the phone on the desk rang and the teacher sent me down to the office. I figured I was in trouble, but my father was waiting in the lobby. He was standing on the school crest tiled into the floor, looking at nothing. His eyes didn't light up when he saw me, they just changed focus from some distant point to my face and I shuddered. I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw it was him. My father had nothing to do with school. No field trips, no activities. My mom did all that, even chaperoned the prom before I was old enough to go. She came to all my conferences, and spoke to the principal when I was in trouble.

Seeing him there was like a giant red flag. Something was wrong.

I walked up to him and he said to me in a dull monotone, "It's your mother. Come with me."

He signed me out and we left. He was driving his work truck-he owned and still owns, presumably, the biggest construction company in the area. Real ‘man of the people’ type guy, my father. Except the work truck never saw any work unless someone else was driving it for him. It felt huge and cavernous inside, as if some unseen hand had cracked open the gulf between us even wider than ever before. I felt like I was riding in the car with a hostile stranger. Not a word was spoken until we arrived at the hospital and then it was, "Follow me."

I followed. Lance was already there. He looked like he'd been shot, just staring at nothing. It was just us in the waiting room, nobody from my mom's family.

The rest of the day was something of a blur. Hours in the waiting room, long after the place emptied out. We were allowed to stay.

I didn't see her until it was dark outside. The windows in her room were black.

It wasn't my mother I saw in that bed. She looked so tiny, so frail and small. I'd seen her only that morning, as full of life and bright as ever. She stayed at home, she packed lunches, she tended her garden. She was the perfect little homemaker housewife and, while I'm not sure if my father even cared about her at all, she never seemed unhappy. It was there he told me the story: Around nine in the morning she called him at work and sounded delirious and her speech was slurred. He called an ambulance, drove to the hospital.

By the time he saw her she was like that, lying in the bed with a breathing tube down her throat, her eyes glazed over. The lights were on, as they say, but nobody was home.

He took me up to see her and calmly, slowly told me that her brain function was gone, she was already gone, and he signed the order for her to be taken off life support. They would remove the breathing tube that night.