Crash (Brazen Bulls MC #1)(19)
He could already see that any road they traveled together would have its share of bumps. And yet that thought didn’t worry him like it should. Instead, it quickened his pulse.
As he pulled the beers from the fridge, he glanced over its contents. She kept a full stock: eggs and skim milk, a bottle of some kind of red juice, deli meats and cheese in a drawer, about every condiment he could think of, a tub of margarine, some cartons of yogurt, a few plastic containers that seemed to hold leftovers, three bottles of white wine, the rest of the twelve-pack of Rolling Rock. No produce, but she had that in a couple of bowls on the counter, and in a hanging gizmo with three wire baskets.
A fancy-looking coffeemaker stood on the counter next to the range. He wondered if Willa made good coffee.
Holding the bottles in one hand, he closed the fridge and took a peek in her freezer. A full bin under the ice maker, a carton of butter pecan ice cream, and some supermarket packages of raw meat.
At this moment, in his fridge at home, he had a week-old half-carton of shrimp fried rice, an elderly jar of brown mustard, two twelve-packs of Coors, half a package of bacon, and four eggs. The freezer held a few empty ice trays.
Like he’d told her—he ate most of his meals out of a sack. Her place felt a lot more like a home than his place did.
Of course, he’d had a home once. Dahlia still lived in it, and he still paid its f*cking mortgage.
As he came down the steps onto her patio, Ollie was sitting beside their chairs, getting love from his mom.
“Can he have scraps?”
“Not from the table. Later, I’ll pull a little chicken off the bone and mix it in with his kibble.” She gave Ollie a last scratch under his chin and said, “Lie down, boy.”
He lay down at her feet with a jowl-flapping sigh.
Rad chuckled as he sat back down.
Willa lifted a wry eyebrow at him. “Did you get a good look?”
He twisted the cap off one of the bottles and handed her a beer. “What d’you mean?”
“You were in there a while. You were snooping.” She could barely get a sip of her beer for the smirk on her face.
“I looked around a little, yeah. You must do a lot of cookin’.”
She shrugged. “When I can. I like it.”
Rad eyed his plate of half-eaten food and decided he wasn’t interested in more. Willa seemed to have had her fill as well. The conversation wasn’t conducive to eating while they talked, and the conversation was more important.
“So about your ex.”
“It’s either a long, drawn-out story or not much of a story at all. I’m not sure how to tell it.”
“From the beginnin’. I got nowhere else to be tonight. What’s his name?”
“Jesse.”
“Jesse what?”
“What, are you going to look him up?”
“Might do. Depends on your story. Come on, darlin’, get it out here.”
Fixing her attention on closing up the bucket and the side containers, Willa took another second or two before she began to talk. Rad worked on his patience and gave her time to sort her thoughts. He knew he was being a pushy son of a bitch about this, but if she had some guy lurking in her shadows who had her scared enough to hermetically seal herself in her house whenever she was home, day or night, then he needed to know what to be on the lookout for. And if he could solve the problem for her, he would.
She put the Styrofoam cartons back in the rumpled sack and rolled it closed. “His name is Jesse Smithers. He’s from my hometown in West Texas—Duchy, it’s called. Just a little dip in the road near Odessa. Anyway, we started up in middle school, stayed together all through high school. Then I went to college at UT. Got a full scholarship. He didn’t like me being away, and that was when things started to get weird between us. He was always possessive and jealous, but I didn’t know better. All my friends thought it was romantic, how he was, and most of the guys around Duchy weren’t much different. People around there have very specific ideas about men and women. My dad’s a pretty hard-edged guy, too. He was roughneck on a drilling crew when he was younger. But he’s never treated my mom like…”
She stopped and swallowed. “Anyway, Jesse stayed home on his folks’ farm after high school, and he hated me being in Austin. He started getting demanding, insisting I come home every weekend, wanting me to call every night from my dorm room, losing his shit if I didn’t call on time, stuff like that. I was uncomfortable with it, but too young and dumb to stand up for myself. One weekend, right before finals, I told him I couldn’t come home because I had to study. My scholarship meant I had to keep my grades high, and this chem class I was taking was killing me. We fought and he hung up on me, and I stayed and studied. Before dawn on Saturday morning, he was down at the front desk of my dorm, losing his shit because the attendant wouldn’t let him up to my room. He beat the poor guy up and spent the rest of the weekend in lockup.”
“Christ.” Rad had a vivid picture of this guy in his head now, and he was ashamed to see he didn’t look that different himself. He understood those impulses. He’d never acted out quite like that—but he hadn’t been in love when he was a kid. Maybe he would have been like this Jesse at that age, before he’d gained some experience and self-control.
“Jesse was banned from the dorm, but the desk attendant didn’t press charges. I went to get him out of lockup, and he apologized, told me he loved me, and went home. After that, things seemed more or less okay.”