I couldn’t think of a valid rebuttal, which annoyed me to no end, so I sat back in my chair and glared at him. “Are you sure you didn’t take any law classes while you were in college?”
He wiggled his eyebrows up and down at me in his usual cavalier way, and I fought the urge to throw a chip at him. Going after Rowdy was the first completely out-of-character thing I had ever done. It was a compulsion, a craving for family and a place to belong and be loved, which was something I never had before. I couldn’t resist the pull any more than I could resist the draw and tug of endless attraction between me and Zeb. When I took Poppy in it wasn’t just because she was important to Rowdy, and he had become so very important to me . . . no, it was because I saw so much of myself inside the broken shell of the young woman. I knew exactly what it felt like to have someone try to strip you of your value and humanity. I knew all too well what it felt like to never measure up to someone who was supposed to love you unconditionally and yet all they did was tear you down. My father had never been uncouth or out of control enough to raise his hand to me or to my mother . . . but his words and his pitiless, dismissive actions . . . those nasty suckers had fallen just as heavily as the mightiest of blows. Poppy had her whole life ahead of her. I didn’t want her stuck in place and stuck unmoving from the past’s embrace like I was. I didn’t want her to shut off her heart. It was too beautiful and needed to be shared with someone who would cherish it. She deserved that.
“If you don’t put yourself out there to risk the hurt, then you won’t ever feel the pleasure either. There is no good without the bad, Sayer. Just look at the way I came into this world.”
We both got quiet for a second as he sucked in a sharp breath. “My mom was young, too young, when she had me. Your dad was older, knew better, and was married, with you at home when she got knocked up. The only two people that can tell
us what actually happened between the two of them are gone, but we both know that whatever the circumstances were, my mom was taken advantage of and left to deal with the consequences on her own.”
I gulped a little because I never wanted to admit to him just how manipulative and hateful my father could be. I didn’t want to think about the man who had raised me taking advantage of a helpless teenage girl, but it was impossible not to when the proof was sitting across from me sipping a beer.
“Regardless of the hurt my mom may have suffered, she loved me. She took amazing care of me and never let me go a single second without knowing I was loved and the center of her entire world. She focused on the joy I brought her, not on the pain that she had to go through to end up with me in her life. You have to be wounded in order to heal.”
Rowdy’s mom had been killed during an armed robbery when he was just a little boy, so I was surprised he had such bright and clear memories of her. My mother had killed herself when I was slightly older and yet most of the things I remembered about her were fuzzy and covered in a tint of gray and sorrow. There was no joy and pleasure when I thought about her, only sadness and resentment. I wanted her to be stronger for herself, but more than that I had longed for her to be stronger for me.
“Some wounds go so deep and reach so far down into the basic parts of who we are that they can never be healed, Rowdy. They just bleed, fester, and trickle really nasty stuff out of the person bearing them forever.”
He shook his head and I was amazed that the styled front of his hair didn’t move so much as an inch. I guess it took a lot of skill and a lot of product to keep that modern-day James Dean look in place.