Blake’s eyes cut over to Slim’s accusingly. “I didn’t fucking do it, man!”
Right.
~ * ~ *
"Someone left a voicemail for you, kid," Sonny noted, his gaze locked on the epic gun battle going on in the television screen.
I'd just come in from work, dropping my purse onto the couch that I'd rightfully claimed over the course of the last month and let myself get excited for a brief moment. "Who?"
He made a humming noise in his throat. "Umm, someone named Gladys or something from a place with a stupid name. There were a bunch of Rugrats screaming in the background."
It had to be one of the daycare centers I'd applied to.
"Yes!"
Two minutes later, I'd written down Gladys Ortega's phone number and high-fived Sonny for finally getting a callback.
"I don't get why you're so excited. The idea of working with a bunch of kids sounds like hell," he murmured.
The last time I'd worked at a daycare center, I'd been twenty and fresh out of radiation therapy. At that point, nothing could have brought me down. But now that I really thought about it...crap. I liked kids but did I like them that much? The better question was, did I dislike Dex enough to sacrifice one moody devil for a bunch of innocent demons?
The answer didn’t come as easily as I would have expected.
"I can just see what they have to offer."
He shrugged and it made me narrow my eyes.
I didn't understand what was going on with him, but every time I asked, he always answered the same way.
He was fine. Always fine.
And he was completely full of shit.
"What's wrong with you?"
For the last two days, Sonny had been acting really erratic. One of the most laid-back people I'd ever met in my life, he wasn't the type to sit back and let things bother him. He was an advocate of either ignoring things or dealing with them head on. Preferably with his fists it seemed, when he came home two nights ago with a busted lip and refused to tell me what happened.
I made sure he was okay, and then changed the subject. The problem was, he was still acting weird. Something was bothering him and it was nipping at him, over and over again. He still smiled but it was shadowed and guarded.
I finally had it though. Only one of us could be a moody shit, and that would be me.
"What's wrong?" I asked him again when he didn't answer.
Those hazel-brown eyes slid over to me, a small smile lifting up one corner of his mouth but it didn't do anything. My beloved half-brother was missing. "I'm fine, kid."
"Bull."
He cracked a little smile. "My innocent little Ris."
Innocent, maybe a little. But really, he knew as well as I did, that I just wasn't used to cussing. At least on his level, much less the rest of his friends’.
"Just tell me what happened," I insisted.
Sonny looked at me for a long moment, blowing air out of his mouth before letting his head drop back dramatically onto the couch. "Can we talk about it later?"
I poked him in the thigh. "I'd rather not."
He sighed again, still looking up at the ceiling.
His silence was killing me. The longer he went with hesitating to tell me, the worse it made me feel.
"Please?"
Sonny grunted. "Our sperm donor came by."
And... that was absolutely not what I was expecting to hear.
"Are you joking?" Of course he was serious, but I was an idiot and what he'd said seemed so ridiculous he wouldn't be making it up.
He kept his eyes trained on the ceiling. "Nope," was his brilliant, detailed response.
"Why?"
I don't know why I asked. What I was expecting. There couldn't be anything for me to expect. He'd known where yia-yia, Will, and I had lived for those years after Mom died. He'd always known where Sonny lived. And in almost ten years, neither one of us had seen him. Now all of a sudden—
"Money, kid." I looked up to see him scrub a hand down his face. "He drove all the way over here to ask for fucking money."
"Did you give it to him?" I asked the question slowly.
"Kid."
Maybe it was wrong of me to hope that Sonny hadn't because he was my dad after all, but I couldn't find it in me to be mature about it. "Son."
He tilted his head down, his lips drooped into a scowl. "Fuck no," he confirmed. "I know he asked Luther after I shot him down though."
"And he said yes?"
Sonny shrugged. "I don't know."
I narrowed my eyes at his face, taking in the cut that split this upper lip. "Oh.”
"Kid, I don't support a man that can't support himself. It's embarrassing that he crawls back here to mooch off other people—," I winced because hello. Hadn't I just done the same thing? Come crawling to my half-brother? I felt like a schmuck. Sonny must have read it on my face because he rolled his eyes. "Your situation is completely fucking different. Don't give me that face. You're not mooching off me. You got a job you don't like. You're trying to get yourself together and I've already offered to give you money. You didn't take it, Ris. You're not like that piece of shit in any way, you hear me?"
Crap, I loved this guy.
"I don't want anything to do with him," he stated with so much conviction in his tone.
I didn't either but apparently my brain wasn't working properly because I asked something I shouldn't have. "Did he ask about us?"
Sonny gave me a look I hadn't seen since I was nineteen and been told I needed to have another biopsy. It was filled with a dreadful kind of remorse.
And it projected the answer like a beacon in the sky.
Chapter Ten
“How long you been here now?”
I looked up to see my redheaded buddy, Slim, plopping onto the couch across from me. It was Tuesday, almost a month since I started at Pins and Needles and to be honest, it’d gone by really quickly and mostly painlessly.
I’d fallen into a comfortable routine. During the day, I'd hang out at Sonny's house, cleaning and cooking when I wasn't going to the rare job interview—the one and only one had taken place the week before but I hadn't heard back from them—and applying for places online. Occasionally, I'd let myself think about Dad coming into town to ask Sonny for money but it was rare. The man didn't deserve my annoyance. At night, I’d go home and half of the time Sonny would be up and we’d talk or watch television until he went to bed.
How he made it to work at nine in the morning was beyond me, but I didn’t ask.
The other half of the time, he was gone and I’d go to bed before he showed up again. In the days after he told me about our sperm donor coming into town, his mood had gradually improved so I didn’t ask where he went unless he told me. More often than not, he didn’t. But when Sonny was around, I always had a smile on my face though he was still acting a little strange since his unexpected visit. He was just like Will, whom I hadn’t heard back from yet either, but I didn’t let myself focus on that. I’d sent him weekly emails consisting of a short updates that confirmed I was alive, still with Sonny, still working at the tattoo parlor, and that I had a library card. No surprise there.
The mirror to my Sonny was Dex, who’d been in and out of the shop for days. Half the time, something was eating his butt cheek and he’d go into the shop and head directly into the office, leaving me to have to sneak in randomly to get my work done. On the occasion that he was in a good mood, he’d smiled at me exactly three times—and God, it was a smile—and once he touched my hand when he walked by.