Beautiful Brute (Court University 3)

Both moms gave me what they had the minute I arrived through the door, but they left me alone until they called me for dinner that night. I hadn’t wanted to go downstairs, hadn’t seen the point. They’d said what they had to say, what they believed, and I had nothing else to add. I was paying for my sins, sins that had been true and ones they didn’t even know about.

“Baby, would you please come down for dinner?”

Mama behind my door, Mama trying to coax me out. The peacemaker and kind-hearted spirit that kept this family together. She was our foundation here, and she wanted me to come downstairs.

So I listened.

She was probably the only one who could get me out. That was probably why Mom had sent her. My biological mother had barely been able to look at me after I’d gotten home.

Shooting a basket into the hoop attached to the door of my childhood room, I forced myself up and opened the door for my adoptive mother.

Mama was beautiful, a woman of a honey brown complexion with voluminous curls who appeared half her age on even the days she said she looked tired. Point-blank, my adoptive mother was a knock-out, was from her angelic smile to the glow of her hazel eyes, and I’d had to check more than one of my asshole friends for commenting on such over the years. The comments had started when I was about thirteen and ended that same goddamn year. This was my mom, and eventually, my friends respected that. She’d obviously knocked my biological mother on her ass as well. More than ten years separated the two in Mama’s favor.

She held the door frame. “I was beginning to forget your eyes, sweet love.”

Found that hard to believe. They no doubt appeared dead and cold once I’d arrived through that door today. At least, that’s what they looked like whenever I stared in the mirror these days. I was stressed the fuck to hell lately.

And I didn’t hide it.

Where Mama usually greeted me with a smile, I noticed this time it wasn’t there. Her hand came out, making me move into stride with her. Somewhere along the way, I’d gotten bigger than her, looking like a beast and she the kid. She rubbed my back. “Your mom wants us all to sit together so we can talk. As a family?”

Fucking hell.

I figured they’d both said enough whenever I got here, but whatever.

Shrugging, I prepared myself for the worst, but did go downstairs with her. I was scrubbing into my hair by the time we made it into the kitchen. And though my biological mother was there, Sherry, she wasn’t sitting at the table by herself.

Familiar eyes stared up at me, mostly because I’d seen them every day. We had the same goddamn eyes.

We had the same goddamn everything.

My father’s heart was just as dead and cold as myself, and I growled, com

ing between both him and my biological mother.

“The fuck is he doing here?” I charged, but Mama pulled me back.

“Jaxen,” Mama scolded, shaking her head. She put a hand on mine before tugging me back and making me take a seat between both herself and Mom. Mom was playing with her hands, staring at them.

And I swore to God she’d aged in a day.

Obviously, my mom was a little older than Mama, but she’d never appeared so tired looking. Mom had dark creases under her pale blue eyes, her blond hair tied up but bunched in a messy way. She rubbed her arms without words.

And she hadn’t said anything despite me cursing.

Mom was the first to hand me my ass for that shit, always had been. It’d been Mama who never scolded. But now, the roles seemed to have reversed.

Mom opened her hands. “I asked your dad here today to talk. We need to talk. As a whole family, we need to talk.”

This man wasn’t my family, though, and in Florida, he’d made that all too clear. He’d chosen his own family.

Dad sat there quiet now, staring at the grains in the table. He had fingers pressed to his lips, a part of the action without being a part of it.

With them all around me, I thought, well, would you look at that? Here they all were to tell me about my shit. Tell me how disappointed they were in me for what had happened under Dad’s watch. I’d get to hear it now for how I’d taken advantage of my stepsister straight on.

“I messed up, Jaxen.”

But then Mom said that, Mom who couldn’t seem to look at me in that moment. Jaw tight, she continued to squeeze and massage her arms. “And you’re suffering for it.”