Chasing Serenity (River Rain 1)

“Let’s go,” Dad whispered, and everyone moved.

Everyone but Jamie, Judge, Rix, Dru and me.

It was my turn to position at Judge’s back.

And I didn’t mess around getting there.

“Come here, buddy,” Jamie encouraged.

Judge didn’t take the last step to his dad.

He dropped his head.

The door closed on Gage.

I put my hand on my man’s back but otherwise didn’t move.

It hurt to stay away from him, but he had to get this out.

He had to process it.

He had to face it.

So he could truly let it go.

“I…” Judge stopped, that word so clogged, he had to clear his throat, and I felt pain in mine. He lifted his head and focused again on his dad. “I lied at the funeral home. She didn’t want us together. She didn’t love you. She didn’t love me. She—”

Jamie cut him off. “Judge, she loved you.”

“She didn’t love me. Love is not that.”

“No,” Jamie said softly, coming closer, but not too close. “Love is not that. But when she found out she was pregnant with you—”

At these words, Judge stepped back and almost ran over me.

I scooted out of the way.

He didn’t even glance at me.

“You’ve told me this story so many times, Dad, it isn’t fucking funny,” he stated bitterly. “She might have been excited she was pregnant. She might have been thrilled to have a healthy baby boy. I’m sure she nurtured me and took care of me when I was little. And then…that stopped. And it didn’t stop because New York made her feel small. It didn’t stop because you fucked up by taking her from Texas. It didn’t stop because she did what countless other people have done, except for her it would have terrible consequences, she snorted her first line of coke. It stopped because she was just not a good person.”

Oh God.

My eyes darted to Rix, and I saw he was still mid-flinch.

He felt my gaze and looked at me, the uneasy in his eyes warming, but he said nothing and didn’t move.

I didn’t either.

“Addiction is not that simple to characterize,” Jamie said carefully.

“You know,” Judge said matter-of-factly, “when you told me she was dead, I blanked out. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move.” He tossed a hand my way. “It freaked Chloe out. And I thought about that. I thought, ‘I not only don’t give a shit my mother’s dead, I’m not surprised she is. I’m just surprised it took this long.’ So I had to think on that, Dad. I had to think about why I blanked when I don’t give…that first…fuck that she’s gone.”

No one said anything.

So Judge kept going.

“I figured it out. And you know why that is, Dad?”

“No, Judge, why is that, buddy?” Jamie asked.

“Because that was it.”

Oh God.

Oh God.

Oh God.

I closed in him after the way his voice broke on the last word.

“Do you know what it’s like to live for twenty-nine years hoping your mother will give a shit about you?”

At these rough words grating up his throat, I was done.

I moved into his back, put my cheek to it, pressed my body to it, and wrapped my arms around his middle.

It was like I wasn’t there.

“Do you know what it’s like to lie in bed with your woman pressed to you, your dog, both of them, even my fucking dog, Dad, showing me more love in the time I’ve had them than she has my entire life?”

I closed my eyes tight and held on tighter.

“You can’t possibly know what it’s like to have that moment where everything stops because any last hope you had that your mother would someday give that first shit about you is gone,” he declared.

Then, he wrapped his fingers around my forearms so strong, it hinted at pain.

“Look at this,” Judge demanded. “She can’t even stand listening to this fucking garbage without doing everything she can to show me love. How hard is it, Dad? Just a movement and I’m surrounded with it.”

I swallowed.

Judge kept speaking.

“You’d call and she’d shout at you for an hour and wouldn’t let me talk to you and it was like she got off on the fact she could hang up on you and you’d call again and again and again, and she’d scream at me not to answer. And I’d sit there and listen to you calling and that’s what I thought love was, the sound of a phone ringing, because in that house that’s the only love I felt.”

I heard Jamie make a low, pained, ugly noise that hurt me almost more than what Judge was saying.

But I just held on.

“She was so fucking beautiful, and I’d look at her and I’d swear to myself never, never to be with a beautiful, weak, empty shell of woman. And that’s what it was. It wasn’t addiction. It was that she was empty.”

He was right.