Jeremiah (Stud Ranch 5)

“Don’t want to hear that Daddy dearest fucked around on Mommy?” Buck sneered, backing away but only slightly. He was still bent over in my space, so close that when he spoke, his spittle landed on my cheeks. “Well, he did. And he told my mother that he’d leave yours and come and be with her. He told her that for years. Years and years we lived in a shit little apartment on the shit side of I35. All while you grew up here, in the hill country on your ranch, riding horses and being the belle of the redneck county motherfucking ball.”

He waved his hands wildly, his steps unsteady as he paced back in the tiny space of the shed, smaller than ever with Jeremiah’s big body on the floor.

“Daddy pays for college, for everything for his little angel, and what do I get? A child shot from the same cock? The same blood? I get a few cards over the years. Once, in junior high, I came home and caught him fucking my mom in the kitchen. Before he left, he came by my bedroom and pulled out a couple twenties for me, like I was her pimp.”

I winced, understanding how deep of a bastard my father was now. Some small part of me had always hoped there was some sort of redeeming quality in him deep down… and I do mean way deep down, because he was a fucking asshole on the surface. But no, this just confirmed what had always been my lived experience of the man.

“I’m so sorry he did that to you, Buck. He was a terrible person. Believe me, growing up with him was no gem, either—”

“Don’t you dare, you little fucking bitch!” he screamed with renewed energy, the gun rising back to my temple with alarming alacrity. “You think we’re going to stand around sharing oh our poor daddy stories?” He laughed caustically.

“When Mama was too washed up for him to keep coming around, he ignored us completely. And when Mama died, and I came to your house, and I knocked on your door, shivering, starving, begging for help so I didn’t go into the system, begging for my own father to take me in, when I was barely fourteen years old, do you know what that man did?”

I shook my head and then whispered, “No. I don’t know what he did. You know I don’t.”

“That’s right,” he said with a bitter smile. “You don’t. Because he was so concerned with you and his wife not knowing of my existence that he drew me to him in what I thought was a hug. But it was really only so he could turn me around to hide my body with his and cover my mouth and nose with his hand. And then he pulled one arm behind my back and perp-walked me out past the corner lot until we were covered by the neighbor’s fencing.”

I sucked in a huge rush of breath. “I’m so sorry. Did he at least—”

“He told me if I ever came within a hundred feet of him again, he’d get a restraining order against my ass. But if I disappeared forever, he’d give me a thousand dollars. Right there, on the spot. No matter what, though,” Buck laughed caustically, “he said as he shook me hard, would there be no further contact between us. Daddy didn’t have no son.”

Buck pulled his gun from the holster at his hip and traced the barrel down my cheek. His voice went darker, more serious. “Only his precious daughter got to bear his name. And so when he died, of course his ranch went only to her. Only everything for her.”

“Buck,” I breathed out, “it breaks my heart hearing that—”

“Oh, I’ll break your heart,” he said, and punched me in the gut. I coughed in pain and writhed over in half as far as the restraints would allow. Oh God, that hurt. “But maybe I’ll start with your lungs.”

I heaved for breath as I looked back up at him. This man who shared a father with me. My brother. We shared the twisted DNA of that man and this was what could become of it. Or maybe it was the way he was nurtured, maybe our father’s hatred and rejection had made him this way.

I’d have to deal with the mixed feelings of realizing that my father, who I’d always understood to have hated women, preferring me when he’d had a son of his very own to run the business… But then again, maybe my dad’s ego was such that he would have found fault no matter who his progeny were, because apparently neither of us was enough of a reflection of himself or his values. Not me, who fit into his world, from his perfect but otherwise barren wife, to his son, who was a boy but born from a mistress, and overly surly to boot.