“Hey,” he said as I walked up. He got up from the table and gave me a hug, and it was all I could do to restrain myself. He smelled good, he felt good, and he looked good.
This was going to be more difficult than I had expected. I needed to keep my wits about me, not be swayed by the first pangs of lust.
I’d missed him, though. That was the honest truth. It had been a while now since we’d seen each other, a while since we’d even talked, and I didn’t realize how badly my soul had craved this.
“Where’s Ava?” Ace asked as he pulled away. I couldn’t tell if he was suspicious or not.
“I felt better leaving her with Maisie,” I told him. “I’m not keeping her from you. Not anymore. I just thought that we have some adult stuff to talk about and that it might get emotional, and I didn’t want her to be here to see that.” I definitely didn’t want her to be there if I started crying.
“Fair enough,” Ace said, nodding slowly.
He seemed to be waiting for me to start, so finally, I took a deep breath. “I am sorry that I didn’t tell you about her sooner. That I kept her from you.” I shook my head. “She’s so wonderful. She’s been my whole world for the past three years.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Ace asked.
“I don’t know,” I sighed. “The excuse I kept telling myself was that you said that you never wanted to have kids and a family. To be honest, that’s part of what drove me away when we were still in Kuwait, too. It just felt like having sex with you was a mistake, on a personal level as well as a professional level. It was never going to go anywhere, no matter how much I wanted it to. So why bother? I felt like I was selling myself short.”
“I had a reason for never wanting kids,” Ace said. He wasn’t looking at me, and I could tell that whatever he was about to tell me, he was deeply unhappy about it. He dug a fingernail into the wooden picnic table. “My childhood wasn’t exactly pleasant,” he said.
“Was your dad in the military as well?” I asked curiously. I knew both so much and so little about Ace. It felt as though we had known each other for ages now. But then I realized I knew very little about his life growing up. I knew the man he’d been in Kuwait, but it felt as though I barely knew the man sitting across the table from me right now.
It was part of what made him so exciting, so enticing. There was an element of mystery to him.
Ace cleared his throat. “My dad wasn’t in the military, no,” he said. He finally looked at me. “He was an abusive, drunken asshole.”
“Oh,” I said quietly. I wanted to reach out to him, to comfort him, but I could tell he wasn’t done yet. He had more that he needed to tell me.
“He wasn’t a bad guy when he was sober. But when he’d been drinking, he’d get mad at me over the stupidest things. He was just full of rage, I’m sure partly because his life just didn’t turn out the way that he wanted it to. He was washed up and nearly broke in West Virginia. No wife, but a young son who wasn’t interested in any of the stuff he was interested in.” He paused. “I got pretty good at avoiding him, but I wasn’t always successful. Especially since I could never predict what he was going to do next.”
“Wasn’t there someone you could tell?” I asked, my voice hushed.
Ace shrugged. “I’m sure there was, but I didn’t realize it at the time. Honestly, I don’t think I realized anything abnormal was going on for a long time. I thought everyone’s families were just like mine and it was just, you know, some Hollywood bullshit to pretend otherwise.”
I put my hand over my mouth, feeling like I could cry. It was a story I’d heard from a number of the military guys, or some variant on it, but I had never really connected Ace to those stories. I’d never pictured him having a rotten childhood. Of course, that was what had made him so driven to succeed, though.
“You’ve noticed the scar tissue, I bet,” Ace added. “All over my back. Underneath the tattoos. That’s why I have so many tattoos back there, because every time I took off my shirt during basic training, it felt like everyone was staring at me.”
“I didn’t realize what they were from,” I said. “That must be terrible, having to carry around the physical reminder all the time.”
Ace shrugged. “It’s not like they hurt or anything. I almost don’t even notice them. They’re not really in a place that I can see.”
“That’s fair,” I said, but I couldn’t help looking at him with sadness and pity, even though I knew he must get that a lot and hate it. Or maybe he didn’t get that a lot. Despite the casual, don’t-give-a-fuck way he said it to me, I doubted he had told this story to anyone else.
I felt lucky that he trusted me enough to tell me what had happened. And I wondered if I knew where he was going with this. I had, of course, never been abused, but I imagined that if I had been, I wouldn’t be too quick to have children. That had to be the kind of thing that left other, nonvisible marks.
Sure enough, Ace sighed. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I’m not the victim. Or I wasn’t always, I guess.” Again, he was looking me straight in the eye, unflinching. “I almost killed my dad. One night, he came at me for coming in late from school. I had been working on a school project; it wasn’t like I could help it. But he was pissed, and he wouldn’t listen to me. Called them dumb excuses. And he came after me. I just went at it with him. I’d just had my growth spurt, and I was taller than him now, and I don’t think he expected that. Plus, he was pretty drunk. My reflexes were faster. I got him pinned on the floor, and I just started hitting him and hitting him.
“Things had been going on for so long by that point. Years and years and years. And I was so angry. I just felt like if I could punch him enough times, maybe he would understand that. Maybe he would realize what the drinking was doing to us. To him. It’s such a stupid thing to say because it’s not like I ever knew what he was like when he wasn’t like that. But I guess I always tried to imagine that somewhere under all of that, he was still a good guy. Because otherwise, there was no way that I could ever be a good guy.”
He swallowed hard. “And I just decided that I never wanted to have kids. I didn’t want to be that man. And I didn’t particularly want to be any of the foster dads that I had either. They were nice enough, but they just seemed like they’d be happier if they didn’t have their wives and their children and all these things weighing them down.”
“Where’s your dad now? Do you know?” I couldn’t resist asking.
Ace shook his head. “I stopped myself from killing him once,” he said. “I think that was more fear than anything else. I was afraid of the consequences. And to be honest, I was afraid to kill a man. Even beating him up was a weird sensation. But after years in the military…” He trailed off and shook his head. “Things are different now,” he said. “I’m different now. But I wouldn’t trust myself around my father.”
I felt a chill run through me. Ace was the father of my daughter, yet here he was, talking so calmly about killing his father. I had a feeling he would do it if the opportunity arose. And I wanted to hate him for that. I wanted to be scared of him.
But I knew him too well. And I trusted him too much. If that was how he felt, I was sure there was a reason for it. I didn’t think that he was full of rage like he had accused his father of being. He just had very targeted anger toward a situation that hadn’t been fair at all.