Counterfeit Love

He smelled like the hotel soap still. Even though it wasn't his scent, I found myself taking a deep breath, breathing him in.

My hand moved out, fingertip gliding over the various tattoos scattered around. A bird here, a skull there. A dollar symbol down near his ribs.

My hand was moving up his arm when I found them.

"Finch!" I snapped. "We talked about this," I told him, grabbing hold of the edge of one of his nicotine patches, ripping it off.

"Hey, I need that."

"Nobody needs multiple nicotine patches in the middle of the night."

"People who started smoking at thirteen do," he objected.

"Thirteen?" I gasped, pushing upward to look down at him. "Seriously?"

"Seriously," he agreed, one hand raising, brushing my hair behind my ear.

"Where were your parents?"

"Mom was dead. Dad didn't give a fuck. My grandparents would have cared. I just didn't tell them when I went to visit."

"Did you spend summers there?" I asked.

"Summers, yeah. Holidays. When my father was locked away."

I'd been curious about his father since my mom mentioned meeting him years ago. I didn't look into him myself. Which was very much unlike me. The one time I tried, I realized that I would rather have Finch tell me about it, that it almost felt like a betrayal to go behind his back and look into his past.

"Was your father in the same business as you?"

"Yes and no. Yes, he was a criminal. But, no, he didn't make money. He didn't have the hands for it. Always shaking. Never confirmed it with a doc or anything, but always figured the shaking was from all the drugs he put in his system when he was younger."

"Did he quit for your sake?"

"He quit drugs because of the law catching him for it over and over."

"Well, whatever the reason, that's good that he quit."

"He replaced it with booze," he went on. "Which made him a fuckuva lot meaner than the drugs ever did."

My stomach twisted at that.

My first mom had always been a safe place.

I couldn't imagine her being mean.

Firm when I misbehaved? Yes. Because she wasn't raising a child, she was raising a functioning member of society, and she didn't want to launch a spoiled brat who couldn't take no for an answer into the world.

But she was always constructive. She always explained expectations and consequences for my behavior.

Your parent was supposed to be someone safe, someone able to control their anger toward you, someone who sheltered you from the ugly of the world, didn't expose you to it further.

"I'm sorry he wasn't a good dad," I told him, watching as he shot me a sweet smile.

"I turned out alright."

"You did," I agreed. "Can I ask you something?"

"Yep."

"How did this happen?" I asked, shifting my weight, reaching out to touch the scar on his cheek. "I figured you got it when you were older. In a bar fight or something. But then my mom said you'd had it when she met you. You don't have to tell me," I added, not wanting to be intrusive.

"I'm an open book, angel. I was seven, I think it was. And I was screwing around kicking a ball around the kitchen because it was raining for the third day straight and I was antsy. I didn't realize my dad had been drawing coke into lines. The ball bounced off the fridge and flew past me, sliding across the table, making the powder fly everywhere."

"Oh, no," I rumbled, knowing what was coming.

"We didn't have a lot of money. Why the fuck he chose coke, of all the other, much cheaper drugs available, is beyond me. But that was what he wanted that year. And he had to scrape together the money every time he wanted some. Which was often. So he flew into a fucking rage, grabbed his switchblade off the table, and swung out at me. He figured out real quick how bad he fucked up when we couldn't stop the bleeding."

"You needed stitches."

"Yeah."

"Did you... did you get stitches?" I asked, having a hard time believing a father would take chances of letting his kid bleed out.

"Dragged me to his buddy's house. Worked as a vet tech. Figure this fucking thing is still so ugly is because of the shit job he'd done on me."

"It's not ugly," I objected, running my finger over the smooth surface of it. "It has character."

"It helped me sell my badass image when I was locked up, if nothing else."

Finch's hand started to gently stroke across my lower back, a soft touch, both reassuring and exciting at once.

"Go on, you can ask," he said.

"Ask what?"

"What you want to. What I got locked up for."

"You got locked up for assault," I told him. Of course, I had looked into it.

"You don't have any questions about that?"

"I figured it had to do with work."