“If you don’t put yourself out there to risk the hurt, then you won’t ever feel the pleasure either. There is no good without the bad, Sayer. Just look at the way I came into this world.”

We both got quiet for a second as he sucked in a sharp breath. “My mom was young, too young, when she had me. Your dad was older, knew better, and was married, with you at home when she got knocked up. The only two people that can tell
us what actually happened between the two of them are gone, but we both know that whatever the circumstances were, my mom was taken advantage of and left to deal with the consequences on her own.”

I gulped a little because I never wanted to admit to him just how manipulative and hateful my father could be. I didn’t want to think about the man who had raised me taking advantage of a helpless teenage girl, but it was impossible not to when the proof was sitting across from me sipping a beer.

“Regardless of the hurt my mom may have suffered, she loved me. She took amazing care of me and never let me go a single second without knowing I was loved and the center of her entire world. She focused on the joy I brought her, not on the pain that she had to go through to end up with me in her life. You have to be wounded in order to heal.”

Rowdy’s mom had been killed during an armed robbery when he was just a little boy, so I was surprised he had such bright and clear memories of her. My mother had killed herself when I was slightly older and yet most of the things I remembered about her were fuzzy and covered in a tint of gray and sorrow. There was no joy and pleasure when I thought about her, only sadness and resentment. I wanted her to be stronger for herself, but more than that I had longed for her to be stronger for me.

“Some wounds go so deep and reach so far down into the basic parts of who we are that they can never be healed, Rowdy. They just bleed, fester, and trickle really nasty stuff out of the person bearing them forever.”

He shook his head and I was amazed that the styled front of his hair didn’t move so much as an inch. I guess it took a lot of skill and a lot of product to keep that modern-day James Dean look in place.

“You’re wrong. You know how I know that you’re wrong? Because I used to think the same thing. I had a heart that was broken and, I’d thought, beyond repair. I was hung up on what I thought I always wanted instead of what I actually deserved. The wound might be deep, so deep that you feel it all the way to your bones, and that means you get comfortable with the pain, the hurt becomes familiar, and you don’t know what to do without it. But then someone else comes along and sees you suffering and it hurts them to watch you ache within the walls of that pain. Your wound wounds them and you realize really fast that maybe you weren’t able to heal the hurt on your own, maybe you are, in fact, immune to how shitty it feels, but for them and with them you work to get better because that person makes you realize that you shouldn’t be comfortable or complacent with something that feels awful no matter how used to it you are. It just takes the right person to see it. No one except for Salem was able to put my heart back together and she had to fight to position each and every single piece in the place it was supposed to be. She healed me not only for me but for her as well.”

The sentiment was so sweet, so brutally honest about how he felt about his girlfriend, that it made a heavy ball of emotion form in my throat. Mostly to break some of the feelings that were sneaking up on me that I wasn’t sure what to do with, I lifted an eyebrow and jokingly asked him, “Aren’t you supposed to be doing the brotherly duty thing and warning me away from a guy with a criminal record and a history of sleeping around? Isn’t he the last kind of guy who we should be talking about fixing what’s broken inside of me?” It was a silly question to ask considering Zeb fixed broken things for a living, but houses weren’t people and it would take more than some new paint and refinished floors for the ice that surrounded my insides to fissure and thaw.

“If Zeb is the right guy then he’s the right guy and none of that other shit matters. At first when I saw him watching you it made me really uncomfortable, but not because I don’t trust him or think he’s a good dude. I’d just gotten you and I don’t think I was ready to share you with anyone else yet, but now that you’re obviously here to stay and I get to keep you forever, I want you to be happy, Sayer.”

Deciding to change the subject because I wasn’t sure what happiness really looked like or how I went about getting it for myself, with or without Zeb in the picture, I asked him when the baby was due and when they would know if it was a little boy or girl. His excitement over impending fatherhood was contagious. I knew he and Salem would make wonderful parents, and when the sisters joined us a few minutes later, both looking emotionally wrung out but finally at peace with one another, the weekend that was meant to be a celebration finally started.

None of us came from families that taught us to love and to care about others. All of our backgrounds were fractured and cracked. It was a flat-out miracle we had all found one another and through fight and persistence now had a solid foundation of real family and love to rebuild on. My niece or nephew would never know what it felt like to be unwanted or unloved. He or she would never have to worry about living up to unrealistic expectations and being judged harshly for any of the struggles and failures life liked to test us all with. That baby would know what a real family and what a real home was like, and just like that, I felt the edges of that wound I pretended I didn’t have, and had told Rowdy would never heal, start to tug themselves closed somewhere deep inside of me.

CHAPTER 10

Zeb

I wasn’t this nervous when the cops slapped cuffs on me and hauled me off to lockup.

I wasn’t this nervous when the judge issued my sentence and I learned that I was going to be locked up for a minimum of two and a half years of my life.

I wasn’t this nervous when my high school girlfriend, who had eventually become my fiancée and then ex-fiancée after I had gone away, told me that she thought she might be knocked up when I was only sixteen. It was a false alarm, one that you would have thought taught me a valuable lesson about birth control, but no, it was another lapse in judgment when it came to women and sex that had me walking into the massive Denver court building with Sayer looking serious and ready to fight tooth and nail at my side.

In fact the only other time I had been this nervous was that first day I got to meet my son. It was overwhelming how important someone I had just met could be and how vital that little boy had become to not only my future but my happiness as well. Every chance I got to see him I took it. It was tricky scheduling visits around his current foster-care situation and my work schedule, but I did it, and so far I had been fortunate enough to get a few hours each week with the little boy. Every time I saw him he took a bigger chunk of my heart with him when I had to say good-bye, and I could tell he was getting more and more attached to me as well. After our last visit he had wrapped himself around my legs and refused to let go. It took both me and Maria, plus a promise of an extra visit, to talk him into letting go.