Page 62 of Trick
Lauren put her hand on my arm to stop me as I reached to turn off the light again.
“You don’t need to apologize,” she said, then asked softly, “Do you have nightmares often?”
I was ready to deny it, the lie coming automatically after all these years, but as soon as I saw the genuine concern on her face, I couldn’t do it.
“I used to, but I haven’t had one in a few years,” I admitted. “They started when I was a kid, right after my dad left.”
“I’m so sorry this mess with Beau caused you to have one tonight.” She looked like she was on the verge of tears, and I knew I couldn’t stand to watch her cry. I flipped the light off, then settled back in the bed.
Neither of us said anything for several long moments before I started talking again.
“I thought I killed my dad,” I confessed. “It was just a few weeks before my thirteenth birthday. He came home drunk again and started beating my mom, worse than he ever had before. Then he went after me. Mom stopped him, so he knocked her to the ground. I grabbed my baseball bat and swung at his head.”
There was something about laying there in a darkened room in the middle of the night that caused the goddamned floodgates to open. The words trickled out slowly at first, then started flowing faster as I told her about everything. Dad getting fired, us having to move into the trailer, the escalating abuse, and my panic when I thought he was dead.
I told her about calling King, and how he and Sinner and Viking had taken my dad away, and that we’d never seen him again.
Lauren listened, not interrupting aside from a quiet gasp now and then.
“Mom got a package in the mail a week later. Divorce papers with his signature, along with a request to terminate his parental rights. All Mom had to do was file them.” I laughed then as I told her that I’d wondered for a long time if King and the others had actually killed him that night and faked his signature.
“I looked him up online when I was seventeen and found a small newspaper article from the year before. He’d been killed in a bar fight in Detroit after hitting some guy over the head with a beer bottle. The guy he hit had a knife and defended himself. Good ol’ Dad was a mean drunk until the fuckin’ end, I guess,” I said bitterly.
“King and the club helped my mom out financially, hiring her to clean some of their businesses and paying for her to go to school to take some accounting classes. She started working as a bookkeeper when I was fifteen. One of her customers owned an insurance agency, and he fell for Mom right away. They got married when I was eighteen. He retired two years later, and they moved to Arizona. I missed her,” I sighed, “but he was a nice guy and she loved him. I was glad that she could finally relax and enjoy her life.”
I paused for a second, swallowing around the lump in my throat. “She died four years ago. Had an aneurysm in her sleep. They’d flown out to visit me the week before, and she’d been happier than I’d ever seen her.”
My voice trailed off, and I sighed heavily.
“My mom was the only one who ever knew about my nightmares,” I confided. “She would get upset every time I had one, so I started trying to hide them. I moved into the bedroom down the hall, farther away from hers so she wouldn’t hear me.”
A soft sniffle caught my ear, followed by a muffled sob.
“Oh, darlin’,” I groaned, pulling her into my arms. “Don’t cry. It all turned out OK. The nightmares stopped around the time I graduated high school. I didn’t have another one until a few weeks after my mom died.”
She shuddered against me, and her warm tears trickled down onto my chest.
“Don’t waste your tears on me. I don’t need your pity, babe,” I said, the words coming out more harshly than I intended.
She stiffened, then rubbed her hand along my side soothingly. “It’s not pity, Trick. I’m just sad that you had to go through that. Nobody should ever have to live with that kind of abuse, especially a child. I’m sad for your mom, who must have felt trapped until you saved her. I’m sad that you lost her, just when things were going so well. I’m sad that you felt like you had to hide your nightmares from her.”
I hugged her tightly, then pressed a soft kiss into her hair, trying not to give in to the rush of emotion caused by her sweet words.
She hesitated, then asked softly, “That’s the real reason why you always sleep alone, isn’t it?”
I inhaled sharply as the truth hit me like a punch to the solar plexus.
“It’s part of it, anyway. There were a few women over the years who got the wrong idea if I let them sleep over. But, yeah, the nightmares were the biggest issue.” I dragged in a ragged breath, then admitted, “After my mom died, I went off the rails for several weeks. I was drinking too much and doing everything I could do to avoid being alone so that I didn’t have to think about how much I missed her. The last time I had a nightmare, the random woman next to me bitched that I’d woken her up and asked me what the hell was wrong with me.”
Lauren gasped, and muttered, “What a heartless cunt,” under her breath.
Her outrage made me smile into the darkness, and I kissed her forehead.
“So, I announced my new rule and always enforced it, no matter what. If I took a woman to my room, I made sure she knew the score up front. Some of them tried to change my mind after the fact, and a few of them got ugly about it and caused a scene, so I just stopped taking them to my room at all.”
“I have to tell you, Trick, that when I first heard about that damned rule, I thought you were the most disrespectful asshole on the planet.”
I winced. “You weren’t too far off, darlin’.”
