Page 55 of Smokey's Distraction
Surprised, she looked up at him. . “That’s a long time. Were you in high school when you joined?”
He shook his head. “At seventeen, I hung around the club, then prospected for a couple of years. I patched in at twenty.” He took a pull on his beer. “Joining the Insurgents was the best thing I ever did. It fuckin’ saved me.”
“What do you mean by that?” Ashley ran her finger along the top of the bottle before putting it to her lips.
“Let’s just say, I was on a one-way road to destruction.” He looked away, turning his attention to the waterfall.
“Did your parents support your decision to join the club?”
“My parents? Fuck.” Snorting, he met her gaze. “They didn’t give a shit about any of us.”
There was a gap of silence.
“Some parents are that way,” she said, pulling at a loose thread in the blanket.
More silence.
Smokey tossed the empty beer bottle to the side and reached for another one.
“Were yours?”
“My dad was. My mom was great, but my dad didn’t give a rat’s ass about us. He pretended to give a damn for show, but he didn’t.”
“Are your folks still together?” Popping the top, he tipped the bottle to his lips.
“No. My dad took off when I seven, and never paid one penny of child support. Every time the Department of Social Services dragged his ass to court, he’d always say he wasn’t working, or only had a part-time job, but it was all lies.” Pulling her knees to her chest, she wrapped her arms around them. “The few times he’d come by to take us out for ice cream, he was always dressed real nice. And the cars he drove weren’t second-hand clunkers, that’s for sure. I guess he thought we wouldn’t notice, or was rubbing it in our faces, I’m not sure which. What an ass.”
“Yeah, my old man was a selfish bastard too.”
“Did he cheat on your mom? My dad thinks there’s always someone better, so he’s cheated on every woman he’s been married to.”
“How many wives has he had?”
Biting her lower lip, casting her eyes upward, she tried to recall. “I’m not sure if Kat is his sixth or seventh wife.” She shifted her gaze to his. “Let’s just say, there have been many.”
Smokey laughed. “I agree with you. But my old man’s only love was the bottle. He was around twenty-two years old when he started, and the sonofabitch never stopped until he died at the age of forty. I’m pretty sure he cheated on my mother, but it never came up in our household if he did. The asshole would disappear for weeks at a time, and never left us any money. We lived on cereal, but none of my brothers or I cared, because the only time we had any peace was when the bastard was gone. He drank hard and ruled the house with an iron fist. He was …” Smokey’s voice trailed off, his jaw clenching as if some dark, buried memory had suddenly illuminated in his mind.
Leaning forward, Ashley touched his knee. “I’m sorry you had to go through what you did.”
It was as if her words had snapped him back to the present because he jerked his head and pushed her hand away.
“It is what it is.”
Sensing he was angry about revealing a part of his past, she didn’t say anything else.
For several minutes, silence filled the space between them. Feeling an urge to fill the void, she said, “I’ve never been on a motorcycle.”
The corner of his mouth hitched up. “You’d like it.”
“I think it’d be scary.”
“You could handle it. I’ll have to take you for a ride sometime.”
“I’d like that.”
“Yeah.” Slipping a hand inside his vest, he took out two joints. “Do you smoke?”
“It’s been a long time.”
