Page 60 of Pelvic Flaws

“I say I am so damn glad my bag handle broke and my car is crap.” I kissed him gently on the lips, feeling a tingling sensation all over. It was a quick kiss, but it was enough to tell me I wanted more. “Maybe we should just get some take out and go back to your apartment, as long as you don’t mind getting me home by ten. My mum is keeping an eye on Charlie because Annie and Isaac are out.”

Dex looked at his watch and grinned. “That’s awesome,” he replied. “I have two and half hours to spend kissing you.”

“It will only be kissing, Dex,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound stand-offish.

“Good, because you’re not ready for me yet, Katie Cat, but when you are, we’re going to be awesome.

Dex

Katie and I had eaten Chinese food and then moved to my couch to drink our beer. She’d insisted that I drink with her and that she’d get a cab back home, but what she didn’t know was I was drinking alcohol free beer – there was no way she was getting home any other way than in my car.

“So, you have no family left, at all?”

I shook my head. “It was just me, Mom, and Dad. When they both went, I figured there was nothing to keep me in Texas, so came here. The land of my mom’s birth.”

“Did you lose them close together?”

Katie shifted and pulled her legs up, getting comfy, and as I looked at her, I felt so fucking content that I had the need to touch her.

“Mom went first,” I said, taking her hand and linking our fingers. “She had a stroke and never really came around from it.”

“That’s awful.” Katie squeezed my hand. “What about your dad?”

“He died of pneumonia a little over two years later. He’d never really got over losing Mom and hated not seeing her in places he expected to, so he moved from Dallas to an assisted living place in El Paso – why he chose there I have no clue, but he loved the place. Worse part was I didn’t get to see him more than once a month.”

“That must have been hard, particularly as you only had each other.”

I nodded. “Yeah it was, but he loved it there. I think he liked the attention from the ladies.” I grinned remembering Dad slapping on the cologne just to go and check some lady’s outside faucet for her. “He didn’t need to live in assisted living. He was only seventy-two, but he complained his old neighborhood was full of young families who didn’t give a shit whether he was living or dead.”

“He sounds like my mum,” Katie said with a giggle. “She’s always complaining that me, and my brother, Mark, wouldn’t know if she’d been dead for weeks with flies living off her. Seeing as Mark lives in Adelaide, it’s not surprising.”

“Do you see much of her though?” I asked, rubbing my thumb against Katie’s hand.

“At least once a week, so I have no idea what her problem is.” She lifted her beer and took a swig. “If your dad lived in assisted living, how the hell did he get pneumonia?”

I shrugged. “I saw him at Thanksgiving, he came to stay with me and was fine. He had a little cold, but nothing unusual. Within three weeks, I was getting a plane to El Paso hoping he’d last the night. The lady who ran the place where he lived said he’d told them he was coming to stay with me until he felt better. He had his own little apartment, so it was easy for him to disappear. The first they knew he wasn’t with me, was when he rang his alarm for help because he couldn’t breathe.”

“Why do old people never want to ask for help?”

“Pride I guess. Well his pride meant he got pneumonia and I only managed to see him for three hours before he died.”

I let out a long exhale, remembering Dad hooked up to breathing apparatus and tubes. He looked so tiny and frail in the hospital bed and I knew as soon as I saw him, he wasn’t going to make it.

“What about your dad?” I asked, moving a little closer to Katie.

“He had a heart attack just after I had Annie. We didn’t really get on to be honest. He and Mum were divorced and he’d pretty much abandoned us when we were kids. I think I was ten and Mark was thirteen when he left. My mum married Eric about three years later. I didn’t hear from my dad in over fifteen years and then only sporadically. Mark never wanted anything to do with him, but I was a bit more forgiving, for all the good it did me.”

“Why was that?”

“He continued to let me down. He let Isaac down all the time, promising him trips to the park, or to go for a burger. He was just a leech who wanted money from me and whenever he got what he wanted he disappeared.”

“Were you in touch when he died?” I asked.

“No. He’d disappeared about a year before, with over a grand of my money. I’d left my purse in the kitchen when he was at the house one day, and stupidly, I had left the PIN on a piece of paper with it.”

I grimaced. “You don’t expect your parents to rip you off, that must have hurt, a lot.”

“Not really, it’s what I’d come to expect from him. I was more bloody annoyed that I’d been stupid enough to write the PIN down. You can imagine the shit that Carl gave me for doing that.”

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