Page 78 of Bad & Bossy

“Something like that.”

The man, probably in his fifties, if not sixties, laughed as he turned back to me. “No problem, son. I know how it is. Events like these always bring out the seediest women, always wanting their own investment,” he chuckled.

I bit my tongue so hard I tasted iron.

“I’ve heard whispers through the grapevine that you’re thinking of adding a zero percent,” he added.

I nodded. “One for each flavor of the new range, as well as one zero IPA and zero light,” I replied. “If we’re going to do it, I’d rather go big, then narrow down if the demand for certain ones aren’t high enough.”

His grin widened but I couldn’t help but look past him, over his shoulder, at Dana laughing with a beer in her hand as she stood with our friends. I wanted to be over there, a beer in my own hand, that not being the worst thing in the world for me. I just wanted to relax and enjoy myself with her. Wanted fucking everything with her. You’ve ruined it already, fuckwit.

“If you can make that happen, I’ll gladly invest,” Damien said, his words barely reaching my ears. “Only wish you had some of them on offer tonight so I could try them.”

“We’re still perfecting them so that they taste like the real thing,” I explained, the words clocking that he offered an investment. “But thank you. I’m glad you’d like to play a part in this.”

He offered his hand to me and I took it, giving it a solid shake before something unexpected caught my eye.

No.

No, no, no. Not tonight. Not here. Not in the one goddamn place I had left that they hadn’t sullied, not in the place I’d built on my own.

Dana’s eyes met mine in a flash of worry, and before I knew it I was abandoning Damien and moving toward her, needing her, aching for her or booze or something, I didn’t know what. She was moving toward me too, her eyes glancing back at the four of them as they slotted themselves into the crowd as if they belonged.

“I can get them to leave,” she offered, her gaze caught between whatever look had plastered itself to my face and my parents in the distance behind her. “I can ask Ben to get security?—”

“No,” I said, the word feeling imprecise in my mouth. “Thank you, but no.”

Her eyes went wide. “No?”

“It would only cause a scene.” Even with her in front of me, that unmistakable ache flared again in the base of my throat. I need a drink. I need a drink. I need a fucking drink. But I couldn’t, at least not with her here, not with the inability to cover it with toothpaste and a mint. “Maybe I should go.”

“Cole, it’s your event. Not theirs.”

I watched them over the top of her head, watched as my mother and father worked the room as if this success was theirs while the two teenagers they kept in tow hung out on the sidelines. I watched as they took hors d’oeuvres from a waiter, watched as they took a free drink from the bar.

Dana squeezed my hand, and then my forearm, my bicep. I glanced down at her, watching her lips move but hearing nothing but ringing. It grew louder, blocking out anything else, minimizing the growing concern on Dana’s face as Hunter and Lottie stepped up behind her.

I blinked, and once again, time blipped.

My feet were moving, a hand around my wrist pulling me back, a sea of people dividing as I beelined for my father.

I blinked, and he was backed against a wall, Dana’s voice seeping through. “Get them out,” she pleaded with someone.

But I didn’t care.

They’d left me. Crying, barely thirteen, with a stashed bottle of top-shelf scotch in my backpack and a suitcase full of clothes at the foot of my aunt’s driveway. The summer sun beating down on me from above, the mountains in the distance, a look of irritation on their faces.

“Don’t bother thinking you can come back,” Dad had said.

Mom looked bored as she’d adjusted her sunglasses and checked her lipstick in the mirror of the sun visor.

I blinked, and my hand was around my father’s throat, pinning him to the wall.

“Conrad!” my mother shouted.

“Stop, stop, stop!”

A hand about the size of mine gripped onto my forearm, pulling me off of him, dragging me back. I didn’t fight it. The adrenaline raced in me but I didn’t have the will to do anything with it, to drag myself back to him and beat his face in until my knuckles were bloodied and he was mush, until I was being escorted away in a police car and charged with fucking murder.

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