Page 40 of Stone Rules

I close my eyes and let the warm feeling of the alcohol wash over me. And before I know it, I’m fishing the business card out of my pocket. For a second I fear he’s only given it to me in hopes I have contacts that could help him with his career as a screenwriter. But when I examine the card, I see he’s not a screenwriter at all. I blink my eyes and re-read the card.

George Tate

Author of children’s books

He writes children’s books?

The card lists contact information with a website and email. I turn the card over to see he has hand-written his cell phone number on the back.

My curiosity gets the better of me and I lean over to use Skylar’s laptop.

I’ve never once in ten years looked up anything about my father. I never wanted to know the first thing about him. I especially never wanted to know if he’d hit it big in show business.

My fingers shake as I open Google and type in his name. I’m directed to an Amazon page that lists all of his books. I count. There are nine of them. Upon further inspection, I see they are all short books illustrated by many pictures. The details in his bio say he writes the stories for young school-aged children to raise awareness of sensitive topics such as bullying, peer pressure and even abuse. The last line of his bio makes me pause.

George Tate writes these books in an effort to help the children of others, as he was never able to do with his own child.

It makes it sound like I’m dead.

I close the laptop, unwilling to read anything more about him. I don’t want to know if, after he left me to the fucking wolves, he acquired redeeming qualities. He could be the king of fucking England for all I care. Nothing he has done or will ever do can make up for the fact that he left me. Abandoned me. Ruined me.

But all this time I thought he left because of me. Of course, now I realize my mother wanted me to think that. Hell, she started brainwashing me even before he left. Every time I misbehaved she would tell me he wouldn’t love me. Every time she did something she didn’t want him to know about, she threatened me that he might leave if he found out. So I never told him. I never told him about the drugs and the drinking and the men she would entertain when he wasn’t home. I think maybe all along, deep down she knew he would leave so she set me up to take the fall for it.

She was jealous of our Football Saturdays. My dad was a big fan of college football and he raised me to love the game, too. The two of us even went on a road trip every year when his favorite team, the Miami Hurricanes, was playing within driving distance. Those were the only good memories of my childhood. Those trips were a thousand times better than meeting movie stars, going to premiers, or having lunch with big-named producers—all my mother’s idea of showing me a good time.

Two months before he left, she ruined football for me, too. One Saturday when my dad and I were loading up the car to head four hours away to Pennsylvania to watch the Miami Hurricanes play Penn State, she stopped us at the last minute, telling my dad she was able to set up a meeting with a prestigious production company who wanted to look at one of his screenplays. But they would only see himthatafternoon. We cancelled the trip, of course, and my dad waited three hours at a restaurant. He came home steaming mad. This was one of the fights I heard. He said he knew she was lying because he called the company and they had no record of anyone ever setting up a meeting. My mother made up excuses, telling him that his screenplays were shit and they must have decided at the last minute not to take the meeting. Producers do that all the time, she said. It’s just the nature of the business. When he accused her of setting up the whole charade to keep us from our road trip, she laughed it off, telling him he was silly to even want to take a twelve-year-old girl to a football game. That others would think he’s a dirty old man. I remember hearing a crash and running to my room.

The next day, my mother was complaining about how my dad broke one of her vases. My dad was complaining about how he hit his head on the bedpost in the middle of the night. I was too naïve to put two and two together. After all, women don’t hit men. They only hit children, right?

And even though I work the rest of my shift, if only as a distraction, it doesn’t stop me from thinking about a man who was once beaten by his own wife. A man who was once so ruined himself that he felt he had no choice but to leave his only child.

I hate him. But I hatehermore. She broke him before she broke me. She’s lucky she’s already dead. Because if she weren’t, I would fucking kill her.

At six o’clock, Skylar insists things are slow and that I should go home early. I don’t fight her. Today has been emotionally draining and all I want to do is go for a swim and then pick up a bottle of tequila.

But as I exit the front door of Mitchell’s, two things catch my eye.

A stretch limo.

And the gorgeous man standing beside it wearing jeans and a White Poison t-shirt.

Chapter Nineteen

Stunned to see Ethan standing outside Mitchell’s, and even more surprised to see him wearing something other than his regular attire, I fail to see what he’s holding in his hands.

He waves something at me and I come closer to take a look.

Concert tickets to White Poison. I look up to question him.

“Rule number nine,” he says, smiling down at me. “A promise is a promise.”

I take them from him and examine them. I gasp. “Second row?”

“Yeah. We’ll not only get tofeeltheir sweat, we’ll get totasteit.”

He never misses a thing, does he? I remember the customer who hit on me saying something about being close enough to feel their sweat. But that was weeks ago, long after the tickets had sold out. “But they sold out in minutes. How?”

He shrugs. “I know a guy who knows a guy.”

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