Page 72 of Grumpy Sunshine

And he was pretty nice.

At least, so far.

Chevy wouldn’t have let him into my house if he wasn’t.

Speaking of Chevy…

I turned to survey him and questioned, “Did you know?”

“I suspected,” he admitted.

“The whole reason we had your mother working at our clubhouse was so we could get information.I asked Webber to hire her.”He sighed.“My ex-wife, Cally, had made some pretty cryptic comments when we were in the process of divorcing that I had to look into Trini.Apollo started to dig into her and found that she was advertising herself as a licensed and bonded cleaning company, so we decided to get her to come out.See what we could find on her.Never expected you to walk right into my life, though.”

I smiled, though it was a little shaky.

This was a lot to process.

As if he sensed my thoughts, Chevy leaned back in his chair and said, “I think we should give her some time to process.”

Cakes—Paden—my dad—looked at me with a sad smile.“We have all the time in the world.”

Did we, though?

I felt like nothing good ever happened to me without being followed up by something really bad to overshadow it.

I might have a dad, but like I said, good is always followed by bad.

Always.

“If you’re up for it, you can come to the club party this weekend,” he said as he stood up, knocking on the table as he did.“Chevy can give you my number if you want it.”

Then he was gone, leaving me and Chevy alone to finish our food.

I picked at my fries when Chevy said, “Penny for your thoughts?”

I looked up, my gaze snagging on the cake that Cakes had brought in with him.

Cakes.

Paden.

“What do I call him?”I asked.“Cakes is kind of weird.”

Chevy chuckled.“Boys in the club call me Chaos, but it’s used so interchangeably with Chevy that I go by both.”He paused, studying me for a long second before saying, “Call him Paden.Call him Cakes.Call him Dad.Though, I think that last one will give him a little bit of euphoria to go with you actually acknowledging him.”

I turned back to him.

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to talk about my dad anymore.

I had a feeling that I needed to process that information, and the way I processed was to internalize everything and go through it in my mind, picking it apart piece by piece, until I had it worked out.

I’d almost had to because of what my mom had put me through.

Not that Silver wouldn’t have listened, but we were both well and truly fucked and rehashing it to each other only seemed to make it worse.

So, I changed the subject.

When he stood up and headed for the trash can with all of our trash—I’d eaten every single bit of my burger and fries—I stood up with him.

---