Page 42 of Honeysuckle
This had happened before.
“14?” Silas asked. "You counted?”
“He’s the size of a bear. It's pretty easy to notice when he’s not around,” I deflected. “You have too many eggs in your basket to be worried about your daddy’s bastard son. Leave me alone and do your job so I can do mine.”
“Josh!” Silas called out as I left the office and went down to practice.
I pushed the argument to the back of my mind and focused on practice, putting one foot in front of the other and keeping my head down. My priorities were baseball and school, not on making Silas feel better about himself in a situation I never asked to be in the middle of.
I remembered catching her on the phone with my biological father… Mom was crying, asking him for more money. She had mumbled about it my entire life but I never believed her. I was thirteen when I found out that I had the blood of a Shore running through my veins with evidence that wasn't spilling from some drunks mouth. Thirteen, and every time I walked to school, I had to see his stupid face in the newspaper or on bus benches.
Charles. Mr. Shore.
Dickbag, deadbeat, dad.
It took another three years until I found out the story of how they knew each other. And knowing the story was more painful than the truth of who I really was. The bastard baby who was thrown away because I had the potential to topple an empire. She had been healthy, thriving almost, working as a nurse at St. Christian’s downtown. But Charles was handsome and persuasive; it wasn’t long before he was banging my mom in storage closets like a bad episode of some medical sitcom.
I wasn’t part of the plan, though, and the moment she had gotten pregnant, Charles found any reason to get rid of her. He paid her to get rid of me and then continued to threaten her after she didn't. Eventually, he started sending her money to keep her quiet.
That paper trail was how Silas found me.
I wanted nothing to do with them. I had worked hard to get where I was, and I did it without their help. I never saw a cent of that money, it had been funneled into drugs just to keep my mother’s heart pumping.
Every day of my life was spent listening to her blame me for our situation.
You ruined everything.
You look just like him.
You’re a piece of shit just like your Dad.
You’ll never be anything, just a rat scurrying around begging for scraps from a family that wanted you dead.
She tried more than once to see it through. When money was tight she’d let her shitty boyfriends into my room. They’d do what they wanted, take what they needed, and time after time it left me as a husk. An angry kid with a deadly codependency with vodka and enough PTSD to put down an army vet. I tugged at the collar of my sweater as my thoughts stirred.
I should have known from the moment Silas showed up at Lorette that day he’d be annoying about the entire thing. He’d claimed no one knew—that he’d found out by accident when the family accounts were transferred to him. But I didn’t believe him. His father—our father—had been keeping me a secret my entire life, and he’d just slipped up?
It felt slimy.
I didn’t want what Silas was offering: the truth, freedom, and money.
That was until Ian attacked me in the showers that night and, suddenly, I was in more trouble than ever expected. Trouble that I couldn’t talk or pitch my way out of. Silas had almost sounded excited when I called.
Only three people knew the truth: Silas, Coach Cody, and me. It had to stay that way. I was almost free, and I never wanted the Shore name; I just wanted to be clean of my past.
“What about you?” Arlo kicked his foot out and it connected with mine, bringing me back to the bonfire raging before me.
“What?” I shook out of my dissociation.
“Favorite holiday?” Ella asked for Arlo.
“Uh, I don’t know, I don’t really have one.” I shrugged.
“What do you mean you don’t have one?” Cael asked, as his fingers raked through Van’s chocolate brown mullet in circles. It weirded me out how comfortable they were with one another, and I was almost eighty percent sure that it had sent Mitchell to sleep.
“What’s yours?” I asked him.
“My birthday, duh.” He answered like it was obvious.
