Page 70 of Love Bank
My phone buzzed in my back pocket. I paused to pull it out in case it was Lucy and then started the truck engine.
Jayden:Hope your head this morning is a hell of a lot clearer than your texts last night.
I groaned, tilting my head back until it hit the headrest. I knew I shouldn’t have gone to Hell’s Tavern in the mood I was in. I wiped a hand down the beard I’d let grow out a few days too many. Scrolling through the texts, I saw at least nine of them at various intervals throughout the evening. They got progressively incoherent.
“Oh, shit!”
A thought occurred to me like a lightning bolt to the brain.
“No, no, no…” I chanted, jabbing at my phone.
Nope. No mercy for a drunk idiot. There it was in all its glory.
A text to Lucy last night around midnight.
A voice chat.
I hit play and nearly climbed back out of the truck to find a hole to fall into and never come back out. My voice warbled and cracked, not so great on a good day, let alone after I’d drunk half the liquid in that dingy bar.
I sang the chorus to Justin Bieber’s song “Sorry.” Including a couple of whoops for good measure and then a loud crash at the end where I thought I remembered dropping my phone. The only reason I remember that part was it landed in a sticky puddle and I wondered what deadly disease I’d catch from it.
I smacked the steering wheel, threw the offending phone on the passenger seat, and peeled out of the driveway. I had damage control to do and I couldn’t do it drunk in a bar or stuck at my house alone. I needed to grovel and groveling was best done in person.
The four-way stop entering town was already backed up. I gripped the wheel and tried out opening arguments in my head. They all sounded either callous or overly pathetic. It was my turn at the stop sign, so I tapped the brakes and was just about to hit the gas for a right turn onto Brinestone Way when the car in the intersection slammed to a halt and a woman leaned half her body out the window. Her arm waved wildly in the air.
“Bain!”
“Fuck me…” I groaned.
It was Addi. The alleged baby mama, flagging me down in the middle of the jam-packed four-way stop. If you wanted to be the highlight of the gossip mill, this was the way to do it. Everybody and their mother was watching us right now.
I waved her over, turned right, and pulled off to the side of the road in the red dirt. She pulled in front of me, the tail end of her car still in the damn lane. This woman was reckless all right.
I slid out of the truck and put my hands on my hips, ready for a confrontation. Until I had facts, I wasn’t going to let this pint-sized woman trample all over my life.
She jumped out of the car, the incessant ding of the door being left open getting on my last nerve. I could literally see every tooth she possessed, she was smiling so wide. On the surface, she was a pretty girl—if you could overlook the crazed look in her eyes—but Lucy had ruined me for other women. No one could compare to her.
“Good morning, sweetie!”
When she was in front of me, she opened her arms out wide and leaned in. I sidestepped quickly, leaving her with nothing but good old-fashioned small-town clean air in her embrace.
“Don’t call me sweetie. In fact, don’t call me at all until you have DNA evidence to prove who the father is.”
Her mouth flopped open and closed like a fish before settling into a pout a toddler would be proud of. In my peripheral vision, I could see heads swiveling in the cars going by. No need for a cop to enforce speed limits. Just give the town some juicy drama and these assholes drove slower than my grandma getting her driver’s license renewed on her eighty-fifth birthday. I was sure they wanted to catch all the drama, but I had other things to do.
“I’ll see you when you have that document.” With that order, I climbed back into my truck and pulled back out onto the road, careful not to hit her while she still stood there in shock, like I’d killed her dreams and strangled her cat.
Halfway down the mile stretch of road, I saw her car come up behind me, rising from the ashes like an angry, pregnant phoenix. Based on the way her eyebrows went from two distinct lines to one, I had a sense she was angry. My head started to ache in earnest. Now that I had a tail I couldn’t go straight to the clinic and dump this mess on Lucy’s doorstep. I’d have to get rid of Addi and then I could talk to Lucy.
As I passed the clinic, I saw the chief’s car in the lot, along with the mail truck Poppy drove. That pounding in my head took a turn for the worst, barreling straight into fear for Lucy’s safety. Last time the chief was there, my girl had a gun to her head. My truck turned on a dime, skidding across the pavement and bouncing wildly into the clinic parking lot. Had to give Addi credit; she took the change in plans remarkably well, swerving into the dirt on the side of the road as she flipped a U-turn and followed me.
I hopped out of the truck and ran to the door of the clinic like my soul was on fire. Mostly it was just heartburn from the fried fish and chips last night at Hell’s Tavern.
“Luc—”
I hit a wall of flesh, my eyes not used to the dimmer lights in the clinic after the spotlight right to the brain from the morning sunshine. A domino effect occurred, pushing the chief into the two ladies in front of him, which sent them all forward into Lucy. A mangy cat hissed and ran out the door.
Lucy yelped and pushed back with both hands on Poppy’s forehead, desperately trying to turn the tide in a sea of limbs and bodies. Momentum wasn’t on her side, and after a brief second of a shaky pause, she went down to the floor like one of those buildings they demolish in the city, a cloud of cat hair the ash flitting through the air from beneath the bodies.
