***
“Thank you,” my wife whispered.
Thank God for the shades that were covering my eyes.
I knew that my face was different enough, but my eyes weren’t. And I’d only seen three people with the exact same color as my eyes before. My daughter, my sister and Lynn.
I nodded instead of speaking, not trusting my voice with her.
And not because I thought she would recognize it.
She wouldn’t. The smoke inhalation had permanently damaged my larynx and vocal chords. I didn’t sound the same, not even close.
But I knew my voice would crack the moment that I spoke to her.
She turned around, albeit a bit reluctantly, and I sat back in my chair.
Josh glared at me and bared his teeth. He knew exactly who I was, even if his companion didn’t.
I wanted to punch those perfect teeth of his right down his throat, wait for him to shit them out and then force him to swallow them again.
I didn’t do that.
But boy, did I want to.
Then, my worst nightmare at any major league game popped up, and the kisscam was on the large screens above the uppermost stands.
And it was directly on Mina and Josh.
I stiffened.
Mina stiffened. Josh answered his phone.
“Thank fucking Christ,” I muttered to myself.
The camera stayed zeroed in on Mina and Josh, with Josh none the wiser, and Mina looked down at her lap while fans booed all around us.
The screen, after staying on the two for over a minute, moved backwards to Ellen and I, and I shook my head.
“Sorry, darlin’,” I told her. “I’m not saving face here only to get it fucked up when I drop you off.”
Ellen started giggling. “He wouldn’t dare.”
My phone buzzed, and I pulled it out of my pocket.
Jessie (1344 hours): Don’t you fucking dare.
I showed it to Ellen, and she had the nerve to bat her eyelashes at me.
I sighed and typed back a quick message, then shoved it back into my pocket.
“You knew that he would do that,” I pointed out. “He told us he’d be watching it.”
“Which, by the way, he was really jealous about,” she said. “They’re playing his favorite team today.”
I didn’t much care for baseball, and I never had. My game was hockey because of the physicality of the sport. Sometimes I could watch football, but only if it was college ball.
It was embarrassing to watch a bunch of millionaires run around the field and cry when they got roughed up too bad. It was an embarrassment to all the men who came before them that we now had so many rules that’d been put in place that took away from the spirit of the game. They couldn’t do this, and they couldn’t do that. Blah, blah, blah.
My thoughts were abruptly cut off when Mina stood.
“I have to use the restroom,” she whispered to Josh, who, I might add, was still on his phone.
Dumb mother fucker.
I didn’t want him talking to her, not at all, but it was still rude as hell to bring someone on a date, or whatever it was, and stay on your phone for the majority of the time.
“Let me tell you something, mother fucker,” I growled, leaning forward. “You may have forced me into doing this, allowing you to have her, but that doesn’t mean that once I figure out how to get her out of this, I won’t beat your ass for every single time you’ve hurt or embarrassed her. Watch it.”
Josh didn’t so much as stop his conversation, but I could tell he’d heard me by the stiffening of his spine.
“Let’s go get something to eat, Elle.” I offered Ellen my arm.
She took it, and I led her out to the aisle where we went to find something to eat, only to come to a halt when I spied Mina in the line for the bathroom, her head down and tears running down her cheeks.
“Will you go talk to her?” I begged.
Ellen didn’t even hesitate. Instead, she walked straight to my woman and struck up a conversation.
By the time they made it into the bathroom, Mina was laughing.
I spotted something on the ground where the two women had been talking, and walked over to it, stooping down to pick it up.
At first, I thought it was a wallet, and then realized quickly that it was a phone wrapped in a leather case.
I flipped it open and pressed the home button on the screen, and nearly had a heart attack when I saw my daughter’s smiling face staring back at me.
A huge kick to the gut ensued, and I swiped the phone open, staring blankly when I saw the passcode.
It was six digits long.
I pursed my lips, and then I typed in Mina’s birthday, followed next by Sienna’s when that didn’t work.
Then I smiled and typed in my birthday, and the phone slid open with a click.
My heart stopped when I saw the lock screen. This time it wasn’t my daughter staring back at me, but me.
Or the old me, anyway.
“Damn,” I muttered.
Then, like any curious man would, I went through her phone for the fifteen minutes it took for the ladies to get out of the bathroom.
And not once did I stop reading the messages that Josh had been sending my woman, and my woman’s clear and unhidden animosity toward the man.
I felt like shit, then.
It was very apparent that Mina wanted nothing to do with the man. The only reason she was even giving him the time of day was due to the fact that he’d blackmailed her into it. She’d tried, multiple times, to get out of it, and he hadn’t taken no for an answer.
The motherfucker would die. A slow, agonizing death. Soon.