Chapter 1

Don’t piss in your boot because you think it’s funny.

-Things I never thought I would have to tell my kid not to do.

Jessie

“Why the hell are you out here and not in your fucking room doing that?” I asked my sixteen-year-old son, Linc.

Linc looked up from his homework and shrugged.

The problem with Linc doing his homework out here meant that he had the TV blaring, his phone on some stupid YouTube video, and his pencil tapping a million miles an hour while he hummed to some random song that only he could hear.

He was also nearly naked. Had been for the majority of his life.

He ignored me as if I hadn’t said a word.

“Seriously,” I said to him. “What makes you think it’s okay to sit here in your underwear with the fuckin’ front window wide ass open? The people in this neighborhood are not down with that, and I’d rather they not egg our shit to communicate that to us. Not to mention you don’t pay the fuckin’ electric bill, and it’s cold as fuck out.”

Linc snorted.

“They’d have to be able to walk close to our cars and, since most of them are old geezers, I don’t see that happening,” he countered. “What’s gotten up your ass?”

I grunted, walking to the kitchen to grab a beer. It’d been a long fucking day, and I had to go back to work and do it all over again tomorrow.

I was a welder for a pipeline. My job was exhaustingly hard work that I fucking loved. I made a whack and paid my bills, but I had to work long hours to do it. Nearly eighty hours a week.

“Someone called for you today. A woman.”

“What was her name?” I asked, scanning the contents of the refrigerator for something to eat. “Did you eat all the leftover pizza?”

Linc and I had pizza a lot. Anything that was fast, usually something that came out of a box, was one of our go-to menu items seeing as neither one of us really knew how to cook. Lunchables, macaroni and sometimes Hamburger Helper when we were feeling adventurous.

“Ellen?” Linc guessed. “I wrote it down on the pad next to the phone.”

The name ‘Ellen’ wasn’t common, but it was still unlikely that a girl from my past—almost fourteen years ago to be exact—to come back and haunt me some two-thousand odd miles away from where I knew she had moved to all those years ago.

“What did she want?” I asked. “And you never answered me on the pizza.”

“That was gone around three in the morning,” Linc chuckled unrepentantly. “And I wrote it all down on the note.”

I closed the fridge and moved across the small space to the counter next to the landline that I wasn’t sure why we still had, and I stared at the pad of paper with two words on it.

Club party.

“Can I go?”

I looked up to find Linc, the boy who was the spitting image of me, standing at my side.

Already standing at six foot one, he was likely to continue to grow according to his pediatrician who said he’d probably reach my height, if not pass it. He had jet-black hair with a slight wave to it, also exactly like mine.

Hell, he even had a beard, just like me. Though, his was trimmed and neatly kept because the school he was attending informed him if it wasn’t done just so, he’d have to shave it or leave the school.

We had to fight for the beard, so, if he wanted to keep it, he’d damn well follow their rules or I’d make him shave it off myself.

His body mass was the only thing still lagging behind mine. He was much skinnier, but he was definitely on the verge of getting some bulk, just like I’d been at sixteen. He was still in that in-between stage, no longer a boy but not yet a man. You could see the promise of what he would become some day, but he just wasn’t quite there yet.

Me, I was six foot four, two-hundred-fifty pounds of solid muscle, including a six-pack that was honed the hard way—through long days of manual labor on the pipeline. I had a beard that was on the verge of being too bushy, but I’d lost the desire to impress anyone a long fucking time ago.

I was me, and I wasn’t going to change, even though there were some who wished I would.

“I’ll have to ask if it’s kid friendly,” I laughed when my son gave me a face that clearly conveyed what he thought about me lumping him in the kid-friendly category. “And you didn’t mention the time, or why she called to tell me something I already knew.”

“She was supposedly reminding everyone about it since someone complained a few weeks ago that they weren’t reminded. Oh, and I’m not a kid.”

My kid wasn’t a kid. He couldn’t be when he was raised by me.

I’d done my best, but I’d been more like a brother than a parent. We were sixteen years apart in age, and there wasn’t a day that went by where I did the whole parenting thing correctly.

He had to grow up faster than most. By the age of ten, I was leaving him at home for extended periods of time because I’d been switched to a different shift that meant I didn’t get home from work until a little after nine o’clock.

By the age of twelve, he was spending almost the entire night alone, every other day, because my shifts were switched again.

By fifteen, we didn’t even pass each other for the entire day at times.

Now, at sixteen, I had a better paying position. One where I worked days, though they were long and just as tiring—if not more so—as my previous job. I was a supervisor (or manager, whatever) and being the boss was the pits. I had a low tolerance for dealing with people’s bullshit, and there was a lot of that in this job.

The only saving grace was being able to pay all my bills, and slowly drive down the debt I’d accrued over the years. Not to mention I was able to afford a house payment for the first time ever.

“You took me to the last one.”

I grinned. “That’s right. I did.”

“I can’t believe you’re prospecting. I’m so fuckin’ excited.”

I just shook my head.

My kid rolled his eyes at me and went back to the couch. He came back to me with a paper in his hand. “Read this and make sure it looks good.”

I grabbed the paper and read it, my heart tightening slightly when I read the words on the paper.

“You think I’m a superhero?” I asked quietly, my eyes flicking up to my son’s, where he was leaning against the wall.

Linc looked at me, really looked at me, and nodded.

“Yeah, Dad. I think you’re a fucking superhero,” he grated out. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here right now, now would I? My paper was on someone who inspires me to be a better person. That’s you, bitch.”

I grabbed my man-child in a headlock and brought him in close to me, then pressed a kiss to the top of his head before taking him down to the ground and tickling him like I used to do when he was six.

“Get out of here, kid. Let me read. You get your shit picked up outside, or it’ll get stolen.”

My kid left, thankfully putting on his pants before he walked outside to pick up his football gear, leaving me to read a paper that was enough to bring a grown man to tears.

***

I pulled my tired body out of bed, walked stiffly to the bathroom, and clambered into the shower.

Yesterday had been long and tiring, but I loved being a Dixie Wardens’ prospect.

Being called out at three in the morning because another member’s wife was in trouble made me feel like I was actually wanted. Needed. Like I had something to offer the men of the Dixie Wardens.

Sadly, my job didn’t allow me to do that all the time. I couldn’t just take off whenever I felt like it as some of the other brothers could. I had to work from six in the morning until five or six at night, Monday through Friday. If I didn’t, I didn’t have the cash for the house payment or have enough money to buy food after all of my credit card bills were paid, or the loan payments that I’d taken out when I couldn’t afford to put food on my son’s plate, or buy him school clothes for the year.

Not and keep Linc in school. A school where he was finally excelling.

Groaning with the need to fall back in bed, I finished my shower, then went to work. Only to do it all over again the next night.