I was such a dick. But seriously, if I was going to take the little man to Chuck E. Cheese of all fucking places, I was not doing it alone.
Sketch had been watching Owen for me, and when I’d even mentioned the place, he gave me a look of murder before vowing, “If you say that fucking name again and Emmy hears you, the last meal you’ll eat that doesn’t come out of a tube will be their fucking pizza.”
So, I took that as a no for him coming with me.
I’d been thinking since that morning that I ought to spend some time with Avery that wasn’t just at Candy Shop or when we were ripping each other’s clothes off—this being a thought that didn’t really make sense to me, but I was just rolling with it. When I sat down to meet with her and Roy, I decided I could kill two birds with one stone.
As we walked from the car to the front doors, I was seriously starting to question the whole idea. Everyone walking out of that place—adults and kids alike—looked fucking ravaged. I’d seen guys leave the ring after taking on Jager in a fight who had more pep in their step.
“This seems like a bad idea,” Avery voiced my thought.
“We can’t back out now.” Owen had been singing, “chuck cheese, chuck cheese,” the whole way there.
“You can’t.”
“You’d ditch someone so cute?”
She leaned forward a bit to look around me down at Owen holding my hand and sighed. “No.”
“Was talking about me, sugar.”
She glared at me before focusing back on the increasingly scary fate awaiting us at the end of the lot. The overwhelming sound of it couldn’t be contained and spilled out through the closed doors. Even muted, it triggered some sort of get-the-fuck-out-of-there mechanism in my brain that had my head already pounding.
No, I was not being dramatic about this.
The sign on the door caught my attention as I reached out to open it.
“Open until ten p.m.? Are they fuckin’ kidding me? Kate’s got him down and asleep by seven every night. What the hell are these kids doing out that late?”
Avery laughed as she said, “Maybe you want to ixne on the uckfe while we’re in here?”
“Shit.”
She laughed harder. It was cute, which was odd for someone so overpoweringly sexy. It made my eyes focus in on those freckles across her cheeks.
“I thought some of the Disciples had kids. Don’t you watch your language around them?”
As we approached the kid behind the counter who had to sell us way too expensive tokens, I responded, “No. We taught the oldest not to repeat what Uncle Daz says. The others’ll be getting the same lesson as they get more talkative.”
“And that works?”
“Like a charm.”
I had to give it to Avery. I threw her right into the fucking deep end with tricking her into coming, but she handled it like a goddamn pro.
Right then, she was playing some game where fake spiders on the ground lit up when you were supposed to stomp on them. Owen wasn’t getting it. He just kept stomping around on all of them willy-nilly and was having the fucking time of his life doing it. Meanwhile, Avery—good on her feet, for obvious reasons—was moving around him to get all the lit ones so the tickets were still pouring out of the machine.
It took her about as long to charm the little Larson man as it did to get me.
Of course, she got me by ripping her shirt off, but what-the-fuck-ever.
When the time ran out on their game, Avery lifted Owen up against her side.
“Good job, little man,” she praised, having already adopted my nickname. “Look at all these tickets!” Like he’d earned them or even understood the concept of what they were for.
Owen threw his pudgy fists in the air to cheer with her.
For one long moment, I wondered if that was what it would be like if Avery and I had a kid. Would our child look like Owen? Would we have a little girl with red hair?
Christ, what the fuck?
Did they put something in the food here to encourage people to procreate so they got more customers?
Shaking that off, and locking it away, I followed Avery’s lead as she and Owen headed back toward the toddler area with its mini jungle gyms and shit for kids his age. At his insistence, she let him loose at a shallow ball pit and started moving back to me where we could watch without getting in the way of any of the kids running around.
Halfway to me, she was stopped by a woman who looked to be a grandmother to one of the little girls also playing near Owen. She said something to Avery, who smiled and replied in kind before resuming her way across the room.
“What was that?” I asked when she got to my side.
Avery bit her lip, looking like she wasn’t sure she wanted to say, before admitting, “She said we were a cute family. And that…”
I wasn’t sure what was freakier than the idea of me going family man, but I gave her a nod of encouragement to get her to share the rest.
“She said he was the spitting image of his father.”
Fuck.
It was an easy mistake—Joel and I looking so much alike; Owen taking after his father. Probably wasn’t the first or last time people would think it. And she wasn’t wrong. Owen was the fucking spitting image of his father, but he’d only ever know that from photographs.
Avery grabbed my hand, but she didn’t bother offering bullshit apologies. She also didn’t keep that from me. Shit like this was going to happen. Reminders that Joel was gone were going to be a part of my life now. It hurt like a motherfucker, but it was good she didn’t try to treat me with kid gloves.
“When I was thirteen, my grandmother died," she said in an even tone that I knew from experience was a way of keeping the emotion bubbling under the words from spilling over. “I know it’s not uncommon, not unexpected like losing him was, but it destroyed me. My mother was around, but Gran was the only family I had that counted.” There was a bit of light coming through her next words that told me more about the woman beside me than I’d learned the whole time I knew her. “It was her who taught me to bake.”
It was important to her. I knew she was fucking incredible at it, but her telling me that made it clear it was far more than some hobby she had a talent for. It wasn’t something she learned just so she could satisfy a sweet tooth. I could only fucking imagine what it was like for her to be in the kitchen, feeling that connection to the family she’d lost.
“I still use her handwritten recipes. I don’t need them anymore. Sometimes, I don’t even do them the way they’re written. Gran always said sticking to someone else’s recipes was like wearing their shoes. It might look fine, but you’ll be stuck with the scent of their feet afterward.”
I barked out a laugh. “Christ, that sounds like something Doc would say.”
She reflected on that for a second. “You’re right. Gran could be pretty brusque like him. Maybe that’s why I liked him so much right away.”
Letting that linger, I watched Owen as he traded a blue ball for a red one with another kid when there were literally dozens of each color all around them. He was perfectly fucking happy in his three-year-old world. I wanted that for him. I wanted to freeze him there so he’d never have to grow up and realize the extent of what he lost.
The extent of what we all lost.
“Does it get any easier?”
I felt her whole body stiffen reflexively, and prepared for her to feed me some bullshit about every day being better than the last.
“Not really,” she admitted, and I actually felt my lungs release and take a breath because she was giving me the truth. “You sort of get used to it. Over time, it doesn’t hurt so constantly. It’s not a part of every thought. But when something reminds you, it still feels like it happened yesterday.”
That, I could believe. Watching Owen grow up was going to bring that shit back time and again. All the things Joel would miss. All the times Kate and I would do everything we could to keep Owen from feeling that absence, but it would still exist. All the times something would happen that I’d want to tell my brother about. Hundreds of every day moments that were going to be agony.
This was the shit that plagued Ash and sent her running all those years ago. The details were sketchy, but I knew it was what lived in Jager to make him such a surly fucker. And it had been a part of Avery for twelve years.
I’d known loss. Friends, a couple club brothers, they’d been lost to me before, and I thought that shit had killed, but it was nothing compared to this.
“It’ll help, as much as it will hurt, having Owen and his mom. Having Doc. It’s hard to face the memories, but not having anyone else to help keep their memory alive kills.”
I knew she was right. Not even just about Kate, Owen, and Doc. I had the whole fucking club at my back. Walking out to see them all before the funeral, I already knew what having them meant.
But Avery, from the sound of it, had no one. She was speaking from experience. It made me wonder, again, why she wasn’t running a bakery with a line out the door every fucking day, charging three dollars a cupcake and raking it in as well as she did dancing for me. She’d evaded it last time I asked, but she hadn’t hidden that dreamy look in her eyes at the very idea.
Some other time, when we weren't already delving way too fucking deep in the middle of a kids arcade, I’d push that issue.
Right then, it was time to focus on the kid again as he came clamoring out of the ball pit, his toddler attention span tired of that and ready to move on to the next exciting, noisy, bright colored thing in the room. We let him lead, able to keep up easily with his waddling steps as he moved from one thing to another. Occasionally, this meant helping him figure out what to do. Sometimes, it was just letting him play however, even if he wasn’t doing much.
But every time one of us wasn’t helping him, Avery’s hand ended up back in mine.
And I’ll be fucking honest, I liked it.