Chapter Thirty-Four
Soft flakes fell to the ground. Levi silently counted from one hundred to ease the mounting anger that wanted to kick its way out of him. Usually when he spiraled close to the edge, classical music helped, but he doubted it could do shit for the haze of red in his head.
Before the snow turned into the hard stuff, he needed to head in to town. That way he would already be waiting for his mom before the streets got bad. He crossed through his yard and jumped into his truck.
As he took deep breaths to space out his breathing, he looked for his keys in his pockets but came up with nothing. Levi tried to fight back the tight vise-grip of pain that twisted in his chest. Of course, the minute his mind slipped back to Cayden, he lost it.
Beating the wheel of his truck with his fist, he let out a primal scream. It helped a lot better than counting to ten. Ready for another go at it, he opened his mouth when someone knocked on his driver side. Levi lowered the window.
“Where you going?” his dad asked.
“To pick up Mom.”
“Think you might need these?” He dangled his keys in front of him. Levi made a grab for them but his dad snatched them back. “Move over.”
“Come on, Dad…”
“You heard me.”
In no mood for spending twenty minutes alone in the truck with him, Levi tried to get out. “Get Mom yourself.”
“Scooch your big ass over to the suicide seat, now!” Not mentally able to tangle with Dad, he moved over to the passenger side, while the old man got in. Dad started the truck with not so much as a word and drove away from the resort.
The roads into town weren’t bad, yet. Before midnight, the salt trucks and snow plows would clear some of the snow off.
“At some point, you two are going to have to stop fighting so dirty.”
“Doesn’t matter, we’re done.”
Dad gave him a wry chuckle. “Yeah, I’ve seen what that looks like before.”
****
November 28, 2011—Thanksgiving
They sat at the table in uncomfortable silence. He just announced to his parents that he asked Sarah to marry him, and no one offered a single congratulations.
It had been three months since he tried to see Cayden. He went to the city and found out about her CEO, Gil. From that point forward, he didn’t bother contacting her again.
“Could you pass the stuffing?” his mother requested without looking at him. Her face scrunched down in a frown, but she didn’t voice her opinion.
A racket at the front door pulled their attention. Cayden walked in, struggling with her luggage. “Sorry I’m late. My plane got de … layed,” she finished. “Hi.” More beautiful than ever, her long black hair lay pin-straight down her back. It complemented her designer red dress. His heart stuttered at the sight of her. She went around the table and kissed his parents and stopped in front of them.
“This is Sarah,” Levi said.
Cayden offered her hand.
“I’m his fiancée,” the blonde squeaked excitedly, making sure to show off her small ring before she took Cayden’s hand.
“Congratulations!” She gave a faint smile, while her right eyebrow twitched. “Your ring is lovely. Well, I don’t want to disturb you guys…” She tried to scoot out of the room.
“Sit,” Mom demanded in her no-nonsense tone. “You must be starved.”
Tiny and fast, Mom jumped up before Cayden could disappear. Guiding her over to the seat across from them, she quickly piled her plate with mounds of food. Half of which Cayden wouldn’t even touch.
“I’m sure anything the plane served wasn’t very good.” Mom placed the plate in front of her and whispered something in her ear.
“Yes, ma’am,” Cayden answered.
As his mom patted her arm, resentment rose inside of him. They treated her with warmth but gave him and Sarah nothing better than icy coolness.
Twenty minutes into the worst Thanksgiving he’d ever had, everyone aimlessly pushed the food around their plate except for Sarah. She seemed oblivious to the whole scene. Guilty of the latter, he hadn’t been that hungry since he came back from the war.
“Are you two still on for New York?” Dad asked once the silence got too much for even Trent’s socially stunted taste.
“Yep, Lydia and I have tickets to SNL.”
“You got them?” His mother clapped in joy.
“I heard those are impossible to score,” Dad chimed in.
“That’s right, you can count on Cayden to do the impossible,” Levi muttered with bitterness. He got up to pour himself a drink from the butler table loaded with alcohol.
“New York sounds fun,” Sarah said, hopeful.
Sweet from the moment he met her, he didn’t want Sarah to think she would be included in Cayden’s little circle. He knocked back a glass of Johnny Walker and went to pour himself another, but his dad got up and grabbed the bottle.
“A little too expensive for you to hog it all,” he grumbled, and poured himself a glass.
“So, I heard you’re in charge of a bunch of cool stuff?” Sarah said.
He cringed at how silly she sounded.
“Yeah,” Cayden replied. “It’s a lot.”
“And you and Levi grew up like brother and sister?”
The genuine sound of Cayden’s laughter caused an emotional somersault in his stomach. “Practically siblings,” she said while her right eyebrow went crazy.
“Maybe I’ll take you wedding dress shopping in New York,” he interrupted. Childish, maybe, but something in him wanted to impose maximum damage as a car horn honked outside.
“That’s my ride.” Cayden damn near scrambled to get out of her seat.
“I thought you were staying in the cabin,” he threw out, hating for her to leave but knowing he had to let her go.
“Yeah. Well, you know, I have a bunch of … stuff.”
Mom giggled at Cayden’s joke. His blood boiled. Not jealous or hurt, she threw her hair back and smiled. Like always, the Holy Grail played her position well.
“I’ll walk you out.”
“Not necessary,” the beauty told him.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about.” He grabbed her luggage at the door.
Cayden stepped past him into the frigid temperature and ignored the hand he offered to help her on the harsh gravel.
As the driver got out to greet her, she stepped across the rocks and reached for the sedan’s door. Hurrying to block her swift exodus into the car, he dumped her bags near the trunk.
“Move,” she said.
“You don’t want to know how I met Sarah?”
This time, her carefully crafted armor slipped a notch. A mixture of sadness colored her brown eyes while anger changed her pretty features.
“Get out of the way, Levi.”
“It’s cute, actually. I’m considered the old man on campus and they assigned Sarah to be my tour guide.”
“Cool story, bro,” she said with a sigh before she tried to get past him again.
“Hold on, I want to talk to you about the resort. With my signing bonus and the money I saved up, it should give me enough to buy it back. Owning the resort out right will be my wedding present to her.”
“Great.” She held his gaze in a challenging manner he had never been on the receiving end of until this moment. “You’ll just need to come up with the twenty percent interest plus renovation cost then you’ve got yourself a deal. Contact my office and they’ll set up the paperwork for you.”
When she went for the door again, he grabbed her arm tighter than he should have. “Don’t be spiteful,” he hissed.
“This is business, baby. Now move.”
“It’s all you got, isn’t it?” Levi continued to push. “Power gives you money but little else. Certainly not family … or at least mine anyway.” He didn’t know what reaction he wanted, but it must have been one of pain.
“Is everything okay, ma’am?” the driver asked from his seat.
Realizing he still had her arm, he loosened his grip.
“Fine,” Cayden responded as tears shimmered in her eyes. “If you don’t move”—she lowered her voice to a menacing whisper—“Iraq will pale in comparison to me screaming my head off to get Trent out here. Regardless of what you think about me, I’d be a fucking fool to sell the resort back to you for less than its worth. Sorry, Levi, you and Baby Spice will just have to suck it up with me as a partner.”
Cayden peeled his hand away from her arm before she grabbed the car door. The threat of his dad didn’t scare him off, but the quiver in her voice forced him to let he go. Levi had never made her cry before, at least not on purpose, and he figured out too late that he never wanted to again. Letting her go, he went into the house without looking back.
He assumed everyone headed to the kitchen. At the very least, he expected to find his dad or Sarah helping to clean. However, his mom scraped food off the plates by herself as Levi reached for the dish towel.
“Go check on Sarah. She’s getting ready for bed,” she said in that ‘don’t argue with me’ tone that he hated.
“Let me guess, you’re so disgusted with me you don’t need my help.”
“Pretty much.” She snatched the plate out of his hand. “I didn’t raise you to be like this.”
“Thoughtful?” He chuckled. “You’re right, you didn’t.” Overlooking her snub, he picked up another dish and tried to clean it off.
“Cruel.”
“Oh, come on!” He dropped his head back with a sigh. “You always take her side.”
“If her side is right,” she hissed at him in a low tone. She probably didn’t want Sarah to hear about his relationship with Cayden.
“You didn’t even congratulate me,” Levi muttered.
“Fine, congratulations on settling.”
“What the hell, Mom?”
She threw her drying towel on the table and pointed at him. “You’re not making me the bad guy in this. That sweet girl upstairs deserves better.”
“Than me?” he asked, shocked that his mother thought so little of him.
“A life half full.”
“Something’s better than nothing I guess,” he shot back, knowing full well whom she referred to.
“I don’t know what happened over there”—her eyes welled up with tears—“but the son that went to the war isn’t the one I got back.”
Dumbfounded that he managed to make two women cry in one day, he gave up and put the serving bowl down.
“You need help.”
“Why, because I want a simple life?” he growled.
“No, because you’re short on patience, cruel with your words, and you just—”
“What did you tell Cayden?” Levi cut her off, not willing to listen. “At dinner, what did you whisper to her?”
She shook her head and looked him straight in the eye. “If she cried, I would kill her. You simply aren’t worth it.”
They stood in uncomfortable silence while he fought to control the crazy explosion inside of him. “It’s a tough transition back to civilian life,” he admitted through gritted teeth.
“Get help, Levi.” She swiped at her tears with the back of her hand.
Levi hated to see her cry. Not in the least the dramatic type, he knew his mom must have held the stuff in for months. “Come on, I’m not that bad.”
“You just let the love of your life walk out that door. And after what you just did, trust me, she won’t be back.”
“Money over everything, huh, Mom?”
“There it is.” She turned her back on him and pulled a plate off the never-ending mound of dishes. “Get out. Find what’s wrong with you.”
A hard ball of pain dropped straight to his stomach. “Mom?” he nearly begged.
She waved him off with a sniffle. “We’ll be fine without you.”
Panic ate away at the thin line of sanity he had left. Levi knew the flashbacks would crush him if he didn’t have a distraction. The resort kept him too busy to fall apart.
“All of this because I’m marrying someone you don’t approve of?” He started toward his mom, determined to make her face him.
“Son.” His father’s gruff voice stopped him short. Dad came down the last couple of steps that led into the kitchen. “You heard your mother.” He nodded at the front door. “Don’t make this harder.”
“What’s going on?” Sarah’s sweet voice barely registered over the thundering hate in his brain. He looked down at his balled-up fists. He didn’t realize how tense he had become.
“Go get your stuff.” He swallowed. “We’re leaving.”