Slowly, Gage made his way around to the back of his parents’ house, working his way through everything that he’d just heard as he walked. He’d known it was bad. Every warning sign that’d blared off Cady like a nuclear reactor about to explode had said that whatever had happened to her in the past hadn’t been pretty.
But still…somehow, the truth had been even worse than Gage had imagined. This nameless football player – he’d noticed how careful she’d been not even to mention which position he played – was now in the NFL, eh?
Sure did make it hard to believe in karma.
The partygoers were a blurry group around him and a part of him knew he was being rude by not talking to anyone, but it was hard to focus. Everything he’d just heard…
Well, it definitely made a certain Cady Walcott a lot more understandable.
More than anything else – and he was dead sure she’d hate this analogy, even though (maybe especially because) it was totally accurate – she reminded him of a feral baby kitten who’d been hurt. Tiny, defenseless, completely untrusting of any human, hissing and swatting and doing its best to fight against the mean world it’d found itself in.
Underneath all of that hissing and tiny claws, though, was the heart and soul of someone who wanted to be loved.
But how to make the little hissing kitten trust me? I can’t just slide tuna cans under Cady’s front door, although I’m gonna guess Skittles would appreciate that…
Emma hurried up beside him, worry stamped across her face, jerking him out of his thoughts. “Is she all right?” she asked. “Where is she?”
“She…uhhh…she went home.” He paused then, trying to decide what else he could safely tell his sister without breaking Cady’s confidence, and then realized the answer to that was: Nothing at all. “I can’t really say more than that. So, what happened to Dickwad?” he asked, before she could brazenly ignore that statement and press him for more anyway.
“Abby carted his ass off to jail. We’ll see if the county prosecutor has the guts to go after him, though.” She screwed up her mouth in disgust, clearly doubting the chances of that happening, and Gage couldn’t blame her. No county prosecutor would want to piss off the only judge in town, and to boot, their current prosecutor wasn’t exactly known for his backbone and high sense of morals.
But still. Waving a gun around at a party? Trying to kidnap Sugar? Surely Dickwad’s father couldn’t fast-talk his son out of that one, right?
He’s in the NFL now.
Cady’s simple statement of fact about her attacker reverberated in his head, and Gage winced. If karma wasn’t at play with the nameless football player, why would it be at play with Dickwad?
“Is Sugar okay?” he asked, needing to hear something reassuring.
“Yeah. Jaxson took her home, and then went to go pick up the boys from the babysitter.”
“Oh, shit,” Gage said, surprised. “I didn’t even notice it, but you’re right – Aiden and Frankie weren’t here.” Damn. Sherlock Holmes he was not, at least not tonight. He decided then and there to blame it on Cady being at the party. It seemed only fair. He found it damn hard to think with her around, for reasons he didn’t really want to think about too hard.
“Rose is too little to be left with a babysitter, of course, but Sugar wanted to have fun and not worry about corralling two little boys the whole night, so they dropped them off at the babysitter’s before coming over. And then…” She shrugged morosely. “So much for having fun.”
Gage leaned over and gave his only sister a quick squeeze. “I’m sorry Dickwad ruined your birthday party,” he said quietly into Emma’s hair before letting her go.
Emma shrugged again, not making eye contact, clearly trying to act as if it wasn’t a big deal when it really, really was. Emma was a social butterfly, and her combined birthday party with Sugar was a Very Big Deal in her life. Having Dickwad ruin it for her made Gage want to hunt him down and get in that uppercut to the jaw after all. He was beginning to regret listening to Abby on that topic. Surely one punch wouldn’t change anything, except to make him feel a hell of a lot better.
“I saw you chatting with Grandma after you and Cady showed up,” Emma said quietly. “She didn’t seem happy. Does she not like Cady?”
Gage chuckled a little at that. “That’d require Grandma to know Cady,” he pointed out dryly. “No, she’s just…you know how she is about me dating.”
“Creepily protective?” Emma offered up. He narrowed his eyes at her. She shrugged unrepentantly. “You asked for my thoughts,” she pointed out.
Gage decided to ignore that. Just because his sister was right didn’t mean he had to acknowledge that fact out loud.
“You know why Grandma is the way she is,” he said heavily. “Her only child, leaving town after his high school graduation and joining the Marine Corps? She pretty much didn’t get to see her son or any of us grandkids for twenty years, and whether or not she should, she places the blame for that squarely on Mom’s shoulders. It would only make sense that she’d be a little more protective of me.”
Yeah, his grandmother was a little more protective of him than most grandparents would probably be, but Gage tried to see it from her point of view, even if that viewpoint was a bit smothering at times.
Emma clearly had more she wanted to say on the topic, but in a rare showing of self-control, she just nodded noncommittally and gestured towards the only remaining item on the dessert table – a huge birthday cake. “Since Sugar isn’t here to blow out the candles with me, wanna help?”
“You don’t want to ask Chris to help you?” Gage asked with a teasing laugh. It’d always been Gage and Emma together, with Chris as the annoying younger brother who got away with murder just because he was the baby of the family. And baby was what he damn well acted like, too. “Where is our erstwhile younger brother, anyway?”
“Erstwhile…nice one,” Emma said approvingly. “And, I have no idea. Probably hiding down in the basement and playing video games.”
“Shocking,” Gage said dryly. “A teenage boy, hiding out and playing video games? I never would’ve seen that one coming. All right, old woman,” and he slung his arm around Emma’s shoulders, “just because you asked, I’ll help you blow out your candles.”
“You know you’re older than me, right?” Emma asked sarcastically, slinging an elbow into his stomach for good measure as they walked towards the dessert table.
“Older and wiser,” he said with an air of self-importance, and it was an indication of just how upset Emma was over Dickwad’s appearance that she didn’t have anything better to dish back at him than a dignified sniff.