“Oops.” More laughter spills out of me.
“We were the same age, just so you know. It’s not like I went after his underage daughter or something.”
Little sparks of jealousy are ready to catch fire inside me. I hold up one hand. “I don’t need details, please.”
“Sorry, I’m trying to give you context.”
“I get it, I get it. You were a stud before we met. You think that’s some sort of secret?”
He rubs his palm over his forehead.
“He’s not still president, is he?” I’d rather not have my man get shot when we visit Washington.
“No. He left a while ago.”
I squint at him. “She still around?”
“Probably. She’s married and has four kids now, so—”
“And why do you know that?” I tease.
“Jigsaw told me. Apparently he keeps up on all the news. I sure don’t.”
“So now I know everything?”
He stops and squints up at the sky, as if he’s trying to search his memory for every last detail of his life. “I think so.”
I stand and stretch. My butt’s gone numb from sitting on the lumpy rock for so long. Rooster hooks an arm behind my knees and pulls me until I’m straddling his lap.
“Thank you…for listening to everything with an open mind.”
“And an open heart.” Leaning in, I kiss his forehead. “Nothing you could’ve told me would’ve changed how I feel about you. I know who you are in here.” I rub my palm over his heart.
I hate asking but since we’ve already come this far, I want to know everything. “What happened to your aunt and uncle?”
Rooster
These memories hurt in a different way, but I still want to share them with Shelby. “Kidney disease got my aunt about two years after we moved. She’d had problems her whole life, but it suddenly got worse.” Bitterness coats my tongue and I have to pause for a second. “I always thought the stress of the lawsuit had accelerated her condition. She wanted to see us graduate from high school. She hung in for that. Then, a year later, she was…gone.”
“I’m so sorry.” One tear slides down Shelby’s cheek and she quickly brushes it away.
“That was the final nail in my uncle’s coffin. He’d lost his sister. Lost his wife. He and Em had been together since high school and he was adrift without her. I spent a lot of time with him after she passed. Jiggy and I both did what we could to keep his spirits up. But he had a stroke six months after she passed.”
“My gosh.”
“No one will ever convince me he didn’t die of a broken heart. He just didn’t want to go on without her.”
More tears roll down Shelby’s cheeks and I reach down to swipe them away with my thumbs. “If my parents showed me the worst kind of relationship, my aunt and uncle showed me the best.”
“It’s so unfair you lost them too,” she whispers.
“Life’s not fair. You already know that.”
“For sure.” She shifts and moves her body, resting her head on my shoulder.
I hug her tighter.
“I’m sorry I made you talk about all of this. I never realized—”
“It’s fine. I’d rather you know.” I cough and glance out at the sea. “Like I said, I was planning to talk to you about it when things weren’t so chaotic. I trust you.”
“Thank you.” She runs her fingers over my sweatshirt. “You mentioned your uncle’s Harley. Did you find the club through him?”
“More or less. He rode but was never affiliated with one particular club. The bar they bought was a hangout for a couple different clubs. He had a knack for gettin’ along with everyone, and the clubs respected him enough to keep their beefs out of his bar.”
“That doesn’t happen often, I take it?”
“It can be tricky,” I agree, smiling at the memories this brings. “Jiggy and I would head straight there after school. Aunt Em would feed us all the chicken wings we wanted, and we’d help her clean the place.”
“Smart woman. She paid you in food.”
The corners of my mouth turn up. “Yeah. I learned how to run the place, though, too.”
“You didn’t want to play football again?”
“Nope. Never should’ve played again after my mom died. All that shit with Ashley probably could’ve been avoided.”
“Logan,” Shelby says. “What she did wasn’t your fault.”
“She wouldn’t have been interested in me if I wasn’t a football player. So, yeah, I put everyone I cared about through hell because I was selfish.”
Shelby bites her lip as if she wants to say more.
“I owed it to them to help out after everything they did for me. I didn’t mind. Funny thing was the football coach yapped about brotherhood and loyalty as if he knew what those things meant. But no one from the team reached out to me after I got kicked out of school.”
“So you stayed close to the family after that.”