As the man who loved Jose, it was hard as hell watching her go through it all, and accepting that I couldn’t fight yet another battle for her. DB had said it was like a parent dropping their kid off at college and having to drive away knowing that they were flying free without you to protect them, and that had made me think about the day we’d be doing that with Liv… ever see a grown man cry? You want to, you tell him to picture the reality of that moment and how he’d feel letting his daughter go out into the world. You’ll either be hit with tears of sadness or happiness depending on the daughter, but you’d get them all the same.
“So, you got the ring?” Tom asked as we sat drinking a beer on the deck while the women relaxed in the sun. “Tom made his own diamond,” Cole snickered, hiding his grin behind his bottle of beer.
“Fuck you, Cole. At least I put some effort into mine,” he snapped back, throwing a chip at his brother’s head.
“Yeah, you used your taint, Taint.”
Leaving his two grandsons to argue it out, Hurst leaned in closer to me and DB. “Have you got it?”
“In the safe at work,” I whispered back. “I didn’t want to risk her finding it, so I hid it there.”
Leaning in on my other side, DB checked to make sure the women weren’t watching and asked, “When’s it going down?”
I’d gone back and forth on this one all week, but I’d finally made my decision this morning and I hoped it was right. Swallowing around the lump in my throat, I went with my gut. “Tomorrow night.”
Just then Mace walked over and joined us. “You told them yet?”
“Yup, literally just told them.”
Looking around for any female radar ears – because there’s one thing you learn for sure when you have a woman: those ears pick up noises they’re not meant to from at least two rooms away – he whispered, “Remember the competition guy from DrawInk Magazine?” Like I could forget that. Our faces were still being shown around the country. “I rang him after you left this morning, and he said…”
And thus, the plan was made, agreed upon, cemented in stone, covered in steel, put in a box with a chain and a lock snapped shut on it, and then we dumped it in the ocean for good measure. You’d have to be a mermaid, an alien, or a freak of nature to find it. As Linda Townsend was all of those things and more, we came up with a forfeit for Hurst that even he wouldn’t want to do if he let the plan slip to his wife. A back, sack, and crack wax every three weeks for a year, and a tattoo across his chest that said Lindee’s Bitch Boy. Savage? Absolutely, but it was enough to get him to stay quiet.________________
Twenty-seven hours later…I’d been more nervous than I’d ever been before in my life for the last twenty-seven hours.
In fact, it was so bad that it felt like I had sweat on my balls. “Are you ok?” Jose asked as I parked up on the side of the road after telling her I felt sick.
Getting out of the car, I glanced nervously at my watch and swallowed harshly. Two minutes, that’s how long I had to stall for. “Yeah, I think I ate something that didn’t agree with me.”
The sound of the door closing as she got out of her side made it feel like beads of sweat were now building all over my face. In reality, I was freezing cold, and I felt like I was going into shock or something, but I had a strange sweaty sensation on my skin, too.
“I think we need to get you to the doctor, Ellis,” Jose murmured, walking up and putting her hand on my forehead. “Holy shit, you’re freezing. That’s it, we can go to dinner another night, you’re going to Urgent Care.”
Gently pulling my hand away when she started tugging on it, I pulled her against me, and put my face in her neck, calming the second I smelled her perfume. Underneath it was the scent that was just Jose’s, and it was better than anything any laboratory could think up, and I needed it right now.
“I’m fine,” I rasped, tightening my hold on her. Another look at my watch showed I had twenty seconds until it began, and I was starting to worry about my ability to do this. Maybe I should just text her? Didn’t they make cards for this shit nowadays? They made them for everything else, so would it kill them to make one that said, ‘I love you, let’s put a ring on it?’
Just then she groaned and tilted her head back, and I worriedly thought they’d started before I was ready. “Did you have to stop next to one of these damn billboards? Seriously, I look like the poster child for why marijuana shouldn’t be legal.”