It was all so damn annoying, from the small-town gossip to the small-minded folks. The people acted as if they were straight out of a cliché movie with every corny, fictional small-town stereotype, though I supposed the stereotypes had to come from some truth. Maybe Chester was the case study for those shitty films. Either way, I hated the place.

One couldn’t quite call the people of Chester ignorant to the realities of the real world outside of their small quarters because they weren’t unaware of life in the real world. They knew what was happening outside the town.

They knew the current state of the union was a disaster. They understood the poverty sweeping our nation, the drug trafficking stories. They damn well knew about the wildfires, school shootings, marches at the nation’s capital, and rallies for clean drinking water. They knew about our president, both past and present. Yes, the people in Chester, Georgia, knew all about the workings of the real world, they simply much preferred to speak about why Louise Honey wasn’t at Bible study on Thursday night, and why Justine Homemaker was too tired to make homemade cupcakes for the church bake sale on Friday.

They loved to gossip about shit that didn’t matter, which was one of the many reasons I hated living there.

For all the hate I had for the town, it was nice to know the distaste was mutual. Chester’s townspeople hated me just as much as I despised them—maybe even more.

I’d heard people’s whispers about me, but I didn’t give a damn. They called me Satan’s spawn and it had bothered me when I was younger, but the older I got, the more I liked the ring of it. People had harbored an unnecessary fear of my father and me for fifteen or so years. They called us monsters, and after some time, we stepped into on the role.

We were the black sheep of Chester, and I didn’t mind one bit. I couldn’t have cared less if those people hated me or not. I wasn’t losing any sleep over it.

I kept my head down and ran my dad’s auto shop with the help of my uncle. The worst part of the job was dealing with people from town. Sure, they could’ve left Chester to find another auto shop, but alas, to them, venturing into the outside world was even more terrifying than dealing with my father and me.

That was why my current situation was so damn annoying: I had to deal with idiots.

“I’m just sayin’ you owe me five hundred dollars by the end of the day. I take Visa, Mastercard, check, or cash,” I told Louise Honey as she stood in front of me in her pink dress and high heels, tapping her fake nails on my desk.

“I thought we made an agreement last Thursday,” she asked me, confused by my coldness. “When I stopped by to talk…”

By talk, she meant fuck, and we’d happened to do that all night long.

That was why she had missed Bible study—because her small tits were bouncing in my face.

The women of that town had no problem hating me when the sun shone while moaning my name when the shadows of night fell. I was the secret escape from their fake realities. A challenge for their well-behaved Southern souls.

“Was our agreement made before or after you sucked my dick?” I asked dryly.

“During,” she replied in a whisper, her cheeks turning red. She was acting shy, which must’ve been part of her act to get her bill lowered because she hadn’t been so bashful when she’d asked me to tie her up and slap her ass.

“Any deals made with your lips around my cock are null and void,” I stated. “Just leave the payment on my desk. Half today, half next week, all right? Or I’ll just give your boyfriend a call and see if he’ll pay it.”

“You wouldn’t!” she cried. I stayed quiet, and she stood tall and quickly pulled out her checkbook. “You’re a monster, Jackson Emery!”

If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard that…

“Thank you for your time. We at Mike’s Auto Shop appreciate your loyalty to our company. Have a blessed day, sweetheart. Now, if you could please let yourself the fuck out of my shop, Louise—”

“My name’s Justine, you jerk!”

Oh. Justine…

Names weren’t something I cared about. They made things personal, and I didn’t do personal.

“As long as your name is right on the check, we’re good,” I replied.

“You’re an awful, awful man, and you’re going to die alone!” she barked, storming out of the shop.

“Joke’s on you,” I mumbled to myself. “Most people die alone.”

After she left, I returned to the car I had been working on as Tucker napped in his dog bed in the far-right corner of the shop. If my black lab was good at anything, it was napping in his dog bed.

He was an old man, fifteen years old, but out of the two of us, it was clear that I was the grump. Tucker just went with the flow in the same way he always had. When I was down in the darkness, he was always the happy spark of light.

My faithful companion.

As I worked on the car, my father walked into the shop, and by walked, I meant he could hardly remain standing. I hadn’t seen him since the day before when I dropped off groceries. His house had been a mess, but that didn’t shock me. His place was always a mess because he didn’t care enough to clean it up.

He looked identical to me in almost every way, except for his constantly bloodshot eyes and skinny body. He scratched his salt-and-pepper beard and grunted. “Where are my keys?”

I had taken his car keys away from him four nights earlier—crazy how he was just noticing they were missing.

“You can walk anywhere in town, Dad. You don’t need your car.”

“Don’t tell me what I need,” he mumbled, stretching his arms out. He wore a dirty T-shirt and a pair of torn and ratty sweatpants. It was his normal wardrobe even though I bought him new things every now and then.

“What do you need? I can get it for you,” I told him, knowing he had no business getting behind a steering wheel. Even though his license had been revoked long ago, he still tried to drive around.

Ever since he pissed on the damn float at the Founder’s Day parade, the townsfolk were just looking for a reason to get him locked up again, and I didn’t want to deal with that.

“Gotta get some food.”

“I just restocked your fridge. You should be good.”

“I don’t want that shit. I want a pizza.”

I glanced at my watch and cleared my throat. “I was gonna go grab a pizza, too. I’ll get you one.”

He grumbled some more before turning to walk back to his house. “And some beer.”

I always casually forg0t the beer.

“Tuck, you wanna go for a walk?” I asked my dog. He lifted his head to look at me, wagged his tail, but then plopped right back down and went back to sleep.

That was a clear no.

Going downtown was always a bit stressful. My father and I didn’t belong in a place like Chester, but still, there we were. Over the years, my dad had done a good job of getting everyone to despise us. He was the town drunk, the filth, and the OM—original monster. I was twenty-four years old, and I harbored more hate inside me than the average man. Everything I’d learned about hating people, I had learned from my father.

Nobody took the time to get to know me because they knew my father’s reputation well enough. Therefore, I never introduced myself to them and their judgments.

Plus, I was a monster all on my own, and it didn’t take anyone long to realize it.

I took right after my pops.

As I approached the pizza shop, I heard the whisperings of the people around me. I always noticed how they moved away whenever I approached. They called me a junkie because I used to use drugs. They called me a drunk because my father was one. They called me white trash because it was the only clever title they could come up with.

None of that bothered me because I didn’t give a damn what they thought.

Small-town people with small-town minds.

When I was younger, I’d get into a lot of fights with people who would talk shit about my father and me, but eventually, I learned they weren’t worth my time or my fists.

Every time I got into a fight, they savored it. Every time my fist met a jerk’s face, they used it as justification for their fabricated lies. “See? He’s wild. He ain’t nothing but a lowlife.”

I didn’t want them to have that power over me; therefore, I became silent, which seemed to scare them even more.

When they whispered, I kept quiet.

When they spat at me, I walked on, though if I was feeling wild, sometimes I’d growl at them. It scared them shitless. I was certain some of them actually thought I was a werewolf or something.

Idiots.

“He’s just like his father—a no-good piece of trash,” someone muttered.

“I wouldn’t be shocked if Mad Mike died in his own vomit,” a fellow customer remarked, his voice low but not low enough for me to miss his comment.

I paused my footsteps and took a deep breath.

Those words hit me the hardest because I wouldn’t have been shocked either.

I listened to them talk about my father dying, and flashes of my past shot through my mind. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I wanted to use. I needed something to fix my current fucked-up mind. Just a little, nothing too major…just one small hit…