I shook my head. “First, I rehearsed. One of my routines tonight has some tricky lighting, so I had to go through it with the lighting guys.”

Axl shifted us around and started walking us, attached, to the kitchen, saying, “And?”

“Then, well …I’m feeling the bug. Got something in my head. I had to go to the studio to check materials. And I found what I knew I’d find. I needed to make an order. So no, I didn’t work. But I’m going to get back to it once my order comes in.”

“Mm,” he hummed, detaching from me in the kitchen and pulling a stool from the wall that had a chrome base and footrest and black leather seat with back.

The only stool of its kind in the kitchen, but it was kickass.

He adjusted it to a place by a counter where it looked like he was making a salad and then shifted me so I knew he wanted me to climb up, which I did.

Once I was there, he moved to a cupboard, opened it, and I saw upside-down hanging wineglasses.

He commandeered one—awesome, wide-bowled and tall. He came back to the counter where the salad prep was happening, and I saw there was another wineglass there, filled with red. Not to mention the bottle.

He nabbed the bottle, poured and handed the glass to me.

“So what else did you do today?” he asked, picking up a knife and going back to cutting cucumber.

Okay.

Um.

Okay.

Was all that just … awesome?

“Hattie?” he called.

“Remind me, if I get a chance, and I’m home before you’re home, to be equally awesome with you.”

His expression changed, and apparently he liked what I said so much, he felt it needed to be communicated beyond that change.

So he put the knife down, came right to me in a way I had to open my knees so he could get between them. Once there, he took my jaw in both hands, and yeah.

That time we went at it.

When we broke off the makeout session, I was minimally panting, Axl was all I could see, and I was in no doubt he liked what I’d said.

“So, good day?” he asked.

A giggle erupted from me and I answered, “Yeah. And it keeps getting better.”

His eyes glittered with icy-blue goodness before he slid his hands away and went back to cucumbers.

I took a sip of my (excellent) wine and inquired, “How was your day? Or can I ask that?”

“You can ask that, if you don’t mind non-detailed answers,” he shared. “And we had some movement on a case. That movement is promising only because there’s been no movement for weeks. So, bottom line, it’s good.”

“Great,” I said, before I asked, “Where’s Cleo?”

“Hiding and preparing her complaint there’s someone in the house that divides attention from her, which she’ll add to her ongoing, active, but contradictory complaint about not having the house to herself where I only visit to feed her and appear when she’s feeling like getting some love.”

That didn’t get a giggle.

It just made me laugh.

He shoved the cucumber aside, grabbed a carrot and asked nonchalantly, “How’s your dad?”

Dang.

He looked at me out of the sides of his eyes, “Honey, we’re gonna have to go there.”

I sighed.

Then I said, “He was a jerk.”

And he was.

Not calling-me-a-whore jerk, but, say, in the mid-to-lower range of Dad’s multiple levels of jerkiness.

Axl looked down at the carrot in a manner I knew he intended to look down at the carrot so he didn’t do something else, like press me for details, demand I never see my father again, or get one of his six guns and go shoot him in the kneecap.

“I like to think that it’s because he’s lonely and he misses me,” I said.

“But?” Axl prompted me for what I obviously didn’t say.

“He wasn’t pleased he had to order pizza. Not that he doesn’t like pizza. Just that he’s into control. And when I show at his house, he knows he’s controlling me. And I don’t know if you know, but he has diabetes. The kind you have to closely manage. So when he doesn’t check his blood sugar or take his insulin, it’s a way to control me. It’s all an exercise in control, even though I’m not ten anymore and even then, the way he did it wasn’t okay. Mostly because controlling anyone isn’t okay at all, ever.”

Axl spoke no words.

But the carrot was getting decimated.

“I know, I know,” I guessed his reaction. “He can take care of himself. Or he could get someone to come in and do a few things to look after him without leaning so heavily on me. He has money, not a lot of it, but he has a pretty good income from a work-from-home job. He’s got a nest egg. It was bigger before he had a couple of hospital visits that bit into it. But we sold his house and downsized him—”

He turned just his head my way. “You mean you sold his house and downsized him.”

I rubbed my lips together.

“That means yes,” he said, watching my mouth.

I nodded.

Then I said, “We don’t have to talk about this.”

Axl put the knife down, grabbed his glass, took a sip of wine, and I watched his throat work while he did that.

So it took a second for me to shake myself out of the fascination when his focus came back to me and he spoke.

“You lay this stuff on your mom?”

I shook my head.

“It pisses her off,” he deduced.

I nodded my head.

“You give it to your girls?”

“Well, until recently, I wasn’t really speaking to them.”

“Before that?”

I shook my head again.

“Intend to do that?”

“I can, but I haven’t and …I don’t know. I don’t think they’ll be judgy, but they care about me. They’ve never met him. Pretty much anyone I talk to about this, Aunt Pam, Uncle Dave, Mom, my high school friend Tammy who lives in Wisconsin now who I FaceTime with a lot, and she knows all about Dad, they think I should tell him to jump in a lake.”

“So I’m your safe place.”

The whoosh of warm, sweet, pure goodness that came from that nearly knocked me off the stool.

“Yeah, Hattie?” he pressed. “I’m your safe place. I cannot guarantee that won’t come with reactions. It goes against the grain, knowin’ a woman I care about, the woman I’m seein’, the woman who’s sleeping in my bed, walks into her dad’s house with a target on her back for abuse. But even telling you that, it’s only so you know I give a shit about you. It is not judgment. It isn’t pressure. It’s not up to me to stop it. It’s up to me to support what you feel you have to do, and support it if you feel you have to keep doing it, and then praise God if the time comes you’re done and you stop.”