He grinned. “Yeah, I was there through all that.”

“I’m totally practicing Pac-Man while you’re at work tomorrow.”

“Honey, I’ve had years to become a master.”

“Well, your turns are very long at the video machine because of it, and as utterly fascinated as I am at witnessing your Pac-Man superiority, I have to admit that, at times, my mind may have wandered.”

Ah.

“Yeah?” he prompted on a smile.

“You’ve said things that have made me think.”

He wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.

What he knew was, they didn’t have two hours to go through it. They had maybe fifteen minutes before they got to her father’s.

Even so, he said, “Sock it to me,” because if she needed it, he’d stop and talk to her for two hours and that was not about avoiding her dad.

It was to give her what she needed.

“One day, just, you know, on a roll, watching documentaries on Netflix, I watched the Amy Winehouse doc. Did you see that?”

“No.”

“Well, we can just say it didn’t depict her dad in the greatest light.”

There it was.

“Okay,” he said.

“Then, I don’t know, it was a bummer, obviously, since she’s lost to us now, and she was so amazingly talented. And Lady Gaga is so badass. So, in order to cleanse my palette, I watched Gaga’s documentary. And her dad is in it. And he’s awesome. Very supportive.”

No.

There it was.

“Yeah,” he said quietly.

“Did you see that one?” she asked.

“No, but I get you,” he told her.

“I never really … ” She paused. “It’s just my life. I never really stopped to think about it.”

“And now you are.”

“Yes. And what you said about loyalty. I don’t know if that’s true.”

“Baby, you go there every—”

She cut him off.

“I go there to win his approval. I’m realizing now that I’m still trying to win his approval, Axl.”

Well.

Shit.

He hadn’t thought of that.

“I can’t say I don’t love him,” she carried on. “He’s my dad. And like I told you, he can be charming. Funny. Not just to others, also to me. It isn’t just ugliness and yuck.”

Yuck.

So damned adorable.

He fought smiling.

“So, it’s not all bad times,” she continued. “But it isn’t even that. It’s just … ” Another pause. “I want what I can’t have because he’s not going to give it to me because if he did, he’d lose his ability to control me.”

Shit.

She was onto something deeper and more sinister than what he was seeing as an outsider who hadn’t even met the villain yet.

“Yeah, it’s why he tells you you’re less when you’re more,” he concurred.

She didn’t reply.

He reached out and touched her thigh then kept his hand there, the back of it on her jeans.

She slid her fingers around his.

He brought their hands to his leg.

“The sky is not green, it’s blue,” he said. “You just need to find the place where you see the color of the sky through your own eyes. You with me?”

“I’m with you.”

“And it fucks me to say this, but if you got that, if you’re firm in that, in understanding who you are, you can take care of him and it won’t be a threat every time you go over there because he can say what he wants and it won’t affect you because you’ll know it’s bullshit.”

“If I go over there,” she mumbled.

He felt a weird thump in his chest.

“Sorry?” he asked.

“I have a lot to think about, honey,” she said. “And you’re right. He messes with my head. I don’t know if I can …if I … ” It took her a second, but she got there, “If I can get myself straight while he’s messing with my head.”

Fuck, in that Jeep with her, he could not shout in triumph.

Instead, he kept a lock on it and said, “Told you, I’m here to support you. We’ve had to adjust that considering how shit is. But that doesn’t change the support part.”

She squeezed his hand. “Thanks, babe.”

“And something else to think on,” he continued. “It is without a doubt that our upbringing is a huge factor in the people we turn out to be. But Amy Winehouse’s dad didn’t pour booze down her throat to make her drink herself to death and Lady Gaga is a straight-up boss. You gotta find that line you draw where it’s you who decides your future.”

“Yeah,” she said quietly.

He let it go at that, fucking elated that some of what he said was sinking in and she was reconsidering where she was at with her dad.

Her phone binged with a text and she slid her fingers from his hold to pull it out of her bag and check it.

She’d texted her father earlier to let him know she was bringing someone over while she got his dinner together.

These texts had been Axl’s first experience with holding his tongue when it came to this sitch, because her father texted right back, saying he didn’t want company. Thus ensued a back-and-forth of her standing her ground that Axl was coming. A back-and-forth Axl felt badly about, but he couldn’t back down, because it was his opinion she shouldn’t back down.

He worried, her dad knowing that the time was nigh for her being over there, that text was him giving her shit.

“Your dad?” he asked when she was moving her thumbs over the screen in reply.

“Pepper,” she answered. “During your marathon turns to kick my ass in Pac-Man, I told the girls we were officially boyfriend and girlfriend in all that conveys. They’re pretty excited.”

At least there was something good coming over her phone.

They hit her father’s house, which was small, but in a good ’hood, and there was a fairly new model, relatively stylin’ Buick in the driveway.

On sight of the Buick, the question begged to be asked, why couldn’t the man use that to get his own ass to the grocery store?

Even if it begged to be asked, Axl didn’t ask it.

He parked.

They got out, and as Hattie made it around to his side, she rubbed her hands down the front of her jeans with nerves.