There was always the job at the damn strip club. Lord.

Schooling my features, I leaned forward to close the short distance between us to a microscopic one despite the near foot in height difference.

“It’s not everyday someone I don’t know calls me a f**king idiot, then insults my clothes and my time management.” I looked him right in the eye, not caring that he winced. “I’d say I’m sorry that I had to ask you for help, and that I can’t pretend you didn’t hurt my feelings, but I won't. If you would've showed me what to do slower or not rolled your eyes each time I wrote something down in my notebook, I wouldn't have had to. I'm not stupid or an idiot or a moron or whatever else you've called me.” In all honesty, I hadn’t intended to tell him he’d hurt my feelings but once the words were out in the universe it was a done deal. Whatever. I couldn’t take them back so I had to stand by them. “And now, I’m just pissed off, and I want to go home.”

And Dex, Dex just looked at me with those irises the same shade as a crayon. “You don’t know what it’s like to have a shit day, princess?”

Princess?

Princess?

This dickwad had no clue.

I sucked in another breath, steeling myself. I wasn’t going to be a pushover again. No. Friggin’. Way. I was done. If I could get fired, it’d be better than leaving on my own. So I laid it out on him as politely as I could. “When I have bad days, princess,” I whispered, opting at the last minute to leave out the Duke Dickface teasing my tongue, “I cry. I read. I clean. I eat crappy things. I swim or do the yard. I don’t make people feel like crap, your royal highness.”

Chapter Six

“Are you sure this won’t get you into trouble?”

Sonny’s upper body had disappeared beneath the car minutes ago with tools and a pan. I plopped down on top of a tire that was sitting off to the side of the bay at the body shop he worked at, watching him because I had no idea how to help. “It’s fine, Ris. Trust me.”

Well, shit.

The shop was closed on Saturdays; there was a very clear sign by the gate that we’d come through. Personally, I’d rather not get arrested for trespassing but Sonny didn’t look worried even a hundredth of a fraction. Plus, I’d spotted three bikes and two cars parked alongside the big adjacent building to the bays, so I figured we either weren’t alone or somebody was using the space as a parking lot.

Only I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not.

“You trust me, don’t you?” he asked in a teasing voice when I didn’t respond.

"No." I extended my leg out to nudge his knee with my toes. “Yes.”

Because I did. A lot. Sonny had never let me down when he knew I needed him.

Regardless, I still didn’t want to risk him losing his job all because I couldn’t change my own oil. “You're positive?”

A dirty blue rag went airborne and smacked me in the face. “Quit asking.”

"Sheesh," I muttered but made a face and picked the rag up with my index finger and thumb before tossing it back at him.

He worked quietly for a few minutes, the sound of metal on metal and drip, drip, drip filling the silence before he spoke again. “Wasn’t your mom’s anniversary last month?” he asked in a muffled voice.

I froze, sucked into the fact he remembered the date.

But just as quickly as my appreciation for him flared, a distant but familiar feeling that was both pressing and heavy swam around in my stomach. It was awkward and irregular shaped, but after a second it went away like it always did in the past. I licked my lips and focused on answering him. “Yeah. It was.” Eight years had passed since my mom had died and it’d felt like something that happened two lifetimes ago instead. Which was a good thing, I thought. Will and yia-yia would agree, too.

It’d taken me years to get over my dad leaving. Years of crying and suffering and feeling like the hole his absence left in my life would never go away. At ten, it's unfathomable that the father you love and adore would just... leave. By the time he showed up again when my Mom got sick, I'd gone from being upset to downright pissed.

When I'd needed him before, he'd fallen off the face of the planet. Not even Sonny had seen or heard from him.

I'd even blamed him for a while for what happened to Mom. Maybe if she wouldn't have loved him as much as she did, and then been left alone with two kids, juggling two jobs, she might have been fine.

But she hadn't been. She died and left us with my crazy ass yia-yia that made the most amazing baklava... for breakfast.

Dad was alive but he'd become a long lost dream. A long lost dream that withered into smoke and ash right after Mom was buried.

Will was there though. And without Will, who needed me to keep going, I wouldn’t have gotten through those floating, disaster months that ruined any chance of me making grades that were good enough to get scholarships. Scholarships that I should have been shoo-ed into if I’d played up The Arm Situation, but not even that could make up for my crap, quarter-hearted grades.

“The older you get, the more you start to look just like her,” Sonny noted, pulling me out of my thoughts.

Yia-yia and Will had both said the same thing. “Yeah, it's kind of creepy.” Mom and I had the same black hair. We had the same normal nose, the same small mouth and slightly fuller bottom lip. Our build was the same too from what I could remember. Mom had been long and lean, and while I wasn’t as long as she was, at five-seven I wasn’t exactly short either.

I was my mother’s daughter. The looks, the impulsiveness, the temper, almost everything. My brother, like Sonny, was a mirror image of our dad, where I was our mom’s doppelganger.

Sonny slid out from beneath my car, wiping his hands on the rag I’d thrown back at him. He reached over and patted the top of my running shoe, his eyes warm. “It’s a good thing. I take more after my mom, too.” He closed his eyes and let out a long breath. “Thank f**king God.”

That was a blatant lie. He looked just like our dad but I wasn't about to ruin the mood by stating what seemed so obvious to me.

“You do have those girlish features,” I told him with a grin, wanting to pull away from the talk of my mom.

Sonny snickered and sat up. “Stupid.“ With a shake of his head, something behind me caught his attention making his eyes narrow. And because I’m nosey, I turned around to see what he was looking at.

Dex.

Walking onto the lot, his short black hair went in ten different directions. Wrinkled jeans and an equally wrinkled blue t-shirt finished off his obviously bedhead ensemble. But what caught my attention, and what might have also caught Sonny’s, was the blonde woman he was walking beside. A blonde woman in a very wrinkled dress that screamed she wasn't opposed to public fondling. And it wasn't the same woman I'd seen him with two weeks ago.

Dex stopped just a few feet shy of a Hyundai parked in front of the office. It was a magnetic pull that kept me watching him drop a quick kiss on her mouth before slapping her ass as she crossed the distance toward her car and got in.

Pig.

“That motherfucker,” Sonny murmured, shaking his head in a disbelieving fashion.

My eyes went from my brother to my boss, who stood with his back to his lady friend, completely disinterested. Sonny didn’t look mad, but he looked annoyed and that alarmed me. “Please tell me that wasn't your girlfriend."