Page 38 of Breathe
Chapter 15
Gabriel, Thea’s boyfriend, had so little imagination that when Kane found the bar he was in, he didn’t even run. He was dressed like Kane, as was most everyone else in the bar: jeans, boots, an old Sox henley, and padded vest. Kane wore his baseball cap low, but he didn’t think anyone would recognize him in this crowd. These weren’t the kind of guys that bought the newest cell phone so they could snap pictures of unexpected visitors to their local bar. The music was Irish folk, but it was quiet. This was a place to drink and commiserate and drink more, not dance.
Although Kane was itching to seize the kid by the front of his shirt and yank him off his barstool and into the nearest wall, he managed to control himself enough to walk up and just tower over him. Gabe had gone pale, his eyes wide, his normal get-away-with-anything smile replaced with horror. “Did she—has she...” he stammered.
“Yes,” Kane ground out. He still had his car keys in his hand. He didn’t plan on staying.
“D’you hear that, fellas?” Gabe tried to say to the other men at the bar (this was not a bar for women). “I’m a da again!”
Kane was pleased to see that no one congratulated him. Every one of them looked away, embarrassed. They obviously had Gabe’s number.
He couldn’t resist any longer; he took a hold of the back of Gabe’s neck and pulled him off the stool. “You piss on the idea of a father,” he said. Gabe reached for his glass, but Kane pushed it out of his hands, far down the bar where it threatened to slide off the end. Kane kind of wished it had. “Thea’s still soft enough to want you to come see him. And that’s the only reason I’m not punching some teeth out of your useless head.”
Gabe didn’t put up any more resistance, and no one came to his rescue, but before Kane could get out of the door, the bartender, in a hopeful tone, said, “He’s got a tab, chief.”
Kane let go of the younger man long enough to pull a bill out of his wallet, crush it into a ball and throw it at the bar. “Stop serving him then, moron,” he said, and made sure that Gabe hit the doorframe on the way out.
He kept hold of Gabe all the way to his car, and if the kid’s head hit the frame, too, as he roughly pushed him in, well, the guy had been screwing with Thea’s life for ten years. He deserved every bruise.
In the car Gabe was quiet for a long time. At one point when Kane was looking at the traffic to his right, he could see that Gabe had tears running down his cheeks. “Oh for God’s sake,” Kane said.
“You gotta know,” Gabe said in a choked voice. “I love ’em both, so I do.”
“Yeah, that’s one way to put the way you treat them. And there are three of them now.” They pulled up to a light. When Kane turned to look at him, Gabe flinched. “The stupid thing is that I believe you. So this is the way it’s going to go. Thea’s finally done with you. After you go to the hospital, where you will not try and convince her to take you back, because you know how much better they’ll be without waiting for you to take off again, we’re going back to the apartment and packing up your shit.” Gabe had his face turned away from Kane’s, now, wiping tears away as he looked out of the window. “Then you’re going to sign papers agreeing to provide child support, and then maybe she’ll let you be a part of those boys’ lives. The moment—the millisecond—I hear you missed a payment, you lose all visitation rights.”
“Ah, Chrissake, Kane,” Gabe said, still not looking at him. “It was just—I lost that last job. I couldn’t face her.”
“And yet, when you’re a grown-up, you face the tough times. It’s called being a man. When I think about what you’ve done to Jacob, the role model you’ve been for him...” The light changed, and as Kane went to change gear, his hand “accidentally” swept up and backslapped Gabe right on the nose. “Oops.”
“Jaysus!” Gabe shouted, holding his nose, checking for blood.
Jaysuswas right. Gabe did deserve a fair amount of abuse, but he wasn’t going to learn how to be a good father from Kane slapping him about. And it wasn’t just Gabe’s behavior that Kane was taking out on him.
Kane had been furious for two days, ever since Ellen had told him about her... He still couldn’t say the word. He thumped the steering wheel, and Gabe yelped, “What now?” but it was Edward he wanted to have under his fists now. It was Edward, and the damage he’d done, both physical and psychological, to Ellen, that put Gabe in such immediate danger. And it was three fires and no pattern to how they were done, except cut security feeds and total destruction. Now every building had two security guards patrolling at night. Every building. And Kane still wanted—needed—to go look at them all himself.
And yes, he admitted it; he was horny as hell. Waking up next to the warm, soft, pliant body of the woman he was now permanently and irrevocably in love with had been painful. Very painful. He’d had to get out of there before he gave himself a blood clot or something. It didn’t matter how many times he reminded himself that he had no intention of even bringing up the subject, and that he was a good man for being so understanding. He’d spent all last night dreaming about her, and his body was telling him in no uncertain terms that his hands-off policy was fucking stupid.
Kane dropped Gabe off at the front entrance, and while he parked the car, he tried to calm down. He had to deal with his older sister now as well, which wasn’t going to help his temper any, but he was going to ask her if he could bring Ellen to Thanksgiving, so he needed her in a good mood. Not that he’d seen Cat in a good mood for about ten years, but still, hope sprang eternal. And handling his sisters was the one thing guaranteed to shut his libido down. He slammed the car door, hard, making the window rattle. Yeah, right. You’re a freaking oasis of calm. Letting the keys bite into his fist, he walked into the hospital.
• • •
Three days later, Ellen was the one fighting to improve her mood. Penny called and said, “Bryson’s got a head for someone else’s figure.”
“Well then, he’s out of his tiny number-crunching mind.” Oh good, she tried not to think. We can talk about Penny’s problems tonight, and I can stop obsessing over mine. “I’ll tell you what. Come with me to the gym tonight. I’ve been dying to get you in there. You can make big eyes at the new boxing instructor.”
“Ugh. Really? That’s your answer to my trauma? Boxing?”
“Come on,” Ellen said bracingly. “I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty.”
Penny, in tight black capri pants and a shocking pink T-shirt that made her look straight out of Grease, was morose and weepy when Ellen picked her up, not at all her usual bubbly self. She wiped away tears on the drive to the gym as she talked.
“The worst of it is,” she sniffed, “that it was the languages he couldn’t get past. He didn’t understand why we bother learning them, when ‘everyone speaks English now.’ If it wasn’t about numbers, he didn’t want to know.”
Ellen considered it part of the fabric of their friendship that every few months, she would have to take Penny out and listen to the tale of her latest breakup. Bryson hadn’t lasted long, and Ellen reminded her that this was good; Penny hadn’t yet invested too much in him.
Penny looked like a beautiful, kicked puppy. “You never say ‘I told you so,’” she said.
“I never did. Not this time, anyway. He seemed just fine.” Truthfully, Ellen hadn’t spared a thought for Penny or her boyfriends since meeting Kane. The guilty twinge she felt made her decide to spare Penny the boxing lesson tonight. “Okay, honey, now what did I tell you to call this kind of man?”
