Nash

“That was nice of her. Nurses are usually really impersonal and clinical, so it’s sweet she reached out. You boys have a lovely day.”

We watched as she drove away and Rule turned to me with a lifted eyebrow. I scowled and patted my pockets searching for a pack of smokes. I swore when I remembered Saint walking out the door with them.

“What?”

“New neighbor.”

“So?”

“So?”

I walked to the passenger side of his gigantic pickup truck and waited until he popped the lock so I could climb in. Once I was in the seat, I slumped down and rested my head against the cool pane of glass and closed my eyes. I knew I had to go to the hospital, but I really didn’t want to. What was I supposed to say to Phil?

Something like … oh, so you’re my long-lost dad … good to know, oh, by the way, thanks for waiting until you had cancer and might be dying to tell me …?

There just weren’t words that made any sense.

“So a week ago I would have walked into that apartment and there isn’t a chance in hell that you would’ve been alone. That neighbor would have been with you and you both would’ve been naked.”

I barked out a laugh and opened one eye to look at him.

“I’ve been too jacked up. I was so sauced the last week there isn’t a chance in hell I could’ve got it up let alone gotten it in.”

But that wasn’t entirely true. When I had pulled Saint against me, when she had finally opened up and let me into the warm, damp recesses of her mouth, I had gotten hard as a rock and there was nothing the river of tequila in my blood could do about it. Like he was reading my mind, Rule asked, “So what’s the story with the nurse?”

“We went to school with her. She was like super smart, shy, kept to herself mostly. She didn’t party or go out, so I don’t think you would really remember her. I recognized her the night I picked Rome up from the ER after he got his head smashed in. My locker was next to hers senior year. She looks a little different now, lost some weight, I guess, and her hair is longer. She doesn’t seem to care for me very much, but she was great the night Phil was rushed to the hospital and it was nice of her to check on me last night.”

“But why would she do that if she doesn’t like you?”

“I don’t really know. I think she’s just a really nice person.”

Rule snorted. “She’s hot.”

I nodded. “She is.”

“Sucks she doesn’t dig you.”

I blew out a breath. “I guess. It’s not like I’m in the market for a girlfriend anyway.”

“Why the hell not?”

It was a familiar argument we had now. Ever since he had decided Shaw was it for him, he was on my case to settle down, to find the one girl that would make me think love actually stood a chance and that monogamy was worth trying out. While I was happy for him, for all my friends that had found “the one,” I just didn’t see that being the route for me. When my mom had tossed me aside for her idiot husband under the guise of love, I knew even at such a young age that was not something I was ever going to do. Love someone enough that they made me willing to sacrifice the rest of my life for them. I liked being single, liked having the opportunity to experience different women, different moments with different people whenever I wanted. I didn’t need a girlfriend to be fulfilled, nor did I really want one.

“Dude, I just found out my uncle is really my dad, he has cancer, and my best friend is fucking getting married in less than a month. Not to mention my pseudo big brother is expecting his first child. You tell me where in any of that I have the time or the mental capacity to try and be some chick’s boyfriend.”

He grunted and pulled the truck into the parking lot of the hospital. I felt my heart rate start to pick up and a cold sweat start to trickle down the back of my neck. We climbed out of the truck and met at the front of it. Rule gave me a hard shove with his hand and grunted when I dug the point of my elbow into his ribs to retaliate.

“That’s the thing, Nash, you aren’t ‘some girl’s’ boyfriend, you’re ‘the girl’s’ boyfriend and when it’s ‘the girl’ you find the time for it, and you get your head around it really quick because the idea of being without her is about the worst thing you can imagine.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just kept my mouth shut and followed him through the sliding glass doors and to the elevator. Unconsciously my gaze searched the long white hallways for a glimpse of fiery-red hair. I didn’t see her and I couldn’t decide if that made me feel relieved or irritated.

We got to the top floor of the hospital where the oncology unit was located and I had to follow Rule because I didn’t know which room Phil was in. Man, I really did suck and I wanted a damn cigarette so bad it was making my skin hurt. The door was cracked just a little bit and Rule stepped to the side.

“Go in there and spend some time with the guy that raised you. He might have called you his nephew, Nash, but he always treated you—hell, all of us—like his sons. I’ll give you a few minutes before I come in.”

I nodded jerkily.

I took a deep breath and pushed the door open. The curtains were pulled slightly open and the winter light was casting eerie shadows across Phil’s fragile form. He had always been a big, strapping guy, and now that I knew he was my father I could see all the similarities between him and me. It was so much more than our unusual eye color. He lifted his eyelids and looked at me. I wanted to shuffle my feet and clear my throat, but I didn’t. I walked to the end of the bed so that we were just watching each other. He was so thin and his pallor looked awful.

I rubbed my thumb along the edge of my jaw and tried for a grin. “You scared the hell out of me, old man.”

He grunted and lifted the hand that had some kind of monitor on it attached to miles of wires and tubes coming out of him.

“I was tired of all the poking and prodding. I wasn’t going to spend Thanksgiving in a goddamn hospital. I just needed to get away. I didn’t know I was sick, I thought it was just a cough.”

“Just a cough?” I couldn’t help the bitterness that crept into my tone. “I thought you were dead when I saw you lying on the floor of the cabin. Do you have any idea what that did to me?”

“I’m sorry, Nash. For all of it. I’ve made some bad decisions along the way, done some things I regret, but you, son … you were never one of them.”

There it was. Son, something I had always wanted to be and never thought I would be. I rubbed my hand across the back of my neck.

“I don’t even know what to do with that, Phil. I don’t even know what to call you anymore.”

“What you always did. I’m still just Phil, Nash. The things that happened between me and your mom, it was too long ago and had nothing to do with you. Who you are today is a man you should be proud of … a man I am proud of as a father, uncle, as a boss and anything in between. I thought I was protecting you, thought maybe getting sick was a sign. I thought it would just go away, honestly.”

“Cancer? You thought cancer would just magically go away and that you could indefinitely hide from it? Hide from us?”

“Seems to be a family trait. Took you a full week to get your ass in here, didn’t it?”

He had a point, so I just sighed and leaned against the edge of the bed. I wrapped my hands around the rail and stared at him. He was sick, it was obvious, but there also appeared to be a lightness in him that had never been there before. I wondered how hard it had been for him to pretend all this time, to listen to me bitch about my imaginary father and the blame I placed on him for the way things broke loose with my mom and her husband. Maybe it was true, and the truth really did set you free.

“I had to get my head around some stuff. I needed to do that alone.” I knew it should be on the very tip of my tongue to ask why he hadn’t disclosed that he was my father before now, why he had been keeping secrets from me my entire life, but I think I was kind of terrified of the answer. My mom had never made me feel like I was worthy of carrying her blood. I don’t think I could handle it if Phil had any of that kind of reasoning behind his actions.

“Where you at with everything now?” His tone was hesitant and I felt like an asshole for making him uncertain of where he stood with me.

“I don’t really know, but you’ve never let me down in my life and I would never be able to live with myself if something happened to you and we left things the way they were. I owe you everything I have and everything that I am. I’m not going to let you fight this alone.”

He cringed a little and looked away. The goatee that surrounded his mouth curled down on the sides and I felt my stomach dip.

“There isn’t a fight anymore, Nash. The cancer has officially had a TKO on my system. It’s metastasized, it’s moved into my lymph nodes. Not much we can do but wait it out.”

I gulped and felt moisture start to burn at the back of my eyes. I pulled the brim of my hat down lower over my forehead and blinked hard to keep the emotion in check.

“What about chemo, or radiation … hell, what about a voodoo ceremony? No options?”

He shook his head, and while I felt like he was giving me the worst news in the world, Phil looked like he had had plenty of time to come to terms with his fate and the lack of satisfying answers.

“I know this is all new to you, and that you haven’t had enough time to really come to terms with the lot of it, but I’ve been sick for a while and this isn’t my first go-around. The time I had with you, with the rest of the crew, it was a blessing.”

I felt anger start to coil back up in my gut and I had to concentrate on breathing in and out to stop from lashing out.

“You were sick before?”

He made a noise of affirmation and reached a shaky hand out for a glass of water. I walked around the side of the bed so I could hand it to him. Our matching gazes locked and I had to swallow back all the sour-tasting feelings this conversation was leaving in my mouth.

“Yeah. Same thing. Right before I bought the shop. It was a tumor in one lung and I had surgery to cut it out and then had to do treatment for a year afterward. It was one of the main reasons I was so eager to let you and Rule apprentice under me. There is a lot of crap work out there, people don’t take the art, the work behind tattooing, seriously. I knew if I taught you boys the right way to do it, made you respect the skill and craft inside and out, if anything happened to me my legacy would be left in good hands. I beat it that time around, thought maybe I could beat it again.”

“Why didn’t you quit smoking?”

“Because quitting is hard. Because I thought I was invincible. I don’t know, Nash. There isn’t a good reason. I wish I had quit, and I hope you will. There is absolutely no reason for you to tempt fate.”

I opened my mouth to say something else but got sidetracked when the door swung open and Rule walked in.

“All good in here?”

“Working on it, kiddo. Come in here really quick, I want to talk to both of you about something.”

Rule shut the door and made his way to the opposite side of the hospital bed. Phil opened his mouth, and before he could start speaking broke off into an awful fit of coughing. It hurt me to watch the way the hacking cough moved his frail body. It took him a few minutes to catch his breath and Rule and I shared a concerned look over the bed.

“Damn, that hurt.” He cleared his throat and shifted his gaze back and forth between the two of us. “I’m signing the shop over to you boys. We own the location outright, so the deed to the property is going in Nash’s name. You two have been an unstoppable team since you were old enough to start giving me gray hair, you’re also the best artists in this town. You both put the Marked on the map, gave it a style and a name that I never could. You made it yours and I think the two of you as business partners have a lot to offer this city.”

Rule and I exchanged stunned looks and then looked at Phil like he was speaking French and we didn’t understand. We could tattoo, we could work with clients, but neither one of us had any clue how to manage or operate a business.

“I was looking for a new location, a second shop in LoDo. I wanted to expand, get our name and work to a different breed of clientele. I found the perfect spot. Signed a five-year lease on it, but now … well, now it’s going to be up to you guys to get it up and running.”

LoDo referred to the lower downtown portion of Denver. It was filled with bars, restaurants, and any kind of lease on a storefront down there had to be astronomical. Rule was the first to ask:

“Uh … you do realize we have no idea how to run a shop, right?”

Phil rolled his eyes and snorted at us.

“Of course I know that. I already talked to Cora. She’s going to be your business manager. You really think once that baby gets here she’s going to want to answer phones and schedule appointments for you boneheads all day? No way, that little spitfire was born to take care of someone, she’ll wanna spend as much time with the baby as she can. Give her an office in the new building, she can handle the technical aspects for you, and if she still wants to pierce, she can schedule it on her own time. All you need to do is find a new shop manager and hire the staff for the new location. I have faith in you boys. You’ll do me proud.”

“You’ve planned this all out without bothering to ask either of us how we feel about it?” I couldn’t keep some of the simmering anger I was feeling from bursting through.

“Nash …” Phil’s voice dipped down an octave. “I don’t have enough time left to argue. I want my family taken care of, I want what I worked so hard to build to live on. This is the way to achieve both those things. Trust me.”

I used to trust him without question … recent events made that a little bit harder to do.

“Where are we supposed to find a new shop manager? And how do you expect either of us to vet an entirely new staff of artists? Rule and I don’t have any idea how to do that.” I sounded a little bit petulant even to my own ears.

“You’ll figure it out. I have a few calls in to some people, some contacts I’ve made over the years. I’m not going to leave you high and dry.”

Both of us had a million and one questions to ask, but Phil broke off in a fit of coughing that didn’t seem to have an ending point. He was obviously uncomfortable and in an immeasurable amount of pain. Rule went and found a nurse, who gave Phil something that soon had his eyes drooping closed and his chest moving up and down in a steady rhythm. He faded out and Rule jerked his head toward the door, so I followed him into the hallway.

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah, that about covers it.” I took my hat off my head and then slammed it back on. “What the fuck are we going to do?”

“Figure it out, I guess. That’s what we always do.”

“This is insane, all of it.”

“No doubt, but we’ll just take it one step at a time. We got your back, Nash. Remember that next time you want to play ostrich and bury your head in a bottle of tequila for a week.”

I did know it. “Thanks, Rule. Hey, give me just a minute. I wanna try and track down Saint and apologize.”

“Apologize for what?”

“At this point I feel like I need to apologize to her for simply existing. Thanks for dragging me out of my stupor.”

“Anytime. I’ll meet you at the truck. I need to call Shaw. She still hasn’t told her parents about the wedding. I don’t care one way or the other if they’re going to come or not, but I know Casper well enough to know she’ll feel guilty if she doesn’t at least give them the opportunity to prove they aren’t horrible, even though we all know they are.”

I snorted because he wasn’t kidding and because it still made me laugh when he used his nickname for Shaw. Her super white-blond hair lent itself to the endearment. His words were also a harsh reminder that I wasn’t the only one that had seriously screwed family dynamics. The building blocks that made me who I was as a person were changing, being rearranged and placed in different places. I wasn’t scared of change, one look at my body and anyone could see that … what I was terrified of was having to look back and see that my mom giving me up … letting me go, had nothing to do with a broken heart left from a deadbeat dad, but everything to do with me and the fact I wasn’t what she wanted. It had to do with the fact that I just wasn’t good enough, and even though I had long since made peace with never meeting her standards, it still left a mark.

CHAPTER 4

Saint

The little boy I was working on was just too cute. He was probably only five or six and the gash he had on his head was pretty nasty, but he seemed to be taking it in stride. The mom was a hysterical wreck, like they all tended to be when their babies got hurt, but a couple of stitches later and the advice to get some Tylenol and have the child wear a helmet when he was riding his bike and they were on their way. Of course I had to scrounge up a sucker to give the young patient. I couldn’t stand seeing him leave without some kind of smile. Working on little kids was hard, but it always made my insides happy when I could fix them up and send them on their way with their tears dried up.

I snapped off my surgical gloves and nodded at the attending ER doctor as he moved on to the patient in the next room. It was flu season, so we were running at a pretty steady pace, not to mention the colder weather had the homeless population in and out dealing with a variety of weather-related injuries and symptoms. I always had to be on my toes, never knowing what was around the corner, which made my days move quickly and kept my job challenging and interesting. However, when I came around the corner and saw a familiar tall, dark figure leaning against the intake desk, I had to pause and decide if I wanted to turn around and run the other way before he caught sight of me. Nash wasn’t a challenge I particularly felt up to dealing with today.

I was irritated at him for acting so selfish while someone close to him was suffering, but more than that, I was furious with myself for giving in and getting involved when I knew better. I was also peeved that even though he rubbed me all kinds of the wrong way, the kiss he had forced on me had had me tossing and turning in bed at night, and if I concentrated hard enough, I could still taste the imprint he had left on my mouth. Ugh … why did he have to be so memorable in every possible way?

I narrowed my eyes and straightened my shoulders as I headed toward him. The nurse behind the desk was gazing up at him with a look I could only describe as awed. She was probably a decade older than me, had four kids, and her husband was a cop, but that didn’t stop her from falling into the charismatic snare that Nash seemed to so effortlessly weave around the opposite sex.

“What are you doing down here? Your dad is on the top floor.” I saw him wince when I used the word dad, but I refused to feel bad about it. I had trouble with tripping over words and saying what I really meant with people, but for some reason none of that was a problem when I spoke to him.

I tossed the paperwork I was holding to the admitting nurse and crossed my arms over my chest as he turned so that he was facing me. The baseball hat he was wearing cast the top part of his face in shadow, but I could see he had dark circles under each eye and that there were fine white lines of tension bracketing each side of his mouth. All in all he looked a lot better than the last time I had seen him. Well, better, minus the fact he was fully clothed, and even though I didn’t want to, I could still picture him half naked in vivid detail. I really did want to know what the front part of that massive tattoo was attached to on the backside.

“Do you have a minute?” His voice was kind of gruff but he softened the question with a half grin that made my heart trip.

“Not really. We’re pretty hectic today. The weather makes people go nuts, so we’re extra busy.”

He sighed and shifted so that he could shove his hands in the pockets of his hoodie. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the other nurses floating in and around the desk watching us with open curiosity.

“It’ll just take a second, please, Saint.”

I didn’t really think big, tough, tattooed guys used words like please, not that it was going to sway me. He had an unwanted effect on me and I knew it was a good idea to keep my distance from him. Just as I was about to refuse, the other nurse behind the desk, the one that was clearly smitten with his handsome face, offered up, “I’ll take the next room that just came in. You go ahead and take a breather for five minutes.”

I wanted to shift my glare to her, but she was just trying to be helpful, so I bit my lip and tilted my head toward the waiting room. There were more private places in the hospital I could have led him to, but being alone with him made me nervous and anxious.

“Follow me over there.”

He nodded and did as I asked. I felt the way his gaze burned into my back, and had to take several calming breaths and make sure I schooled my face into an impassive mask before I turned around to face him again. He sighed and used one broad shoulder to prop himself up against the coffee vending machine I had stopped by. We just stared at each other for a long moment. I was about to throw my hands up and walk away because the silence and his intense gaze gave me anxiety, when his quiet words surprised me.

“Phil’s condition is really bad. He told me there isn’t anything they can do. He’s dying and he just seems to be rolling with it, I don’t know how. I should have been here sooner.”

His tone was somber and his eyes under the dark bill of his hat had lightened to the shade of lilac. I could see how glassy they were, how much emotion he was trying to swallow down, and it took every ounce of self-control I had not to reach out and touch him, to try and soothe him. He wasn’t a wild animal that needed to be gentled … even if he kind of emanated that vibe.

“I’m sorry. Stage four is ugly and has a terrible prognosis no matter what kind of cancer it is.”

He nodded jerkily and tossed his head back on his neck so that he was peering down at me from under the brim of his ball cap.

“I’m sorry about the other night. I was really drunk, my shit was all over the place, and I swear I’m not usually that kind of guy. It was very nice of you to come over and check on me, and I acted like a dipshit. I just wanted to apologize, to tell you thanks.”

I was dumbfounded. That wasn’t what I was expecting from him, so I just stared up at him like a moron. He must have taken my silence as a rebuff because he pulled his hat off and scraped one of his hands roughly over the top of his shaved head. His dark eyebrows dipped down low over those fabulous eyes and his nostrils flared out a little. With that piercing he had in the center of his nose, it kind of made him look like an angry bull.

“Cut me some slack here, Saint. My life went sideways and this shit has been hard to deal with. I know you don’t like me, so it was extra nice of you to swing by. What I don’t know is why you don’t like me.”

I jolted back and dropped my defensive stance. Sure, I had my reasons for being standoffish and keeping my distance from him, but I had never meant to make my discomfort and unease around him totally palpable to others, especially to him. The last thing I wanted was to relive that moment, either of them. There was no way I was ever going to tell him that his dismissal, his harsh words, had forever changed me, forever changed how I looked at the opposite sex. It was humiliating and obviously way more memorable to me than it was to anyone else. If he had no recollection of it, I wasn’t going to remind him. He gave his head a shake and put his hat back on his head. He pushed off the vending machine and shrugged the wide expanse of his shoulders.