Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69303 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69303 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
Finnian pulled out a fifty and said, “Buy everyone some.”
Denny pocketed the fifty and walked away without another word.
“He has a point,” Finnian murmured as he watched his kid walk away. “If the worst thing they’re doing right now is having sex, I can handle it.”
“Well, you’ll handle it even more when you have a talk with him tomorrow night when we get home.”
The group laughed, and conversation topics changed.
But what didn’t change was the fun we had as a group.
I loved hanging out with all the Truth Tellers, their wives, and kids.
I never thought I’d be happy to be in the middle of these men, but there I was, happy as could be.
Later the next night, after we’d arrived home late, I found myself leaning against the counter and staring at the wall where our big calendar hung.
Next to that calendar was the start of our family wall.
But the photo front and center was the last photo that Tavi and Finnian had ever taken together—both of them smiling huge.
That photo never stopped putting a smile on my face.
Tavi may be gone, but he was never forgotten.
His brothers and sister knew all about him, and talked about him constantly as if they’d met him.
“Whatcha lookin’ at?”
“Tavi,” I admitted.
Finnian squeezed my hip and placed a kiss on the side of my head. “He would’ve been twenty-five soon.”
My heart squeezed inside my chest. “He’d have been so handsome.”
“Yeah.”
The silence wasn’t bad.
We were both thinking about that little boy, and what life would’ve looked like had he lived.
The possibilities were endless.
“Ma! Who’s taking me tomorrow?”
I looked back at the calendar and started talking.
“All right,” I said as I looked at our next few days. “You have Jack and Geenie tomorrow.”
Finnian groaned. “What? Why?”
Geenie and Jack were a couple of workaholics both on and off the field. Academically, they were dominating their class, and usually we split them up between us to keep the running around at a minimum.
But this time, that wasn’t possible.
I glared at him as I sat with my hips against the counter, my eyes on the calendar.
“Because I have a parent meeting for Cort because he was an ass to a teacher Friday.” I leveled him with a look. “And I wonder where he got that from?”
Finnian had nothing to say.
The shit.
“You do realize, right, that it’s unacceptable for a fourteen-year-old to be hacking into the school’s email and changing teacher’s email addresses to their provocative last names, right?”
“I think it’s unacceptable that he was caught,” Finnian agreed, “but it really is unfair. Every other teacher and student has to go by their last name in their school email.”
“Yeah, but when you pair it with the first three letters of their first name like everyone else, you don’t get anything provocative. With hers, you do.”
“If she wasn’t such a dick to him, and tried to act like he knew nothing, then he wouldn’t act like that to her.”
The teacher’s email address had read “BigDicks@DISD.com” for a solid four hours because it’d taken them a while to catch it.
In the meantime, every student in the school had chosen to email her, just to get a rise out of her.
The woman was overly uncomfortable with her name, and I had to question why she would come to a school with that kind of last name and not expect fourteen-year-olds to give her shit about it.
That was what they were majoring in—assholeness.
“And the only reason I was caught,” Cort said as he came into the room. “Was because someone narced on me.”
Cort’s big brother, Jack, walked into the room as he said that, then turned around and walked right back out.
“Ah,” I said as I watched the move. “Come back here, Jack.”
Jack turned and his cheeks flushed. “What happened?”
“It wasn’t me,” he sighed. “It was my girlfriend’s friend. She was failing that class and was trying to earn some bonus points.”
I liked Jack’s girlfriend, Tillie, a lot. Tillie’s best friend? Not so much.
Or I had loved Tillie a lot before this weekend when we’d taken them to Broken Bow, Oklahoma, for the weekend.
“What’s with that face?” Finnian asked. “And bros before hos, Jack. And family above all others.”
Jack looked nervous and glanced over at me.
He didn’t know if Finnian knew, and Finnian wasn’t giving him a thing.
I knew what he was doing.
He was challenging his son to be a man and tell what he’d done wrong.
Jack didn’t surprise me when he admitted to Finnian what I’d caught them doing.
We’d meant to talk about it when we’d gotten home, but you know how it is when you get home from vacation. There was just too much laundry and shit to unpack to get to anything fast.
“Uh, yeah. So about that, Dad…” Jack drawled.
Finnian listened silently, his eyes on his son, and his face completely devoid of any emotion.