Jay Crownover - Nash

My hands clenched into fists at my sides. “But Phil didn’t go anywhere. He just didn’t know I existed.”

“No, he didn’t, and, in a perfect world, it would have stayed that way. Grant took care of us, provided for us, and we told you that your dad had abandoned us. But as time went on you just looked more and more like Phil. One of his friends saw you with me at Cherry Creek Mall when you were about four and told Phil. He was furious, threatened to take me to court, to fight for custody. Grant didn’t want that kind of mess, didn’t want the whole sordid tale out in public and we didn’t need child support, so we made a deal. I begged Phil, pleaded with him to keep his real identity and relation to you a secret, to keep it quiet until you were older. He very reluctantly agreed, but only as long as he got to be in your life and only as long as I agreed to let you have his last name. I never put a father on the birth certificate, so making you a Donovan officially was the easiest thing in the world.”

She twisted her hands together and had the nerve to look at me like this was somehow my fault.

“When you got older, you were too much. Too wild, too loud, too hard to handle. You didn’t want to dress nice or play with the right kind of kids, Grant was already resentful that he was raising Phil’s kid, but the way you were, how much you looked like Phil, it was his breaking point. It was just easier to let Phil handle you, try and put you on some kind of path, because where you were going wasn’t any kind of place Grant or I wanted any part of. You were always so much more Phil’s son than mine.”

My back teeth snapped together, and I felt my temper start to surge in an angry torrent under my skin.

“I was a kid. Maybe if you hadn’t constantly been on me about shit I couldn’t change, like my eye color, I would have picked a more acceptable path to you. You never gave me the chance. You were always too busy trying to make Grant happy to worry about what all that vitriol was doing to your kid.”

“You were always too much like your father, even though you didn’t know who he was.”

“He loved you, still does.”

Her mouth tightened and turned white at the corners.

“He loved the idea of me. He never really knew the real me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me when I was older, when I went to live with him permanently?”

“He didn’t want to.”

“Bullshit.”

“Fine, he wanted me to be the one to tell you and I refused. I didn’t think Grant or I needed to deal with the fallout. You had moved on, Phil was a better parent to you than I ever could have been. It was all said and done.”

I wanted to throw something heavy at her. I wanted to break every stupid piece of Williams-Sonoma cookware in her fancy kitchen. My fingers curled into fists at my sides.

“But I’m still here, Mom. Still trying to live my life, and now the only father I’m ever going to have is dying and there is nothing I can do about it. You robbed me of that relationship because you didn’t want to deal with the fallout, because you didn’t want to inconvenience that dipshit husband of yours? How does any of that sound right to you?”

“What’s right for me has never been what’s right for you, Nashville. You don’t even use the name I gave you.”

“Because it’s ridiculous … all of it. What’s right for me isn’t what’s right for you because I’m an actual human being with feelings and emotions, and you, Mom … you’re a goddamn monster.”

I had always longed for her attention, thirsted for her love and approval, but now looking at her, seeing the absolute lack of remorse or regret in her eyes, I was thankful she had simply let me go. If I had tried any harder, worked any more to make her love me, who knew what kind of miserable, unfeeling robot I would have become at her hands. As an adult, I was still pissed at her, still resentful she had such an easy time letting me go, but I was also overwhelmingly grateful that I wasn’t anything like her and her people.

“I’m not a monster, Nash.” Finally, my name. “I’m just not the mother you wanted or needed, and frankly you were never the son I wanted or needed. Having you made it pretty clear I was never cut out to be someone’s mother. Why do you think Grant and I never had any more kids? We wanted it to just be us.”

“Thank God for that.”

I pushed off the counter and headed toward the door. I knew once I walked out I had no reason to ever come back. This solidified it for me, it was why Phil had pushed and pushed me to make her be the one and tell me the entire sordid tale. I was finally free of any chains to the past that she might have held. I didn’t need her approval. I was a good man, had a good life, had the best friends in the entire world, and I was working really hard on figuring out how to have a good woman on a permanent basis. There was no need for my mother to be proud of me or find worth in what I was doing, because I was proud of myself, and Phil had given me that.

It didn’t matter that I had no idea what to do with the new shop, or that Saint had me spinning in circles. I would figure it all out, and there was no way I was going to let him or anyone else down while doing it, not because I needed validation or appreciation, but because that was just the kind of guy I was. The kind of guy my father had raised me to be.

I knew his visit with his mom was going to have him in a bad mood. He didn’t talk much about her, or why he had been raised mostly by Phil, and the fact he was quiet about it spoke to me more than I think words could. He’d mentioned more than once that the reason he was so quick to anger, so quick to run his mouth when he was younger, was because of how unhappy he was with his mom, that he acted out for attention and to rile her up, so I knew his visit was going to have him feeling raw and out of sorts. I wanted to do something to make him feel better.

He had gone out of his way to show me a good time, to take me out and keep things between us fun and playful, but always keeping a sexy edge to it all so that I knew he wanted me. I felt like it was time I returned the favor.

He showed up at my apartment sulking, thunderous, and in a full-on bad mood. His eyes were all dark and swirly, and no matter how much I tried to get him to talk about it, he just grunted one-syllable answers at me and scowled at nothing and no one in particular. I couldn’t really shake him out of it, and when I suggested we get out of the apartment, he just looked at me like I had lost my mind. Really he wasn’t fit to be around other people, but I couldn’t stand to see him so unhappy, so I was going to drag him into a better mood kicking and screaming if I had to.

It was a testament as to how much he wanted to please me, wanted me to have a good time, that he agreed to leave the apartment with me in the first place when clearly he would have been content to sit and wallow in his awful mood for the rest of the night. I could have kissed him all over his shaved head for that alone. When we got into the Jetta and he didn’t ask any questions as I drove downtown, I could only hope my plan didn’t backfire and end up with him in an even more sour state of mind.

I had to find a place to park and he gave me a questioning look as I took his hand and guided him toward the ice-skating rink that was located right in the heart of Denver’s downtown at Skyline Park. It was only open a few months out of the year, in the winter, and you could skate for free if you brought your own skates. It had always been one of my favorite parts of growing up in a cold-weather state. There was nothing like gliding around the ice in the dark while white lights twinkled over your head. There was something so fun about doing something so quaint right in the middle of such a metropolitan area … I hoped Nash felt the same way.