Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 141951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 473(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 141951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 473(@300wpm)
She already had her whiney whimper coming out to play, too. Fuck him for having other things to get to that morning because he’d spend the rest of the day listening to Delaney get herself off if that’s what she wanted to do.
Yes, please, he thought.
“Is unfairly the right word?” he asked. “Because from my position, I’m not complaining.”
He turned and kicked his bedroom door closed with one foot while his hand worked to free his erection from the confines of his briefs, unashamed about his open fly and hastily pulled down pants.
“Good,” she mumbled shakily. “Are you gonna play, too?”
“Until I have to go. Don’t worry, it’s no one important. They can wait thirty minutes for me to show up instead of it going the other way around.”
Delaney didn’t ask who Lucas would be meeting.
For that, he was grateful.
There was nothing like talk of his mother—or the therapist he’d booked for a second appointment to see after his planned brunch with her—to make his dick soft.
That’s not what Lucas was trying to do here.
“Oh, my … Oh,” Delaney exclaimed in a squeal he knew well.
Lucas pumped his cock with a snug grip, picking up the pace. “That’s one, Delaney. Edge yourself out at least once or twice. I want to catch up.”
Chapter 28
Lucas had not been prepared to have brunch with his mother while another companion sat across the table, but he hid his surprise—and annoyance—with the smiling man who greeted him by standing and offering his hand to shake.
Maybe he shouldn’t have been shocked by Penelope’s husband joining them. He had been the one to reach out and make the request for the breakfast between Lucas and his mother in the first place.
“Hanson,” he replied, shaking the hand of his mother’s new husband.
Well, was he new?
The two had been married for a couple of years.
“I’d apologize for being late for this,” Lucas went on, “but it’s been a rough week. I’m doing what I can.”
“Terrible about Jacob, isn’t it?” Hanson—Hanny to his friends; Lucas did not pretend to be one of those—asked, offering a sympathetic smile as he took his hand away and returned to his seat next to Penelope.
A drinking Penelope.
It wasn’t even noon.
“I take it the healing spa in Florida didn’t really stick then,” he noted when his mother lifted her screwdriver for a sip.
One of many rehabs where his mother had found solace over the years, and preferred to go back to whenever she wanted to dry up for a bit. Hell, she’d traveled all over Canada and the United States attending one program or another. Only the best of the best would do. None of them seemed to help with her chronic alcoholism that had tainted the memories of his childhood. Once he got into his adult years, Lucas had put distance—and what he thought were healthy boundaries—between him and his mother. As much as he could, anyway. He wouldn’t show up to be the ride home from the drunk tank on her worst nights—or the person who cleaned up her vomit after a particularly bad binge.
She didn’t know her limits, and he couldn’t set them. She only saw her son’s space as a betrayal. Certainly not what it really was—him protecting himself.
“You don’t have to be so judgemental,” Penelope finally responded once her glass clinked down to the shiny tabletop between them. “It’s a drink and seeing you today … It made me nervous.”
No, it didn’t.
No shock that she used him as the scapegoat for her drinking, though, and those alcohol glassed eyes said it wasn’t just one drink, either. There began the tip of the iceberg that made up the dangerous waters that were his mother.
“Making an observation that you’re drinking before noon is judgemental?” Lucas asked. “Is that what you tell the doctors every time they remind you that you only have one liver for life, Mom?”
Okay, that one was a lot more direct.
Lucas still wouldn’t apologize for it.
Penelope, who hadn’t even asked him for a proper greeting when he joined the table which usually included a kiss to her wax-like cheek, focused on stirring the speared cherry tomato around the rim of her drink. Lucas desperately searched for the small part of the boy left over from his childhood who always found some sympathy for his mother, but there she sat, at sixty-seven years of her clinging onto a long-gone youth with her heavy makeup and face frozen full of Botox.
Liquor on every breath.
Still, he tried to find the excuse or justification to get him through that brunch—barely an hour, if he ate fast. Just like he would have years ago, finding reasons for yet another bad week, one of her tantrums, or the long stretches of silence and neglect in between.
He didn’t have that ability anymore.
Every time she walked away from him, or hurt her sons, especially in recent years … well, it taught Lucas how to live without her.