Extreme Curves (Dangerous Curves Book 7) (9 page)

After all, the man that he had been and that he was now wasn’t worthy of Liam, were they? No… no way. Oh sure, Ace
wanted
to believe that he deserved a second chance with Liam – but not this way. Not with what he could offer at the moment, which was – what? And was who?

He didn’t actually know.

“Where are Honey and Tex?” Ace asked quietly.

“Honey’s sleeping, and Tex is standing guard outside,” Jack said, also keeping his voice low. “I’m on front door duty.”

“Right.” Ace paused. “Well… OK.”

“OK?” Jack repeated. “OK what?”

“OK, I’ll talk to you.”

“Alright, man.” Jack sat on a stool, opened his hands. “Shoot. I’m listening.”

Ace nodded, but didn’t say anything yet because, where the actual fuck to begin? He opened his mouth, and this came out:

“Everyone thinks that my road name is Ace, but it’s not. Ace
is
my name… my birth name.”

Jack blinked at that. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. My Dad was a gambler. Like, a serious one. I guess you could say that he was an addict, but you could
also
say that he wasn’t bad at it. The man never held down a job in the whole of his life, except for playing the tables and the slots. Somehow, he kept a roof over our heads and food on the table – not a nice roof, mind you, and sometimes he forgot to buy food for days on end, when he was on a drinking-and-winning streak, but still. He won more than he lost, and there seemed to be cash around when we really needed it.”

“Your Mom?” Jack asked. “Was she there?”

“For a while. Then she died.”

“How old were you?”

“Two.” Ace shook his head. “I don’t really remember her, but I
do
remember her voice. I remember her singing me to sleep. The one about the star twinkling up in the sky.”

Jack was surprised that Ace would share such a sweet, intimate moment that he’d had with a woman that he’d clearly loved deeply, and still had strong feelings for. He narrowed his eyes at Ace, wondering if he was being taken for a ride by the conniving bastard, then he stopped as he saw it… really
saw
it. What he was seeing was like a light being turned on suddenly, flooding a dark room with brightness and illumination. Your eyes just needed time to adjust and you blink – and then everything became clear and sharp and technicolored.

So.
This
is what Ace Cuddy looks like when he’s vulnerable. Huh
.

“Then it was just me and him,” Ace continued. “And that wasn’t great. Like I said, he was a gambler and a drinker, and he wasn’t up for raising a kid. Not even close.”

“He was abusive?” Jack asked, trying to keep his tone level and non-threatening. God only knows how a man like Ace would react to having his weakness called out – even if he’d been a small, frightened boy at the time that it had all taken place. “He hurt you?”

Ace was quiet, but in that silence, Jack both saw and heard
everything
that the man was thinking and feeling. Oh, yeah, Ace had been hurt… hurt badly.

“He did lots of things,” Ace said, deftly side-stepping the question, the surest sign of deep-seated pain that hadn’t even begun to heal. “But I learned early and fast how to read his moods, and when to get the hell out of the way and disappear, and how to be what he wanted me to be in that exact moment. By the time I was about six, I’d actually figured out how to avoid getting beat on sometimes. Not always, of course. Not when he came looking for me, or came home drunk and angry after losing a shit-ton of cash. Then I was fair game, and no way to stop what was coming. I just took it, and waited for it to stop. It always did, eventually. He got tired or bored or passed out. Or whatever.”

“Nobody helped you?”

Ace shrugged, trying to look nonchalant. “I didn’t ask for help.”

“But no adult stepped up and called the cops? “ Jack wasn’t about to let
this
go. “A relative? Neighbor? Teacher?”

“No. This was over thirty years go and those were different times, remember. Back then nobody really got involved in domestic stuff, and people turned blind eyes all over the fucking place. I was left alone to handle it, as best I could. And I handled it OK, I suppose, until this one thing happened…”

Jack didn’t ask this time. He just waited.

“It was all pretty bad,” Ace said at last. “But the worst thing, the one that got me taken away at last, was when he left me locked in a closet in eighty-plus-degree weather for four days without enough food or water. I almost died.”

“OK,
what
?” Jack said, disbelieving. “What the actual, living
fuck
?”

“Oh, he didn’t do it on purpose,” Ace said, and Jack saw that despite the passing of time and the fact that Ace had become a brutal, emotionless man in so many ways, he was
still
making excuses for his worthless dickhead of a father. “I mean, he locked me in the closet, sure enough, but he always did when he went out for an all-nighter.”

“
What
?” Jack repeated.

“Yeah. Said it kept me safe if someone broke in to steal the TV, and it was a load off his mind, since I couldn’t get out of bed and wander the streets in the middle of the night.”

Wordless, Jack just looked at Ace. The other man shifted, clearly uncomfortable, but also bound and determined to talk. Jack wondered the last time that Ace had talked about this, and then he knew when.

He knew that Ace had
never
talked about this.

He also knew that saying one word now –
one fucking word
, even a supportive one – would shut this whole thing down. Ace would come to his senses, and come to the realization that he was, ultimately, giving Jack a big piece of who he was, and exactly how he’d become that way.

Ace was about to just hand over a slice of his soul… and a single syllable would shatter that act to the point of no-recovery.

“So.” Ace stared at his hands, not seeing anything at all. “I was used to it, really. He had night games on the regular, and they went
all
night. I got used to sleeping on the closet floor, on a bunch of blankets, behind a locked door. In fact, I kinda forgot that I even
had
a bed.”

Jack wanted to hiss in rage, but he held it back. Fuck, he
hated
hearing about abused kids, hated it like poison. His own parents had never touched him that way, so he had no personal experience – but in his professional life, he’d come across victims and survivors of child abuse, and every one of those people had some serious demons to combat. Even the ones who’d managed to move past it all still had the shadows clinging to them and circling around them. Yeah, they were faint and held at arm’s length through incredible strength of will and character… but they were there. They were always going to be there, one way or another.

Ace was a man living in shadow in so, so many ways, and now Jack wondered if he was ever really going to be able to step on out into the sun.

And weirdly, Jack found himself hoping it for Ace. Hoping hard.

“So this one time,” Ace said. “He shut me in as usual, headed out as usual. Left me a sandwich and a bottle of water, also as usual. But the next morning, he didn’t come home. Didn’t come home all the next day, or the next night. I had no way of knowing what time it was, of course, but I
did
know that way too much time had passed. I’d eaten my sandwich the night before, and I only had a bit of water. I made it last as long as possible, but it ran out too. Then I was screwed, you know? I started to panic at one point, and kicked at the door and screamed, thinking that maybe he’d just stumbled home super drunk and passed out and forgot about me – but he never came. I didn’t see him again for almost four years.”

“So where was he?” Jack said, mentally adding, ‘
the fucking dickhead bastard?
’

“Jail. He’d gotten himself all liquored-up and lost bad at poker. He then lost his
mind
. Flipped the table, beat up the other guys, smashed most of the alcohol bottles behind the bar. It was a semi-respectable place and the nice old guy who ran it actually called the cops. My Dad got arrested for drunk and disorderly, destruction of property, assault and battery, and got dragged away to jail. He was drunk and passed out for a day, then he was all concerned about his injuries, then he got into fights with the other prisoners, and he never once thought about me. It was summer and a long holiday weekend, so no court hearing for four days – and I wasn’t in school, so nobody was around to notice that I’d gone missing.”

“So who came for you, in the end?”

“Weirdly enough, two guys looking for my Dad because he owed them money. They broke down the front door of the house and even though I was in bad shape by then, I heard them. Managed to scratch at the closet door a bit, and they opened it up and found me there. The one guy grabbed some water from the fridge and squeezed drops from a facecloth on to my tongue, and the other guy ran outside to the other houses on our street until he found one with a phone. We didn’t have one in our house, see.”

“And why didn’t you see your Dad for four years?”

“Because even though he was out on parole two years after his arrest for all the stuff that he did that night
plus
the child abandonment and endangerment charges, I was still taken away from him and put in foster care. And I flat-out refused to see him for visitation.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.” Ace set his jaw. “Wouldn’t do it.”

“You were how old then?”

“Eight when all this shit went down and he was taken away. Ten when he was released and started making noise about seeing me.”

“Shit, Ace,” Jack said softly. “So when did you see him again?”

“It was by accident. I was twelve and skipping school with some buddies, hanging out in a parking lot and smoking cigarettes. He rolled on out of the store with a case of beer.”

“You talked?”

“Nope. He couldn’t even walk straight, let alone focus on a long-haired, wild-eyed, grungy kid. He walked right past me, never gave me a sideways look. Didn’t notice the son that he’d fucking left to die in a closet four years earlier.”

“And you did something.” It wasn’t a question. “You did something to him.”

“Yeah.” Ace shifted again. “I sure as hell did.”

“Which was?”

“C’mon, Jack.” Ace’s tone was almost scornful. “You’re going to act like you don’t have a clue? Seriously?”

“You beat the shit out of him. How bad?”

“Bad enough that I felt better than I had in years.”

Jack nodded. “Did he know it was you?”

“I told him when I had his face planted under my boot. He bawled and apologized, but I didn’t care. He was dead to me by then anyway, and I made that crystal clear. I left him there bloody and barely-conscious, and that was it. Never saw the fucker again, never checked in on him. I have no idea if he’s even alive, and I don’t give a good goddamn either way.”

“Right.” Jack paused. “You feel at peace about how that all ended?”

“Jack,” Ace said. “It’s just about the only damn thing in my whole life that I
do
feel at peace about.”

**

Spider snuck back upstairs to his room, heart pounding and legs shaking, holding his breath the whole way. He didn’t release the badly-needed exhale until he was safely behind his closed door, and then he sank onto his bed, his knees still a bit weak.

Ten minutes earlier, he’d smelled bacon and gone to the top of the stairs, hoping and praying that Ace The Asshole was still holed up in his bedroom, jerking off or staring at the walls or whatever the hell he
did
in there for hours and hours on end every day. But no… he was down in the kitchen with Jack, drinking coffee and eating bacon and eggs, and just taking up the space that Spider wanted to occupy. Annoyed and disgusted, he’d turned on his heel, ready to stalk back to his room to browse some news – but then he’d heard Jack ask about Ace’s childhood.

Spider had stopped dead in his tracks, boy… he’d just
frozen
where he stood. Because even though Ace had been cagey about many, many things when they’d been together, the thing that he’d been most closed-mouthed about had been his earliest years on this earth.

Oh, Spider had known a few things, of course. He’d known that Ace’s mother had died, and that his father had been a gambler and a mean drunk, and that Ace had been taken away from the loser pretty young. What Spider hadn’t known was
why
.

Well, he knew now. And it made him sick to his stomach. It also explained all those nightmares that Ace had had sometimes, nightmares where he’d been trapped in small, dark spaces with no way out, or in long, dark hallways that got narrower and narrower as Ace walked down them, and which closed behind him, forcing him forward.
God
, he’d woken up shaking and panting from those dreams – and he’d never told Spider why. Not once.

Also? He had always assumed that ‘Ace’ was the man’s road name; he’d asked what Ace’s ‘real name’ was, and more than once, but Ace had just given him that quirky little smile and said, “Ace
is
my real name, sweetheart.” And Spider had taken that to mean that he felt more like ‘Ace’ than whoever he’d been before being named for the MC – and he’d let the matter drop, but not happily.

Spider knew then and he still knew now,
God help him
, how good it felt for Ace to call him ‘Liam’. For Ace to still be the only person to call him that, except for his Mom. It felt… intimate to him. Like it was something warm and sweet and secret, something just between them that they shared. When Ace said his name, it was like a soft, gentle caress; it was like a rhythm that Spider could set his life breath and heartbeat to.

Why hadn’t Ace told him the full story about his name? About his God-awful son-of-a-bitch asshole loser drunk gambler father? About almost dying all alone in a fucking closet at the age of eight, about damn near killing his own father in a convenience store parking lot at the age of twelve? Did Ace think that Spider was going to judge him? Condemn him? Think less of him?