You Are the Reason (32 page)

A look of disgust came over her face. It wasn’t pretty. “You mean he’s one of your lot? Fuck. No wonder he was saying no, then.”

I reined in the urge to smack her one. A voice from the doorway backed up this urge. It was Clem, shaking his head in horror. “Oh, fucking hell. You are one psycho bitch. Not everyone finds you attractive.”

I couldn’t deal with her anymore and only listened with half an ear as I helped Lee right his clothing. Clem and Cynthia were yelling at each other.

“You certainly did,” she told him.

“Hell, no,” Clem rebutted. “I turned you down at least four times until you decided to rape me when I was too drunk to know any better.”

“It wasn’t rape. You can’t rape a man,” Cynthia scorned.

“It was rape, and if I’d known you were doing it to others, I would’ve reported you.” Clem’s voice was determined. I wondered when the hell that had happened. I had noticed he’d stuck to nonalcoholic beverages all day, and now I knew why. The poor man wasn’t game to be drunk near this woman.

“She tried it on with me too” came another voice. A male voice.

I whirled to Cynthia, who was now covered with a robe but staring insolently at her accusers crowded in the doorway. “Give me the key, Cynthia.”

“Fuck
you
,” she replied. “You and your
girlfriend
aren’t getting anything from me.” She stalked into the bathroom nearby, and I heard the lock click on the door.

I needed to get out of there. Lee was looking forlorn, still chained like an animal. I frantically assessed the situation. The bed frame was wood. Good.

“Move to the side,” I told him, and he nodded. I climbed on the bed and began kicking the frame, splintering it. To my shock, three other men joined in, stomping the bedhead until the cuffs came free. Lee flew into my embrace, and I hugged him tight.

“Let’s get you out of here.”

I pushed through the gawkers—some looking ashamed and sad, as if they knew what Cynthia was like or had been victims too. Thor was sitting on the lounge, his head between his hands. I had a sinking suspicion he knew what Cynthia was like too, and had tried to drown his knowledge. His brother, standing over him, gave me a sympathetic smile. “I’m going to take him to my house.”

“Good idea,” I told Zach. “Ring me later. I need to get out of here now.”

Zach nodded in agreement. Luckily my car wasn’t boxed in, and I almost threw Lee into the passenger seat in my haste to depart. I left black marks on the road in my escape.

“I’m sorry,” Lee said to me.

I scoffed and shook my head. “Hell, no. You have
nothing
to apologize for. It’s me who needs to apologize for taking you there. I’m sorry. I’m so fuckin’ sorry it’s unexplainable.”

Lee reached for my hand, but unfortunately the cuffs still dangled around his wrist—which made me swear and take an abrupt left into a street.

“Where are we going?” Lee asked in confusion.

“Jake’s house. He’s the closest. I need to get those off you before I go mad. I can’t believe that she did that to you.”

There was a ringing in my ears, and I felt like punching someone. I pulled up in Jake’s driveway and thundered up the path to rap frantically on the door. Lee followed with less haste.

Jake answered. “Davo? What—”

“We need a hacksaw. Immediately. You have one, don’t you?”

“Of course, but—”

He cut off when he saw the cuffs and paled.

“Cops?” Jake asked.

I shook my head. “Female cobra and rapist.”

He ushered us in without further ado and told us to take a seat. I was too wound up and ended up pacing the floor.

“Dave, it’s okay. You got to me in time,” Lee tried to soothe.

“I wanted to punch her,” I confessed. “I want to crawl away in shame knowing I took you there and placed you in that position.” My hands were shaking with rage.

Patrick entered the room, Maxine in his arms. He made a beeline for me and almost dumped his daughter in my grasp. “Here. Hold her for a minute will you? I need to help Jake.”

I looked down at the pink bundle in my arms and dredged up a smile for my number-one girl. “Hey, sweet pea.” She immediately smiled back at me, and I grinned. I started to calm down and finally sat on the sofa opposite Lee. I had a sinking suspicion that Patrick had given her to me on purpose. And if his purpose was to divert me from my anger and rage, it worked. I couldn’t be angry with that baby girl in my arms. “Have you been giving your daddies hell, like I told you to? You have? Good girl. Well done. Uncle Dave thinks you’re a superstar.”

Then while I held the baby, catching all those girl germs I was once so afraid of and having all that femme and pink rub off on me, the blind man and his husband sawed through the handcuffs to release my heart.

I spoke nonsense at Maxine, making her giggle while they worked. “And you’re not going to grow up mean and nasty like that snake, are you? You’re going to be such a good girl and you’re never going to be any sort of trouble. Uncle Dave can’t wait until you’re big enough that I can take you to the park and play on the slide. The slide was my favorite playground equipment.” She watched me intently, as if taking in all of my words. “And when you’re old enough, I’m going to buy you some Barbies. My sister reckoned I was the best accessorizer of Barbie clothes. I always knew which shoes went with the outfit.”

I made some faces at Maxine and realized there was a hushed conversation happening on the other side of the room. Patrick was holding a piece of hardened plastic against Lee’s skin between the cuff and his wrist, while Jake sawed. Lee was retelling the story of his ordeal.

“…and I’m just thinking that maybe this situation has gone beyond my control when Dave bursts into the room like an avenging angel and starts yelling at her. Man, he was angry. They yelled at each other until there’s all these people in the room, but she wouldn’t give Dave the key. So he went all macho man on me and kicked the bed frame until I was free. Oh my God. He was so sexy—rescuing the damsel in distress. Me.”

Jake chuckled. “Modern fairytales. You gotta love ’em.”

“You haven’t heard the best part, though,” Lee said.

“What?” Jake asked.

He snuck a look at me, and when he saw that I was watching and listening, he didn’t drop his eyes. He maintained the eye contact and declared, “He said he loved me. He told that woman that I was his, and that he loved me.”

I stared back. If he wanted me to deny it, or take it back, he would have a long wait.

Jake snorted and didn’t show surprise. “Moths.”

“Yep,” Patrick agreed.

F
IFTEEN
MINUTES
later I was feeding a bottle to Maxine, and Lee was still rubbing cream into his wrist when Jake placed a coffee in front of me and said, “Davo? Patrick and I have something we want to ask you, and we were hoping now was an okay time?”

Ask me? I frowned. “Sure. No worries. What do you need?”

“Well… you see….” Jake seemed unsure of what to say now that he had my attention, so Patrick took over.

He stood tall and addressed me formally. “Jake’s mother has requested that we get Maxine baptized. In a church. We were rather uncertain about it, because we’re not exactly the traditional family, but we’ve found a church that’s gay friendly, and we’ve applied to have her baptized. They’ve agreed, and we’re organizing the paperwork. We need to nominate two people to be her godparents. And Jake and I were hoping that you would agree to be one of them.”

My jaw dropped. Me? A godfather? What responsibilities did a godfather have? “But what would I have to do?”

Jake smiled. “In the traditional sense, you agree that should something happen to us, you’ll continue to foster a sense of Christ in Maxine. To us, what we want, is for you to be someone special in her life. Someone who’s there for her when she needs them. Someone who’ll spoil her and love her and cherish her. Someone to listen to her if she has the need. Someone to love her. We want you to agree to be her family.”

I blinked and told myself that it wasn’t tears pricking at the back of my eyes. They wanted me to be her family? Like be connected to this little baby forever?

I couldn’t look at anyone other than those beautiful eyes on my precious girl as I choked out an emotional, “Okay.”

Jake stood and slapped me on the back. “Good.”

He bolted from the room, and I heard cupboards opening and closing. Patrick sighed loudly and took the seat on the lounge next to Lee. “He’s making pancakes,” he said with a bit of a smirk.

“Pancakes?” Lee asked.

“It’s a Jake thing,” Patrick explained. “When someone’s in trouble, he makes pancakes. When someone’s sick, he makes pancakes. When someone upsets him, he makes pancakes. When he wants to tell you he loves you, he makes pancakes.”

Lee frowned. “So how can you tell if he’s angry with you or if he’s really saying he loves you? If he makes pancakes for both occasions?”

Patrick tried to hold back a grin. “The amount of banging from the pans and bowls.”

I looked at my goddaughter-to-be and smiled. She really did have the best dads in the whole world.

W
E
DIDN
’
T
mention the
L
thing between us for a while. Lee seemed to be waiting for something, and I was nervous because he hadn’t said anything back.

Thor visited. He was a visibly broken man. He apologized profusely to Lee and then broke down in tears. We told him we didn’t blame him, and consulted Mr. Magic 8 Ball. He told us that he couldn’t predict, at that moment, whether Thor would get a new girlfriend or not.

“Something has to happen before the oracle can tell you,” I said knowledgably. “You haven’t done something.”

“Have you kicked her out of your house yet?” Lee asked.

Thor crumpled and admitted he hadn’t. So, under our watchful eyes, he sent her a text message telling her she had twenty-four hours to get out, and that if he found anything missing, he’d report her to the cops.

I shook Mr. Magic 8 Ball. “Is that what you needed Thor to do?” I queried.

As I see it, yes.

Satisfied with our world, the three of us got drunk. Stinking drunk. It was good.

But I knew I still had one more hurdle to pass before I could do what I wanted to do. I waited and looked for an opening. Lee spent so much time at my house that my garden was finished, and instead of nice, simple hedges and palms, it had turned into a riot of color—pinks, purples, and whites all vying for space. It turns out that ‘rosewood’ is actually brown, and roses don’t flower in that color. It also turns out that the employees at Bunnings are very helpful, and after they stopped laughing, they were able to suggest some wonderful flowering plants they thought Lee would like.

For a man who didn’t like pink, I had a very rosy, blushing garden. And several shades of cerise.

Lee’s life became more enmeshed with mine. My mum taught him how to sew a hem, and Howard took us on a yacht for the day. A bloody
yacht
. Who knew people still had them? But Howard did.

Then, on a Friday afternoon, Frank Liddle called me to his office.

“What’s up?” I asked him happily. After six weeks of working Martin Summers, I’d managed to not only get the nod to bid on two huge multimillion-dollar contracts, but I had sewn up two smaller maintenance contracts, which would give us a chance to prove our products. I was happy. Lou was happy. Frank was happy. Nick was happy. Joseph was happy.

Frank handed me an envelope. “Here. These are spare. Go and have some fun.”

I opened the envelope and found two orange tickets inside. They were for entry and dinner at the prestigious Beau Rivage restaurant. For tonight. “What’s this?”

“They’re leftovers,” Frank said. “I think you’ve earned them.”

There were tickets to certain venues and functions Everett Manufacturing purchased to wine and dine clients with. In other words, bribes that really weren’t bribes. Maybe they could be described as the butter for buttering-up clients to get sales. And sometimes we had leftovers. I’d taken a couple previously, but they were small potatoes. Nothing big like this.

My eyes grew wide as I imagined taking Lee to the harness racing, and watching the whole night from the swanky restaurant overlooking the track. Could we…?

Frank took in my excitement. “Oh, for God’s sake. Get out of here. Go home early and have a great time tonight. I don’t want to see or hear from you again until Monday morning.”

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I grabbed my jacket and my laptop and practically ran to the car. I dialed Lee’s number. “Babe?” I said as he answered. “Pull your favorite dress out. I’ve got tickets. I’ll be at your house at five thirty to pick you up.”

“Dress?” he practically screeched in my ear.

“Yup,” I told him. “Dress, heels, makeup. We’re going to the trots. See you soon.”

I hung up and ignored him when he rang back. I fielded his panicky messages—which asked me to confirm that I meant an
actual
dress, asked if I knew what I was getting myself into, and then asked me to confirm my identity because he was sure I had been abducted by aliens.