My house had become his safe haven before I’d left for Lily’s, and the thought of him having nowhere to go for the past few months made me sick. I’d been selfish, I should have called him more, I should have checked in more often. Who was taking care of him? I knew Tommy wasn’t any better from the way Callie had described things.

The dude had seriously fallen off the deep end when his wife and kids were killed, and I couldn’t fault him for that. But I did fault him for ignoring his remaining child. Tommy just seemed to ignore the fact that Cameron needed him, preferring to drown his sorrows in alcohol and disappear for days at a time, even during the lockdown. It was fucking frustrating.

I wished I could just take Cam home with me and be the parent I knew he needed.

Chapter 36

Farrah

“I need to get out of this motherfucking cock-sucking bed!” I yelled to the ceiling in annoyance.

Cody had just left for the morning, and I could hear Gram making breakfast in my tiny kitchen.

“Then get your ass out of bed!” Gram yelled back.

“I’ve got a fucking cramp!” I moaned, rubbing my calf gingerly as I tried to flex my foot.

Shit, when the doctor had told me when I left the hospital that my recovery time would be minimal, I’d figured that it would be smooth sailing from then on. I’d been up and around the house after a few days, and within a couple of weeks I’d been off shopping with Gram, hanging with Lily when she’d come up to visit as promised, watching movies with Cameron and driving over to see Callie and Will. I’d felt fantastic.

But as time went on, I felt less and less fantastic due to a number of different factors. My back hurt. My ribs hurt. I got excruciating cramps everywhere from my ass cheeks to my feet, no matter how many bananas I ate. Yeah, bananas were supposed to help with muscle cramps—who knew? On top of all that, my eyes became super sensitive to sunlight for some ungodly reason, and I had to wear the blackest shades I could find, even when the weather was overcast.

I was so done being pregnant, and I was only thirty-four weeks. God, the next six weeks were going to blow big, hairy donkey dick.

Oh yeah, and I’d started cursing like a goddamn sailor because my mood swings were so extreme it was either do that or scream at the top of my lungs, and I’d already had the neighbors complaining to the landlord. Twice.

I’d seen Slider and Vera a few times in the last few months, and I couldn’t say that our relationship had progressed, but it had gotten easier to be around them. We weren’t quite friends, but maybe in the future when I wasn’t dealing with Cody’s spawn turning me into a maniac, I’d be able to make the first move. Maybe. I had to admit they were being cool, though, in a way that I knew they were letting me set the pace.

The biggest problem weighing me down, other than the thirty pounds of extra weight I was lugging around, was Cody. He’d been nothing but helpful since the moment I’d left the hospital, but that was it. He was helpful, but he wasn’t anything else that I’d come to expect from him.

He barely touched me, and we hadn’t had sex in so freaking long that if a hymen grew back from lack of penetration, the doctors would be encountering a virgin birth in six weeks. It was frustrating as hell and I didn’t understand it, but I knew with complete certainty that it didn’t have anything to do with me. There was something weighing on him, and after hearing about the member and his daughter who’d betrayed the Aces, I wondered if that had anything to do with it.

The playful, sexy Cody I’d fallen for was gone, and left behind was a man who rarely showed any emotion at all. He was good to me, and I really had no room to complain, but I missed him.

I missed him kissing me like he couldn’t get enough of me, and copping a feel as I walked by. I missed the way he would waggle his eyebrows at me like a complete idiot when he was teasing me, or kiss a scowl off my face when he’d done something especially irritating. I missed the way he would piss me off and then fuck me into forgetting what I was mad about, like he’d done that one day . . .

• • •

I had been listening to the Beatles while standing at the sink in the kitchen, completely irritated that Cody couldn’t remember to rinse a single dish. I’d been trying to peel dried chili off the bottom of a bowl, when he walked up behind me.

His hands grasped my hips through the long summer dress I was wearing, and before I could spin around, he pressed against me, guiding our hips so they were slowly swaying from side to side with the beat of the music.

My breath caught in my throat as I felt him grow hard against my ass.

Then he began to sing, and while his voice usually sounded like a dying hyena anytime he sang along with music on the radio, this time it was so low that he was practically whispering as he used his chin to pull my hair away from my neck.

“Come together, right now, over me,” he sang.

How he made the song sexy, I will never understand. But as he began to pull my dress up and over my hips, I dropped the bowl into the sink with a loud crash, completely absorbed in the way he moved against me, and the feel of his breath against my throat.

Within minutes I had been sitting on the kitchen counter—my irritation completely forgotten—and he had been inside me, chuckling at the way I’d come unglued.

• • •

I shook my head at the memory, a small smile on my face as the cramp finally abated. God, those things freaking hurt.

Gram and I were headed over to Callie’s in less than an hour so we could take Will off her hands for the day. Where I’d barely felt any different during the first few months of pregnancy, Callie had had the absolute worst first few months, and things didn’t seem to be getting any better. She was into her second trimester, the time period that every pregnant woman looked forward to as the end of her morning sickness, but Callie’s wasn’t going away. She was still sick all day long, and you could see the weariness on her face no matter what time of day it was, or even if she’d just woken up. She’d pretty much gotten screwed both literally and figuratively this time around. She just lay around the house most of the time, so on top of feeling like she was going to constantly vomit, she also had to deal with the guilt of foisting Will off on family members.