Jesse (Glass City Hearts Book 3) Read online

  Jesse

  Glass City hearts Book Three

  Desiree Lafawn

  Copyright © 2018 by Desiree Lafawn

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design by Tracie Douglas of Dark Water Covers

  ISBN-13:978-1725604056

  ISBN-10:1725604051

  Website - www.desireelafawn.com

  Contents

  1. Jesse

  2. Harlow

  3. Jesse

  4. Harlow

  5. Jesse

  6. Harlow

  7. Harlow

  8. Jesse

  9. Harlow

  10. Jesse

  11. Harlow

  12. Jesse

  13. Harlow

  14. Jesse

  15. Harlow

  16. Jesse

  17. Harlow

  18. Jesse

  19. Harlow

  Other Books by Desiree Lafawn

  About the Author

  1

  Jesse

  “What do you mean the delivery was canceled?” I was having a hard time processing the words on the other end of the line. In a classic case of someone faced with a situation they couldn’t understand, I simply repeated the phrase I had just heard, but in the form of a question.

  “What I just said, Jesse, I am surprised your dad didn’t tell you. I talked to him about it on Monday. If the balance doesn’t get paid, we can’t send out any more deliveries.” The voice on the other end of the phone was sympathetic but firm.

  “Shit, Alex, is there anything we can do here? I was expecting that delivery today. Tomorrow is Thursday.” Thursday night in a college town was Friday for a bar. Most kids made it so they didn’t have class on Friday, or no morning classes anyway and the bars filled up with college youth partying off all the studying they were pretending to do during the week. Nasta’s was no different. I needed the beer. I needed the liquor, too, but most college kids were buying cheap pours on draft, so I could get away with running out of a few things - but I had to have that beer. Otherwise, we might as well shut down for the weekend, and I couldn’t do that either. I couldn’t afford to shut down for a single shift, we were barely squeaking by as it was.

  “Jesse, I took your dad off credit hold when you came home to take over operations,” Alex said, his voice low. Alex owned the beer distributor my dad’s bar had used for years. We weren’t really friends, but we were kind of friendly, I guess? He didn’t have to use customer service voice with me at any rate and he certainly wasn’t using it now. “You guys are net thirty, not net sixty or net ninety. You are eighty-five days past due on the last several invoices. I just can’t right now.”

  “That can’t be right, Alex,” I countered, tugging on my beard. It was a habit I mostly didn’t realize I was doing, but lately, I’d been doing it so much my chin was starting to get sore. “I budgeted the money for those deliveries. I specifically laid out all the invoices to be paid and handed them to Dad myself.”

  “I’m sure you did Jesse, but he didn’t pay them.”

  Damn it.

  Squeezing my eyes shut I tried to calculate how much I had on my credit card, and how much I could afford to put on it and still afford to pay it off at the end of the next billing cycle. It was going against everything I said I wouldn't do when I came home to bail him out, but we needed that shipment. “How much to get us caught up?” I asked, bracing myself for the blow. Alex gave me a number. If that number had been a weapon it would have been a sledgehammer busting me right upside the head.

  “Motherfucker,” I yelled into the phone, slamming my hand down on the bar. “Oh shit, sorry, Alex, that wasn’t for you. Can you email me over the exact invoices that we haven’t paid so I can double check them against the checks that were sent out?”

  “Yeah, Jesse, I can do that.”

  Breathe, Jesse, in through your nose, out through your mouth.

  “How much will it take for us to be able to get anything, even a small delivery?” Holding my breath, I prayed silently for a smaller number.

  There was silence on the other end of the phone, then a long drawn-out sigh. “Pay off the ones that are over sixty days and I can get you a delivery tomorrow. A small one,” he added at the end.

  Thank you, Jesus, I sang a hallelujah in my head. I dug my wallet out of my back pocket and pulled out my—strictly for emergencies—credit card and rattled off the appropriate numbers. “Thanks, Alex,” I said into the receiver, “you’re a lifesaver.”

  “Yeah, Jesse, I got you. But you know you need to do something about him, right? He’s backsliding. After all the work you did to dig him out of the mess he had made.”

  “I need to check out a few things first, I don’t want to jump to conclusions,” I replied lamely. Alex knew what was going on, and I was a broken record of excuses. I could use whatever words I wanted to for the purposes of a phone call, but Alex knew, and I knew, my dad drank that money away. It wasn’t the first time that bills didn’t get paid. It wasn’t the first time we had deliveries or services canceled on us. It wasn’t the first time my dad lied.

  “The truck will be there tomorrow before two,” Alex said. “And if I were you, I would make sure you were the one there taking inventory as it comes off the truck.” I sucked in a breath. I knew what he was implying, and he was probably right, but man it sucked having someone lay it all out like that.

  “Thanks for your help, Alex,” I said as I hung up the phone. I balled up my fists on the bar and counted, keeping my breathing slow and even.

  Each breath is a wave. Breathe into the shore, out to the ocean.

  Into the shore—I had to calm myself down before I talked to my father.

  Out to the ocean—I needed to eliminate all anger from my body before I confronted him about the money. If I came in with accusations he would just shut down and we would be on a train to nowhere. There would be a hellacious argument, and then somehow, he would be a victim and I would be downstairs at the bar doing exactly what I was doing now, except for with an extra helping of guilt thrown in.

  Into the shore – screw it, I needed a cigarette. I’d been doing so well, too.

  I’d been trying some meditation to help me keep my temper and not go apeshit on my dad, and also to help me cut down on smoking. It was a terrible habit, and one I had almost managed to kick except for when I was really stressed out. And nothing stressed me out more than my mostly functional—but still consistently a fuck-up—sixty-year-old father. Standing outside the back entrance of the bar I leaned against the building and let my head rest against the rough brick exterior. The late fall air blew a frigid blast up the sleeves of the flannel I wore unbuttoned over a plain t-shirt but I didn’t care. My temper had me hot under the collar and I welcomed the chilly blast. No snow yet, but it would come soon enough.

  Inhaling deeply, I let the smoke fill my lungs, hang out there for a few seconds, then I exhaled, letting it come out my nose and mouth. I watched the swirls of smoke plume up into the air, twirling around until they disappeared above my head. I hated that such a nasty habit did such a damn good job of calming me down.

  I wasn’t always such a stressed-out mess.

  I wasn’t always a bar manager either. I used to be a baker—well, I was trying to be before I got called back home to bail out my dad. I’d gone to a prestigious culinary school out in LA, and I was just getting ready to start my internship at Flake, a bakery in the Los Angeles area with a very prominent backgrou
nd, when I got the call that Mom had died of an aneurysm. Silent killer, they called it. No one saw it coming.

  That was pretty much the beginning of the end, actually. I’d come home for the funeral and I never went back. I couldn’t. Dad couldn’t function. I had thought that his downward spiral was due to Mom’s passing but that wasn’t it. Dad had always been an alcoholic, but Mom had just been so good at covering up for him. I’d been devastated when she’d died, too. I wanted to mourn too.

  But I didn’t get a chance. Instead, I had to play parent to someone who didn’t know how to deal with his own grief, so he turned to his old standby to help him get through the tough times. Oh, who was I kidding? Dad turned to alcohol to get him through any times. If it wasn’t for Mom, we probably would have lost the bar a hundred times over by now. Couldn't trust Dad with a bottle or a dollar.

  Closing the window on those particular memories, I kicked away the rock that had been holding the back door propped open and went back into the bar. Thinking about Mom would only end up depressing me into needing another cigarette. No sense dwelling on memories of the past, when I had the immediate future to deal with. I could only get about a quarter of my original order for delivery tomorrow, and I needed to figure out how to make it work.

  A half-stocked bar on a Thursday night in a college town. Shit.

  Fortunately, besides learning about pastries, I had the benefit of some good business and management courses while I was blessed with my education.

  People buy what you tell them to buy, you just need to make them think they want it. I wandered behind the bar with a notebook and a pen, taking stock of what we had that I could create a special with. I wasn’t what I would consider a born salesman. I was better with my hands than with my words, but even I knew the basic sales rule of thumb. Today’s “hottest” product to push is whatever you have the most of. So all I had to do was check my inventory and see what my “most of” deal of the day was going to be.

  Why the hell did I have all this peppermint schnapps? I looked at the full bottle of Rumpleminz tucked on the shelf. We hadn’t even opened the damn thing yet and there were like ten more bottles on a shelf in the back. Why did I buy a case? Was it cheaper? Hell, I couldn’t even remember when I had ordered it, and ten bottles of Rumpleminz was about nine and a half bottles too many, but I’d learned long ago how to turn excess into profit. We were about to have a special on…what is cheap as hell that I can use as a mixer? Not another alcohol, it needed to be something that would make up the body of the drink and I could serve it in a rocks glass…or a martini glass.

  It came to me. A drink that would be cheap as hell to make, that I could market as a specialty, and that was sweet enough that it would definitely appeal to the clientele that came in not sure what to order because they didn’t normally drink. Those were my most mind-numbing customers. The ones who didn’t really drink, but they were out with their friends so instead of ordering a soda or coffee like they would probably rather be drinking they made myself or another member of the staff run through every drink they knew of by memory until something stuck out to them.

  Well, here they could have this weekend’s special—the Rumpletini, which was chocolate syrup swirled into the glass, a shot of peppermint schnapps and topped off with chocolate milk. For those who were more advanced and felt more comfortable with a shot in their hand, I would present the Rumplemini; Rumplminz with a squirt of chocolate syrup and whipped cream. If the brisk wind outside brought on a need for something warm, a spiked peppermint hot chocolate would do. A couple of taps on my phone and both of the bar’s social media pages were updated with the perfect drinks for this chilly weekend. Good prices for a bar special and still enough of a profit per drink that we would be able to make up some of the money we were losing having to pay back that huge liquor bill that had piled up. I just needed to remember to pick up enough milk to get us through at least one evening before I came in on Thursday night.

  Feeling a little better now that I had a good plan of attack for the weekend, I had almost convinced myself that I could go upstairs to the apartment my dad had moved into above the bar and confront him about the past due bills. He’d moved out of the house that he’d shared with Mom and pretty much let the property go to hell, so when I rushed back home to help him salvage his life I started taking care of things. It was a little big for just me, but I couldn’t stand to think of it leaving the family, so I kept up with what I could. The house had been in the family for three generations on my Mom’s side, so it was bought and paid for, just normal property taxes and such were what was owed, and I took care of that just like I took care of everything else.

  I had to. No one else would. Certainly not Dad. Rounding the back hallway over by the restrooms, I stopped at the foot of the almost hidden stairway that led up to the second floor. We kept it locked during bar hours to keep people from accidentally wandering to the apartment upstairs, but it was unlocked now. I didn’t work the closing shift last night and I’m willing to bet Dad worked his way downstairs and either sat at the bar drinking during cleanup or nabbed something after the bar was locked up for the night. I sighed and swung the door to the stairway open quietly, I would have to check the inventory on the Jack Daniels and see if we were lower than we should be.

  That familiar smell assaulted me as I got three-quarters of the way up the stairs and near to the apartment door, which was half ajar. That musty smell of old man that doesn’t clean his apartment, and the smell of a body sweating out all the alcohol it had ingested the night before. I also heard the snoring before I even got all the way into the room; the incessant chainsaw snorting that rattled the walls in a crescendo before tapering back down. One, two, three, snort. One, two three, exhale. I was surprised I couldn’t hear it all the way downstairs, but grateful as well.

  There was no way I could talk to him about anything right now, he'd be sleeping it off for a while yet I bet.

  God, I need another cigarette.

  I didn't want one, but I fucking needed it. And before I knew it I was standing outside again, leaning against the cold brick of the building, trying to come up with a way to get out of the stagnant situation I was in. The way things were going, I'd never be able to leave the bar. The minute I walked away the whole place would go to hell. I couldn't trust Dad to pay the damn liquor bill. I'd give him a month before the lights in the place were turned off.

  Lost in my own thoughts my eyes snapped open when I thought I heard someone yelling my name. I looked down the alley but didn't see anyone. There was a dead end on the other side of my building, so I knew it wasn't coming from there. I was beginning to think I'd made it up in my stressed-out head when a little kid, couldn't have been more than four or five years old, came tearing around the alley as fast as he could. His little legs were pumping like pistons and seconds later a harried young woman rounded the corner after him.

  "Jesse," she screamed, out of breath from the chase. "Jesse, stop running right this instant!"

  But he couldn't stop, he was running with all the forward momentum that a little kid has, the only thing that was going to stop him was a wall or a tumble over something, and not seconds after I had the thought, he tripped on a raised brick in the road. This was an old end of downtown Toledo, and some of our alleys still sported that rusty red brick. The toe of his little tennis shoe got caught and he went down with a crunch not two feet in front of me. I dropped the cigarette onto the ground, barely having the presence of mind to stub it out with the toe of my boot before I ran to where he lay, terrified he was hurt.

  Now I don't know much about little kids, having none of my own, but it was pure instinct that caused me to crouch in the alley and scoop him up in my arms, cradling his head on my shoulder as I held him still so he wouldn't injure himself further. Kids are resilient though, and it was only a couple of seconds before he lifted his face to mine. He had a mop of hair so dark it was almost black that erupted into a riot of curls that fell wildly all over his face. His
dark, solemn eyes fixed on mine, and before I could say anything he opened his little mouth, and in the cutest voice I had ever heard, said, "I can't hold it anymore, Mister."

  It took me another several seconds to register what he meant by that, but by then I already felt something warm and wet spreading down my arm and the front of my shirt.

  2

  Harlow

  I was living in a nightmare. That was the only explanation I could accept in my absolute panic. A nightmare. When a four-year-old says he has to "go to the bathroom, real bad," you don't question it. You find the safest place to stop the car and find him a bathroom because, and I learned this the hard way, he will pee wherever he is when he has to go. Problem was, I was in an unfamiliar part of town, and I had no idea what a safe place was. This was downtown, I was from the East Side, and that was about as far apart as you could be and still be called Toledo. Where I lived there were no safe places. All the businesses had bars on the windows and graffiti graced all of the dirty brick walls. Any place was safer than where I came from, so when Jesse started yelling from the backseat about needing to potty I turned down the first street that looked like it had businesses.

  We got out of the car to find out that while there may have been businesses, none of them were open. The Italian restaurant seemed to be closed for some sort of remodeling, the tattoo shop wasn't open, and the bar certainly would be closed for some time yet. We were hitting def con five levels of need and Jesse was doing the dance while his hand pinched his crotch, like that would keep his bladder sealed.