Page 70 of The Don’s Virgin Obsession

“Security staying on rotation?”

“Always.”

He nodded once.

I sat on the couch across from him.

That was how he was. No soft greeting. No long talk. Straight to what mattered in his mind.

My father raised me well, even when I was hard to raise.

I was troubled as a kid. Fighting. Talking back. Toting guns. Going to juvie. Running with older niggas before I had enough sense to understand what that meant. But I came from a good home. That was the part people never understood. Everybody thought troubled kids came from nothing.

Nah.

Sometimes trouble came from having everything and still feeling too much inside.

My father didn’t play with me. He put fear and discipline in the same sentence and called it love. At the time, I hated it. As a grown man, I understood most of it.

“How is the project moving?” he asked.

“It’s moving.”

“It’s moving ain’t a report.”

I smirked a little. “Units moving on schedule. Design team moving faster than expected. Some delays with materials, but nothing serious.”

“Delays become serious when you let people explain too much why it ain’t on time.”

“I hear you.”

“Then don’t let them.”

My mother walked in with his tea and set it on the table beside him. He looked at her hand first, then her face.

“You put lemon in it?”

“I always put lemon in it, darling,” she said, already tired of him.

He grunted. “You be forgetting.”

“I don’t forget nothing when it comes to you.”

She adjusted his blanket without asking. He acted bothered, but he didn’t move her hand. I watched that and didn’t say nothing.

That was them.

Fussing.

Routine.

Love without all the extras.

My father only ever loved one woman, and she was still here taking care of him while his body betrayed him. That part did something to me every time I came over. My mother could have hired help and stepped back. She didn’t. My father could have been softer about needing her. He wasn’t.

But when she left the room, his eyes followed her. he loved the fuck out of my mother, and I knew he wanted that for me.

He picked up his tea and took a sip. “You still wasting money on women?”