Autumn looked over the scarring, though didn't seem repulsed or anything. "I've seen worse." she told him lightly. "It's what you make of it. And you're still hot." she added in an offhand manner. "Hot, well built, you've got cool tattoos. Plus I think there's an old adage about chicks digging scars." she added. She did wrinkle her nose a little at his description, though. "Sucks." she said. "And a year had to be rough. I wasn't in that long."
Lips quirked in amusement, Brady shook his head at her. “Thanks. I’d say I take care of myself, but well...” he trailed off, lifting his glass in a mock-toast before finishing it off. “Chicks that dig scars though? That’s a ‘wanna redeem the bad boy’ kind of thing, and that usually just gets the chick hurt.” He’d seen it more times than he could count, and yet girls seemed to keep getting sucked into the cycle. “Eh, was in the Army over ten years, and trust me, that might as well have been prison.”
Yep. Jaded. She mentally confirmed. "I always liked scars because they tell a story." she said, pouring herself another drink, and getting another for him while she was at it. She made his stronger than her last, however. "So the wife and kids...at least you're not divorced?" she suggested. Yes. She tried very hard to find a bright side.
“Some stories are best left untold,” Brady countered, tone bordering on ominous. He took the new drink without even thinking about it, nodding in thanks and then humming in approval at the stronger presence of liquor in it. “Guess again,” he answered. “She filed a few days after I got arrested.” That last time, anyway, and he knew it had more to do with the broken arm and concussion than his crashing the car and inadvertently killing that cop, but he also knew better than to advertise that he was also in for domestic battery.
"Ah, sorry. You didn't say 'ex-wife' earlier." Autumn said. Which most people did, so she was guessing that the whole divorce thing wasn't really something he was happy with. But then he didn't seem happy with anything, something she could understand. Life did that to people a lot. If it didn't, people like her would be unnecessary. Hell, some of her clients had much the same attitude as he did, it was why they went to her. They had problems connecting with people, so they had her, who spent time with them, did things they wanted to do, listened to them talk about anything they wanted to talk about without judgment, and of course, there was the intimacy. But it was more than that. "I'm sure that was hard to deal with." she offered.
No, he hadn’t said that, but at the time Brenna hadn’t been his ex-wife. “Don’t think of her as my ex-wife, probably never will.” Even if Brenna remarried, and he hoped that she would find a man worthy of her that would be good to his kids, he would probably always think of her as his wife. “She was It for me,” he admitted in a soft almost faraway voice as he looked down in the glass, mind pulled into the past, into memories he didn’t feel strong enough to revisit. He didn’t even hear Autumn speak again.
Autumn watched, seeing the sorrow there, and she reached out, lightly putting a hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry." she said softly.