The Brick Yard Read Online Free PDF

with Briley. Hell, he didn’t even know if they had a relationship. Briley was a cool chick who liked to fuck and cuddle on the couch as they watched movies. Never had he thought he’d be the kind of man to cuddle, but she’d shown him how comforting it was. He wasn’t expected to talk or pour out what the hell was bothering him. All Briley wanted was for him to hold her.
    “Christ, I haven’t been to Mac’s in years. Is it still as good?” Dray asked.
    “Same old Mac’s.” Lucky grinned. Although Brick had kept him out of trouble and had given him a place to sleep during his teenage years, it had been Mac who’d fed him most nights. He still remembered Mac knocking on the backdoor of the gym on the nights Lucky slept over. He’d never been sure if Mac stopped by daily or if Brick had informed him when Lucky needed a place to sleep, but Mac had never failed to drop off leftovers. There’d been many times when Mac’s generosity had been Lucky’s only meal of the day.
    “I’d tell you to say hi for me, but I doubt Mac would give a shit.”
    Lucky’s eyebrows drew together at the troubled quality of Dray’s voice. “You know that none of us think badly of you, right? I mean…what went down with the fans was one thing, but the folks around here thought of you as family.”
    Dray made a noise Lucky couldn’t decipher. “I tried to tell Mac goodbye and he was so pissed he refused to talk to me.”
    “You shittin’ me?” A combination of anger and disbelief filled Lucky. He couldn’t believe Mac would do something like that, but he was sure as hell going to speak to the old man about it.
    “No, but I don’t blame him. He fed me like he did you.” Dray chuckled. “You didn’t think I knew about that, did ya?”
    “ You’re the one who told Mac when I was spending the night in the storage room?” Lucky closed his eyes and turned to face the wall of the building. He had no doubt his emotions were clearly visible on his face.
    Dray chuckled again. “No, that wasn’t me. Brick always left the front window light on when you stayed over. It was different with me. The first time Mac gave me food was after I showed up at the gym to work and passed out from hunger before I could do my job. Brick marched me over to Mac’s and bought me the first steak I’d ever eaten. Mac took one look at me, shook his head, and informed me that a diner has a lot of prepared food left over at the end of the night. He made it clear that I was to stop by before going home to pick up some of the food that would go to waste.” He sighed heavily. “I fed three people with that doggie bag. Thanks to Mac, me, my mom and my little brother Frankie never went to bed hungry.”
    Although Lucky felt better knowing he wasn’t Mac’s only charity case, he began to wonder if Jax, Brick’s youngest employee, was also on the receiving end of Mac’s generosity. An ache started in Lucky’s chest at the thought of Jax needing a safe place to sleep and being unable to take refuge at the gym because Lucky was too afraid to move on. He knew from Brick that Jax’s mother had taken off years ago. Maybe Jax needed the safety of the gym as much as Lucky had. “Has Brick told you about Jax?”
    “Yeah, and Leon before that. Brick can’t turn away someone in need,” Dray replied.
    Leon? Lucky remembered the skinny African American kid who used to sweep the gym and handle the laundry, but Leon had been a brainiac who’d earned a full-ride scholarship and had taken off for college as soon as he’d graduated high school. “What was the story with Leon?”
    “Why don’t you already know?” Dray asked.
    “I don’t know.” Lucky felt like the biggest piece of shit in Chicago. “Tell me.”
    “Brick found him asleep behind the dumpster one morning. After that, Leon crashed on that piece-of-shit couch in Brick’s apartment.”
    Lucky swallowed around the lump of self-hatred in his throat. He was almost afraid to ask about the new kid,