“What’s this from?”
She rolled onto her back, and he was instantly sorry he’d asked.
“Never mind. Not my business.” He laced his fingers through hers, but she shook her head.
“It’s okay. It’s been there for a long time. I got pregnant young, I told you that. Sixteen. End of my junior year of high school. My parents are super-religious types who thought if we didn’t talk about sex, then I wouldn’t have it. We went to church every Sunday from the time I can remember. Preaching and praying were pretty much a way of life, and of course their Bible doesn’t want men and women sleeping together outside of marriage. Forget the fact that teenagers are so horny nothing else matters, and that my parents both worked fourteen-hour days so the house was pretty much always empty. Chuck and I had a place to hang out after school. Not an excuse, I know, and I should’ve been smarter, but still.”
“No one’s thinking straight when they’re sixteen.” Grayson sure as hell hadn’t been. If Kara had been available with that heartbreaking smile and an empty house, he’d have done anything to be with her as soon as school let out. Ridiculous, wild jealousy of her high school boyfriend swept over him.
“Anyway, when they found out I was pregnant, they threw me out of the house. Said if I couldn’t respect their rules, I wasn’t entitled to live there.”
He whistled. “So much for the super-religious types being tolerant and forgiving, huh?”
“Exactly. So I moved in with Chuck and his parents. His mom was nice, but she worked two jobs, so she was never home. His stepfather was an asshole.”
The tone in her voice, more than the language, caught Grayson off guard. Anger. Resentment. She didn’t look at him. Instead she spoke to the ceiling. “After Harrison was born, he couldn’t stop staring at my boobs. All the time. He’d make comments like wasn’t my baby lucky, what he wouldn’t give to be able to suck on a tit like Harrison, stuff like that.”
“Jesus, Kara. What a scumbag. I’m so sorry.”
“He started coming into my bed when Harrison was about six months old.” Her mouth drew down and her body tensed, like telling the story was reliving it all over again.
“Fuck. Did he–” He didn’t want to say the word rape. It sounded too ugly, too awful a thing to have happened.
“No,” she said, reading his thoughts. “He never went that far. He’d just wrap himself around me and tell me how lonely he was, how lucky Chuck was, things like that. Touch my boobs by accident and then act like it didn’t happen.”
“You don’t have to tell me this.”
“Yes, I do. It’s part of who I am.” She turned her head on the pillow to look at him. “I never told anyone, not even Chuck. It happened three times, and after that I knew it would turn into more, maybe not the fourth or fifth time, but eventually he wouldn’t stop. So I told him I’d videotaped him coming into my room at night and I’d call the cops if he did it again.”
“How’d he take that?”
“He stopped. But he started getting loud and angry when he came home drunk, making threats, punching the walls, and I knew I had to get out of there. Not just for me, but for Harrison. He was a baby, you know? My baby, my son. And I would’ve done—I would do—anything to protect him.”
Grayson wiped a hand over his face. No wonder she’d reacted so strongly when Dorrie told them about Travis. Same story, different time, different place, different faces. Men who thought they could take what they wanted and call all the shots. Men whose power lay in their rage and their fists, backed up by a firearm.
“Where the hell was Chuck when all this was happening?”
“Working the late shift at a local bar and grill so he could pay for diapers and baby food. And also, as I found out later on, so he could screw the hostess.” She raised her arm and turned it in the light, so the scar was clearly visible. “When I found out, I confronted him. His stepdad came after me with a screwdriver, of all things. Said all they’d ever given me was kindness and a roof over my head, and I’d show them some gratitude or he’d teach me a lesson.”
Grayson didn’t want to hear any more. He took Kara’s arm and kissed it, from the point where the scar started at her wrist all the way up to the inside of her elbow. “That’s horrible. They’re horrible.”
“He got me in the arm, but then I grabbed the screwdriver from him and got him in the face, so you might say I came out on top.”
“Good for you. Though you probably should’ve aimed for his heart.”
“But then I’d be in jail, and Harrison would’ve grown up without a mother. I took him and left right then. We moved in with one of my girlfriends for the rest of the school year, and then I found a job and an apartment in Richmond.”
“You’re a survivor.”
“I was. Then I met Drake Evanston.”
“Of Evanston Suites and Lodges?”
She nodded. “Great guy, at least until he threw me down a flight of stairs because I wouldn’t abort our baby.”
“Oh, God. Kara.” He didn’t have words. Shit, he’d thought his life had been rough, but it paled in comparison to what she’d been through.
He took her into his arms, and for a long few minutes, they lay there in silence. He wished he could take it all back, change it, reverse time so he’d been the teenage father of Harrison instead of Chuck, and they’d gotten married and had a few more kids and a life they both deserved instead of the shitstorms where they’d found themselves.
“You have to understand something,” she said. She extricated herself from his embrace and pushed up on the pillows. “That’s why you scare me.” She waved a hand in the space between them. “Why all this scares me. Violence from men is pretty much all I knew until I was twenty-five. After Drake, I swore I’d never let anyone treat me that way again.”
“And you haven’t, right? I mean, shit, you’re one of the toughest women I’ve ever met.”
She caught her bottom lip in her teeth. “Thank you. It means a lot to hear you say that. It’s taken a long time to get here, but....”
And then, in her hesitation, he finally caught her meaning. Her fear. “You know I would never, ever hurt you. Don’t you? Not emotionally, and for Christ’s sake, not physically. I’ve done a shitload of stuff I wish I could take back, but I’ve never raised my hand to a woman. Never have, never would.” Something inside him felt rotten that she’d even think he was capable of it. “You don’t believe me?”
She took a long time to answer. “Your entire career was about hitting other people.”
His jaw tightened and a sharp pain ran up the back of his neck. “Not women. Never women.” The rottenness grew, and suddenly everything they’d done, everything they’d shared in the last twenty hours, vanished.
“I believe that. I do. But I saw the look on your face the first time we ran into Travis. And when you came back here with Dorrie, and she told us what he’d done....” She stopped.
“What? What about it?”
“You wanted to hurt him. You would have, I think.”
“No.” But that was partly a lie, and Grayson knew it. Yes, he would’ve hurt Travis, the way he would’ve hurt any man who raised his hand to a woman or a child. That’s what his father had always told him, you stand up for yourself and others. That’s what being a man means. You defend and protect the weak.
Now he wondered if something in that philosophy was wrong.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Kara asked. “I know you wouldn’t hurt me, but I can’t be with someone whose first instinct is to fight. It...it scares the hell out of me.”
He sat up and laced his hands around the back of his neck. The sharp pain radiated around the front of his head, until both temples felt like they might explode. He hadn’t come here tonight for psychoanalysis, and he didn’t need Kara telling him what he would or wouldn’t have done. If she didn’t want to be with a man who stood up for something, then maybe he’d read this whole situation wrong.
“You know what, Turk’s
been locked up since last night. I gotta get home and let him out, feed the cats, check on the chickens.” He shoved away the covers and got up, facing the door as he pulled on his jeans and T-shirt.
“Don’t go. Not like this.”
“Not like what, Kara? Knowing that deep down you think I’m like all the rest of the men you’ve ever met? Or that if push came to shove, if I got mad enough, I’d beat up anything that crossed my path?”
She didn’t answer.
“Here’s the thing. You hand out food and clothes and take care of homeless people and abandoned babies and even the dumb jock who lives next door, and you think you know their stories, but I doubt you ever take the time to get to know them. In your mind, I’m a fighter, I’ve always been a fighter, and I’ll never change. Doesn’t matter how much I try to tell you otherwise. You’ve already made the call inside your head.”
She turned red. “You have no idea what’s inside my head. I would bet you don’t know what’s inside most women’s heads, because you’re far too worried about getting them naked than wondering what they’re thinking. But I can tell you this much. I’m sorry I wasted an entire day of my life on you because you spent last year too drunk to know if you had a kid or not.”
The rottenness inside him spread, along with the pain in his head, and then it was everywhere, from his toes to his heart to every word he wanted to say.
“I’m sorry too.” He slammed the front door so hard on his way out that the hinges broke and it splintered down one side.
KARA SAT ON THE BED, unmoving. She’d gone too far. She hadn’t meant that last sentence. The cruelty of it hung in the air.
I should apologize.
She closed her eyes and ran one hand down her bare chest, over her belly and the places Grayson had made love to just an hour ago. She’d screwed up. Yes, she tended to make judgment calls about people as soon as she met them. Not in a bad way, just sizing up their situations so she knew what they needed and how she could help. Usually she was spot-on. With Grayson, she wondered if she’d missed the mark. He was a jock, a ladies’ man, a cocky ex-fighter who was good-looking and knew it. But he was also smart and sensitive and trying hard to get clean and live a stand-up life.
“And I threw his past in his face,” she said aloud. What stupidity. She, better than anyone, should know past mistakes didn’t define a person. Or shouldn’t, anyway. So what if Grayson hadn’t known if Jade was his daughter? He’d spent the entire last day and night protecting her like she was.
Kara got up and pulled a pair of shorts and a clean T-shirt from her bureau. No bra or panties, because she hoped that after she apologized to him, they could make up in the best way, with no words or undergarments needed.
Her front door opened, and she smiled. He’d come back. He’d felt shitty about the whole thing too, and he’d taken the magnanimous step of being the first one to say so.
“I’m sorry,” she began, but the words died in her throat.
Travis walked into her living room, dirty and limping and smelling to high heaven. He looked around, taking in the layout of the house, and Kara thought maybe she could hide in the bathroom before he saw her, but panic immobilized her. He turned before she could move or hide, and his lips split in a grin.
“Well, lookee at my good luck. First I find the front door busted off its lock, and then I find a pretty little piece of ass inside.” He raised his gun and traced a curve in the air, as if it were a lecture pointer. “I know y’all are responsible for my baby girl disappearing. I knew it soon as I saw that bitch at the bar. Wasn’t sure the first time you and Mr. Prize Fighter showed up on the ridge, but I had my suspicions. All three-a you are working together, huh?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My phone. Where’s my damn cell phone?
He walked toward the bedroom. “Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not—”
“Shut up!” He aimed the gun at the center of her chest. “I figured I’d come here like a gentleman and work things out, see if we could come to some kind of understanding.” The grin faded. “She’s my girl, see, she and her mama both, and when another man gets in the way of me and my girls, I get a little pissed off.”
She isn’t your girl.
Kara fought the wave of fear trying to pull her under. She needed to stay calm, to focus. But calm around drunk, angry men wasn’t something she’d mastered. She tried to remember a self-defense move, a way to fight back if he tried to grab her, but her mind went blank and she broke out in a cold sweat.
“Grayson’s not here.”
“No? Then why’s his truck parked outside?”
“He left it here last night. Friend picked him up. I haven’t seen him since.”
Travis laughed. “You’re a terrible liar.” He aimed the gun at the ceiling, the bedroom door, the front door, her. “If he ain’t here, though, that’s not a problem. You and me’ll just have a talk about where Jade is.”
“I don’t have any idea where she is.” Too late, she realized she should’ve said she didn’t know who he was talking about.
He shook his head as he closed the distance between them, and then there was nowhere for her to run. “Like I said, a terrible liar.” The gun stopped being a pointer and instead became a weapon aimed at her heart. “But on the off-chance you don’t know, we’ll take a ride together and see if you can figure it out.”
He picked at something in his hair. The smell coming off him was a combination of weed and liquor and body odor. She wanted to gag.
“Grayson took my girl.” He placed the gun on Kara’s shoulder and steered her toward the door. “Looks like turnabout is fair play.”
7:00 a.m.
Grayson was so angry his hands shook. He spilled Turk’s food all over the floor and then yelled at the dog for not eating it. The kittens cowered under the kitchen table, and even when he cleaned up the mess and poured them each a dish of milk, they wouldn’t come out. They just stared at him with wide eyes and backed into the far wall.
“You think I’m a goddamn danger too? Fine. Maybe I am.” He kicked one of the dishes so hard, it broke and milk spilled across the floor. Turk ran from the room.
At that, Grayson leaned against the table and dropped his head into his hands. None of this is going to help. Breaking things, yelling, losing his cool—it was his father’s behavior all over again, and he’d sworn as a kid he wouldn’t end up that way. He’d grown up with holes in the walls and his best friend’s number on speed dial for when he needed to escape. Part of why he’d turned to boxing was so he could channel his own anger, and his own fear of his father, into something else. Something positive.
But maybe he’d failed after all.
Easy does it.
The thought came out of nowhere. AA slogans on hand-drawn posters hung all over the meeting room at the community center. Polly Watson would tack up the posters when they arrived and take them down before they left, rolling and rubber-banding them so they always curled at the edges. Some were so faded you could barely read the words. But “Easy does it” was simple to remember.
It was Jake Turnbull’s favorite. In his slow Southern drawl, the tobacco farmer would talk about how he’d busted a tire, or yelled at his kids, or ruined a crop, or broken a piece of equipment because he was rushing to get things done. “Not enough hours in the day,” he’d say as he twisted his hat in his hands. “I try to make two hours into one, an’ then I get pissed when it don’t work out. I try to tell myself, ‘easy does it. Don’t kill yerself tryin’ to make a life.’”
Whenever he heard Jake’s stories, Grayson was glad he didn’t rush around like that. He’d never been concerned with the time or the calendar or deadlines or commitments. Work was work and play was play, and he managed to make time for both. But maybe he rushed through life in his own way, now that he thought about it. He didn’t race against the clock, but he didn’t think much before speaking or acting either.
Maybe that was the point. Easy does
it. Take a breath, take a minute, take it easy on yourself.
He wrapped both hands around his neck, the muscles so tight at this point he had a raging headache. “I fucked everything up.” The minute Kara started talking about being afraid, he’d jumped into defense mode. He’d gotten pissed and run his mouth, and he’d ended up the same way he always did in the early morning hours, alone and full of regret.
He glanced up and his gaze landed on his sobriety chip, still hanging on a cabinet door. He’d made it to another morning, which meant ninety-seven days and counting.
At least this time you’re not drunk or hungover.
True.
“Progress, not perfection” was another favorite of Jake Turnbull’s, and Grayson liked that one a lot better than the others. He was exhausted, angry, lonely, and in need of a shower, but he hadn’t blacked out last night, and he knew exactly where he’d spent every minute, so that was something. He wouldn’t ever be perfect or even close to it, but he’d take progress wherever he could.
Turk returned to the kitchen and pushed his wet nose into Grayson’s hand.
“Aw, buddy. You forgive me, don’t you?” If only women were as easily won over as man’s best friend.
The dog rested his chin on Grayson’s knee and thumped his tail on the floor. The cats ventured out from under the table and lapped up the spilled milk. Kit curled up next to Turk, and Caboodle pawed Grayson’s leg until he picked up the cat and cuddled it into the crook of his elbow.
“I have to apologize to her,” he said. Caboodle mewed. “Right? I was a dick.” Kara hadn’t exactly been kindness incarnate, but he knew why she pushed people away. She’d been burned so badly in the past that she didn’t trust herself to get close to anyone.
And I want her to get close to me.
The realization, so clear in its simplicity, surprised him. “She’s different, see?” he said to the animals, as if they were listening.
He liked her. Really liked her. She didn’t remind him of any woman he’d met before, and that was the best part about her. Of course, she was also smart, sexy as hell, and a wildcat in bed. The perfect woman had been living literally next door all this time, and he hadn’t realized it.
Countdown: Grayson Page 14
