Family Love

by Liz Crowe

  By the time he finished with me, I had that used sex-doll feeling again. I hurt all over, even though I’d screamed my so-called safe word until I was so hoarse all I could do was cry.

  He held me close, shushing me while I sobbed against his strong, bare chest and promised me—again—that he’d never hurt me on purpose. That I just made him mad, and if I wouldn’t do that anymore, all would be well. Once he fell asleep, I was able to disentangle myself and curl up on the family room couch under a blanket.

  The next morning, after he’d made me breakfast, fed it to me himself, kissed and loved on me, and forced me to fake an orgasm so he’d stop touching me, he left for work.

  I grabbed my purse, used as much makeup as I dared to cover my bruise, and lit out of there in my old junker car, leaving behind everything he’d bought for me, including all the gorgeous clothes and jewelry.

  I shivered as I sat at the stoplight that would, if I turned left, take me to my parents’ house, and if I went right and drove about twenty miles, to a different sort of refuge. I turned right. And when I pulled into the Brantley’s driveway, I sat and cried with relief for a few minutes, then pulled myself together and went inside.

  Chapter Seventeen

  We sat Diana’s table that night, enjoying a delicious, home-cooked meal and the company of my brother and Lee, Diana’s amazingly hot and fabulous boyfriend.

  I felt at peace. I’d turned off my phone so Daniel couldn’t contact me, figuring he had enough sense not to go to my parents. He probably knew they wouldn’t help him—I suppose they’d sensed in him what I missed, but whatever. I was free of the asshole now.

  The weirdness at the table was exacerbated by my feeling that Diana and Dominic had something going on between them. Call it female intuition, but it took me less than five minutes to spot it.

  Poor cute vet guy was oblivious. At least I thought so, until I realized he was making a concerted effort to appear that way. I flirted with him a bit, and Diana didn’t seem to mind. My head was buzzy, and I was sore from the night before, but it was obvious everyone had their own issues and hardly noticed me.

  We cleaned up, and the awkwardness increased by about a thousand percent when Lee came up behind Diana and hugged her, kissed her neck, and said, “Headed upstairs,” before smacking her ass. Dom glowered after Lee while he climbed the steps.

  Diana had the dishtowel in a death grip. But she followed Lee up without a word to Dominic or me. I still had my hands in the soapy water.

  “Why are you still here?” I asked him.

  “Where the fuck else am I supposed to live?” He threw down the wet rag he’d been using on the countertops and dropped into a chair. “Besides, I’m in charge of that renovation.” He jerked his chin towarad the screen door.

  “Oh, the barn thing?” I drained the sink before turning to face him.

  He squinted up at me. “What’s wrong with your eye?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Nothing. Fell and caught my face on the barre. Want a nightcap?” I held up a half-empty bottle of vodka.

  “Not of that shit. Get the bourbon from the liquor cabinet.”

  We sat in front of the television, not talking, not really watching, and polishing off half the bottle before he stumbled up the steps, muttering under his breath. On reflex, I dug my phone out of my pocket, staring at it blearily until I realized it was still powered off. Once on, it flashed to life with about a hundred texts and missed calls from you-know-who.

  Taking the bottle, I wandered to the window, watching the snow fly and pondering my latest mistake. I barely noticed the tears. Just kept drinking and staring at the messages from Daniel. They started off curt and angry. The most recent one, from about an hour ago, was pleading with me to please contact him so he could at least know I was all right. Drunker than I should be, I hit “I’m fine.” and sent it.

  “Angel, where are you? I’ll come and get you. I’m not mad, just worried, I promise. Please, don’t leave me hanging.”

  I glared at that, still feeling the effects of his beating the night before.

  “Fetish, my ass,” I mumbled, tipping the bottle up and realizing it was empty. But I touched his name. When the question: “Call Daniel?” popped up I thought about it long enough to acknowledge that I was lonely and wanted his attention. He was so hot, and sweet when he wanted to be. He cared about me, which was more than I could say for a lot of people in my life.

  “Hello? Angel, that you? Oh, God, please tell me you’re all right. This weather, and the roads and …” He stopped. I covered my mouth and made the biggest mistake of my life to that point—quite the feat, considering my history.

  “Yes. I’m fine. Come get me Daniel. Please.”

  I ran out into the snow and jumped into his SUV when he showed up about an hour later. He didn’t look at me or speak, merely put the truck in reverse and drove us toward to his subdivision.

  The wipers barely kept up with the snow, but the tires of his heavy vehicle gripped the road. I let myself float in the warm interior, dreaming of a wedding with lots of flowers and all my brothers, happy for me.

  But when I turned to see if my mother was smiling, she wasn’t. She was standing up in the pew, yelling at me. Her mouth was moving and her face red, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  I reached for her. “Mama,” my dream self said. “Mama, what’s wrong?”

  “Look out, Angelique! He’s going to hurt you!” Her voice was so loud then that I slapped my hands over my ears.

  “Mama,” I said, waking myself up by speaking. I blinked, trying to sort out where in the hell I was. In Daniel’s car, I recalled. Driving home, to his house.

  But we seemed to be stopped, and the wipers were off. Snow covered the windshield. Disoriented and still very drunk, I turned my head slowly toward what I finally realized was an open car door and came eye to eye with him.

  He stood there, glaring at me. Then he was dragging me out, down into the snow. Confused and cold, I tried to protest, but a quick slap to my mouth shut me up. He dragged me along to the open lift gate at the back of his vehicle, tossed me inside, and crawled in after me.

  They told me later that I was lucky to be so drunk that I didn’t really have full knowledge of what happened after that.

  I hated to burst their bubble, all those nice doctors and, later, therapists. But I did know. I felt it all. Every blow, every break, every insertion, every thrust. And I heard every word he said, too. That’s what stuck with me most, really, what he said while he raped and beat me so badly I was unrecognizable, even to myself, for weeks afterward.

  Playing dead saved my life. He was so worked up he didn’t think to check my pulse when he left my half-naked, lifeless body in a snowbank.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The pain that burned and hammered into my consciousness pissed me off. I’d been perfectly content in the snow, after all. It had cooled the agony, and I’d been fine there, sans pain, headed toward a nice nap.

  But when I came to in the ambulance with a couple of guys working me over with needles and God knows what, I tried to sit up, and screamed so loud one of them jumped away. Then I must have fainted, because when I opened my eyes again, I saw a blank white ceiling.

  My brothers all filed in, making pissed-off noises. My father sat by my bed almost twenty-four/seven. I barely remember my mother’s presence, or maybe I ignored her. It was, understandably, a blur.

  The one time I floated above the painkillers long enough to see a person other than my father sitting by me, I cried. Kieran crawled into the bed beside me, waving away the nurses fussing at him.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” I remember him asking over and over again as he held me close. But I had no answer. “We took care of him,” he whispered, his lips touching my hair. “There wasn’t much left for Mark to arrest,” he said, naming their childhood friend Mark Garner, now a county sheriff’s deputy.

  I got drunk. I let him put me in his car and drive me to the middle of now
here. My fault. The words floated, unspoken, through my head as I stared down at my brother’s large, roughed-up knuckles.

  Some stranger visited me a lot.

  Daddy told me it was the EMT guy who found me when he stopped to take a leak at the park, by the river where Daniel had left me. His name was Cal, and he was handsome, in a boy-next-door way, best as I could tell, but I was higher than a kite on morphine for at least a week, and when I was weaning off it, I got combative, so everyone left me alone.

  When the doctors claimed I was ready to be released, Daddy appeared, making his fussy sounds and plans to get me home and under his control.

  “I want to go out to Diana’s,” I said, crossing my arms. “I don’t want to be around Mama. She thinks this is all my fault, and I can’t stand her harping at me about it all day long.”

  Daddy sighed and patted my shoulder. The fact that he didn’t disagree was the most depressing thing I’d ever not heard.

  After a couple of weeks letting me lie around, recuperating in body, but feeling nothing but sorry for myself, Diana put her foot down.

  “Get up,” she said, yanking the blinds up. “Let’s go, Angel. I’m not running a nursing home here. There’s work to be done if you’re not paying me rent.”

  I glared at her, then swung my feet to the floor, got up, took a shower, and launched myself headlong into whatever task she assigned me. I helped with her recipes, stirring and chopping and dicing and pouring and dishing out pounds of food for her sister to sell. Dom had me painting walls when I wasn’t doing that. I learned how to milk goats in between the rest of my chores.

  I saw my father and brothers, but my mother never once came out to see me. I didn’t care. I was busy.

  And one of the things that took the most energy? Rebuffing the persistent attentions of Calvin Morrison, the EMT who turned out to be Diana’s sister’s brother-in-law or some such convolution. Whoever he was, the guy refused to take no for an answer. He showed up at least every other day, and had eaten dinner with us plenty of times, even though I refused to speak directly to him.

  Diana and the veterinarian, Lee, got engaged, finally. Dom moved out to the new barn they’d built for her livestock, out of sight of the older one that they’d almost finished converting into a party space. I took over Diana’s old room upstairs. She and Lee shared her parents’ former bedroom.

  Life moved forward.

  I took it twenty-four hours at a time, no more, no less. But the silent days piling up between my mother and me were getting pretty high. I wanted to ask after her, but didn’t. I wanted her to hold me, to smooth my hair and kiss my forehead. But she’d never done that before. Why would she start now?

  It took Diana Brantley’s no-nonsense confrontation to put an end to that. I found out later that it was less confrontation than compromise. Mama had come out to tell Diana that, once he’d figured out Dom wasn’t going to communicate with him, Kent, the man Dominic had been with, had gone to New York to track down Dom’s son.

  He’d found the boy—Jace—in a halfway house, more feral dog than a little boy, thanks to years of neglect and abuse. And he was bringing him home, to Dom. Mama wanted Diana to be the one to tell him. She agreed to do it, but only if my mother agreed to take me home.

  When I heard her calling my name that morning from the bottom of the steps, I’ll admit I cried. And I let her hold me. And, out of deference for Diana’s attempts to get on with her life sans the Love family underfoot, I went with her to my childhood home with its familiar smells, shapes and memories, back to my my old room with its faded pink canopy bed.

  I even went out on a date or two with Cal. But I was operating on autopilot, waiting for the next rotten thing to happen to me.

  Luckily, there was a fair bit going on to distract everyone from my zombie-ish trance. Jace did, indeed, come home to Kentucky. We had a giant celebration dinner for him. Poor kid. His looks and attitude were breathtakingly familiar. I’d never seen a more perfect miniature version of one of my brothers until meeting Jace. And from nearly the second he laid eyes on my father, Jace latched onto him, ignoring Dom and most everyone else, when he wasn’t cursing or throwing massive fits of temper.

  About two weeks after that, Kent, the man who’d loved my brother so much he made a point to reunite him with his son, and saved the kid’s life in the process, died of the cancer that spread fast after he’d contracted AIDs.

  Real Love family epic drama to be sure. But Dom topped it all off by announcing he was moving to Colorado and taking Jace with him. My misery and silence were completely lost in that shuffle.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Angelique, your boyfriend’s here,” Mama called from the kitchen.

  I groaned and rolled my eyes, then struggled slowly up off the bed, where I’d been lying since coming home from teaching a fresh passel of clumsy little girls to dance.

  “Stop calling him that,” I hollered down the steps before slapping on a bit of makeup and fussing with my hair. I regarded my reflection in the full-length mirror behind the door. The fact that I still gazed into the same long glass I’d used as a little girl and a teenager depressed me so much I suddenly didn’t want to change out of the dark jeans and ratty T-shirt I had on.

  I slouched down the steps to the living room, then into the kitchen, noting with annoyance that Cal was indeed there, sipping iced tea and regaling my mother with tales of his latest rescue, leaving out the names, of course. He was nothing if not a by-the-rules sort of guy. I dropped into a seat without greeting him. Mama shot me a nasty look. I returned it, then jumped up, so sick of her bossiness I wanted to scream.

  “Come on, let’s go.” I grabbed my purse and headed for the door.

  Later, after a movie and dinner, we sat in his car, staring at my house. “You know, I should tell her that to be considered my boyfriend, we’d actually have to kiss or something.” I glared at him. “I’m not gonna break, you know.”

  He took a long breath. I took that moment to regard him in the half-light. He was handsomer than I’d first thought. I knew a lot of that had to do with the way he brought me flowers, or my favorite iced mochas, or went on long walks with me along the river, where we talked about nothing in particular. He’d even come to the little recital Gayle and I put on for the girls that had ended with a duet she and I danced together.

  His dark brown, nondescript hair was cut military short. His eyes were a compelling shade of dark green. His nose was forgettable, his jaw square, his shoulders broad, his waist trim, his legs long. There was not a single disagreeable thing about him.

  And he was obviously smitten with the idiotic woman he’d found facedown, half-naked, beaten up, and raped, in a snow bank. I think it was this fact that motivated me to keep my distance.

  “You’re a real bitch to that poor guy,” Dom had said to me when he called from his new life as father and brewer in Colorado.

  “How d’you know that?”

  “Please, sister. How long will it take for you remember the small town you now inhabit?”

  “How’s Jace?” I’d asked to change the subject.

  “A total hellion. No, more like a hopped-up-on-sugar-and-caffeine hellion. It’s cool. We’re managing. He’s no less than I deserve.”

  “I’m glad for you, Dom. It’s good you got away from here.”

  “Yeah, I guess. Listen, be nice to that kid, willya? He’s a keeper.”

  “Whatever.”

  I pondered him a bit longer. Cal Morrison symbolized the opposite of everything wrong with my life—the bad choices, rotten behavior, inability to stay on the right path. He was, in short, perfect.

  “I got into med school,” he said, his soft, calm voice having the opposite effect on my nerves.

  I threw up my hands. “Of course you did.”

  He looked puzzled, then started to get out of the car. I grabbed his arm, suddenly desperate for more than this man’s kindly, hands-off friendship. “Kiss me,” I demanded, my jaw clenched. “Please,”
I added, blinking and making a concerted effort to soften my tone.

  The smile lit up his face. He pulled me close over the console, threaded his fingers in my hair, his touch soft and unthreatening. I hadn’t realized how tense I was until I let it go at the touch of his lips to mine.

  He started off slow, as if he had no intention of really kissing me at first. I stiffened a little when he got serious with it, parting my lips with his tongue, but still keeping his touch light. His other hand cradled my face and I sighed, recognizing a class-A kisser at about the same time that I fell in love with him.

  When he broke the kiss, we were both breathless. I grabbed him, wanting more, wanting to never, ever stop kissing him. But he leaned away from me. “No, Angelique. Not tonight. I don’t want to rush anything.”

  “Rush?” I had my hand on his thigh, creeping up, eager to feel what I sensed about his reaction to that incredible moment. “Damn, Cal, we’ve been on a million dates. We need to play catch-up, I think.”

  He chuckled, plucking my eager hand off his zipper. “Maybe. But that’s not how I want this to go, okay?” He kissed my nose, but I grabbed hold of his shirt front and slanted my lips over his.

  He made a sound deep in his throat that turned me on more than anything I’d ever heard. His hand brushed my breast, and I shifted to give him better access. When I stroked his erection beneath the khakis he always wore, his hips moved, and he dove deeper into my mouth, burrowing himself into my soul. White noise filled my head as my normally healthy libido roared back to life.

  “Please, oh, Cal, please,” I said.

  But he stopped at that, freezing almost in place, one hand up my shirt, the other tangled in my hair.

  “What?” I was breathless and so was he. The noise his zipper made when I slid it down filled the inside of the now-steamy car.

  “No,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Not here. Not tonight.”