Very bad.
Ellie could remember doing the same thing on a certain fated night long ago. She only hoped that if Bobby was stupid enough to lay a hand on Kia again, the teen would be strong enough to kick him somewhere extremely painful. “Be careful,” Ellie said as the truck rumbled off with a show of speed, knowing she was talking to both Kia and the girl she herself had once been.
And also knowing no one was listening.
CHAPTER THREE
Dear Diary,
I still hate you. But I promised Ms. Cahn, so I’ll try to hate you just a little bit less than I did yesterday.
Kia
Dear Diary,
So. Hi. My name is Ellie Cahn, and as it turns out, I haven’t put myself out there enough. For a former wild child, how shameful is that? I’m hiding behind my work because it’s safe.
When did that happen? When did I become afraid to live my life?
And what exactly am I supposed to do about it? I’ll let you know soon as I figure it out. Wish me luck.
Ellie
The next week’s PIC workshop was titled: Making Good Choices. Ellie and her guest speaker, former TV child Katie Stephens, spent half the day giving the girls the tools they needed in order to do just that—make good choices.
It hadn’t started out smoothly. None of the teens were prepared to admit that they’d either seen people they care about making bad choices or done so themselves.
Then Katie Stephens sat on the floor with them and told them a story. Her story. In fine detail she described how she’d gone from being the happy-go-lucky middle child of a blue-collar family to one of the highest-paid child TV stars of all time to an unemployed, uneducated, homeless twenty-year-old. Her mistakes started at age fifteen, when she’d become emancipated from her parents, fired them as managers in order to get out from beneath their authority, then gone through handlers as fast as she’d gone through the booze and pot. By the time she’d hit nineteen, she was flat broke, and had no one who cared about her because she’d pushed them all away.
Her testimony had opened the floodgates, and by the end of the session, almost all the girls were sharing stories, and even laughing and having a good time.
Except for Kia.
Kia hadn’t made any bad decisions, or so she claimed. Celia and Maddie had snorted their disagreement, but Kia had held firm.
She was good, no regrets, nothing to fix.
Afterward, Ellie had walked out with the girls, almost everyone still smiling and talking—until they all came to a sudden surprised halt on the sidewalk by Ellie’s car.
Mind your own business, Teach had been spray painted across her back window. With an Or Else beneath it.
A collective gasp rose from the girls.
“Who would do that?” Zoe whispered. Zoe was one of the younger girls, and had been sent to PIC because her mother suspected depression and didn’t know what else to do with her. She shifted closer to Ellie and reached for her hand.
Ellie gently squeezed it. “It’s just a prank,” she said firmly, calmly, even though on the inside she was seething at whoever had changed the happy atmosphere to a fearful one.
And she had a feeling she knew exactly who’d done it. She carefully didn’t look at Kia, but she felt sure the culprit was Bobby. She’d bet her last buck on it.
As for Kia, she’d gone positively green.
“You okay?” Ellie asked her.
“I broke up with him,” she said softly, staring at the graffiti-smeared window. “After I realized…you know.”
“That it was an unhealthy relationship?”
Kia nodded. “I think he blames you.”
No doubt, but at least he hadn’t gone after Kia.
“I’m so sorry, Ms. Cahn,” she whispered miserably.
The other girls moved closer and huddled around her. She might be a handful, but she was their handful.
“Not your fault,” Ellie said, hugging Kia before calling the police to make a report. When the girls were gone, she scraped the paint off the window the best she could, which wasn’t all that great. Some of it was still visible, but it couldn’t be helped, not until she got a chance to get a stronger soap.
She didn’t sleep a wink that night, and woke up wishing she could wrap her fingers around Bobby’s overbuilt neck.
But she couldn’t give him more credit than he was due. It wasn’t entirely Bobby’s fault that she hadn’t slept.
Ellie had never been much of a solid sleeper. Once upon a time, that had been due to nightmares. Now it was more anxiety related. Had she shut off the heater? Had she paid the water bill? The list was never-ending, and at two in the morning, things that didn’t matter in the big scheme of things suddenly took on huge importance.
But adding a self-defense program to her PIC program… That was important in the big scheme of things, and something she’d been wanting to do for some time now. She’d just never had the means. If she could give that to the teens, the confidence they gained might help them realize they didn’t have to be victims.
Which was how she found herself on the sidewalk in front of No Limits Training Club.
Jack’s place.
She’d looked him up. That had been the easy part. But she stood there for a good five minutes, talking herself first into, and then out of, going inside. The hard part. Because it was one thing to run into a long-lost friend on the side of the road, another entirely to actively seek him out.
You need this, she reminded herself. The girls need this.
And that was absolutely true. The girls did need this.
But there was also another reason for standing here, one she didn’t really like to put into words.
Simply put, she wanted to see Jack again. As for what else she might want, she didn’t dare let her mind go there. All those years ago he’d been very important to her. Truth was, he’d been her closest ally, her best friend.
And yet when he’d left town, he’d left her behind as easily as he had all his troubles. Maybe she could have understood if he’d kept in touch.
But he hadn’t.
She’d gotten over many, many things in her life, but that—losing one of the few people who mattered to her—had been one of the hardest, and all these years later she still wanted to understand why he’d done it.
Not that she was going to ask him. Nope. She had way more pride than that. This was about the girls. Period. And maybe if she kept telling herself that, she’d believe it.
She glanced at the sign again: No Limits Training Club.
No Limits. Did that apply to old best friends? She hoped so. “He’ll say yes,” she told herself.
“Yes.”
She nearly leaped out of her skin at the low, husky voice in her ear. Whirling around, she came face-to-face with the man himself, looking lean and tough and badass in washed-out jeans—no mud on the knees today—and a long-sleeve black collared shirt.
And those mirrored sunglasses.
His brows rose above the lenses. “Another flat?”
“No.” She let out a little laugh. “Though I wanted to thank you for helping me out.”
“You already did.”
Right. “Well, I wanted to do it again.”
His mouth quirked into an almost-there smile. “Then, you’re welcome. Again.”
She hesitated. “Okay, and maybe that’s not the only reason I’m here.”
He just looked at her, tall and dark and very still, his face giving nothing away. He’d always been hard to read, but the military had fine-tuned and honed the skill. She let out a breath, her thoughts all tangled up now that she was face-to-face with him again. Because here was the problem—even on the best of days, asking for help wasn’t easy for her, and this wasn’t the best of days. Plus, it was Jack, who’d once been a part of her life. The best part.
Until he’d walked away without a backward glance.
“We didn’t keep in touch,” she said.
He registered no change in expression at
the abrupt subject change, and she tried not to smack herself for letting her mouth run off with her brain.
“No,” he said quietly. “We didn’t.”
“Actually,” she said. “You didn’t. That’s what I really meant to say. You left. You didn’t keep in touch.”
“I went into the army, El.”
El. His long-ago nickname for her, one she hadn’t heard in years. It melted her a little bit, dammit. “I know, but even in the military, they have these new-fangled things called computers and email.”
He let out a long breath that said maybe she was being a pain in the keister. Well, she might as well stick with what she was good at.
“I’m not great at communicating,” he finally said.
No kidding. “If that was an apology, it needs work.”
“I went into Special Forces.”
She nodded. She’d known, and had worried about him. A lot.
“I was out of touch with everyone,” he said. “Not just you. Family, friends…”
And he’d probably been so far off the grid that he hadn’t wanted to keep in touch. She understood that too. “But then you came home. I don’t know when. I wish I did.”
He looked at her for a beat, not a muscle so much as twitching. She admired the whole stillness thing. It was a good skill. He was like a big predatory cat, dangerous and lethal. Beautiful. She wished she could pull that off herself. It might help her in the classroom. But she’d never done still well.
Or at all.
“How’s your grandma?” he asked.
“Nice subject change.”
“It worked for you a minute ago.” He gave her a look that could still make her smile.
Damn he was good. She could lay the cause of most of her teenage wildness at the feet of that innate charm of his. Just one look into those bad-boy eyes and she’d have done anything he asked. “Grandma is alive and kicking and demanding great-grandchildren.”
His face softened. “No one’s swept you off your feet then?”
“I don’t need to be swept off my feet. I want a partner, not a knight in shining armor.” She paused. “How about you?”
“What about me?”
She had to shake her head and laugh. “I see getting you to talk about yourself is still like pulling teeth.”
He flashed said teeth in a playful smile. If they kept up this playful banter, she was going to get sucked into his vortex. She had no doubt.
“So you don’t want to tell me anything about yourself,” she said. “That’s okay. Maybe you have too many women to count.”
His smile was pure testosterone-ridden maleness.
“Men,” she said in mock disgust. “You’re all the same.”
“Now, there we’re going to have to agree to disagree.”
“Yeah? How long have you been back in town?”
“Two years.”
“And why did it take us two years to run into each other?”
His smile faded, replaced by that cool, blank face.
“Wow,” she said. “That’s good, Jack. They teach you how to do that in Special Forces?”
“I didn’t want to stir up bad memories for you.”
She stared at him as she processed this. Bad memories? They’d had nothing but great memories until— Until.
The night of their senior farewell, at a party in the hills afterward, packed with their entire graduating class. He’d left early with a girl that wasn’t her and she’d let hurt feelings rule her brain.
Bad mistake. One she’d paid for dearly. “So you what?” she murmured. “You stayed away from me out of some sort of guilt?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to, and she let out a low breath. “Seriously? Because that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s true.”
“Well.” She tried to understand but found she couldn’t. “I suppose if you’re going to carry guilt around for, what, fourteen years, then I might as well use it.”
His military training made it all but impossible to read him, but she was certain she saw a little light come into those gun-slate eyes of his. Affection for certain, and also warmth. The comfort of old memories.
She’d use that, too.
Hell, when it came to the teens, she’d do whatever she had to. “I could use a little favor.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Standing on the sidewalk in front of his building, Jack watched Ellie fidget, and despite the fact that he had a lot going on this afternoon, and not a lot to smile about while he was at it, he felt his mouth curve up anyway.
She’d always been able to make him smile, which was different in itself.
He wasn’t a guy who smiled a lot. He’d been a rotten kid and an even worse teenager. He was the last of six kids born to two blue-collar, hardworking parents. He’d had little to no supervision, leaving him far too much time to find trouble.
And he’d found it, repeatedly.
After growing up fast and rough—all his own doing—he’d gone straight into the army, and then on to Special Forces.
Oddly enough, he’d thrived there, even if he had seen and done too much for his thirty-two years. Now that he was back in Connecticut where he’d started and not in mortal danger on a daily basis, little got to him, and certainly less disturbed him.
Except Ellie.
She disturbed him plenty. She put a ripple in his calm, a visceral, physical ripple that was more like a punch to the solar plexus. Not because of the attraction, though there was that. No, this was much more. Deeper.
Much deeper.
There’d been a time in his life when she’d been his only grounding force. She’d been a friend, someone to confide in, someone to watch his back.
Not sleep with though.
No, for all they’d meant to each other, they’d never been intimate. His teenage self had thought she was hot, but she’d been his friend. Yes, she’d skipped school, sneaked out of her grandmother’s house, drunk underage…but he’d known the truth about her, the truth she’d hidden from everyone. On the inside she’d been nothing but a lost girl, a good girl simply playing at toeing the line.
Unlike him.
He hadn’t been playing at anything, and Ellie had been far too nice for the likes of him in that phase of his life. No way would he have touched her, no matter how much he’d wanted to do just that.
When she’d gotten hurt because of him…it’d nearly killed him.
And now she needed his help. Whatever it was, he would do it. “You going to tell me about this little favor?” he asked.
“Yes.” She fidgeted some more. “But to be honest, it’s not little so much as…”
“Big?” he guessed.
She grimaced. “Yes.”
His eyes cut to her car, specifically to her back window, where something had clearly been painted on, and not quite successfully scrubbed off. “More car problems?”
“No, that’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
Which meant the opposite, of course. “What did it say before you smeared it around?”
“It said, ‘Have a nice day.’”
He gave her a long look. She’d never been able to lie to him. No one had.
“Okay,” she said, caving. “So it wasn’t exactly a greeting. It’s not important, or related to the favor.”
“What did it say, Ellie?”
She blew out a sigh and mumbled something beneath her breath.
“Didn’t quite catch that, El.”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“I already know that.’
“Fine. It said, ‘Mind your own business, Teach. Or else.’”
He felt himself tense. “New boyfriend?”
“No, this particular charmer belongs to Kia, the girl who was with me when I got the flat tire. Or he did belong to her until she dumped him. At my encouragement.” Ellie looked at her window. “He’s not happy with me.”
“His name?”
She turned ba
ck to him, eyes sharp. “I fight my own battles these days, Jack.”
“Did you at least make a police report?”
“Yes.”
Her hair was loose and in her face again. Her eyes were flashing stubbornness and pride. She’d always been sure of herself, and that attraction and heat he’d once felt for her surged again. “Let’s hear this favor you need from me.”
She nibbled on her lower lip.
“I’m going to say yes, Ellie, so just spit it out.”
“That’s a lot of power,” she said. “An open yes like that.”
Yeah. If she only knew…
“What if I abuse it?” Her tone was playful.
Contagious. “Go for it,” he said. “Try me.”
“I can’t decide if that’s just overconfidence or stupidity,” she said, studying him, hands on hips. “Giving me carte blanche like that.”
“I can handle you.”
She laughed, the sound joyful and easy, but suddenly he got the unsettling feeling that maybe she was right. Maybe for the first time in his life, he truly was in over his head. “Let’s take this inside.” Grabbing her hand, he opened the front door to the building, nudging her in ahead of him.
The foyer of No Limits was wide and open, lined with sleek black shelving where people shed their outerwear and shoes before heading into any of the four studios. To the left was the reception desk, behind which stood Kel, Jack’s brother and business partner.
Kel wore a white tae kwon do teacher’s uniform—a pullover-style jacket, loose pants and black belt. He’d just finished teaching a class, and his students, ten women varying in age from early twenties to fifties, were sagged on the benches, pulling their shoes back on, all flushed and shiny with exertion.
Kel hadn’t broken a sweat. Body relaxed, a smile lurking behind his solemn eyes, he nodded at Jack, who introduced him to Ellie. Kel had been four years ahead of them in school, and though he had never met Ellie, he’d heard plenty about her. He alone knew what Ellie had meant to Jack and raised a brow.
Jack ignored him.
“You only teach women?” Ellie asked, glancing at the bench.
Kel gave Jack another long look. “No,” he said. “Though it started out that way.”
“Come on,” Jack said to Ellie. “I’ll show you around.” Still ignoring his brother’s dark, knowing gaze, he led Ellie up the stairs to his office. “We’ve recently expanded.”
More Than Words, Volume 7 Page 18
