Shelter

by Stephanie Fournet

  Blurb

  Elise Cormier has hated Cole Whitehurst since she was five years old. He’s always known just how to make her feel dumb, shabby, and — worst of all — invisible.

  Even when they live under the same roof.

  But that’s where Elise learns Cole’s terrible secret and why he is the way he is. Despite how he’s always treated her, Elise becomes his ally.

  Cole Whitehurst has the weight of the world on his shoulders. Day in and day out, it’s up to him to keep his mother and sister safe. He’s used to giving up everything he wants in order to protect them.

  And there’s nothing he wants more than Elise Cormier.

  Cole has no business falling for his housekeeper’s daughter, but how could he resist? She’s funny. She’s real. And he trusts her with his life.

  But, as Cole knows, loving someone comes with a price, and it may take him years to pay it.

  Shelter

  Stephanie Fournet

  Shelter

  By Stephanie Fournet

  © Stephanie Fournet 2018

  Created with Vellum

  To anyone who has ever needed a safe place.

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part II

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Stephanie Fournet

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  ELISE

  When I first met Cole Whitehurst, he had blood dripping from his nose. The collar of his light blue shirt was ripped and hung limp like a banana peel. The skin over his knuckles was split and angry. Everything about him looked angry.

  He was the scariest looking eight-year-old I’d ever seen.

  I wasn’t supposed to be at the Whitehursts’, but I’d come down with an earache and a fever in Mrs. Sonnier’s kindergarten class, and since Mama couldn’t afford to miss a day of work, I could either lie down on the Whitehursts’ back porch swing or sit at the kitchen table while Mama folded laundry and cooked their supper.

  I chose the porch swing.

  Mama had given me two Tylenol and set me up with a blanket that smelled like lemons. She’d rolled up a bath towel and put it under my head as a pillow, and every twenty minutes or so, she’d come out and take away the damp kitchen towel I had pressed to my ear and pop it back in the microwave. And while I waited, I held my palm to my ear and counted to a hundred.

  It hurt a lot.

  After the third time she got me settled and went inside, she was back out again not five minutes later, carrying a Ziploc bag of sliced onions and peeled garlic.

  “What’s that for?” I asked, frowning at the see-through bag. I hoped I wasn’t supposed to eat it. Raw onions burned my tongue.

  “It’s for your feet, Elise,” she said. “It’ll draw out the fever.”

  I didn’t want onions and garlic on my feet, but my ear hurt too much to argue, so when Mama untucked me and peeled off my socks, I just whimpered my protest until raw vegetables actually touched my skin.

  “That’s cold,” I whined.

  “I know, baby,” Mama said, arranging sliced onion wedges over and under my feet with one hand and patting my blanketed knee with the other.

  “Ugh! And it stinks!”

  I watched her smother a laugh. “I know it does, Elise, but until I can get you to the clinic for some ear drops, it’s the best I can do.”

  I clamped my mouth shut. Even at five, I knew we didn’t have much. We didn’t live in a house anywhere near as big as the Whitehursts’. We had an old, brown car that ran most of the time. We had food in the pantry, though sometimes it came from FoodNet, and we had clothes, though usually they came from Goodwill.

  But I loved my mama, and I knew it made her sad when I wanted or needed something we didn’t have enough money to buy. So, I tried not to want anything. I tried very hard. I didn’t want an earache, so I thought it was just plain mean of God or the devil or whoever gave little girls earaches that I now needed medicine. Medicine that would cost money we didn’t have.

  So, with my mouth shut, a hot towel on my ear, and a bag of onions around my feet, I closed my eyes on the Whitehursts’ back porch swing and fell asleep.

  “What are you doing?”

  I lifted my eyelids to see a scowling boy with a bloody nose. A scowling boy who was a lot bigger than me. And the way he looked at me combined with the way he stressed the second word in his question made me feel exactly like a girl with a bag of onions on her feet, lying on someone else’s porch swing. Weird. Ugly. Small.

  Like I’d swallowed a bowl of worms. My stomach turned sour, and my eyes stung.

  Before I could say anything back, his lip — bearing a dripping trail of blood — curled even higher, and his frown deepened. “Ugh! You stink.”

  He stepped away from me, thrusting his hand down and away as though officially putting the likes of me behind him. And that was when the sour in my stomach turned to gasoline, and I sat up.

  My ear hurt, and sitting up so fast made it hurt even worse, but the boy I’d already guessed was Cole Whitehurst had lit a fuse inside me. My movement caught his eye, and he paused in his exit to stare.

  “And you just lost a fight,” I fired back, trying to match his ugly look the best I could.

  Something like surprise flickered in his frosty blue eyes before he narrowed them in fury. His nostrils flared. Not being a hundred percent sure that dragons weren’t real, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had opened his mouth and breathed fire.

  “You’re as dumb as you look.” The words came out low. Like the rumble of thunder that let everyone know a storm was on the way.

  My face grew hot. Considering I had a towel over my ear and a bag of onions over my feet, I guessed I looked pretty dumb. On top of that, I was one of the few kids in Mrs. Sonnier’s class who wasn’t reading in picture books yet, and I wondered if he knew that just by looking at me. The thought made prickly-heat rush up my chest and down my back.

  I realized then that looking dumb and feeling dumb were two different things, and the second one was a whole lot worse. Wanting to make Cole Whitehurst feel just as bad, I tried to think of the ugliest names I knew, combining them in my head to come up with new, fancy insults. I was drawing in a breath to call him a fat-fart-booger-butt, when he lowered his scowling face to mine.

  “And if you weren’t just some dumb girl whose mother works for my mother, I’d do to you what I did to the kid who did this to me,” he said, jerking a thumb in the direction of his still bleeding nose. “And you’d see that I did not lose that fight.”

  Without giving me the chance to do anything, fire back or cower under my hot towel — and I was probably leaning toward the latter in that moment — Cole Whitehurst spun away from me and stormed into his kitchen. He slammed the door behind him, but instead of shutting, the door bounced in its frame, standing open about two inches. Wide enough for me to hear Mama
.

  “Cole! Good heavens, what happened to you?!”

  I sat back on the edge of the swing, knowing not to follow him inside but listening as hard as I could. I heard nothing.

  Mama tsked. “Baby, who did this to you?”

  A moment passed. “I’m not a baby.”

  My mother made a sound. A sound I recognized. A snorting kind of swallowing sound. Like she did when she was trying not to laugh.

  “Don’t laugh at me, Flora.”

  My head snapped back as if I’d been slapped. Because I knew I would’ve been if I'd talked to Mama the way Cole Whitehurst was talking to her now. Kids didn’t talk to grownups that way, but instead of hearing Mama’s swift and sure justice, I just heard her clearing her throat.

  “Let me get you cleaned up,” she said. And that was all she said.

  They must have gone to one of the first-floor bathrooms because I couldn’t hear them anymore. I was left frowning on the back-porch swing with my feet still in a bag of onions.

  Who was this boy who didn’t cry when he got beat up? Who could tell I was dumb just by looking at me? Who could talk to Mama that way, even call her Flora without say ma’am or Ms., without earning at least a swat on the leg?

  At five years old, I had little experience with hatred, but I decided I’d start learning with Cole Whitehurst.

  Chapter 2

  ELISE

  I didn’t see Cole Whitehurst for almost year after he told me I stunk and was as dumb as I looked.

  I would like to say that the second time I encountered him, I kept my dignity intact, but that didn’t happen. Far from it.

  It was Halloween, and I was six.

  Two weeks before Halloween, Mama had asked me what I wanted to be. I have no idea why she needed to ask. I’d seen Mulan that summer, and since then, I’d eaten, breathed, slept, and lived Mulan.

  I’d even had Mama cut my hair like hers — which worked well enough since it was dark and fairly straight. But cutting bangs revealed a cowlick over my right eye that wouldn’t smooth down for anything.

  Still, with two weeks, Mama was able to put together an outfit that mostly looked like Mulan’s costume in the final battle scene when she saved the emperor. With an old half-slip of Mama’s that she pulled up under my arms and secured with safety pins, a long-sleeved light blue T-shirt she borrowed from one of her church friends, a navy-blue jumper she found at Goodwill, and her pink scarf that she tied around my waist as a sash, I almost looked like Mulan.

  Since I was good at art, I drew and colored Mulan’s dragon medallion out of a small paper plate, poked a hole in it, and strung it onto a red ribbon so I could wear it around my neck. Then I took a broken broom handle I’d found by the dumpster behind the Coin Laundry and turned it into a sword with a hilt made out of aluminum foil. It didn’t have the curvy shape of Mulan’s sword, and it wasn’t silver — or even gray — but without any paint or the craft foam Miss Leaky my art teacher had, it was the best I could do.

  All in all, I guess I was a pretty shabby Mulan.

  Because that was exactly what Cole Whitehurst mumbled under his breath when Mama dropped me off to trick-or-treat with him and his little sister Ava. Now, I had been trick-or-treating since I was two, but I always, and I mean always, went with Mama. She would drive us to Our Lady of Fatima Church, park the car, and get out and walk me over to the Twin Oaks neighborhood. The houses were real nice. The people were nice. And they gave lots of candy.

  We lived on Silkwood Street on the wrong side of Four Corners. I was not allowed to trick-or-treat on Silkwood Street, even with Mama. Although it was just two-and-a-half miles away from Twin Oaks Boulevard, it may as well have been another world. But that year, I would not be trick-or-treating on Twin Oaks because Mama couldn’t take me. She’d dropped a jar of imported Italian olives on her left foot that morning and broken a toe.

  Of course, this had happened in the Whitehursts’ kitchen. We did not have imported Italian olives. We didn’t have imported Italian anything.

  And Mrs. Abigail Whitehurst, Cole and Ava’s mother, feeling awful, had insisted that I join her children on Myrtle Place for Halloween.

  After my one humiliating and, frankly, frightening encounter with Cole Whitehurst, I wasn’t keen on spending an entire Halloween evening with him.

  “Can’t I just go with Ava?” I asked as Mama tied the pink sash around my middle. We sat on the edge Mama’s bed, her foot propped up on a three-legged stool and covered in an ice pack.

  “No,” Mama said, her voice gentle. “Cole and Ava are doing you a kindness by inviting you along. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to trick-or-treat at all tonight.”

  I pressed my lips together to keep the words I wanted to say in my mouth. Cole Whitehurst wasn’t doing me a kindness. Based on what I knew of him, he wouldn’t do anyone a kindness.

  Ava, on the other hand, wasn’t all kindness, but she was all kinds of fun. Unlike her brother, Ava Whitehurst was sparkly, playful, and just one year older than me. She always wore a dreamy smile, even though her eyes could also be wide and watchful, and she’d always seek me out in the kitchen on days I didn’t have school or if Mama needed to work late when the Whitehursts were entertaining. We’d play with her Water Lily Barbies — she had two of them — or her Tomagachi, or we’d take her ribbon dancer set outside and pretend the wands could cast spells and the ribbons were bursts of magic.

  I’d flick my wand around, imagining that with every flick, I granted myself a wish. Flick! A new house. One in a nice neighborhood like Myrtle Place. The house didn’t have to be as big as the Whitehursts’, but bigger than our two-bedroom shotgun, and it would be full of nice things, like Ava’s house was. White couches with deep cushions… big screen TVs in every room, even my bedroom…

  Flick and poof! Instead of Mama working as a housekeeper for someone else, we had a housekeeper who worked for us. Mama could wear her Saturday clothes every day and pick me up straight after school instead of working until five o’clock.

  And, finally, with one last flick, my wand would produce a fluffy, brown and white dog to go in our new back yard, but who would also secretly sleep in my bed at night. And Mama would never know because she wouldn’t be the one changing my sheets, so she wouldn’t be able to see any dog hairs on my brand-new Disney princess bedspread.

  The things Ava Whitehurst wanted confused me. Once, she wished for a new dressage outfit, whatever that was. Another time, she wanted a Bijon Frise. I didn’t know what that was either. But most of the time, she would flick her wand and cast a spell to make Cole as big as her daddy. Her brother, of course, never played with us, thank goodness. She would cast her spell on a pretend Cole nonetheless. Once, when she started dancing around a pretend, grown up Cole, I asked her where her real brother was.

  “Lessons,” she’d answered.

  “What kind of lessons?” The only person I knew who took lessons was Anna Grace Hillborn in my first-grade class, and she took ballet. The thought of Cole in a leotard and a tutu made me giggle.

  “He takes karate lessons on Mondays and Wednesdays, fencing lessons on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Chinese lessons on Thursdays and Saturdays.”

  As far as I was concerned, lessons sounded a lot like school, and I hated school. “He goes to school on Saturdays?” I’d asked horrified.

  Ava nodded, her sandy-blond ponytail bouncing as she did. “He likes it. Oh, and he has swim practice on Saturdays and Sundays too.”

  I’d wrinkled my nose at this news. Who liked going to school on Saturdays and Sundays? Maybe that was what all fourth graders did, but I’d hoped not. Still, it was one more reason for me to stay away from Cole Whitehurst. If he took karate and fencing lessons, then he probably hadn’t been lying about who got beat up worse the first time I’d met him.

  I remembered all this as Mama drew makeup on my eyes like Mulan. Cole Whitehurst was going to ruin my Halloween.

  “If I had a daddy, he could take me trick-or-treating,” I pouted.

/>   Mama’s mouth got flat the way it always did when I talked about daddies. “Elise Nicole, it’ll do you no good to talk like that,” she said. She wasn’t using her angry voice, but she didn’t sound happy either. “Your daddy isn’t worth knowing.”

  She’d always say that when I asked about him. He isn’t worth knowing was all I knew. But that answer just seemed unfair.

  “But you know him, don’t you?” I argued.

  Mama eyes didn’t look into mine, but I saw her slim, brown eyebrow make a hill on her forehead. “I knew him once,” she muttered, barely opening her mouth around the words. “But that’s my fault, not yours.”

  I frowned and puffed air through my nose. I asked my next question, hoping for more as I always did. “Does he know me?”

  Mama sighed, and a felt her breath blow over my face. It smelled like peppermint Life Savers. “I’m afraid he does.”

  “Well, then why doesn’t he ever come to see me?”

  Mama shook her head. “Like I said, he’s not worth knowing. Now close your eyes and be still so I can put on your eye shadow.”

  I knew that be still meant be quiet. Mama always wanted me to be quiet when I asked about my daddy. But I couldn’t help but wonder about him. If he knew me, that meant he’d met me. Maybe when I was a baby or too little to remember it. And if he met me and he didn’t come back to see me again, maybe it wasn’t him.