Elliott Redeemed

by Scarlett Cole

  It seemed to take forever until doors to the elevator slid open and Elliott walked out. Her heart slammed in her chest at the sight of him carrying two large cases. One was shaped like a guitar. The other was a square, the contents of which she had no clue. As if to tease her tired body, he was dressed in black jeans and a navy T-shirt that pulled tight across his chest. He wore a reassuring grin, one that did nothing to calm her racing pulse.

  “Thank you for coming to see him,” she said as he stepped toward her. “We tend to run out of things to talk about, partly because Daniel doesn’t really want to talk at all, partly because I am uncool, being his mom and all, and partly because he is terrified about today.” She was rambling, she knew, but if she threw herself in conversation with him, she wouldn’t need to think about what was happening with her son in a few hours.

  Elliott smiled as he held up the two items he was carrying. “I got you covered. How is he this morning?”

  She couldn’t think when he stood there towering over her, not when she could smell the sandalwood of his cologne and could feel the warmth from his hand only inches away. Scrambling to gather her wits, she shook her head. “It’s been a little bumpy.”

  Elliott put his cases down on the floor. “Come here,” he said and tugged her into his arms. She wasn’t going to cry again—she’d told herself that over and over as she’d splashed cold water on her face—but still tears burned. “We’ll get through this,” he said.

  We’ll. She wasn’t alone.

  Fiona, one of the nurses, was standing by Daniel’s bed when they arrived at his room, which was nothing new. But when she stepped to one side, Kendalee could see the tears coursing down Daniel’s cheeks. “What happened?” she said as she rushed to his bed. She’d only been gone twenty minutes, maximum.

  “Kendalee,” Fiona said, “Adrian showed up, insisting on seeing him before his surgery. It’s distressed Daniel.”

  Grabbing her son’s hand, she lowered herself onto the bed. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.”

  “He threatened to get a lawyer, Mom. Said I was his son and he hadn’t done anything wrong, so nobody could keep him from seeing me.”

  “Adrian wanted to wish Daniel luck before his operation, but he knows the rules,” Fiona said. “I’m thinking it might be best if the doctor gives Daniel a little something to help him relax before his surgery. Let me go get him,” Fiona said, reaching for Kendalee’s shoulder. “Are you okay here?”

  Kendalee nodded as she gripped her son’s hand tightly, brought it to her lips, and kissed it over and over until he tugged it away. Burning anger filled her at the thought of Adrian. She’d told him that she would pass on his messages, and she had. He was a grown-ass man who should respect his son’s feelings. Whatever perceived slight he felt at the situation was not even close to the gut-level damage his son was experiencing. She’d rather be cut in half with a blunt handsaw than witness this kind of pain in her son. She felt it as surely as if her innards were being pulled apart. She doubled forward to pull him into her arms while he sobbed.

  “Why won’t he leave me alone, Momma?” he said, using the name he’d called her when he was a little boy. She’d been Mom for years, and hearing “Momma” from his teenage lips squeezed at her heart.

  It was her fault. Where had she been while her son was dealing with his father? Oh, yeah. Crying out her own pain and eating chocolate. She was the worst fucking mother.

  “I’ll find a lawyer, talk to the social worker, see if we can’t get some kind of permanent intervention to stop him coming to visit. It’s okay, baby.”

  “And I’ll get a private security detail for you so that he never gets through your door if that’s what you need, Daniel.”

  Kendalee jumped at the sound of Elliott’s voice. For a moment, she’d forgotten he was there, but she’d never been more relieved to see Elliott sit down on the other side of the bed and reach for her son’s free hand. “I promise you. You don’t need to worry about this. One way or another, we’ll sort it out.”

  She looked at Elliott through tear-filled eyes. Somehow, once they were through today, she’d need to talk to Elliott about spending his money on them. That wasn’t what she wanted; his support was more than enough. But for now she just nodded, unable to speak past the lump in her throat.

  As if surprised by the reappearance of his idol, Daniel tried his best to calm himself by wiping his eyes on the back of his hand and taking a few sharp deep breaths while looking over toward the window.

  Elliott discretely placed his hand on her back and rubbed it gently for a moment before standing.

  “I have something to show you, if you feel up to it. But we might get into a bit of trouble in the ward.”

  Daniel quieted enough to look toward Elliott and swallowed deeply. She could see his curiosity get the better of his sadness. Perhaps being a sympathetic ear with Daniel wasn’t the best approach. Perhaps she should learn how to really distract her son when he was upset.

  “What is it?” Daniel said, looking over to the cases by the door.

  “Well, you can pick. I brought my guitar and portable amp. Thought we could play together,” Elliott said, looking over to the cheap acoustic guitar she’d picked up for Daniel with the money Adrian had given her. “Or, we had a videographer follow us around Europe as part of a documentary about the tour, and I thought we could look at some of the rough cuts. Your choice.”

  Daniel sat up, a forced smile on his face that broke Kendalee’s heart. “Let’s play first. I mean, you play first. Let me hear your guitar.”

  “You got it.” Elliott began to take his guitar out of the case.

  Daniel leaned forward. “What kind is it?”

  As Elliott explained something about an Ibanez, Kendalee stepped into the small washroom and wiped her eyes with a tissue. What little mascara she’d applied was now forming black puddles under her eyes. The next tube needed to be waterproof for sure. Or maybe she just wouldn’t buy any more until this whole saga was over. She turned on the cold tap and bent forward. As she splashed cold water on her face, a god-almighty scream of a guitar shattered the silence of the early morning ward. Frantically, she patted her face dry with a paper towel and swung open the bathroom door.

  “What the—”

  “Gimme a song, sweet Lee,” Elliott said, bouncing on his toes, a huge grin on his face.

  “Stop,” she said, looking out toward the hallway. “You can’t just—”

  “Foo Fighters, ‘Learn to Fly,’” Daniel called from the bed.

  With a wink, Elliott let his fingers fly all over the strings, and the . . . frets? Chords? Kendalee didn’t have a clue what they were called, just that they caused very loud sounds that filled the room.

  “Turn it down,” she insisted, although she fought the urge to grin.

  “I can’t hear you,” Elliott mouthed as he continued for a few moments more until he burst into the opening of a song she immediately recognized—“Thunderstruck” by AC/DC.

  A couple of nurses wandered into the hallway as the music changed to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”

  “I can keep going all day, Kendalee. Gimme a song.”

  Kendalee walked over to the amp in an attempt to turn it down, but Elliott blocked her. God, that damn guitar sounded freaking incredible in his hands. But this was a hospital. A couple of parents joined the nurses in the hallway. But nobody looked angry. In fact, they all looked like they were enjoying themselves. Elliott turned to face his new audience and began to play “La Bamba.” He was changing songs so quickly, just hitting the intros, that she barely had the opportunity to name whatever he was playing before he changed it up again.

  “Nirvana. ‘Teen Spirit,’” Fiona called out as she passed by. Kendalee just stared at her.

  Then Elliott broke out into full-on rocking out. Feet wide, jeans low on his hips, he started to move back and forth to the Cobain classic. Then he stood up straight again, throwing that long hair of his over his shoulders like he wa
s in a goddamn shampoo commercial.

  Dear God.

  “Come on, Lee,” he shouted. “One song.”

  “‘Eye of the Tiger,’” a parent shouted, and Elliott obliged. He stood up and swaggered in the direction of the hall in a way that should have looked plain stupid in a hospital, but somehow didn’t. He stopped in front of a young boy who was rocking out in a wheelchair. Elliott crouched down on one knee, playing at eye level with the young boy, who smiled widely.

  She looked over at Daniel, who was looking at Elliott like he walked on water, a huge grin plastered to his face as he clapped his hands and cheered. As Elliott started walking toward her, it was impossible to keep a smile from creeping across her face. “Come on sweet, Kendalee,” he said, stopping about a foot away, the guitar between them. He didn’t even glance at the strings as he switched to Roy Orbison, all of his attention on her. “Give me a song, pretty woman, or I’ll start singing to you.” His body was relaxed, but there was a tension in his eyes she couldn’t figure out.

  “Fine,” she conceded. “‘The Final Countdown.’”

  “Too easy,” he said as he began the intro to which just about every woman over the age of thirty-five knew the lyrics. “Try again.”

  She thought about it for a moment. “‘Jump.’ Van Halen.”

  “One chord all the way, baby. Take it you were an eighties-hair-band lover. Come on. You gotta stump me.”

  She was older. He was young. There had to be something. “‘Message in a Bottle.’”

  “You think just because you’ve got a few years on me, I won’t know them,” he said, switching instantly to the Police classic. “But me and this Ibanez go way back, and she has a long memory.”

  “She?” Kendalee asked as she studied his lips, and his grin, and the way he had the most perfect smile she’d ever seen.

  “She. You don’t think I’d stroke a man the way I hold this baby, do you?” He slid his hand up and down the neck of the guitar, switching to Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight.” There were other people watching, but the way he mouthed rather than sung the lyrics while staring intently at her told everyone he was singing the song to her, solely for her. His face lost its grin, his eyes hooded, and she could barely breathe. He was performing just for her in the crowded hospital room.

  For a moment she felt like her heart had stopped.

  He let a chord hang in the air, reverb filling the room, just like the pull between them. The pull that was getting harder to ignore.

  Sudden clapping from the hallway made Kendalee jump. She placed her hand over her racing heart. “You were incredible.”

  Elliott studied her for a fraction of a second longer and then grinned. “I always am.”

  * * *

  Fuck. He loved performing. Didn’t matter who for. Didn’t matter where. He simply needed the feel of a guitar in his hands, a mic stand by his feet, and at least one person who wanted to hear him play. The adrenaline rush never got old, and the look on his audience’s faces, whether tens of thousands of people singing his lyrics back to him or the single smile of a kid in a wheelchair, fueled him. Yet for all those people who had crowded the hallway as he played, deep down he knew he’d played for one person alone. Kendalee. Sure, the huge grin on Daniel’s face had been a welcome bonus. For those few moments, Daniel had forgotten where he was and what was coming. But the way Kendalee’s eyes had widened when he got close to her, the way he could see the pulse at the side of her neck increase, had turned him on. Fact. She hadn’t even touched him, yet he wanted to push her backward into that tiny little bathroom and kiss her until she couldn’t remember her wonderful mouthful of a name.

  * * *

  “Where was this footage taken?” Daniel asked sleepily as Elliott put on another video for him. He’d pulled up a chair next to Daniel’s bed so they could both face his laptop as the sedative they’d given Daniel kicked in.

  “Madrid.” He remembered because he’d changed out of his favorite shirt, which was soaked through, into a dry T-shirt, and some fucker had stolen it from the side of the stage. “I think the idea is to blend all the different performances through all of the places we played. We might start singing the song on the final cut in London but finish it in New York.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  Daniel pulled Elliott’s laptop a little closer, his forehead wrinkled in concentration as he hummed along to “Preen.”

  Elliott’s mind drifted back to Kendalee. After Elliott’s performance, her smile had turned into a frown as she’d excused herself to go talk to the doctor about what had happened with Daniel’s father. Elliott wondered if she’d realized that she’d reached out and put her hand on his waist as she’d spoken to him. The feel of her fingers tentatively rubbing his skin through his T-shirt had him considering tugging the damn thing off and throwing it to the floor so she could touch his bare chest.

  “Did your stepfather . . . you know . . . touch you?” Daniel asked, forcing Elliott from his daydream. He’d said the words so quietly that Elliott thought at first he’d imagined it. The kid was still studying the video screen, but Elliott noticed that his hand was gripped tightly into a fist.

  “Depends what you mean by ‘touch,’” Elliott said, the calmness in his voice belying the panic he felt. A wave of nausea crashed over him, and he regretted that huge breakfast. “He beat me.”

  “Oh,” Daniel said sadly, as if disappointed by Elliott’s answer. It was obvious the kid needed to connect with someone who had experienced sexual abuse, but perhaps if he shared a little more of the depravity he’d suffered, Daniel would share with him. Kendalee had said Daniel had refused to talk to people about what had happened, and Elliott knew from personal experience just how hard it was to open up to strangers about the kind of thing he’d gone through. It was a huge responsibility, and a privilege, that Daniel was trying with him, but it also terrified Elliott. Rehashing that time in his life was like opening a vein.

  His palms began to sweat as he stood and pulled the left-side waistband of his shorts down a little over his hip. “You see these, Daniel?” he said unsteadily. He never spoke about the scars, but for Daniel, he would.

  Daniel looked up from the laptop and his eyes went wide as he took in the perfectly executed set of three circular scars in three rows. Nine in total. “What . . . are those?”

  Elliott swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. “It was my ninth birthday present from my stepdad. Nobody had wished me happy birthday; there was no birthday party or birthday cake. Before I went to bed that night, I dared to ask whether I’d gotten any birthday presents. He said that I had and that I needed to go over to him to get them. He smacked me, and I fell backward.” He remembered the way he’d hit his head on the piece-of-shit coffee table that sat in the middle of the living room. “Once he had me on the floor, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and pressed it to my skin. He was three times my size.” In unbearable pain, he’d screamed for his mom, who’d hurried out of the kitchen where she’d been drying the dishes. When she’d run to him, his stepfather had beaten her. Then he’d turned to Elliott and asked whether he was prepared to take his punishment or whether he should he take it out on his mom instead. Watching the blood dripping from her nose, seeing the way her eye was already closing shut, he’d nodded. “Nine times to celebrate my ninth birthday.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah.” Elliott sat back down. “It went on for years. I guess what I am trying to say is that no matter what happened to you, I get it. You can tell me. I’m not going to judge. I won’t even tell your mom if you don’t want me to.”

  Daniel pursed his lips. “It happened to me for a while.” The pain in Daniel’s voice echoed his own. He felt it like a razor blade along his skin. “Does it ever get better?” Daniel scratched his skin, and Elliott suspected it wasn’t an itch, but that feeling of dirt that clung to your skin long after the abuse had happened. Hell, Elliott could still feel it. Worthlessness. Uselessness. They all blurred into one
unholy mess of inseparable emotions that were impossible to process, even with the aid of a therapist. But how could he tell Daniel that? How could he tell a teen who was looking at him as if he walked on fucking water? Daniel needed him say that it was going to be fine. That it would be all right. But he didn’t want to lie.

  “It changes,” Elliott answered carefully. “Right now, especially with your injuries, it’s going to feel like the biggest, most insurmountable thing you’ve ever had to deal with. Guilt, hate, despair, distrust, feeling like you don’t even deserve a place on the fucking planet.” Elliott’s throat tightened as he spoke. “Now that people know, they’re going to try to help you. Some will help. Some won’t. I hated my first two psychologists, but I loved my third. My first set of foster parents were incredible, but I . . .” Shit. How did he explain to Daniel that he was terrified, so overwhelmed by his new surroundings that he’d set fire to their fence, leading them to declare he needed “more support than we are capable of providing”? “Well, it didn’t work out. My first two group homes sucked balls, but Ellen, who ran the third one I stayed at, saved my life. She still does.”

  Elliott made a mental note to go see Ellen and ask her to help him think through his involvement in this. She’d set him straight in her no-nonsense way. Help him figure out if he could really make a difference in Daniel’s life, or if he was playing with fire. He huffed at the irony.

  “My dad didn’t believe me,” Daniel said, looking straight at him.

  “I know. Your mom told me. And he was a dick for not listening to you. But he will now, and somehow you need to get your head around that.”

  Daniel reached for his hand, and Elliott gripped it in both of his. “You’re going to think I’m mental.”

  Elliott shook his head. “Not the best choice of word there, but why would you say that?”