“I can’t believe you never told us,” Ren sounded almost wounded by it all, and I couldn’t say that I blamed him.
“I couldn’t,” I put my head in my hands trying to think of how best to explain it. “I couldn’t even get my head around it myself to begin with, and then after that, I felt like it was my fault.”
“How the fuck do you figure that? We would have been there for you, Cole. Jesus Christ, you’ve dealt with this on your own, and you didn’t fucking have to!” He thundered, making me feel even worse.
“Honey, let’s go and get Crystal, and I’ll drive us home. Cole did what he did, and you have to put yourself in his shoes,” Maya implored, rubbing his arm.
“I’d have told my fucking family.”
“You don’t know that,” Ebru spoke up. “You think that that’s what you’d have done, but you don’t know that. You can never say you’d do something until you’re in that position and, thankfully, you’ll never go through the hell that Cole’s been through. Think about that.”
One by one they all started to filter out of the house leaving us alone with Maya and Ren, who seemed to be losing the anger now and feeling the hurt of it all in its place.
“I’m sorry, man,” he croaked, and I was shocked to see him looking like he was going to cry. “I’m so fucking sorry.” He took a shuddering breath in. “I’m thinking of Crystal and how I’d feel if she’d been taken away from me before I’d even gotten to hold her…” he was stopped by the sobs that started coming from his wife. Almost like they broke the last defense he had against his tears, one fell down his cheek. “I’m just so fucking sorry!”
I can count on one hand the number of times that Ren and I have hugged. We’ve done the ‘yeah brah’ type man hug with the obligatory thumps on the back, but true hugs? Hardly ever. So when he walked up and pulled me to him in a bear hug, I felt lost for a matter of seconds before I hugged him back.
Pulling away from me, he wiped his face. “You need to tell Mom and Dad.”
I’d never wanted them to find out, but now that it was out there…I knew he was right. They deserved to know.
“Tomorrow,” I confirmed, not feeling the fear and dread that I thought I’d have felt. It was a relief to finally be able to share the worst moment of my life with my family. The knowledge of how upset they were going to be also made me hate Adele even more.
Almost as if she was reading my mind, Ebru said, “I hope that bitch burns in hell.”
“She will,” Maya had that gleam in her eye, and the responding evil smile that Ebru gave her would have made me feel sorry for Adele if I didn’t also echo Maya’s sentiment about hell.
I’d left my parents house and was walking back to my home, thinking about what had just happened. As expected, they’d been upset and then angry and had then gone back to being upset. Mom had even given me a couple of smacks across the head for not telling her, just as well she hit like a butterfly - weakly.
Dad had some sage advice to give out too, saying that there was nothing that I could have done to stop it and that it wasn’t my guilt to bear because I’d wanted to do the right thing and be in my child’s life. Gram and Pops were the heated ones of the bunch while Brett, who’d flown back in at the crack of dawn, had said nothing. It was never easy to tell what he’d do, he was the most secretive one out of all of us, but I didn’t have it in me to worry about it. It hadn’t been bad, but it had been an emotionally exhausting revelation.
After a lot of tears from the women and wisdom from Pops and Dad, Mom and Gram had decided that the emotion that they were going to go with was anger.
“Oh I’m going to smack down on that bitch,” Gram fumed.
“It’s smack that bitch down,” Mom corrected, but she was nodding her head anyway.
“Actually it’s…” I stopped when both of them turned to face me, and I saw the glares headed my way.
“Whatever, her ass is mine,” Gram snapped.
“That just sounds kinky,” Pops observed, becoming the lucky recipient of the glare from her now.
“Get your head out of the damn gutter. And, so help me God, if you even mention a nekkie hotel or ass floss I will cut your balls off.”
Realizing that this was the best time for me to make my escape, and wanting to get back to Ebru, who was waiting for me at the house after saying that it was best for me to tell my family myself, which I now agreed with, I’d headed toward the back door.
“Cole,” my Mom called. I turned to face her with my hand on the door knob, and she said the words that made me want to cry like a baby. “I love you, sweetheart, and I’m so sorry.”
Swallowing over the lump in my throat, I gave her a smile, and then she said the words that helped heal the ache and that actually got me thinking. “You’d be a great daddy, in fact you still will be. You and Ebru will have beautiful babies one day, you wait and see.”
I didn’t think it would be possible to grin after what I’d just put my family through, but I couldn’t help it. Ebru and I would have beautiful babies, she was right. Saying goodbye and leaving my Mom and Gram arguing over who would kick Adele’s ass, I walked up the path towards our house not seeing Coleman until he was right in front of me. The guy seriously was a fucking ghost.
“I’m sorry, man,” his voice sounded gruffer than normal. I didn’t think that he’d ever be the kind of guy for a heart to heart over anything, so I just shrugged. “When did she do it?”
“Summer of 2010.”
He nodded and looked across the field beside us. “What’s the chick’s full name?”
“Why are you asking?”
Looking back at me, I saw a hardness in his eyes that even beat the one that was normally there. “I’m gonna look into it, okay? Don’t question it, just let me do it.”
I didn’t know what that was going to achieve, but I really needed to get home to Eb, so I answered his questions.
“Thanks,” he put his hands awkwardly in his pockets, and I swear to God I wished I had the balls to take photos of him because he looked so unlike his usual confident self. “I’m sorry, ya know?”
“Thanks,” I echoed and nodded. Things had suddenly gotten really fucking awkward. “Uh, are we gonna stand here and braid each other’s hair or discuss nail polish colors?”
“Fuck you,” he snorted, and turned around and walked away.
Welp, that was one way to get rid of him.
Ebru
I’d just put my cup of coffee down on the table when Cole walked through the front door. I’d hated sending him to face his parents on his own, but they needed to hear it from him and have family time. It was a relief to see him, though, because I’d been fluttering around the house unable to sit down while I worried if he was okay. Both Poppy and Winston, who had been following me around everywhere after somehow mastering the staircase, ran toward him making their normal excited noises.
“How did it go?” I took in the expression on his face and the fact that his shoulders looked relaxed and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Obviously they weren’t happy about it, but after some tears and ranting I left Mom and Gram arguing over who was going to, and I quote, ‘smack the bitch down’.” I burst out laughing because I’d figured that something like that would happen, both of them were Hellcats when they got started. “The biggest surprise was on my way back here, though.” He kicked his shoes into the corner of the room, which was a pet peeve of mine, and plonked himself down on the couch.
“What was that?” I asked when he didn’t elaborate on it.
“Coleman was nice and said he was sorry. I thought we were gonna braid each other’s hair and play Barbies,” he leaned over to pick up the babies who were trying to climb up his legs. Having trotters and puppy claws weren’t conducive with Spiderman scaling abilities, though, so they were getting more and more frustrated with every failed attempt. I’d been on the receiving end of their frustration because of that quite a few times s
ince we got them and it usually ended up with scratches and bruises.
“Meh, Bigfoot likes you. We all know that.” And it’s true, he did. He gave the standard eye rolls and looks of displeasure that we all gave Cole frequently, but you could tell he respected and liked Cole. Who didn’t?
I watched as he made a fuss of the puppy and piglet and hoped that they didn’t do an excited pee on the couch.
“I need to talk to you.” The tone of his voice took my attention away from the animals.
“What now?”
“Come sit.” He patted the space beside him causing the puppy and piglet to start attacking his hand. As soon as I sat down, though, they lost interest in finger killing, and Poppy climbed onto my lap for a cuddle while Winston went to Cole. Deciding that he didn’t like this arrangement, Cole put the protesting babies on the floor and then lay down and pulled me down beside him.
“What have you done?”
Grinning at me, he moved my hair away from my face. “You’re so beautiful,” his voice was barely audible. Smiling back up at him, I gently flicked his nose making him laugh.
“Get on with it!”
“I got a lawyer to look into the stabbing, and he wants you to press charges.” I don’t know what I’d expected from him, but it sure as hell wasn’t that.
“What?”
Sighing, he dropped his forehead gently to mine. “I spoke to your dad when we were at your parents' house. He was blackmailed into not pressing charges ‘cause one of the bitch’s dads was the DA. He’s no longer the DA after being caught with underage prostitutes.” I sucked in a shocked breath. I’d known he was the DA, but I didn’t know any of the other things that he’d just told me.
“Holy shit!”
He nodded and looked at me more seriously than I’d ever seen him look. “Yeah, apparently when you’re caught with minors it doesn’t go well for you. And he wasn’t picky on what gender they were either.”
My heart broke for the kids who had to resort to that to survive for whatever reason, but my stomach was close to rebelling at the thought of Lara’s dad actually paying them for…probably best not to go there. “Gross! That’s just so fucked up.”
“So, the lawyer looked into it and basically with the statute of limitations not being up yet, you can still press charges. Your dad gave me the file and the letter that he got from the dad.”
I chewed my lip while I mulled all of this over. “Is there a point in taking action now?”
“Yeah, baby,” he said softly. “You get justice for what happened to you, and you can close the door on it. You will also get rid of the worry that I know you feel about them doing it to someone else.”
It was true, I did worry about someone else ever being on the receiving end of any of their hatred. I hadn’t done anything to them, and they’d almost killed me. And for what?
“What do I have to do?”
“We need to make a statement to the police about it.” He made it sound so simple.
Sighing, I nodded. I was fucking terrified of doing it and nauseous over reliving what happened that day, but if it meant that they got charged with the crime that they committed and it helped their other victims, then I’d do it. And I knew there had been other people on the receiving end of their nastiness. Granted they hadn’t stabbed them, but they’d done other things that could scar people both inside and out. Bullies were rotten to the core with a heart blacker than oil, and those bitches were definitely bullies.
Chapter Seventeen
Ebru
Cole had brought us back out to the lake after I’d given my statement to the police. When he’d passed the report from the lawyer and all of the other paperwork over to them, they’d promised to assist in the case.
What had happened to me was horrible, and it was something that few people would recover from, but psychologically it hadn’t scarred me as much as people expected. After it had happened and I’d recovered, Louise had gotten me through it. I’d been so focused on getting the hell away from my parents that I’d built a wall around it and had subconsciously filed it under ‘come back to another day’. I knew from my qualifications that some people did this and it was a way of either burying their heads in the sand or they were genuinely that strong mentally that they could do it, especially when they had the strength of an amazing sister to lean on. Some people didn’t though, and they were severely affected by it, or they were so traumatized that they’d try to or succeed in taking their lives. I’d been thinking about how I’d dealt with it, and I wasn’t sure if I was burying my head in the sand or not.
“What are you thinking about?” Cole asked. I’d been sitting staring at the water for ages with my chin on my knees.
“Do you think I buried my head in the sand?”
Moving behind me so that his legs were either side of me, he rested his chin on my head. “I don’t think you did per se. I think that you might have done a tiny bit, but the rest of it was pure strength.” I wasn’t sure that I agreed, but he didn’t give me the chance to argue. “Louise was strong, and you knew that, so you immediately realized, regardless, that you weren’t fighting it alone. Then afterward, you were hit by losing her so suddenly and then just surviving, so it got put away inside here.” He tapped my head gently with his finger.
I mulled over what he was saying and tried to see if it felt right, but I was pretty much one big ball of confusion.
“Have you ever had any nightmares about what happened?”
“A few.” They had happened not long afterward, but I’d had an amazing counselor at school who I’d been able to talk to in addition to Louise. She’d been angry at the way that the girls responsible had gotten away with it, but our hands had been tied by one of the fathers being the DA and everyone in our hometown pretty much bowed down to him. Within a year of it happening, though, the nightmares stopped.
“Did you know that your mom used to park outside the school every day and would do walkthroughs to check that you were okay?” Cole asked, and I froze.
“What?”
“Yeah, your dad told me.”
“She can’t have…they didn’t…why…” I could feel tears starting to fall, but I was so shocked about what he’d just told me.
Cole didn’t say anything, he just turned me sideways and held onto me. I want to say that I bawled, but I didn’t. I couldn’t even make sense of what I’d just heard, so the best I could give was the few tears that had already fallen.
We both stayed quiet for a while, just listening to what was around us while I tried to figure it all out. When I didn’t get any further into understanding it, I gave up. I wasn’t a quitter, but I also knew that I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to try and make sense of what I’d just found out, so I’d think about it when I was.
“Tell me your favorite ever memory of Louise,” Cole asked out of the blue, and I didn’t have to think. I knew my favorite memory off by heart.
Grinning, I leaned back and looked at him. “We went to this party at her university accommodation once. It was just before summer break and they were raising money for Cancer Research. Anyway, they had a lot of fun things going on like a Ferris wheel, bumper cars, that thing where you stand on a beam and have a pole with a soft round pouffy thing either side and you have to knock the other people off.” I mimicked the whacking because hell if I knew what they were called.
“I know what you mean,” Cole said laughing at my description, but nodded his head. Everyone knew those Gladiator things.
“Anyway, we walked around and saw a huge mat on the floor, and massive padded sumo outfits and Lou went nuts because she wanted us to give it a go. I obviously said yes because those things are funny as hell.” I was giggling at the memory already. “So, we get into them, and the second we turned around, Lou started cracking up harder than I’d ever heard her laugh. We couldn’t even look at each other in the suits because we were laughing so hard.” I was struggling to get out what hap
pened next because the memory was just too funny. “She had…the suit…”
Cole was snickering hard at me giggling and my body was bouncing off his chest.
“So, my suit,” I cleared my throat. “My suit had a red crotch thing like Sumo’s wear and hers was blue, and all I could see was this massive padded body with moobs and her tiny little head. Anyway, we were laughing so hard that when the guy yelled ‘fight’ we ran into each other, missed and both hit the deck.” The memory was playing through my mind like a movie making me snort harder over what happened next. “So, we’re on the floor, and we’re both laughing, and we can’t get up. I was trying to crawl over to her, but this damn suit was so padded that I ended up rolling.” I wiped my eyes, but the tears of laughter just kept coming. “Unfortunately, we were on a slope, and she rolled towards me on the mat, and the two of us went rolling down it.”
Cole started roaring as I mimicked this massive suit and me going down the hill. “I didn’t think we were gonna stop, but then I hit the tree and she smacked into me right after that and squished me against the trunk of this damn thing. The dude who was in charge of it was running down the slope yelling and panicking, and the two of us are lying in these suits just laughing our asses off. It took five guys and about twenty minutes to get us off the floor because we’d take one look at each other and start all over again,” I was trying to take deep breaths in which was proving useless because I was laughing so hard.
“What happened afterward?”
“She ran to her room to change her sweats and panties,” I wheezed, and it was true, she had! “That poor bastard had to take the game off the field to go and clean it.”
It took a while for the chuckling to die down and when it did we just sat there grinning. It was a bittersweet memory that I held close to my heart, and I guess if you saw it, you’d see the true hilarity of it that was missed when you retold the story. I didn’t give a damn, though, it was my precious memory and one that I still found as funny today as I did the day that it happened.
Until Forever (Providence Series Book 3) Page 17
