by Ashe, Lila
“Then have right now.”
It was the last thing she expected to hear from her sister, the cautious one. “Are you serious?”
Grace nodded. “Grab right now. It’s all we have. Don’t worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow.”
“What if I hurt him?”
Tilting her head to the side, Grace said, “You know you’re talking about a grown man, right?”
“But I hurt him once…”
“When he was a boy. You were both practically children. You were pretending to be grown up, that’s what we all did at that age. I’m pretty darn sure Hank has made his own decisions for a long time now, and if it makes you feel better, then just be honest with him.”
“And tell him what? That I’d like to kiss him—”
“That’s all you want?”
“That’s all I’m going to admit to my sister,” said Samantha, kicking Grace’s sneaker lightly with her own. “I should just kiss him and tell him that I’m going to leave at some point and that I can’t be held liable for his heart?”
“Why not? It’s honest.”
“Should I get him to put it in writing? To get it notarized. To make it all legal?”
“How does he make you feel?”
Kissing him had felt like drinking a glass of wine and wanting the rest of the bottle. One gulp, and she’d wanted all of him. Maybe that was why it felt so dangerous. She’d had the one sip, and now he was all she could think about, day and night. “He makes me feel like I’m addicted to him or something. That’s a bad thing in addict-world.”
“Love is bad?”
“Well, no, it’s a good thing, but…what? This isn’t love. I can’t believe you said that.” What Samantha couldn’t believe was that for one second, she’d gone along with the word without kneeing it and wrestling it to the ground.
Grace just smiled. “Keep me posted. I’m not going to ask. But tell me about it when you want to. Okay?”
“Jeez.”
“What?”
“It’s like you’re my friend or something.”
Grace grinned, and Samantha felt happiness flood her. “Sorry,” said Grace. “Should I pinch you?”
“Yeah, that might help.”
Her sister reached across the table and pinched her wrist.
“Ow.” Samantha rubbed it. “That’s better.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THERE WERE EIGHT women in the new class, and Hank knew all but two of them. It was a small town—he shouldn’t have been surprised that Dot Rilo from the post office had signed up with her best friend, Kayla. They never did anything without each other.
Gina and Tina and Kelly were there, too, which was a little more surprising. The three sisters were joint owners of the Wooden Duck, all in their early thirties. They’d inherited the bar from their dad, but all of them had worked there since they were of age to serve liquor. If anyone could handle themselves around ill-intentioned men, he would have thought it would have been them. Somehow, seeing them laughing together, their giggles sounding a little nervous, made the purpose of the class even more real.
Linda McCracken was there, too, and Hank was glad. He knew her from having responded to her house regularly when her husband was dying of prostate cancer. In the six months it had taken him to die, he’d gotten thinner and thinner, and Linda had wasted away along with him. It got to the point that when she would call 911 to get him back to the hospital, Hank would take a precious fifteen seconds to run to the kitchen to throw together whatever they’d eaten for dinner—pot roast piled on a plate with some leftover asparagus, or some chili tossed into a bowl—and while the medics packaged Len up, Hank would heat the food in her microwave while hiding her car keys. “No,” he’d say. “No driving to the hospital until after you’ve eaten that.” It got to the point where Linda didn’t even try to talk him out of it. She’d sit obediently at the table, eating whatever it was with a blank expression. She moved slower every day. The afternoon the ambulance had taken Len away code three, the day Hank had known her husband wouldn’t ever come back to the house, Hank didn’t make her eat. They hadn’t let her drive, either, taking her themselves. She’d finally cried that day. She’d cried the whole way.
He hadn’t seen her in more than a year, probably. She smiled to see him, and hugged him. She’d lost even more weight. There was no way she could weigh more than ninety pounds, even with her big sneakers on.
The two women he didn’t know—both of whom looked like soccer-moms—looked sideways at each other and carefully avoided eye contact with both him and Wally.
It felt weird to be instantly sized up as “a potential assailant,” as Samantha had done when introducing them. Hank had been tall since his first real growth spurt at fourteen, but he’d never felt as hulking as he did now. He tried to school his features into a neutral blandness.
He tried to think about kittens and puppies. Puffy puffs of…soft puffiness.
And even still, Hank felt menacing in his skin.
Samantha was good at her job. After the first couple of minutes, during which she took them all on a little tour of her “gym,” the corner of the community center where she’d dragged out the large blue mats, she directed everyone to sit in a small circle in the middle of the mat. Relieved, Hank sat next to Wally, and they both hunched forward. Linda sat on his left, and he noticed that her hands were shaking slightly in her lap. He wanted so badly to lean over and put his arm around her shoulders for a quick squeeze, the way he had many times before, but the tension she radiated was crystalline, and he was afraid he might break her. He settled on resolving to make the slowest movements possible while he was near her.
How that would work when he was pinning her down, he had no idea. Use all his strength on Linda? No way. He wouldn’t be able to do that. Hank was sure that when he and Wally met with Samantha afterward, she’d agree with his assessment.
Samantha explained what the women would learn in the three-day course, using language that was clear and encouraging. She took the helmet of one of the men’s body suits and put it on her own head. The women laughed, but the free-floating tension had coalesced, and now hovered thickly in the circle.
Hank tried harder to think of puppies and cotton balls.
Samantha took off the helmet and passed it around, saying, “Look. Feel this. See how thick this is? There’s no blow that you can land to this that will damage the person inside it. In this class, you’ll learn to use your powerful words and voice. Also, your body will learn how to hit the person wearing that helmet so hard that in real life, if he wasn’t wearing a body suit, he’d be stopped and you’d be safe.”
Hank felt the tremor in Linda’s hands as she passed him the helmet. He tried to catch Samantha’s eye. Linda wasn’t ready for this. Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea for her to be here.
But if Samantha noticed Linda’s nerves, she didn’t let on.
“Some of you may be wondering if you’re up for this.”
Gina elbowed Kelly in the ribs with a grin.
“But I have to tell you, we all think that when we start learning this stuff. Some parts of this class might be scary, and some might be painful, but I’m pretty sure you’re going to be surprised to learn how much fun this is going to be, too. Now.” Samantha smiled at the sisters, and something deep inside Hank twisted. “Now, I’m going to tell you why I do this. Then we’re going to go around the circle and tell each other why we’re here.
Linda gave an almost silent moan, just under her breath.
Samantha went on, “Your reason for being here might be awful. Your reason might be the most painful thing you ever went through. Whatever that reason is, it’s safe to share here. If you can’t, I understand. I really do. But I’d encourage you to share as much as you feel you can. Nothing will leave this room. Okay, me first.” Samantha glanced at Hank, and for the first time, he could see that she was nervous, too. No one else in the room could tell, he would be willing to bet. But there it was, tha
t tiny little catch in her breath that sometimes happened between her words.
Samantha twisted her fingers together. “What happened to me was a long time ago, and sometimes it feels as fresh as if it happened yesterday. I…” She cleared her throat. “I was working at a pizza joint in Reno, and I was closing. The night manager and I were friends, and we’d had a couple of beers each. He was doing the money, I was mopping. When we were done with the duties, we went outside for a smoke.”
Hank hadn’t ever considered the idea that maybe she had a good reason for teaching this class.
He was a freaking idiot.
“Then he asked me if I wanted to have sex with him. When I said no, he informed me that in fact, I did. He forced me, physically, behind the dumpster where we stored the extra fryer oil, and he raped me.”
Hank’s hands were clenched into fists. He rubbed them against his thighs, but it didn’t help. How could something like that have happened to her? Hank wanted to find out the guy’s name, find him on Facebook and track him down. Then he wanted to pull him out of his house and push him behind a dumpster and have his own way with him, a way that would have nothing to do with sex and everything to do with knuckles smashing the guy’s face in.
“Then he offered me a raise. I said that I quit. And he laughed.” Her voice did that little catch thing again on the last word. “That was maybe the worst part. That he laughed at me while I was driving off. For months—no, years—I imagined other ways that could have gone down. I could have learned how to fight, and I could have gone back and beaten him up. I could have found someone to do it for me.”
Hank barely kept himself from shouting that he volunteered. At the same time, he wanted to apologize for his entire gender and slink away, out of the community center, and hide somewhere dark and deep so that he wouldn’t accidentally scare a woman anywhere, ever.
“I thought of a million different things I wanted to say to him, and none of them were exactly right. I spent years thinking about him. Then I took a class much like this one, and I finally learned what I needed to know how to say. I learned how to say NO, how to keep saying it, how to yell and scream and rage and fight and punch and kick. I finally learned that no one could take care of me better than I could of myself. That was when I finally started sleeping through the night.” Her voice was soft now, and encouraging. “Okay. Going around to my right, how about you, Gina? Tell us why you’re here and what you hope to learn.”
Gina said in a tight voice that she was there for her sister Kelly. Tina said the same thing. Then Kelly, with a sister hanging on to each hand, said in a voice that was strangely strong for the words they carried, “I was raped at knifepoint in the women’s bathroom of our bar last year. What I hope to learn from this class is how to get over that.”
Not how to cut the son of a bitch who might try to touch her in the future. Not how to beat someone up, not how to protect someone else. Kelly wanted to know how to get over it. The horror Hank felt was deep and sickening.
Samantha nodded. “No one gets over all of it, that’s the sad part. The really good part, though, is that with the right tools, we can move past it, into a better, stronger place. You’re going to love this, Kelly. I can’t wait for you to learn these tools.” Samantha’s voice was warm, and some of the tension in Kelly’s face relaxed.
This was what Samantha was meant to do. This was her passion, her reason, her thing. And damn, there was nothing as sexy in the whole world as watching the woman you loved do exactly what she was best at.
Oh, man.
Hank loved her.
Okay, yeah, he’d had maybe a hint that it was coming—his history with her, instead of inoculating him, had made him perhaps a little more susceptible, he’d known that. But he thought he would have had a little more time to fight it off.
Hank hadn’t fought it off, not at all. And the realization made him feel like he was invincible, even though the opposite had just been proven. Samantha met his eyes and though her face showed nothing but attentive concern to the women she was working with, something behind her gaze warmed as their eyes locked.
Something for him.
Pull it together, Coffee. There was only one thing that was important in this moment, and it was listening to the next woman talking. But something remained inside his chest, a warmth that was intoxicating, like whiskey poured straight into his veins.
Linda McCracken was still tucked into herself next to him, her legs pulled up to her chest. Samantha’s voice was soft. “Your turn, Linda. Can you tell us why you’re here?”
She shook her pale head and put her chin on her knees. “I don’t think so,” she said in a small voice.
“Are you sure? I’m totally willing to go to the next person, but something tells me that you need to say something.” Samantha scooted forward so that she was sitting right in front of Linda, a foot away. In a low voice, meant just for Linda, she said, “You can whisper it to me if you want. Then I can tell the class, or we can keep it just between us, whichever you’d like.”
There was a pause during which it felt like the whole class was holding its collective breath. Hank knew he was.
Then Linda nodded. Samantha leaned forward and Linda put her lips next to Samantha’s ear. Hank was closer than anyone else, but Linda kept her whisper so low he didn’t catch a single word.
Samantha gave Linda a brief, fierce hug. She scooted back to her place and said without preamble, “Linda would like you to know that she was raped when she was young. Her husband made her feel safe. Now that he’s gone, she’s back to being scared in her home.” Samantha looked directly at Linda. “After this class, you won’t be scared anymore. I try not to promise things, but I’m going to promise you this. You will not be scared, and I’m going to see to that.”
Linda made a whuffling sound and put her forehead back on her knees.
Hank desperately wanted to do something. That was how he’d been trained, how he lived his life. You helped, you ran toward the problem, you worked until it was fixed. You protected.
But Samantha caught his gaze, and as if reading his thoughts, gave the smallest shake of her head.
She was right. Linda gave off fear in huge, brittle waves. If Samantha could pull off helping this woman, Hank would have to marry her.
If she’d have him.
Hank’s heart was lost and might end up crushed, and he suspected his ass was about to be kicked in their demo for the women.
And he’d never been happier in his life.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SAMANTHA PULLED UP in front of Hank’s house. If he hadn’t said the other night that he lived on Lowry, she wouldn’t have even known where to look for his Mustang. It felt…a little stalkerish, maybe, to be driving up and down a street in the dark, looking under the streetlights for a man’s car.
It didn’t make sense. None of it did. It probably wasn’t the right thing to do. Samantha should go to Grace’s house. Grace would take care of her. She had some hippie echinacea-mint tea that made you relax and feel alert all at the same time. Samantha had bought the tea herself, but somehow, making it for herself at the apartment didn’t feel the same. Sure, it was nice taking it out on the balcony and watching the boats chug in and out of the marina, offloading things like crabs, loading up tourists and heading back out again, the mug of tea warm in her hands. But at Grace’s house, her sister took care of everything. She made Samantha sit in that perfectly soft chair in the kitchen where it was always warm and smelled of ginger.
That’s what she should do. She would show up, and like always, Grace would take care of her. It would feel good to be coddled, and then she’d go home and sleep like the dead.
Instead, she was here. Searching for a guy who probably didn’t even want her to find him. Before she’d come back to town, if she’d been asked, she would have said that she remembered Hank Coffee as a sweet man. Smart. Funny.
That was before she’d learned that he was also the three things she always fell for�
�good looking, dangerous, and sexy as hell.
Which was why it was a very bad idea to be walking up the path in the dark to his front door.
A low-slung green house, it was a fifties ranch style, the kind of house Samantha and Grace had always wanted to live in when they were kids. The kind of house where the garage was built to be full of bicycles and cardboard boxes holding old crafts: God’s eyes made of yarn and chopsticks, and snowmen made from cardboard and cotton balls. The light on the porch burned brightly, welcoming. The doorbell was loud inside. She heard laughter and a woman’s voice from behind the door.
Whoa. What if he did have a girlfriend and no one talked about her? What if they had an agreement, and Hank was welcome to make out with other girls in his car, just as long as he didn’t sleep with them? What if that was the real reason why he left the other night? What if a pretty, petite, well-mannered woman opened the door? What was Samantha’s excuse going to be?
Training! Sure. They had a few more moves to go over before the next class. That was it.
The door was opened by a woman, all right, but she most likely wasn’t girlfriend material. Eighty-five if she was a day, Samantha knew her as one of the women who knitted in the back booths at Mabel’s Cafe. She was wearing a lemon-yellow sweater with an embroidered blue rocket on the front, and her gray hair was flying out of its bun.
“Hi, I’m Samantha Rowe.”
“I know,” the woman said.
Then, without another word, she shut the door in Samantha’s face.
Oh. Well, that was one answer to the question of whether this was a good idea or not. Samantha turned to leave, but her steps faltered when her foot was on the second step.
She turned back around.
This time she knocked instead of ringing the bell.
