by J Santiago
“What happened?” she said without preamble.
“I don’t know. She freaked out and tried to get up. When she stood, she passed out. I’ve got a cold towel on her forehead, but she’s still out.”
“She’s breathing?”
“Yes.”
“She’s fine. Just keep doing what you’re doing. I’ll call back in a bit and check on her.”
Somewhat relieved by Glenna’s assessment, Tank watched Amber carefully as he continued to smooth the washcloth over her face. He thought back over the last couple of hours, trying to figure out what had prompted her freak-out.
For the second time since he’d met her, he wondered if he should have listened to her when she told him to stay away from her. He didn’t know what secrets her past held, but whatever it was, he knew for certain that she hadn’t dealt with it. His feelings for her were starting to scare the shit out of him. He liked her, liked the feel of her, liked the thought of her. But he didn’t think he could handle the weight of her issues without knowing where the pressure came from.
Much like the first night in the bar, when she’d come awake, it was with a jolt and a sense of hyperawareness. She didn’t flutter back to consciousness; she sprang back. Her eyes were suddenly staring into the depths of his, challenging him to look at her with pity. But he didn’t feel any pity. All he felt was a deep and utter resolve to figure out what the fuck had just happened.
“You okay?” he asked.
She pushed up with her hands and bent her legs to give herself the momentum to sit up. She leaned back against the wall, where a headboard should have been. Running her hands over her face, she wiped at the dampness left behind by the towel, and then she folded her arms across her chest, belligerence shooting from her deep brown eyes.
“Yeah.” She looked at him.
He saw her note their positions. With his arm over her, he had her caged in. He decided to stay exactly where he was.
“You want to tell me what that was about?” His tone was patient, but the soothing tone he’d infused to get her to talk to him at other times was noticeably absent.
Her face continued to radiate mad, but he held his ground, his pale eyes boring into her dark ones.
“No.”
He shot a quick glance to the clock. “Thirty minutes ago, I was inside you. Five minutes ago, you had an all-out panic attack. What just happened?” He could hear the frustration in his voice, and he was fairly certain she heard it, too.
Her arms came unwound from her chest and pushed against his arm. “I need to go,” she said as she tried to slither out from under him.
Part of him wanted to let her go, to be done with this whole mess. But another part of him, the part of him that was more than a little bit entranced by her, needed to get beneath all the craziness, all the scar tissue, and get her to open up to him.
A quick thought came at him—the memory of her telling him that it was a one-for-one—and before he could even second-guess what he was about to do, his mouth opened.
“I was going to go to State. There was no doubt in my mind. There hadn’t been since I met Franco and Whitey. There was just something about the combination of the two of them. They fed off of each other, and I knew that they were going to be number one at some point. The only time I questioned my decision was the day that Franco called me and told me he would be branching out, taking a shot at a head job at Kensington. And it was really only a second of indecision. Then, Franco told me that I needed to be at State with Whitey because he would take me to the next level, and I’d leave his program as a first-round draft pick.
“I didn’t even want to do that damn press conference on signing day. But there I was, the number one recruit, a true five fucking stars. With the fanfare surrounding signing day, my dad couldn’t let it pass. The shit of it was that my dad had never been involved, at any point. But, for some reason, maybe because my mom felt like she needed guidance—who the fuck knows? Anyway, all of a sudden, at the beginning of my senior year, he was there, involved, at my games. It was bizarre. And I guess some part of me couldn’t resist having him care.” He rolled his eyes at his own stupidity.
Amber had settled down, resuming her defensive position but watching him with both trepidation and blatant curiosity swimming in her big brown eyes.
“He insisted I take my five official visits even though I knew I was going to State. He wouldn’t let me post anything on Twitter that might let people know where I was going. It was like he scripted the whole thing so that everyone would be drooling over my choice.
“When I think about it now, it’s almost funny. You have these coaches wooing you, trying to get you. You feel like you could ask for almost anything, and they would find a way to promise that you can have it. The power…it’s a shitload of power for a seventeen-year-old kid. And, ya know, by default, their parents. Now, I know that. I know that, for Richard, it was all about the power and the attention.”
He stopped, thoughtful for a moment, and then continued, “They set it up for me to be the last signee”—he rolled his eyes again—“milking me for all I was worth. Anyway, we’d spent five months in the dark, not saying anything to anyone. The guys who were supposed to be my recruiting class, they knew. We’d planned it all—Steele and I. We met during a 7v7 tournament and then we’d taken our official visit together. The number one quarterback and the number one receiver, we’d be together at State. It was perfect. I just had to get through the day. So I’m up on the stage, and all my high school teammates are in there with me. And no one in the room truly knows where I’m going, except me and my mom. Then, that motherfucker shows up right before I’m about to pick up the hat. He comes in all State gear, letting everyone know that’s my choice and broadcasting it to the world that he already knew. It hit me right then that the five months leading up to that moment hadn’t had a thing to do with me. He was the same piece of shit he’d always been, except he wanted to steal my thunder now.
“It was a split-second decision really. I looked down at the hats in front of me. They were all the big ones and would challenge State every year as all of them fought for the title. I didn’t want to play against the guys I considered my recruiting class. And, in the back of my head, I knew Franco was here. It made all the difference. It was the best fuck you I could come up with.
“Maybe I cut off my nose, despite my face—as my mother liked to point out. But it doesn’t feel like that. I’m getting everything I thought I’d get there. And I’m not gonna lie; I couldn’t have embarrassed my father more. And it felt really fucking good.”
He’d purposely looked beyond Amber’s eyes for the last half of his story, not wanting to know what lurked in the depths. But, now, he swung his gaze to hers, and what he saw there made his throat tighten and his heart slip—a burning compassion mixed with understanding and desire.
He cocked his head to the side and said, “I go; you go, right?”
She unlocked her arms again, but this time, her hands came up to slide smoothly across his face, cradling his head. She leaned forward and kissed him deeply, pushing all her fears and uncertainty at him. He returned the kiss until she pulled away.
As she leaned back against the wall again, her hands dropped to her lap. “Yeah. You go; I go.”
And she began to talk.
Twenty-Three
Amber would probably never be sure what had prompted her to talk. Maybe it was Tank’s willingness to open up to her or the way he’d recalled her one-for-one philosophy. As he’d relayed his tale about signing day, she was struck by the significance of that one decision he’d made. It didn’t leave him permanently scarred, like her, but that one reaction had changed the course of his life. And, in the end, wasn’t that the same thing that had happened to her? One split-second decision had changed everything, brought her here into his realm, directly in his path.
When he’d finished, she could sense how raw his story had left him, his feelings gutted and on display for her to pick through.
It didn’t seem fair to her for him to put himself out there and for her not to reciprocate.
But she’d never spoken about the events leading up to the accident—not to the police, not to her father or Keira, not to the therapist they’d all insisted that she see. She wanted to lay it all out there for him. The look in his eyes said he was ready for her, ready for her to bare it all. She could see that.
As she studied him, he reached for her hands that were still clasped in her lap, sensing that she needed some physical tether. It seemed so innate that she briefly wondered about their more than physical connection.
Looking down at her limp hands in his strong ones, she laced her fingers through his, seizing the opportunity to hold on to something.
“I know pretty much everything there is to know about Rowdy Daniels. Most importantly, I guess I should tell you that I killed him.” She paused to take a deep, stuttering breath. As she exhaled, she felt Tank gently squeeze her hand. She continued to look down at their intertwined hands. His long caramel-colored fingers were wrapped around her feminine hand. She wasn’t willing to look at him yet, but she could feel herself tying their lives together.
“I wish I could give you details about the crash. I tried for months to remember exactly what had happened, but the therapist thinks the memory is too painful, so my brain has been blocking it. I guess that could be true. Could also be the coma I was in for those first few weeks.
“What the skid marks told the police was that I was trying to avoid something and that the car careened for a while before wrapping itself around a tree. I’m alive because of my seat belt. Rowdy is dead because he wasn’t wearing one. But that kind of has its own questions because I rode in cars with Rowdy a lot, and he always wore one, so why he wasn’t on that night is a complete mystery. His body flew through the windshield, and he collided headfirst with a tree. He was dead on impact.”
Still looking down, Amber stopped for a moment, lost in the memories of her first meeting with Rowdy. She’d been fooled from the beginning, thinking he was someone so different than who he truly was. But the year that it had taken her to figure it out left her an integral part of his life and his family. It’d made it difficult to extract herself.
With hindsight, she could admit that had she moved quicker, made a cleaner break, Rowdy might still be alive. Instead, it had been six months of angst with her gradually pulling away from her father and even Keira because she just didn’t know how to admit to them that she was in a situation that she couldn’t quite figure out how to get out of. For the strong, independent girl they thought her to be, she wouldn’t admit to them that she needed help.
Her pause had turned to a long silence. She wanted to continue but didn’t know how to restart the conversation. But she could tell that Tank was going to push her when he extracted one of his hands and moved it to her chin, lifting tenderly so that she was forced to meet his eyes.
“It sounds like it was a horrible accident.” That was all he said—no accusation, no questions, no demanding that she keep talking.
But it was enough to get her move her forward.
“It was a horrific accident.”
Tank still held her chin in his hand. He moved it to the back of her neck and gently pulled her forward into a brief kiss.
It surprised her more than once that Tank seemed to sense her needs and would react to them before she could even understand that she wanted something. It felt good to have someone respond to her so intuitively. It had been a long time since anyone had looked out for her. She could admit now though—and only to herself—that she hadn’t allowed anyone to get close enough to know what she needed.
“It took me a while to figure Rowdy out. Ronald Wendell Daniels IV was a Southern gentleman from a really old Southern family. Aside from coming from Southern royalty in Mississippi, he was a better-than-average football player. All that combined made him a bit of a celebrity on campus. He was hot and charming and really fucking mean. But you didn’t see the mean. No one did. It got overlooked because of the charm. Without all that charisma, everyone would have seen it a lot quicker.
“As it was, I was with him all the time, and it took me almost a year to understand that his behavior was suspect. When I got it though, I was in too deep to get out easily. So, I stayed and became one of those really pathetic women you see in Lifetime movies who stay with the bad guy. He never hit me or anything like that. He just had this desire to verbally hurt people. And he was controlling. I found myself doing shit and thinking, What the fuck am I doing? This is so not me. But it was just confusing and hard and crazy.” Sighing, she said, “I think I was crazy for a little while.”
“Then, one day, my dad just showed up at school. And I couldn’t deal with him seeing me like that. I didn’t realize at the time that he probably wouldn’t have noticed. Who really notices when you feel crazy on the inside? But I needed him to go away. When he left, I knew I couldn’t go on like I was. I couldn’t be that person. So, I began to pull myself out, pull away. But Rowdy was smart and determined and possessive. He didn’t want me to go anywhere. He didn’t ever hit me. If I had to pinpoint abuse, I’m not sure I’d be able to. Like, if I had to prove it to someone, I couldn’t. There wasn’t anything concrete, except when there was.”
“We’d gone out one night, and he could tell things were different and that something was going on with me. He could probably see the crazy. I think all crazy can recognize crazy. But whatever. He knew something was up. We got home, and he wanted to have sex. It was nothing we hadn’t done hundreds of times before. But I didn’t want to. I needed distance. It’s hard to have distance when someone’s inside you.” For some reason, she chose that moment to look at Tank. She saw him glance away from her at that stark statement, but she couldn’t do anything to lessen the frankness of it. She squeezed his hand, using her touch to soften the blow.
Thinking about what she was about to tell him made her stay stopped. She’d said it before in a detached, clinical retelling. But, admitting this now to him would forever change her and her relationship with him.
“When I told him that I didn’t want to have sex, he tried to convince me. At first, it wasn’t anything that concerned me. It was kissing and gentle persuasion. But, when he started to realize that I wasn’t going to change my mind, he morphed. He became this version of himself that he normally kept under wraps. I could look in his eyes and see that he wasn’t the person he showed to the small world of Oxford. He was someone who wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
“I started to get scared and tried to get away from him. He tackled me in a full-body hold. I think my body probably felt how you must feel when you get blindsided by a defensive end who has fifty pounds on you. For a minute, I lost all sense of what was happening. That one minute of disorientation cost me everything. When I shook myself out of it, he was inside me, taking what he thought he deserved, I guess.”
She felt Tank stiffen, but he continued to hold on to her and wait. She remembered the fight, her complete shock when she’d realized what was happening to her and then her realization that she wasn’t really shocked. This was the Rowdy she’d seen more and more often. The cruel guy who she had known she needed to get away from. She’d tried to buck him off of her, but he had her hands and her body pinned. Rowdy had known her body, what it would take to get her to respond. In the ultimate horror and degradation of everything that had happened to her, she had responded to him, and he’d managed to wring out an orgasm. The humiliation of that moment would haunt her forever. It wasn’t anything she would ever admit to a single soul.
But when Rowdy had laughed and whispered in her ear, “Yeah, baby. I knew you’d like it rough,” her resolve to do something about Rowdy Daniels had become resolute.
“When Rowdy left, I got my purse and drove to the sheriff’s department. I told them that I’d been sexually assaulted and that I wanted a rape kit completed. One of the female officers took me to the hospital where they did the rape kit, and
I filed my report with them. When they learned the extent of my relationship with Rowdy, they tried to discourage me from reporting it. We already had a preexisting sexual relationship, they said. No one seemed to mention that I had bruises all up and down my arms from where he’d held me or the bruising on my thighs. I had known reporting it would be a long shot. It’s why I went to the sheriff rather than the campus police. I mean, we are talking about Rowdy Daniels. But I wasn’t going to let it go. They told me they’d hold onto it so I could think about what I wanted to do.
“A week later, Rowdy was killed in a car accident with me driving. And the whole incident went away.
“I was in a coma. And, when I woke up, I couldn’t remember much of what had happened. I guess there was enough physical evidence to prove that it was truly an accident, but when I couldn’t answer questions, things were pretty rough for my family.”
Taking a deep breath, Amber looked up at Tank. “That’s what I know about Rowdy Daniels.”
Tank’s eyes reflected all the emotions she was sure she’d experienced while she spoke. Anger and disbelief. She could see all of that lurking in his green eyes.
“I’m not really sure what to do right now,” Tank admitted.
Amber smiled sadly. “I don’t know either.” Shrugging, she said, “I haven’t ever told anyone any of this. You know how people say that you’ll feel better if you talk about it? You’ll feel lighter?” At his nod, she continued, “I don’t feel any of that.”
For some reason, that made him smile. “That’s a lot of shit you’ve been carrying around with you.”
He moved closer to her, studying her. She watched him watch her. Then, he picked her up and slid behind her, settling her in between his legs, wrapping her up in him. She felt him lean over and kiss her neck, right on her scar.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She leaned into him, enjoying his sooth. She had more that she needed to say, but she hated what she was about to do. She vaguely wondered if her father had thought this through. Now that she’d shared everything with Tank, she didn’t feel like she could or should hold anything back.
