Hawk

by Abigail Graham

  "Lay still," he whispers. "We don't want that wound to open again."

  "How long am I going to have to lay in bed?"

  "Until I say you can get up," Hawk says, squeezing my hand.

  I glare at him.

  "You can move around a bit," Jennifer says, "But not much. Do what he says and be careful. I'll leave you guys alone to talk. Call me if you need anything."

  I look around a little more. I'm on a bed I don't know, in a room I don't know. Hawk is in an old looking recliner chair and May in what looks like a borrowed kitchen chair. The walls are plain and the furniture looks cheap.

  "Where the hell am I?"

  "This is Jennifer and Jacob's house," Hawk says. "Guest bedroom."

  Huh.

  "Where's my mother?"

  May lets out a little sound and stifles it in her hand.

  "What?"

  Hawk squeezes my hand. "She's gone."

  I blink a few times. "What do you mean gone?"

  I look at him, and I'm shocked how completely calm I feel. Hollow. I squeeze his hand.

  "Hawk, she killed your mom."

  I don't know why I just blurt it out, I can't keep it in. He sighs and leans back in his chair.

  "She said. I was there when she…"

  "She pointed a gun at me," May says, very softly.

  I reach over and grab her hand and she squeezes hard, almost painfully.

  "She pointed it at me and she was going to pull the trigger and then she… she…."

  "Shhh," I whisper, tugging on her hand. "I know."

  "I thought I was going to die," May whimpers.

  She stands up and surges through the door, and takes two steps before Jennifer appears and gathers May up in her arms, leading her away.

  We're alone.

  I sink back into the pillows. "That fucking bitch. She couldn't just do it. She had to make May watch. That was her revenge."

  "Yeah," Hawk says.

  I stare up at the blank ceiling for a while. I need time before I ask, "Where's Tom?"

  Hawk leans back in the chair again, and runs his thumb over my knuckles.

  "You're going to have to testify in court," he says, very softly. "The FBI wants to talk to you."

  "What?"

  He takes my hand in both of us.

  "Jacob and Jennifer say it's okay. They know the agent you'll be talking to. It'll be done here. You don't have to go to court and you don't have to see him again if you don't want to."

  "Is Tom going to go to jail?"

  Hawk scrubs his fingers through his hair. "Yeah. Yeah he is. He's in a lot of trouble, Alex."

  "Lance?"

  "I wouldn't worry about him," Hawk says, smirking.

  "What did you do?"

  "Me? Nothing, I just relayed a message to him. He'd better not come back to this town, ever, or somebody, and not me, somebody he's never seen before, will pay him a visit."

  I stifle a laugh and it makes my throat hurt. Hawk offers me a drink.

  "I want to walk. Just a little bit. Please?"

  He nods and helps me sit up, and practically lifts me out of the bed. My legs feel like two overstretched rubber bands, and I take a few steps out and down the hallway and back. It feels good just to be on my feet, even if I have to lean on Hawk and he ends up carrying me back to the bed. He lowers me onto the pillows, pulls the blankets up around my neck, and touches my chin lightly to check the bandages.

  "You're good," he says, and sits down with me again. "You're one tough bitch to get your throat cut and live."

  "How bad was it really?"

  "Bad," he says. "If you didn't have a navy corpsman handy you would’ve died. Those ambulance guys couldn't have handled it."

  "At least he didn't cut my leg like he said."

  "Yeah. I gotta give him that. I'll give it to him after I finish choking him to death."

  I grab his hand. "Hawk."

  "I don't care if he wasn't the one who killed my mother. He knew. He hurt other people. He stole my life. He hurt you."

  "He's going away and we won't have to worry about him anymore, right?"

  "Hopefully. He still has to have an actual trial."

  I shift a little on the bed.

  "Hawk," I murmur. "Get in the bed with me."

  "Uh," he says, scratching his head. "Alex, I don't think we should-"

  "I just want you to lay with me, you pervert," I roll my eyes.

  It's a tight fit. He has to lay on his side, but that works for me. He drapes his arm over my stomach and nestles his face in my hair. His breathing slows, and he starts to fall asleep. I don't. I watch him.

  It's strange to me now how familiar and different he looks. Sand and sun have aged his face. His physique has taken away the softness of his youth, but his face is still the same, warm and open and peaceful as he sleeps. The face that smiled at me while we worked on homework, the face that walked with me in the woods, the face that looked at me that day at the water park like he had never seen me before.

  He doesn't stir as I trace out the outlines of his tattoos with my fingernails, studying the patterns. His arm tightens around me a little and I rest my hand flat on his bicep, feeling the warmth, feeling his pulse as he breathes against me.

  He makes me feel safe.

  For the first time in a long time, I may actually be safe.

  No one disturbs us that first night until morning, when May trudges in, a haunted look in her eyes, and sits down. I can tell at a glance that she hasn't slept much. Hawk sits up and swings off the bed, and leaves us alone.

  Neither of us speak until he comes back carrying a big tray; Jennifer follows behind him and we all eat breakfast in the bedroom, and May is quiet as a grave.

  There has to be something I can do for her.

  After three days, they let me get up and walk down the stairs. Almost walk. Hawk half-carries me down, and I lean on him the whole way. My neck doesn't feel bad, but I just feel exhausted all the time, no matter what I do. Still it feels better to sit at the kitchen table an eat, and Jacob is an amazing cook.

  By the end of the week, May is starting to show some color again. Whenever Hawk isn't with me, she's hanging around his neck, asking him all sorts of questions about the Navy, and he answers her with a patience that reminds me of how he was before he left, before all of this. I sit in a chair in Jennifer's living room watching them talk. The future feels so uncertain, but for right now I'm almost content.

  When the Federal Bureau of Investigation finally arrives, May is looking at colleges, planning to apply for the school year after this one. It's too late in the summer to worry about it now. She sits on the floor in the living room while I sit in the chair, brochures spread out in front of her.

  "What should I major in?"

  "Undeclared," I sigh. "Find something you like by doing it and do it. Trust me."

  Jacob actually answers the door, and greets a man in a dark suit with a military-style haircut. Hawk appears from upstairs, watching silently as the two men speak on the porch. They seem to know each other from the way they talk. I can't hear what they're saying.

  Hawk helps me move to the kitchen table, where the FBI agent wants to talk to me alone.

  He says his name is Denton and he has some questions for me.

  I answer them all as best I can. I describe the men we met with in the restaurant, Eli, some of the other things I've overheard or seen. He never asks me about the computer, or the information I was supposed to be gathering from it. The questioning goes on until I can barely keep my head up.

  Then he tells me I'll have to go to court and testify.

  I'm okay with that.

  When he finally leaves, Hawk picks me up and carries me upstairs. We've been sleeping together, that is, actually sleeping together, since I first woke up here. No one has said a word.

  The bell rings, and I pronounce, "Class dismissed!"

  I smile and nod to my students as they file out of the classroom. Twenty-six sullen, yawning fi
fteen year olds who just read over my syllabus and learned what would await them in Biology II. I didn't write much of the course myself, I'm following a plan from the department head. Everybody here has been amazingly supportive- I protested up and down that I didn't have any teaching experience and I certainly didn't have a certificate, but apparently for biology and math teachers it doesn't matter as long as I have a degree in the subject.

  Even with Jennifer to guide me, every step of the process was nerve-wracking, even the interview, which she did not sit in on. Somehow I ended up with a job offer, and now, a year after Hawk came back to Paradise Falls, here I am, teaching. As soon as the last student leaves I fall back against my desk and let out a long breath, and realize I'm shaking.

  "Never let them see you sweat," Jennifer says, and I jump.

  She's always so damned quiet, even now.

  Things have changed with her, too. She still dresses the same for work- modest somewhat boyish clothes, but now she can't hide the bump anymore. She's almost seven months along, due in November, and though she looks a little softer now, she's more radiant than I've ever seen her, and always grinning.

  "So how was it?"

  "Scary," I confess. "I'm nervous."

  "Good, if you're super confident about your first day that means it's a disaster. They're tired and grumpy and running on old habits from last year's teachers. Soon they'll start testing you and…" She touches her stomach.

  "What?"

  "Nothing. My son just kicked me. Anyway, you'll do fine. Everybody’s scared the first day, except the really bad teachers. If I came in here and you said it was great, no trouble, I'd know something was up."

  "Testing me?"

  She rolls her eyes and pats my shoulder.

  "You’ll make it, I promise. Just let me know if you need help."

  "Okay."

  "Do you have your lesson plans set up for tomorrow?"

  I nod, eagerly. "Yeah, I did everything a month in advance."

  She smiles. "Good. Keep that up, it'll help maintain your sanity. I've got to run."

  I nod and smile. "Thanks, Jennifer."

  Tom is still in the sentencing phase, but from what they've told me that means they're deciding how many books to throw at him. He had ties to all kinds of corruption, drug running. There was a raid on those Amish farms, although a lot of it had already been destroyed and the operation crippled, apparently.

  Jacob reluctantly left his position as math teacher here at the school after the election. Since he was running unopposed, he had a pretty easy time of it, though there was still a solid turnout and a lot of support. It feels weird even thinking about it.

  Oh well, time to go home.

  We haven't gotten a car yet, so I'm carpooling with Jennifer. She's waiting outside in her little Toyota after I make it outside, carrying a bag full of stuff. My first ever papers to grade. I'm going to do them over the weekend, I think. We only have two days, then a four day weekend for the Labor Day holiday. Hawk isn't so lucky, he'll be working through the weekend, but I get so much time off now I don't much worry about things like that. Once he's been working for a while, his shifts will settle down.

  It's hot but we keep the windows down, and I enjoy the breeze. Jennifer swings by Commerce Street first to drop me off. It turns out that the apartment above the shoe store came up for rent again, just at the right time. It feels strange walking inside. The living room is barely big enough for our couch and TV, and the rest of the place isn't much bigger. There's no dining room to speak of, and two little bedrooms. One doubles as my office and a guest room for May when she comes back from school on weekends. The other is mine and Hawk's. Tired as hell, my feet aching, I drop my bag in the office and flop out on the couch, spreading across it.

  At some point I doze off. It's dark when Hawk gets home from work, still wearing his uniform.

  After the Kane administration took over Paradise Falls, there were a lot of vacancies in the local police department. By a lot, I mean all of them. The chief now is a retired state cop named Brock Edwards who used to work at the old high school before the fire. Hawk was hired on as soon as he applied, and he keeps promising me that his shifts will settle out and he'll be on day hours all the time as soon as they hire more men.

  He first goes into our room and locks up his sidearm, then comes back out in nothing but boxers and sits at the end of the couch. He immediately pulls my feet on his lap and begins rubbing my left food. I let out a small, happy groan and let my head fall back against the pillow at the end of the couch.

  "Long day?"

  "Yeah," I sigh. "Don't stop."

  "I don't plan on it."

  "You get your schedule yet?"

  "Yeah. Chief gave me the weekend."

  My head pops up. "Really?"

  "Yeah, I'm off Thursday through Monday."

  "Me too."

  Hawk grins. "Whatever will we do with ourselves?"

  I take my other foot and lightly prod between his legs.

  "I can think of a few things to fill our time."

  Hawk grins, and I settle back into the pillow as he kneads my foot, and smile.

  Thank you for reading Hawk. I hope you enjoyed it!

  Comments are welcome at abbygrahamromance@gmail.com

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  Also by Abigail Graham

  Stepbrother Romance

  Blackbird

  Mockingbird

  Romantic Suspense

  Paradise Falls

  Vampire Romance

  Thrall

  Blackbird

  A Stepbrother Romance

  by Abigail Graham

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  Copyright 2015, Abigail Graham

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  Chapter One

  Victor

  I live in a studio apartment over a massage parlor in the Old City. It’s a six block walk to the liberty bell. It’s two flights of wrought iron stairs down to the parlor on the first floor. The scents of Korean cooking waft up to my apartment, a two hundred square foot studio with one tall narrow window that looks out over the alleyway. If I stand there I can watch a steady stream of men walk in and out of the parlor. Young and old, plump and thin, chubby boys and stooped graybeards, they all have one thing in common. Slumped shoulders and a faraway look. They know what they’re about to do and when they come out they know what they’ve done. I drink whiskey from a chipped coffee mug and watch. I don’t know how the mug came to be in my box of personal effects, the one they gave back when I was paroled. It was my father’s, though. It’s all that I have of him. For now.

  I have a business meeting this afternoon in New York. I’ll be catching a private jet in a few hours. I’m not sure if I’ll be violating my parole or not. I’m allowed to travel for business.

  First, I need to steal my car back.

  This ‘apartment’ is about the size of my closet in the suite of rooms where I grew up.

  Suits hanging on a rack, a cart like the use at a dry cleaner’s, socks and underwear in a rubber tub, and a mattress covered in a plain white sheet. A refrigerator rattling away as it cools a block of Velveeta, a pack of imported ham, eight beers and a jar of peanut butter.

  I don’t even know why I keep the peanut butter in the fridge.

  This is my life.

  For now.

  As I descend the rickety cast iron staircase I check my watch. It’s a Timex I picked up at K-Mart after I stepped off the bus. I have to be on the flight in eight hours. It’s now two thirty-three in the morning. The parlor closes at three, I think. That’s when the in-and-out stream stops, or maybe the patrons are too scared to brave the mean streets at four in the morning. I don’t know or care.

  A stoop-shouldered man emerges and doesn’t look at me and I don’t look
at him. I check my watch again and walk in the rain. It’s a light drizzle that covers everything, makes the world glow. Water slides down my face and clings to my eyebrows. I glance at a shop window. The lights are shut off inside, and I see myself in a glass darkly. For a startling moment I’m walking side by side with my father’s ghost, but I see the tattoos running down both arms to stop just above the wrist and it’s just me. Dad never wore his hair this long and he never visited a tattoo parlor.

  He had one tattoo, a crudely incised PETER in blue ink on his right shoulder. When he was a kid he and some boys he knew gave themselves tattoos with pins and a ballpoint pen. His was buried so deep in the flesh that all his attempts to remove it failed, and so he had his own name tattooed on his meaty shoulder until he died.

  I should probably be wearing a jacket. November, and rain, but it’s unseasonably warm, almost fifty. I’ve had enough of being confined. I want to swing my arms.

  The car is parked in a lot. I stop to pay a bleary-eyed attendant and walk over. It’s an unremarkable Toyota. I’ve been ordered to keep a low profile.

  I hate driving this thing. The old city is dead at night. Last call was over an hour ago and the tourists get scared of the dark. It’s one of the safer areas but all cities are the same. I fucking hate cities. Too much chain link and concrete and neon, not enough trees. I don’t belong here.

  Turn on 3rd onto Market, catch I-95. It’s a straight run now. I obey all posted limits and traffic signals.

  Have to. I’m on parole, after all. I wouldn’t want to get pulled over on my way to steal a car.

  Driving gives me a lot of time to think. My knuckles go white. The wheel creaks in protest.