by Chloe Walsh
I gasped, appalled. "He locked you up?"
"I locked myself up!" Jordan corrected. "I didn't want to be near anyone. Derek was against it, but he did what had to be done." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "He signed the papers."
"Why didn’t you tell me?" I cried.
"What?" he demanded, crying too. "What was I supposed to tell you? That I tried to fight back and I couldn't?" He grabbed his hair and pulled, clearly in pain even talking about this. "Do you have any idea how that feels? To be a grown man and unable to protect yourself?"
"It happens to men, too," I whispered, blinking back the tears.
"Yeah," he laughed humorlessly. "It does."
"Would you have left me, if it had been me who had been raped?"
"It's not the same thing."
Shifting onto my knees, I crawled over to him and wrapped my arms around him. He stiffened under my touch, but he didn’t push me away. "Would you have left me because of something I was a victim of?"
"No!" he hissed. "Of course not."
"Then you should have told me."
"I couldn't," he whispered.
"Why?"
His green eyes were glassy and full of self-loathing when he said, "because it wasn't a one-time thing."
"What do you mean it wasn't a one-time thing?" My blood ran cold. "Jordan." My voice was shaky. My body was trembling. "What do you mean?"
"It started about a month after mom married him."
"But you were only fourteen…Oh god." I heaved. I physically heaved, feeling like my insides were being dragged out of me.
"It stopped when I left," he whispered, trying to assure me. "I got bigger. Stronger. I could fight back..."
"Jordan," I wept.
"But sometimes I didn't…" He shuddered violently. "Sometimes… oh god, sometimes I just laid there and took it… " His voice broke off and it took him a few moments to continue. "I thought that when I came to you, that it was my fresh start. I thought I was free. Free to start my life with you." He laughed humorlessly again. "I was wrong."
"I hate this," I choked out. Reaching up, I gently cupped his cheek, and pretended not to notice when he slightly recoiled from me. Allowing my fingers to trail over his cheek bone and down to his stubbly jaw, I sighed. "I want to go back in time and change things for you."
He stiffened beneath my touch. "This is why I didn't want you to know." Clenching his eyes shut, he continued to speak. "The way you're looking at me now. The tone of voice you're using."
"What tone?"
"Pity," he hissed. "Disgust." My hand fell on open space when Jordan suddenly jumped to his feet and stepped away from me. "I need to go."
I watched him run out of the room and instantly I was on my feet, running after him.
He wasn’t leaving me.
Never again.
Rushing down the steps, I reached him just as he kicked off the pedal of his motorcycle.
"I'm not stable, Hope," he said in a warning tone, face down.
"I don’t care," I replied as I swung my leg over the back of the motorcycle and got on.
"I can't guarantee you anything," he whispered, shivering. "I'm an addict with a record for fucking shit up."
"And I'm a Carter with a heart that belongs completely to you." Wrapping my arms around his waist, I pressed my cheek to his back and said, "Where you go, I go."
Chapter One
JORDAN
Hope climbed onto the back of my bike just as recklessly as she had when she was sixteen – without thought for the consequences. She was doing what she did in most situations; rushing into it. I shouldn’t have been surprised really. Hope Carter had never taken longer than a minute to make a decision, regardless of how life altering the consequences may be.
She was an all or nothing kind of person and I had always loved her for it.
Her latest impulsive decision scared the hell out of me though.
She was promising to be with me, dangling a future in front of me I wasn’t entirely sure I could ever have.
She didn’t get it.
None of it.
I wasn’t the person she remembered.
I was the victim of a fucking crime and I was the one serving a life sentence.
It didn't go away.
My past was never truly in my past and I struggled every damn day to get out of bed.
I was nothing like the guy she'd fallen in love with all those years ago. I wasn’t easy to love and I was even harder to live with. I had limits and issues and constrictions. Drugs had taken hold of me for years. While I had managed to gain some control back, I was now, and would always be, an addict.
Did she understand that?
Did she realize that I couldn’t give her that perfect love she had been obsessed with having since childhood?
Sex was a fucked up area for me, and I was allergic to even contemplating the idea of having a family. The experiences and ordeals my life had thrown at me meant I never wanted to procreate.
Was that something Hope would want further down the line?
If so, we were going to have a problem.
I was thirty years old and I knew full well I didn’t want to be a father.
Fatherhood wasn’t something I had much experience with; I'd never had one growing up and the one I had been given fucked me up so badly, I still had moments daily when I wanted to set myself on fire and burn the skin from my bones.
"I'm not stable, Hope," I forced myself to say, giving her an out.
"I don’t care." Her response was exactly what I predicated it to be. You will, I thought to myself, when you learn it for yourself.
"I can't guarantee you anything." She needed to get that. She needed to hear my words.
Every fiber of my being demanded I clamp my hand on top of hers and pull her closer, but I knew doing that would be the most selfish thing I could do; bringing her back into this, dragging her into yet another uncertain future. I loved her too much to put her through that twice. "I'm an addict with a record for fucking shit up."
"And I'm a Carter with a heart that belongs completely to you," was her response – again, not thinking this through. "Where you go, I go."
Pain, disbelief, and deep seeded gratitude flooded through me, threatening what was left of my ability to function.
How could she do this?
How could she kill me with words and bring me back to life with promises?
My heart was fucking breaking. It had been breaking from the moment I walked away from her. I was to blame. The wrong one. I could always admit my mistakes and leaving that girl was my biggest one.
Goddamn, this woman was going to bring me to my knees all over again. No words in the spoken language could ever express how important this moment was to me.
She knew my secrets – my deepest, darkest experiences and hidden pain.
And she was still here, still willing to risk it all on me.
She doesn’t know everything, a voice deep inside my head hissed.
And she never would!
I had no idea how I would, or ever could, manage to keep up with her.
But I wanted to.
For the first time in the longest time, I wanted to be selfish.
I wanted to claim my wife.
I wanted to keep her.
Chapter Two
HOPE
Noah was fighting the most important fight of his career tonight, and I had just made the most important decision of my life.
I'd taken him back.
Never in my wildest dreams had I ever imagined myself to be one of those women who fall into their husband's arms as soon as they apologized, but that's exactly what I did.
My prodigal husband had finally returned from his eight-year – and some change – hiatus, and I had welcomed him with open arms.
Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly, and maybe Jordan was right in saying I was rushing into this, but what could I do?
Stand back and watch him walk out of my life again?
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No.
No freaking way.
That wasn’t a viable option for me. Not one I could live with anyway, and not after his revelation.
My husband was abused.
He was raped.
The pain I knew he had to be carrying was unimaginable to me. I couldn’t begin to empathize with how he must be feeling. I only knew that if I let him go now, after telling me his deepest, darkest secrets, he would never feel safe enough to trust me with anything again.
Throughout the course of his entire life, Jordan had been let down and abused by the people that were supposed to take care of him. He was raped when he was a child and he was raped when he was my husband.
By his stepfather.
By the man who was supposed to love him and take care of him.
It had happened right under my nose, over and over again.
And I had done nothing.
I had said nothing.
All of those times I had just known something wasn’t quite right about him; all of those times when I'd seen the bruises on his body, I had done nothing!
The memories I had of the childhood version of him entered my mind and I was filled with a screwed-up concoction of guilt and happiness. Guilt for not being able to save him from him demons, and happiness for how he'd been the most important part of my life back then.
I couldn’t remember the first time I met Jordan Porter.
In fact, I couldn’t remember a day in my life when he wasn’t around. I couldn’t pin point the exact moment in time I knew I was in love with him, the same way I couldn’t pin point a time when I knew I wasn’t.
For me, it felt like my entire existence had always been entwined and interloped with him.
At first, it was an innocent kind of love between two children; young, kindred spirits thrust together because of circumstance, embarking on a slow burning love.
Over the years that followed, that love ignited into something much more, much deeper. Like white, hot fire rinsed with desire and scorching teenage hormones.
I did always remember one specific thing though, one niggling complication that had played on my vulnerabilities since puberty; deep down inside, I had always had the distinct feeling that I loved him more than he loved me. I had always cared more, invested more, worked harder for us. I had always been the one in the drivers seat of our relationship and, to my deepest chagrin, it had sometimes felt as though Jordan was an unwilling passenger.
He had always been hard to make out, hard to crack, and hard to truly read. But I had grown up believing that true love existed. I felt it in our home every day of my childhood; my brothers and I had always been surrounded by love. I watched it unfold every day when my parents looked at each other. Because of this, being a believer of love and fate and happy ever afters came naturally to me, almost like a preset inside of my body. Which was why, when Jordan proposed we elope in my senior year of high school, I jumped at the chance.
We married in secret. I was eighteen years old and that day I gave him everything I was; my heart, my soul, my youth, my body. Everything I would ever be. I offered my entire existence to him without terms or stipulations. I was wholly his. Forever and always.
But then he left me, and everything I'd ever known to be true had been turned upside down. Which was why, at twenty-six years old, I found myself struggling deeply with my torrent emotions, drowning in a pool of uncertainty, and feeling like everything I had ever known and believed in to be true just…wasn’t.
And now, I felt like my life hung in the balance of a few short questions.
Did I still love the man I vowed to share my life with when I was eighteen?
Without a shadow of a doubt.
Did I understand his behavior now I had full disclosure?
Undoubtedly.
Could I forgive him for abandoning me all those years ago?
…
Did I still see a future with him?
…
Those were much harder questions to answer.
Putting aside all of the pain and betrayal I had endured and was still feeling because of his abandonment, I knew that I had to go with him. I had to. I loved the man, and if I'd learned anything from my parents, it was you didn’t run away from the person you loved when things got hard. You stuck it out and fought for them. You fought for them when they weren't fighting for you. That was true love. I knew he was capable of giving me that. I just had to stick it out and do the fighting for both of us.
Jordan didn’t have the childhood I'd had. He wasn’t coated in layers upon layers of unconditional love and support to help him grow into a confident and self-assured adult.
I had.
The way our parents had raised us had a lot to do with how successful all four of us had been as adults. Cash and Casey were still young, but I had no doubt they were receiving the same great childhood Cam, Colt, Logan, and I had been given. Our home had always been a safety net for us to fall back on – a safe haven. I had always known I was loved by both parents. They wanted every one of us, even Cam, and they were always in our corner.
I could do that for Jordan.
I could give him the unconditional love he'd been deprived of.
I didn’t allow the niggling doubt inside of my heart to take ahold in this moment, nor did I listen to the voice inside my head when it screamed, 'you've been the only one fighting these past eight years' or the even more depressing voice that whispered, 'I'm tired of fighting for this…'
Instead, I did what I'd done every day of my life for the past twenty or so years; I closed my eyes and placed my blind faith in Jordan Porter.
Chapter Three
JORDAN
"Is this where you're planning on staying?" Hope asked when I pulled up outside a run-down looking semi on the south side of Denver and helped her off my bike. The area we were in was a far cry from the luxury she'd grown up around, and the way she was trying to hide her distain was kind of adorable. "What happened to staying with Derek?"
"No, Hope, I'm not staying here. This is where I work."
She looked up at me with a surprised expression. "You work?"
"Yes, I have a job," I replied, unable to fight the smile spreading across my face. When I was around my wife, I found myself smiling more. "I have two of them actually."
"Huh." Hope made this clicking sound with her tongue as she looked up at my face like this was the first time she was ever seeing me.
"What do you do…here?" she asked, gesturing towards the halfway house with a dismissive wave of her hand.
"I volunteer as a drugs and alcohol abuse counselor." Stuffing my hands into the jacket, I looked up at the building that, for a long time, I'd called my home. "I usually work a couple of shifts here each week." Shrugging, I added, "My way of giving back to the community, so to speak."
Her blue eyes widened in surprise. "You're a counselor."
"Among other things." Hope and I had a lot to relearn about each other. My fault, I acknowledged. But this was another reason I feared she was jumping into this too quickly. She didn’t even know what I did for a living. She never asked. We were virtually strangers to each other now and had a long road to go to get back to where we used to be.
"So, um… you've been here? All this time? In Colorado?" Her questions were laced with the resentment I knew she was desperately trying to hide. But I could see straight through her, just like I had always been able to.
"I have a house a few blocks from here," I replied, unsure of where this conversation was going.
Hope clicked her tongue again as she looked around at our surroundings before slowly turning to face me once more. "And you were staying with Derek because…?"
"I wanted to be closer to you." That was the truth. Boulder and Denver weren't too far away from each other, about an hour's drive, but I had wanted to be closer to her. "I wanted to see you."
"And when you said you were leaving," she spoke slowly and almost carefully, like she didn’t want there to
be any confusion. "You meant that you needed to leave because you had to go to work?"
"I had some vacation time owed to me." I shrugged helplessly before saying, "I'm due back today."
"Well, I feel stupid," she finally announced with a heavy-hearted sigh. "Making that big gesture of coming with you," shaking her head, she laughed humorlessly and stared down at her shoes, "when you were only leaving for work."
"Hey." Reaching forward, I tipped her chin upwards. "Don’t hide from me."
The moment her eyes landed on mine, I felt like I had been sucker punched in the chest. She took the breath clean out of my lungs. There were so many things I wanted to say to Hope Carter, so many things I wished I was capable of doing for her, but I settled on a smile instead. It was the best I could do right now.
And thankfully, it seemed to be enough because she returned my smile with a megawatt one of her own, revealing that dimple in her cheek, the one that had always made me feel lightheaded.
"Any regrets?" I asked. My voice sounded calm, when the truth was I was anything but. I couldn’t stand the thought of her regretting this. Regretting coming with me. I knew she was better off without me. I knew there was a list as long as my arm of reasons we shouldn’t be together anymore, but still… There was a part of me that needed her unconditional love and support. After all, she was the only one who'd ever given that to me.
"No regrets," she replied just as quickly and impulsively as always, and it made me smile.
"Then come on," I said, voice gruff, as I fell into line with her and gently nudged her shoulder with mine. "Let me introduce you to my world."
"What's the rush?" she shot back teasingly, returning my nudge as she walked beside me towards the building. "I've only been waiting a decade for this."
"Funny."
"You don’t know the half of it."
No, I didn’t know the half of it.
Of her.
But I planned on learning.
Chapter Four
HOPE
