Promise Me This

by Christina Lee

  “Oh my God,” I said. I was so shocked I couldn’t even form the words to match the questions racing through my head. How badly had his mom been hurt? Where was his dad now?

  Nate gave his mom’s name at the front desk of the emergency room. We were led inside the automatic doors to a separate waiting area. Upon seeing us, Luke jerked to a stand at his seat. A purple shiner was beginning to form beneath his eye.

  Beside him, Anna looked disheveled. Her hair wasn’t perfectly styled like it had been at the football game, her makeup was streaked from crying, and her hands were trembling.

  When Luke’s gaze darted between us, Nate reached for my hand and grasped it tightly, either for support or to make it clear to his brother that we were together.

  “Dad was taken to the station,” Luke said in a low voice. “He asked me to call his attorney as he was being placed in the backseat of the squad car.”

  Nate gritted his teeth. “Have you called him?”

  “No,” he said, his jaw tight. “Let him sit there.”

  Nate nodded and his eyes darted outside the room. “Where’s Mom?”

  “We were asked to step out during her examination.” He looked back at Anna briefly, as she sat wringing her hands. “He . . . he was choking her. She was unconscious. But the paramedics were able to revive her.”

  “Fuck!” Nate trembled beside me. He squeezed his eyes shut as if imagining what might’ve happened had Luke not arrived.

  I attempted to hold in my reaction. I could just imagine the scene and what they had walked into. No wonder Anna looked so shaken.

  “Nate,” Luke said and Nate snapped his eyes to him. “I . . . I’m sorry, man.”

  Nate tipped his chin. “Does this mean I have my brother back?”

  Luke gave a curt nod, sat down, and swung his arm around Anna to pull her closer. It was a comforting and protective gesture and pretty evident how much he cared about her.

  “You okay, baby?” he whispered to Anna loud enough for us to overhear.

  Her arms stretched around his neck and she mumbled near his ear. “Promise me this time, Luke. You’ll make that appointment. You’ve been so angry lately. I don’t want . . .”

  “Shhh . . .” he murmured against her hair and then kissed her forehead tenderly. “I promise, baby. I don’t want to lose you. And I know I need to work it out.”

  Nate squeezed my fingers but stared straight ahead, probably in an attempt to protect his brother’s privacy. But one thing was evident in his face, his softened features. Relief.

  Out of the corner of my eye I spotted my landlord, Jillian, walk by the room. I knew she was an ER nurse, but I wasn’t certain we’d see her tonight.

  “Jessie, what are you doing here?” she asked, swinging back toward the door.

  Eyes wide, she looked from me to Nate and then to Luke and Anna.

  “I’m here for their mom, who was brought in a little bit ago.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “The last name is Connors,” I said, as Nate gripped my fingers.

  “I’ll find out how she’s doing,” she said. “Be right back.”

  We sat down in silence, Nate still holding my hand. I didn’t want to let go for anything, because it felt like he needed me to be his anchor, and I wanted to be that for him.

  Jillian returned a couple minutes later. “They’re going to keep her overnight, just for observation. But so far everything checks out fine.”

  Nate released a breath as she continued. “Her voice is hoarse and she’s got some bruising, but you can go back and see her before they admit her.”

  The brothers stood up together to go to their mom. I stayed seated next to Anna. “Thanks, Jillian.”

  “No problem, sweetie.”

  Once they left we grew silent, both of us unsure of what to say to the other. In any other circumstance, we wouldn’t have even been in the same room together.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Anna whispered so quietly, I looked over to be sure I heard her.

  “What happened?”

  “He had his hands around her throat. I screamed and Luke sprang into action, wrestling with his dad.” She shoved her fingers through her hair. “I didn’t know what to do, so I just pulled out my phone and dialed 9-1-1.”

  “You did good,” I said and squeezed her shoulder.

  We stayed at the hospital until they got Mrs. Connors situated in her room. It’d been a long night and we were all exhausted.

  When we got to his truck, I said, “Just take me to your place.”

  Nate didn’t argue or even respond. He just started driving home.

  At his apartment, he opened the door, grabbed my hand, and pulled me inside.

  Nate tugged off his jeans, as I stood quietly on the other side of the room.

  He dragged back the covers, slid into his bed, and then silently motioned to the space beside him.

  He lay watching as I yanked off my combat boots and skirt and then climbed beneath his sheets.

  Almost immediately he hauled me to him, grasping at my thighs so that our hips and chests fit snugly together.

  Then his arm groped for my fingers, interconnecting our hands together like he’d done that other night during sex. Somehow that gesture alone made my heart batter around in my chest.

  His face at my neck, he whispered kisses across my throat before heaving a deep and long sigh. “God, I missed your smell.”

  My muscles relaxed, my body melded to his, and I fell asleep shortly thereafter.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Nate

  I sat at my temp desk at the Williams and Struthers Group, working on a bridge improvement plan that would count toward my grade, but I was having one hell of a time concentrating on the task in front of me.

  It’d been a couple of weeks since my mother had been released from the hospital. My father had already moved his things out of their house and, on the advice of her attorney, she had filed a restraining order.

  I couldn’t help worrying about her mental health. She hadn’t been alone like that in years and in many ways, I could see the relief evident on her face. But I also saw fear and sorrow. I slept at the house with her the first couple of nights, even though she didn’t ask me to. I just wanted her to feel safe.

  Luke also slept there some nights and they were working toward repairing their relationship. His shame ran deep and I saw him attempting to make amends and become the man I’d always hoped he could be. The kind of brother I could finally look up to. But it would take some effort and time. As it turned out, Anna had been just the right kind of influence.

  My guilt was hardest of all to dissuade because I had been the one to shake this family’s feeble foundation. My father was suddenly getting pressure on all sides from people who long suspected but now knew the truth.

  He lost it and took it out on my mother that night. The flip side was that my mom finally admitted that the abuse had still been going on and that she was only trying to keep the peace until we graduated. She finally returned her sister’s calls, and Aunt Johanna had made the trip up to be with her this week.

  At the top of the hour, I packed up my stuff and headed to the counseling center on campus. I’d had a draining therapy session with Dr. Drake the week before that basically blew my mind and my own theory about myself out of the water.

  I was raw and on edge and Jessie had become my safe haven. She had shown up at my place a few times in the last couple of weeks to simply hang out. Unless I shared, she never asked me anything deep about my family or about us, as if she knew I just needed her comfort and company while I worked out all this crap.

  Thing was, I liked having her in my bed, even if the only thing we did these days was sleep wrapped tightly around each other. I’d wake up with a hard-on every single time but it was like an unspoken rule that we weren’t going to go there, not until we got some things straight.

  God, she was the fucking shit and I wanted to do right by her. And that�
��s what I murmured in her ear almost every single night.

  As it turned out, sometimes life hands you a perfectly scripted moment—and still you don’t recognize the significance of it, until it clubs you repeatedly over the head.

  “C’mon Nate, lay it on me,” Dr. Drake said, sitting across from me now in his cushy black leather chair. “We’re in private and nobody is going to hear you or judge you.”

  I felt a burn at the back of my throat. Tears were beginning to well and I did not want to lose it in front of him. But why did it matter? Suddenly it became clearer to me: because my father warned me that crying was for sissies. Was his logic so ingrained in my head that I couldn’t ever shake it?

  “It’s scary,” I said. “Because I don’t know what I’ll become if I let it loose.”

  He immediately picked up on my word choice. “What you’ll become—not who?”

  “Well,” I said, my voice shaking, “A monster is a thing not a human.”

  “A monster,” he said, as if testing out the word in his mouth.

  “Yes,” I said, simply stating the belief I’d harbored about myself for a long time.

  “Do you have urges to do monstrous things?” he asked, in a calm voice.

  I gave an imperceptible nod, now terrified what he’d think of me.

  His voice was soft and low, maybe in an effort to keep me calm. “Are they urges to hurt and control people or things?”

  I cleared my throat, here it was. I could either say it out loud to the person I actually sought out for help with this shit or I could keep it buried and let the acid eat away at me, bone by bone.

  My voice faltered. “Y . . . yes.”

  He shook his head, not even judging me. “Have you acted on them?”

  “A couple of times . . . during sex.”

  He steepled his fingers beneath his chin, as if thinking it through. “Did you get consent before you performed those actions?”

  “Of course!” I sat up quickly in the chair.

  “And outside of the bedroom?”

  “Well, no. Those aren’t the kind of urges I have,” I said. “They’re all related to my fantasies during sex.”

  “You’ve never wanted to control somebody that you were dating?” he asked, pushing his glasses further up his nose.

  I thought of how I’d become so damn jealous with Jessie that I wanted to control who she spoke to in the hallway that night at Zach’s Bar. But as soon as she stood up to me, I’d backed down.

  “Well, I’ve gotten jealous, but no, I don’t ever want to treat a girl like that,” I said with conviction in my voice. “I watched my mom cower in fear my whole damn life.”

  He nodded again. I wished to hell I could figure out what he was thinking. “And in the bedroom . . . have your urges been . . . well received?”

  “Yes and no . . .” I said thinking of Jessie as compared to my girlfriend in high school.

  “Can you expound?”

  “Only if you do . . .” I said, inclining in my seat, my heart thrashing in my chest. “This is killing me, Doc. I don’t know what you think of me or if what I’ve told you is so messed up you don’t know what to say.”

  He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “That statement alone reveals the kind of person you are, Nate.”

  I waited, my fists clenching, in an attempt to hold every single piece of me together.

  “A person who is all about control no matter the consequences would not be asking me that question,” he said, his eyebrows scrunching together. “He’d be trying to manipulate the situation for his gain. Do you understand?”

  He was describing my father, so I understood completely. “Yes.”

  “You, on the other hand,” he said, cupping his chin. “I am going to assume you’ve had these fantasies in the bedroom for a long time—plenty of men do, in fact. And lots of women imagine what it would be like to be dominated as well.”

  My eyebrows rose at that revelation.

  “As long as there are two consenting adults and a mutual agreement has been established regarding limits and safety,” he paused, and I thought about how Jessie and I agreed that she’d tell me if it was too much, if she needed to stop. “What they choose to partake in—inside and outside of the bedroom is their business.”

  I inhaled a sharp breath, as disbelief coursed through my veins. I could feel my pulse pounding in my ears.

  “Now your fantasy is extra tricky because of your upbringing.” Dr. Drake stood and began pacing the room. “You’re trying so hard not to identify with your father, that the very thought of doing something even remotely like him terrifies you. Makes you wonder if you’re on the path to becoming like him.”

  I nodded vigorously. He got it. My most terrifying fear.

  “But, I’ve already learned a couple of things about you, Nate. And one of them is that you are not at all like your father and never will be.” He stopped and turned to me. “If you were, you would have a much different personality, a much different set of examples to give me of manhandling women in all facets of your life.”

  Something in my chest broke loose, and I was able to breathe more freely.

  “I’m going to guess that the fantasies you’ve had in the bedroom haven’t been well received by someone,” he said. “And because of that you tamped down your urges and they manifested in other ways.”

  Damn this guy was in my head. I nodded as I crossed my ankle over my knee, my foot jiggling a million miles an hour.

  “Has there been anyone you’ve been able to be . . . freer with?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “I restrained myself,” I said, fiddling with my shoelace. “I was afraid what she’d think of me, what she’d do . . . after.”

  His lips tipped up slightly at the corners. “Did she seem to be enjoying herself?”

  “Yeah . . . even encouraged me, during.”

  He nodded. “And then you felt terrible afterward?”

  I hung my head. “Yeah.”

  He waited until my eyes met his. “Are you seeing this girl, regularly, in a relationship?”

  “I don’t exactly do relationships,” I said. “Or at least I never used to.”

  He cocked his head. “But you maybe want to—with her?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve never felt this way about anybody before.”

  “Go on,” he said. “Tell me how that feels.”

  “Like I want to see her all the time, if only to have her smile at me,” I said, my heart in my throat just thinking about her. “But then I burn so hot for her. I want to be alone with her, to . . . you know.”

  “Is there a give-and-take in the bedroom?” he asked, picking his paperweight off his desk and moving it from hand to hand. “Or is it all about getting what you want?”

  “Thing is, I had never gotten what I wanted. I used to just get off any way I could,” I said, feeling completely free to be honest now. “But with her, I want to do anything to please her, because she gives it back to me.”

  A huge, genuine smile broke across Dr. Drake’s face. “That, my friend, is the making of a real relationship. If only you could get there.”

  I felt light as a feather, like I’d float right out the window directly in front of me. He was handing me the goddamn key and this time, I was gonna fucking reach for it.

  “Next appointment you’re going to tell me exactly how you’ve done that,” he said, folding his arms across his broad chest.

  “Done what?”

  “Finally let her in.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Jessie

  I was standing beside our photography booth at the art festival. All of the students’ projects had already been hung. Mine was in the center intermixed with some really awesome ones from other classmates. I had gotten an A and my professor was very taken with my assignment. He told me I had a great eye and a promising future ahead of me.

  Emmy, Lila, and Bennett had Raw Ink set up down aisle one. My mom’s welln
ess center also had a tent exhibition here and she had walked over to view my work.

  Her eyes misted over when she saw my presentation, either because it reminded her of Dad or because I did a darn good job, but all I knew was that the next moment she had pulled me into a hug.

  “You like it?” I said, my throat tight.

  “Honey, it’s incredible,” she said. “He would have been so proud.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered and embraced her tighter.

  When she drew back she looked me in the eye. “Does Nate know he’s in your shots?”

  “Yeah,” I said, biting my lip and looking down at my Chucks.

  “You’ve fallen for him.”

  She said it so simply, like it was inevitable, so I just nodded. I realized I was in deep with Nate the night after the emergency room visit when we lay wrapped in each other’s arms. Probably even before that.

  We’d seen one another several days since then in much the same way, and each time my phone buzzed with a message from him, my heart ballooned unbearably.

  “There’s no way he won’t guess something’s up once he’s seen your display.”

  I knew that going in but the project felt natural. Fulfilling. Perfect. “You’re probably right.”

  “Does he feel the same?” my mom asked.

  I shrugged because I wasn’t completely sure and even if I was, he might not be ready to take the next step with me. “I hope so.”

  “What does your heart say?” she asked, her eyes a reflection of mine.

  “It says yes,” I whispered as it rapped uncomfortably against my chest.

  “The heart doesn’t lie,” she said. “And you have so much to give, honey. That family’s been through a lot. But the way that boy looks at you . . .”

  She kissed my cheek, which had become inflamed. When I looked over her shoulder, I noticed a group of muscular guys from the university walking by. The street had been roped off for the festival, so some students had walked through only to get to their destination.

  I spotted Nate’s brother, Luke, in the mix of his football buddies. He wasn’t the largest one in the bunch but he walked with a surety I lacked at times. When my eye caught his, I tipped my chin and he offered a wave and a smile. My chest loosened at his acknowledgement. But that gesture alone told me that he’d already done some growing in the past few weeks, as a human being.