Untitled Until Brandon

by Natasha Madison

  “Hi there, Cassie,” he says, putting down the chart and pulling on a pair of gloves.

  “Hi,” Cassie says. “This is a waste of time. I’m fine. I just bumped my head.”

  “Well, I’m here now, so how about we just examine you, and then you can go?” Dr. Chester says, and Cassie nods her head. “Can I look at your head to make sure you are okay?”

  “Fine,” she says as she rolls her eyes. The doctor touches the bump on her head, and she hisses. “That hurts.”

  “You’ve got a big bump on your head. The good news is it’s out and not in,” the doctor says, getting a little flashlight from his pocket. “I’m going to check your eyes.” He flashes the light in her eye, asking her to look to the left and then to the right. “She has a mild concussion. No television, phone, or computer for at least twenty-four hours. If the headache remains longer than seven days, come back,” he says and walks out of the room.

  The nurse comes right back in. “I need your insurance card please.” She looks at Aurora, who looks down and then up again as her hands start to shake.

  “We don’t have insurance,” she says quietly.

  “Well, if you don’t have insurance, you will be required to make a payment,” the nurse starts, and I get my wallet out.

  “She has insurance with the company; just bill me, and we will send it to the insurance,” I tell the nurse, who takes my credit card. Aurora looks at me in shock and is about to say something but then stops.

  “Would you like me to take you home?” Mr. Dick asks.

  “I got it.” I turn to look at him, and he retreats.

  “Perfect. I’m assuming she won’t be in school tomorrow, so I’ll advise her teacher. Take care, Cassie,” he says, walking out while the nurse returns with a wheelchair.

  “I can walk,” Cassie says, looking at the nurse who just cocks her hip.

  “You don’t have to drive us,” Aurora tells me. “You can drive us back to the club, and I can get my car.”

  I don’t answer her; instead, I grab her hand in mine as we walk out the front door. “Stay here. I’m going to bring the truck around.” I walk to my truck and drive it around to the front to pick them both up. Cassie gets out of the wheelchair and walks toward the back door. Getting in, she fastens her seat belt while Aurora gets in the front. “Where to, baby?” I ask her. She tells me the part of town where they live, and I cringe. I think Cash’s wife, Lilly, lived there at one point. Cash is my brother in law Asher’s brother. Pulling up in front of her building, I can feel my heart pounding because I know I can’t let her fucking stay here.

  “So is this your boyfriend you keep hidden away and fuck when I’m in school?” Cassie says from the back, and I see Aurora shake her head.

  “Watch your mouth.” I turn to look at her, but she just rolls her eyes at me.

  As soon as I stop the truck, Cassie jumps out and walks inside the building. “I’m sorry about her. She is going through a tough time,” Aurora tells me, and I just nod, getting out of the car. “You don’t have to come up.” She smiles at me. “I know you’re busy.”

  “Lead the way.” I motion with my hand as she walks into the door at the building’s entrance that isn’t locked. I look down at the flimsy lock while I follow her up the six flights of stairs. Stopping at her apartment door, she turns the knob and walks in. The apartment must be the best apartment kept in the building. The walls have fresh white paint on them. Pictures are placed throughout the apartment, but it’s smaller than the men’s bathroom at the club.

  I look around and see a small kitchen with a small table for two. Two doors in the apartment are both closed, but I’m assuming one is the bedroom and one is the bathroom. “You don’t have to stay. We are fine now,” she says. “I don’t think I can come in tomorrow. I can’t leave her alone.”

  “Bring her in,” I tell her. “She can lie down in the back.”

  “She …” She starts to talk and then quietly lowers her voice. “She doesn’t know I work there. She thinks I work in the office.”

  “You do,” I tell her, smiling. “She’ll be fine; no one is in anyway.”

  “I don’t know,” she starts to say when the bedroom door opens and Cassie comes out.

  “I’m starving. Is there any food?” she says, going to the fridge and opening it, and I see it’s almost empty. My stomach turns while my hands clench into fists.

  “I’ll order pizza,” I tell them, taking my phone out of my pocket. “What kind do you girls like?”

  “Oh my god, pizza,” Cassie says with her eyes going wide. “We haven’t had pizza in over three months.”

  I see the shame pass over Aurora’s face, and it takes everything in my willpower not to grab her and hold her. “It hasn’t been that long.”

  “It has,” Cassie says and then looks at me. “Everything. I want everything on it.”

  I laugh at her and order two jumbo pies. Whatever we don’t eat, she can eat later. “Should be here in thirty minutes,” I tell them, taking off my jacket and hanging it on the chair in the kitchen.

  “Sweet,” Cassie says, walking away. “Call me when it’s here.” She slams her door.

  “You don’t have to do that.” Aurora looks at me again.

  “I think we need to talk,” I tell her, pointing at the chair in the kitchen. “We can either talk at the table or the couch.”

  “Table,” she says quickly, going to the table and pulling out a chair to sit in. I grab the other chair, bringing it to her side. “Are you going to sit next to me?”

  “Yeah,” I say, sitting next to her. My hand rests on the back of her chair. “Now talk.”

  “What do you want to know?” she asks me, looking at me. My other hand reaches out to hold her face, rubbing my thumb across her cheek.

  “Everything,” I tell her softly. “I want to know everything.”

  Chapter Four

  Aurora

  His leg touches mine, and my heart literally skips a beat. He has saved my ass more than once today, yet I can’t just give in. And when he leans in and whispers to me that he wants to know everything, my stomach drops.

  “I can’t think when you touch me,” I answer him honestly and then get up, walking a little bit in front of him. I look at him and notice for the first time how big he looks in my apartment. He definitely hits up the gym, for hours if I had to guess. What gets me are his blue eyes; so crystal blue you can get lost in them, and I almost do.

  “My parents died in a car accident,” I tell him, “leaving me to care for my sister.”

  “Okay,” he says, and my hand lands on my lips.

  “She got in a bit of trouble,” I say, looking down.

  “What is a bit of trouble?” He now crosses his arms over his chest, making his big arms bigger, and I see the vein in his head start to throb.

  “Possession with the intent to sell,” I tell him, then look to see if he is judging me, judging us. But he isn’t.

  “What drug?”

  “Six hundred Molly pills.”

  “What the fuck?” he roars and stands up. “Who gave her that shit?”

  “Keep your voice down please.” I look over to see if Cassie is coming out of her room. “It wasn’t hers.”

  “Oh, I know it wasn’t hers,” he says, and I full on sigh for a minute. No one, not even her overpaid lawyer, thought she was innocent. “Who was it?”

  “Her boyfriend at the time, Jerimiah Rodriguez,” I tell him, and he grabs his phone out of his pocket and starts typing. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m getting all the information I can on this fucking punk,” he tells me, not looking up, “but I can tell you right now it doesn’t feel good in my gut.”

  “Yeah, well, it wasn’t,” I tell him. “He left her out to dry all by herself. So all the money we had went into her trial. Every single cent.”

  “Fuck,” he hisses, still looking at his phone. “This guy is bad news, and when I mean bad news, I mean he’s the devil’s spawn.”<
br />
  My mouth gets dry, and my hands start to get clammy. “She isn’t allowed to talk to him, and she is basically under house arrest. She goes to school and comes home, and that’s it.” I don’t have time to tell him anything else when there is a knock on the door. He walks to it and opens the door. The man is standing there with two of the biggest pizza pies I’ve seen in my life.

  “Thanks, man,” he says to him. “I owe you.”

  “Anytime,” he tells him and nods to me before he turns and walks away.

  “Is the pizza here?” Cassie asks when she comes out of the bedroom. “Oh my god, we are going to have pizza for days.” She smiles and grabs the top pie before he has a chance to put it on the counter. She opens it and moans. “This looks so good,” she says, grabbing the three plates we have and putting a piece on one of them.

  “Sit at the table,” Brandon tells her when he places the other pie on the coffee table in the living room. I place a piece of pizza on a plate for him. “Thanks, baby,” he says softly and goes to sit down. “What happened to your neck?” He looks at Cassie as he sits down.

  She looks up and stops chewing, fear taking over her face. “Nothing,” she says. I walk to Brandon’s side to find what looks like two fingerprints on each side of her neck. I didn’t see them before because she was wearing a scarf.

  “What is that?” I ask now, leaning into her and seeing the bluish prints.

  “I said nothing.” She gets up, ready to pull a tantrum, but Brandon holds up his hand.

  “Sit down,” Brandon says softly, not raising his voice, which stops her and makes her sit back down. “Now, let’s discuss this calmly.” He turns and looks at Cassie who stares at him. “What happened to your neck?”

  She shakes her head, but tears form in her eyes. “I can’t,” she whispers. “I can’t tell you.”

  I take a deep breath and look at her. “You have to. Who did this to you?” I walk to her and take her in my arms as she cries. “What is it?”

  “Cassie,” Brandon says quietly, “you need to tell us what happened to you, so we can protect you.”

  “It was Veronica,” Cassie says softly, “Jerimiah’s sister. Apparently, another one of his girlfriends was caught with drugs, and the DA is looking into opening a case against him. She thought they were coming to talk to me.” Her voice goes lower and lower. “She gave me a warning.”

  Brandon’s phone rings, and he picks it up. “Hey, Kenton.” He looks down and then up again at us. “I’ll be home in twenty. Get there.”

  “Pack your stuff,” Brandon says. “Both of you.”

  “What?” I ask him. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, that was my cousin Kenton.” He looks at us. “This isn’t going to stop.” He looks at Cassie, who stands there shaking. “Get your things. We are leaving.”

  He grabs the boxes of pizza and shuts them. “We can eat when we get to my house,” he says, grabbing the bags while Cassie runs in her room and comes out with her school bag. I’m standing here almost in shock.

  “I brought most of my clothes to work today,” I tell him as he grabs his jacket.

  “Let’s go,” he says, and we walk out and follow him. “Baby, get in the truck,” he says, and I do what he tells me.

  “You’re scaring me,” I tell him.

  He leans over and puts his hand on my face again. “You never have to be scared of me, ever.”

  I nod my head as he takes off from our apartment building, going toward where I think is his house. We pull up to a huge house in the middle of the woods. “Holy shit,” Cassie says from behind me, my mouth just hanging open when I see the white house in front of me with a wraparound porch. “This place is huge,” she says, getting out of the truck.

  “I’ll show you around,” Brandon says, walking up the two steps to get to the front door. I look down the porch and see a hammock hanging in the middle of it. We walk into the house, and I admire the two-story entryway. To my left is a dark room, and I see that a leather couch sits in the middle of the wall facing the door with a bull head in the center of the wall. “That’s my man cave.” He smiles and then looks to the right; a long brown table with eight white chairs is in the middle of the room with a beautiful flower arrangement in the middle of the table—definitely a woman’s touch “My sister did my shopping,” he tells me, walking farther into the house. The ceiling opens up again, and you see the upstairs again. The soft beige L-shaped couch looks like it can fit twenty people. Throw pillows line the edges, and a huge square ottoman sits in the middle with a tray and remotes for probably the biggest television I have ever seen in my whole life.

  “This place is crazy insane,” Cassie says while she turns around, looking at everything. We turn to the right, walking into the kitchen. His cabinets are all white, and his countertops are stainless steel. His fridge is the size of a house. But what draws me in is the breakfast area. A bench right in front of the windows with a table and four chairs around it. It looks so homey and perfect.

  “I’ll show you to the bedrooms,” he says with his hand on my lower back. We walk past the living room, down a hallway, and come into a huge bedroom. He doesn’t have to tell me this is his. I can smell him all around me. “This is my room,” he says, and my back goes up straight. “I’m staying upstairs in another room.”

  “NO.” I shake my head. “No way are you giving up your room.”

  “Not up for discussion.” He looks over and then Cassie breaks the tension.

  “Can I go upstairs and pick a room?” she asks, smiling. “I’ll take the smaller room, of course.”

  “Go ahead,” he says, and she runs out of the room and up the stairs. “There is another master bedroom upstairs. I’ll sleep there.” He faces me, his thumb rubbing my cheek. “Let me do this for you,” he whispers, and his tone breaks me.

  “Nobody has ever done anything for us,” I tell him honestly.

  “That changes now.” He leans forward, and I hold my breath, hoping that he kisses me. His lips are so close to mine I can feel his breath on me.

  “Holy shit, there is a movie room!” Cassie yells from somewhere in the house, breaking the moment. Brandon laughs, and then the doorbell rings.

  “That should be Kenton,” he says, grabbing my hand in his as we walk back to the front door. Cassie leans over the railing upstairs, waving to me.

  Brandon opens the door, greeting the guy. “Kenton, thanks for coming.”

  “Cassie, Aurora,” he says, “this is my cousin Kenton.”

  “Is everyone in your family hot?” Cassie asks from upstairs while Brandon groans, and Kenton laughs.

  “She hasn’t met Nico yet?” Kenton asks Brandon, and he just shakes his head. “That should be interesting.”

  “Come in,” he tells him, and we walk into the living room. “So what’s the story?” He doesn’t even wait for him to sit down, and Cassie comes downstairs into the room.

  “It’s not good,” he says. “Jerimiah is a small town dealer. He has been picked up a total of seventeen times. Out of the seventeen, fourteen were with women, carrying shit for him.” Kenton looks at Cassie. “She was the one who had the most on her.”

  “Okay,” Brandon says.

  “It seems that the DEA are all over him trying to find out who his supplier is, but every lead has been a dead end.”

  “I can imagine no one is happy with this situation,” Brandon says.

  “Nope, and you can imagine the loss is hitting his wallet big time.” Kenton looks at Cassie. “How far are you into this guy?”

  “I’m not,” she says and looks down. “I just went out with him because it was fun, and he bought me stuff.”

  “Spoken like a true sixteen-year-old,” Kenton says, “So now the DA is going after the girls caught with the drugs to see if anyone will flip on him.”

  “That’s what his sister said,” Cassie says quietly, “then she smashed my head against the bathroom concrete wall.”

  I gasp out in horror and move t
o my sister’s side. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I grab her face in mine.

  “Because they said they would come for us.” She looks at me and then at Brandon. “We have nowhere else to go and no money.”

  “You aren’t going back to that school,” Brandon says right away.

  “If she leaves that school, they will think she turned on him. She needs to go to that school and pretend like nothing is going on, like she knows nothing.”

  “But I don’t know anything,” Cassie says. “I knew him for two weeks. When he started getting a little bit too pushy, I slowly distanced myself, but not before I got caught with all those drugs.” She looks at me. “I swear, Aurora, I haven’t spoken to him.”

  “I know,” I tell her, hugging her, “I know.”

  “So what do we do?” Brandon asks him as he sits back on the couch.

  “I have Justin going through his computer. The DEA is trailing him, so we can’t get between them.” He looks at Cassie. “You see him, you walk the other way, and you make sure you two are never spotted together or alone.”

  “I will,” she says. “Can I go to my room now?” she asks, and I just nod.

  “I took the blue room,” she tells Brandon. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “Anything you want.” He smiles at her.

  “I’m going to see if she’s okay,” I tell Brandon, who just nods at me, and then I turn to Kenton. “Thank you for this.”

  “Family sticks together,” he says, and I just nod at him. Walking upstairs, I head to the room with the closed door. I knock on the door, then open it, coming face-to-face with the blue room. The king-size bed looks like you will sink in if you lie on it. There are about fifteen pillows on the bed and in the middle curled up into a little ball is Cassie.

  “Hey,” I say, getting on the bed. I was not wrong about the bed sucking us in; it’s like a cloud. “Don’t cry,” I say, hugging her from behind. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “I’m so sorry, Aurora. So, so sorry.” She turns in my arms as I hold her, and she cries till she falls asleep.

  I get up softly, trying not to wake her, and go downstairs. I look in the kitchen, but he isn’t there. I walk down the hallway to his room, my heart speeding up. I should just go upstairs and crawl into a bed, I tell myself, yet my feet push me toward his room. I knock on the open door, peeking my head inside where the side lamps are giving the room a soft glow. “Brandon,” I say as I look around and see that he isn’t here either. I’m about to walk out when he walks back into the room, and I’m stopped in my tracks. He’s got a white towel wrapped around his waist as he holds the side, and his hair is still wet from the shower. My eyes roam down from his blue eyes to his broad chest, tiny little drops of water are still on his chest. His abs, so defined with not one ounce of fat on them. “Um, I knocked,” I tell him, trying not to sound flustered and failing.