by Jewel, Bella
One by one, we file into the station, me with Nuke’s lead wrapped around my wrist, my T-shirt spattered with blood, my knuckles busted up. Ellie’s beautiful face is bruised black and blue, and Spencer clings to his mamma for dear life.
Sergeant Murphy takes a statement from me and photographs of Elle’s face. When he asks her if she has any concealed injuries she breaks down and a female officer I don’t know ushers her into a private room alone to obtain evidence. I see red, and I wish I’d continued beating that worthless motherfucker until his brains painted the pavement. It takes everything I have not to get up and go find him to finish the job, but Spencer would be all alone while he waited for his mamma, and though he’s been giving me a wide berth, when a younger man with tattoos and a buzz-cut, his wrists in cuffs, marches by with a police escort, Spencer moves one seat closer to me. I don’t dare touch him for fear of frightening him even more than I already have, but I order Nuke to sit by his feet, and the boy gives me a gloomy smile.
Several hours later, we leave exhausted and hungry and with an RO in Ellie’s possession. It’s something that will stand up in court. If this asshole ever tries to lay a finger on her again, he’ll be sent right back to lock-up where he belongs.
I drive back to my house and shut off the engine. Despite it not being his regular routine, Spencer fell asleep in the car on the way home. The boy was pretty shaken up, which makes me wonder what he saw these last two days while I wasn’t around. I glance at Ellie, who’s staring out the window at my yard. The weight of the silence between us presses down on my skin, suffocating me, and I sigh. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
She doesn’t say anything; she just sits there staring up at my house. “I want to go home.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“You can’t stop me,” she sneers in a whispered hush, careful not to wake Spencer. I just raise a brow. “So you’re going to keep us forever?”
Yes, I think, and chide myself internally. She’s not mine to keep, but she’s certainly not his either.
“Take me home, Jake.”
“No. Not until he’s no longer a threat to you or your boy.”
“He got what he came for—practically cleaned out my savings account. I got no way of paying my rent this month, but his bark is worse than his bite.”
“That why your face is all banged up?” I slide the keys out of the ignition and tuck them in my pocket. I ain’t giving them back to her until I know she ain’t gonna run. “Where else did he hurt you?”
She shakes her head and turns away from me and then her soft sobs fill the car. I don’t touch her because I’m not sure she wants me to, but it takes everything I have not to do it.
“Did he—”
“No. He tried, but he was so drunk he couldn’t keep it up long enough to do any damage.”
My hands shake on the wheel, and guilt slides its ugly fingers around my throat and squeezes. I’ve been such a bastard to her, drunk off my ass and spewin’ hurtful empty words, and then she was faced with a physically abusive drunk when she returned home. I should have swallowed my stupid pride and checked in on her. I could have stopped this before it even begun.
“Come on, angel. Let’s go inside.”
She nods, but doesn’t make a move to open her car door, so I slide from my seat and do it for her. I let Nuke out, and then I lift Spence from his seat and carry him upstairs into the spare room beside mine. I lay him gently on the bed and I’m grateful he doesn’t wake, because the last thing Elle needs right now is a meltdown.
Ellie watches him for several moments before quietly exiting the room, and then she just stands there, lookin’ lost. I reach out and place my hand on the back of her head, pulling her into me, and she breaks down sobbing. She buries her head in my chest, her tears soaking through the fabric of my shirt. I hold her. It should feel awkward, I should want to pull away, but I don’t. It’s been so long since I held a woman in my arms, I forgot what it felt like to comfort another and find peace with someone so close. I kiss her hair and let her cry into my chest, and the moment is as perfect as it is torturous. She looks up at me with her tear-stained face and a beat passes where the breath between us mingles and you could cut the tension with a knife. I take a step back, out of the warmth of her embrace. I didn’t bring her here for that, and under no circumstances do I want her to mistake my intentions.
“I’ll go fix us somethin’ to eat.”
She inhales a ragged breath, and her voice follows me down the hall. “Jake, I wanted to tell you. I just . . . I didn’t know how . . .”
“You don’t owe me anything, Elle.” I say, and hurry down the stairs before she feels the need to explain herself to me. I meant what I said—she don’t owe me a thing. She isn’t mine, and she can’t ever be mine, and not just because once upon a time she took another man’s name, but because now I see where she’s been, I’m determined to keep her from making the same mistakes.
Ellie Mason has had enough broken men to last her a lifetime. She don’t need the burden of another.
* * *
After we eat our grilled cheeses in silence, Ellie turns in, and I walk around the house locking windows and securing doors. This is something I do every night, but this time I’m extra diligent, because I will not have anything happen to the Masons on my watch.
When I’m done, I head to my bathroom and splash cold water on my face. I stare too long at the hole in the wall where my mirror used to be. Nuke nudges me and then leaves the bathroom to jump up on the bed, but I shake my head and tell him we’ll be sleeping in the armchair outside Ellie’s bedroom door tonight. I don’t know how much he understands, but I know that’s not a happy whine.
After thirty minutes, I carefully creak open the door of the spare room and stand watching her and Spence. They’re at opposite ends of the bed but turned in toward one another as they sleep. I cop an eyeful of smooth, tanned thighs; she’s still wearing her shirt from earlier, but her jeans are folded neatly on the chair. I should have given her something more comfortable to sleep in. I glance away, so I’m not staring at her like a creeper, and then I quietly close the room up again and settle into the wingback chair I carried into the hall for this very occasion. Nuke is unhappy with the arrangement, and I order him to bed but he gives a doggy huff to show his annoyance and stretches out on the carpet runner a few yards away. I stay awake as long as I can, but even I have my limits, and after the fight and running like I did today, I’m beat. Finally, I feel my lids slippin’ closed and I drift away.
* * *
“No!” I wake and seize hold of the hand on my arm, digging my fingers in with bruising strength. Her yelp brings me back to the present and I let go of Ellie’s hand as if her touch had burned me. She recoils, backing up into the closed bedroom door. My heart thunders a staccato beat. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“You were having a nightmare.” Ellie rubs at her wrist. It’s dark, save for the moonlight comin’ from my bedroom windows at the end of the hall. In it, I can see that her eyes are round as saucers. “You were screaming someone’s name. I thought you were being murdered.”
I nod. Usually Nuke wakes me, but he may have been thrown off given that we aren’t in the bedroom. The spoiled little brat snuck on back to my bed. “Are you hurt?”
“What’s a few bruises?” she says, quietly. “Maybe if we draw lines from these to the others we could create a picture.”
My stomach lurches and I have to swallow back bile. She might be used to it from her ex, but the last thing I ever wanted was for her to be used to me hurting her. “I’m sorry, angel.”
“Mamma?” Spencer cries out, and she glances at me with a long painful look before she disappears into the room, quietly shutting the door. Beyond it, she coos to him and tells him that they’re safe because they’re with me. I’d feel a hell of a lot better if I hadn’t just attacked her in my sleep.
Nuke jumps off my bed and nudges his head into my lap. I stroke his soft
fur for a minute or two, trying to ease some of the anxiety I feel, then I get up and head to the kitchen to put on some coffee. I can’t go back to sleep now. The idea that she heard me screaming is humiliating enough, but the fact that I lashed out at her, that I hurt her—that burns like acid in my gut.
Pacing in my kitchen, I work the kinks from my body. I ache all over from yesterday’s run, and I’m sweatin’ like a whore in church, though I’m sure it’s just the remnants of the nightmare.
I’d been in my cell again. It was pitch black and so cramped I couldn’t lie down on the dirt floor. I couldn’t even sit without my legs and feet touching the sides of the room. The pain from the shrapnel in my body kept me from sleepin’, even if I could find a way to get comfortable. But pain was how you knew you were alive. In this instance, pain had been my worst enemy and my only friend, and I’d tallied it up. I’d kept track of every whip, every lash, and every beating they laid upon my flesh. Every time I’d bled even a drop, I’d made a promise I would pay it back in kind. I would avenge my brothers. The men they’d killed and the ones who were still alive somewhere in that hell hole. One day they’d slip up, and I’d take down every last motherfucking one of those sons of bitches.
It’s funny how you can feel so replete in the idea of revenge, so consumed that it becomes a part of you. The man I was got swallowed down by hate, drowned out by bloodlust, and injustice, and the need to spill blood for blood.
An eye for an eye.
Only I never got my revenge, and the beast inside me who had longed to exact it was never sated. He lives on still, rattling the cage, looking for a chink in the iron bars that hold him and finding his escape only in the havoc he plays with my mind.
The Taliban might not have killed me, but the beast and the guilt slay me every damn day.
18
Jake
In the morning, I wake to the smell of biscuits cookin’ in my kitchen. My stomach growls. Elle’s biscuits could rival Willie’s down at the Biscuit King. After she woke me, I ended up moving onto the couch in the front parlor. I barely fit on the damn thing, but time in the Corps had taught me I could sleep standing up like a horse if I had to.
Spencer tears through the room and comes to a halt in front of me. I blink bleary eyes at him and scrub my hand down over my face. My joints are stiff this morning, and there’s a little bruising and broken skin over the knuckles, but I’ll live.
“What are you doin’ on that teeny-tiny little couch, Jake Tucker?” he says, with a frown on his face.
“I got lost and fell asleep here.” I grin and sit up, rolling my shoulders and movin’ my neck side to side until it cracks.
He giggles. “In your own house?”
“It’s a big house. You sleep okay?”
“Like a baby,” Spencer drawls. He stares at me a beat, his lips workin’ but no sound comin’ out, and then in a quiet voice he says, “You ever kill a man, Jake Tucker?”
I exhale heavily and lean back against the couch, scrubbing a hand over my face, Nuke jumps up beside me and paws at my chest. I pat him on the head and answer as honestly as I can without tryin’ to glorify war for a boy who’s far too eager to see it. “Yes, I have, Spence. When you enter The Corps you know it’s a possibility. Why?”
“Did you kill my daddy? He wasn’t gettin’ up, and his face looked like Mamma’s mincemeat right after she adds the spaghetti sauce.”
“No, I didn’t kill him. I imagine he’d be pretty sore about now though.”
He nods, his blond curls bobbing. “I bet he would be too.”
“Where’s your mamma?”
“Making a mess of your kitchen,” Spencer says. I get up and let the blanket fall from my waist and stretch out my aching muscles. I’m fixin’ to find Elle and see how she’s doin’ this mornin’. Wouldn’t hurt to get my hands on a couple of those biscuits either. Nuke jumps down from the couch and follows me.
“Jake?”
“Yeah, Spencer?”
“Will you teach me to fight like that?” He fusses with the back of his shirt where the tag should be and looks nervously down at my floor. “You know, in case he comes back?”
I turn and crouch down to his level, careful not to touch him. “Listen, you don’t need to learn to hit like that, because you have me. How are you with numbers? Pretty good, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“If I give you my phone number, do you think you can remember it?”
He nods and I trail off my number and make him repeat it back to me. He gets it spot on first time, and by the third time I ask him to repeat it he rolls his eyes and tells me again impatiently, “I’ll call, but I’m still gonna need you to teach me how to fight. I’m the man of the house; I need to be able to protect what’s mine. Mamma says we protect things smaller than us and girls. She might not be smaller, but she’s still a girl.”
“I’m afraid your mamma might just kill me for that one, kid, but I tell you what. You call that number anytime you need me to come fight your battles until you’re big enough to face off with someone like your daddy. Deal?”
His shoulders slump and he sighs. “Yeah, okay, deal.”
“Swear it,” I warn.
He salutes me. “Yes sir, Jake sir. I swear it.”
I chuckle and salute him back. “At ease, Marine.”
Spencer tears back down the hall screamin’, “Mamma, Jake Tucker’s awake.”
Nuke and I follow behind the boy, albeit at much less of a breakneck speed. When we reach the kitchen, Ellie turns toward me. Her eye looks real nasty today and my whole body tenses, but I remind myself that the yellow of the third-day bruising can sometimes look worse than when it’s done fresh. Still, bastard got off easily.
“I know,” she says, givin’ me a lopsided smile. “I look terrible.”
“You’re perfect.” Her eyes widen and I clear my throat. “It always looks worse on the third day. Couple of cold compresses should help with the pain.”
“It don’t hurt too badly.” She waves it away, as if bein’ hit by your husband is no big deal.
Husband. Shit. I still can’t get used to the idea that she’s married to another man. No, not a man, a scumbag. Real men don’t hit.
“I hope it’s okay that I made breakfast. I figured it was the least I could do, but then I realized it was your food to begin with, so it’s not like I’ve really done you any favors and I just . . . well, there I go again, ramblin’ like always.”
“Breakfast is great.” I glance at the fluffy golden-brown biscuits on my kitchen counter. My mouth waters just lookin’ at them. There’s sausage gravy on the stove, and I lick my lips; there ain’t a faster way to my heart than a good biscuit with sausage gravy. As if she hadn’t already paved her own damn road through my chest right to it. “How you doin’ this morning?”
“I’m great.”
I cock an eyebrow, and give her a cut-the-bullshit glare. “How are you really?”
“I’m fine.”
I gently coax her arm from her side and turn her wrists over to inspect the damage I did last night. The faintest purple fingerprint stares back at me. I trace the outline of it so gently I barely even feel the softness of her skin. “I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head, staring up at me in earnest. “You don’t have to apologize.”
“I do actually. I just beat the shit out of your ex-husband and here I am laying my hands on you in the middle of the night.” I bring her forearm to my lips and kiss the bruise. She closes her eyes and tears leak out from the corners.
“I know you would never hurt me intentionally, Jake.”
I pull her to me, cradling the back of her head the way I had last night as I kiss her hair and whisper, “I’d just as soon throw myself on the mercy of the Taliban again before I hurt you.”
And I mean every word. I’d give my life for this woman and her son—I’d give them my last penny if it would help keep them safe. The two of them came careening into my life when I wanted it the least.
That car accident of hers wound up being the best thing that ever happened to me.
* * *
When we pull into her drive, it’s apparent immediately that something’s wrong. The door to her salon isn’t just open; the whole glass pane is smashed. Ellie puts her hands over her mouth and gasps. I tell her to wait in the car while I sweep the house, but I know he’s probably long gone. I ease open the door. Glass crunches under my foot as I move farther into the salon. The house is trashed, and it’s apparent that Jimmy’s been here. Across the living room wall, painted in what looks to be Spencer’s craft paint in red, white, and blue is the word WHORE.
From a felon to Frankenstein. Elle sure knows how to pick ’em.
I don’t want her to see something like this. Hell, I didn’t even want to bring her back here because it wasn’t safe. She’d hollered and carried on about missing appointments and money lost, and we’d settled on a compromise. She could go to work, but I would stay with her the whole time, and Spencer too. It weren’t safe for either one of them to be away from me while her husband was out there.
I sweep the house and find it clear, but there isn’t a single piece of furniture he hasn’t ruined or left unturned. The TV is smashed and all her plates, glasses, and knick-knacks too. There are a couple of holes where Jimmy put his fist through the drywall.
A noise from the salon has me doubling back before she can see her home destroyed like this. I block the door. “I told you to wait in the car.”
“Let me by, Jake,” she says, looking up at me with tears in her eyes. I shake my head, and I don’t move one bit. Ellie shouts, beating her fists against my chest. I’m now the target for her anger and frustration, and that’s okay. I’ll take it gladly if it means she don’t have to see her and Spencer’s lives destroyed like this.