“Go ahead and let ’em. It’s not like anybody will care.” I snapped the button on my pants and looked back one more time at the only man I could ever love. The man that was a brother to the monster of my past.
Outside, I realized I left my keys in his room. I debated going back after them, but took off walking instead.
Four hours later
I had wandered around for hours. The sun started to rise and I was no closer to my apartment than I was when I first left Ethan’s. I had half expected him to follow me. I, however, guess I was not important enough to get out of bed for. Tired, I slid down the side of a dumpster behind the Westside Mall and tucked my purse under my shirt. I’ve done it before. I could had lived in the streets. That was not the first night I walked around trying to figure out where to go. The only thing different was I didn’t have my mom to protect that time. I heard the car pull up, but didn’t care enough to look.
“Privy,” Ethan said. Hearing his voice automatically destroyed me. “I’ve looked everywhere. I was terrified and I don’t do scared very well.”
I glanced up through my long veil of hair. Ethan appeared worn and tired, but never more beautiful. My head hung. The effects from the alcohol still had my head spinning. I tried remembering leaving the bar. Hopefully, alone. Surely, the whole night had been an alcoholic induced haze. He sat down causing me to draw my knees up and wrap my arms around them. Ethan cradled me in his arms.
“Come home with me. Let me at least tell you everything. You need to know everything, so you can know what you face.”
My eyes closed as I swallowed. What more did I need to know? Maybe, Ethan helped them hurt me. Maybe, he enjoyed it. Mad, I slung his arm off me. “All I have ever wanted was someone to care. I thought you cared.”
“Sweetheart, I do care. I love you and to be honest, I didn’t think I was capable of love.”
“Is this a joke to you?” I scooted down the wall to distance myself from him. He respected my barriers and clasped his hands in his lap. I looked out in the distance. He couldn’t defend what he did to me.
“I was the camper that held you those three days. I’ve never went a day without thinking about you since.”
My head turned and I jumped to my feet. He was crying. He knew who I was. He had fooled me all that time. I combed my fingers through my hair; my purse fell out of my shirt. I didn’t take the time to pick it up. All I wanted was to get away from him. I broke out in a full fledge sprint. He had me in a bear hug before I got a breath out.
“I never meant to hurt you.”
“You did hurt me.” You have lied to me repeatedly. I wiggled in his arms.
“I know.” He released me. “They sent me to Knoxville to find you and kill you.”
I couldn’t move. My feet were cemented in place. The ground shifted under my feet as vomit erupted from my mouth. I felt liquid ricochet against the wall. I vomited repeatedly until I wondered if it was possible to turn inside out. Encased in his arms, I finally collapsed against a hard chest.
“Privy,” Ethan whispered and slowly begin to rock me.
I fisted his shirt in my hands. “Are you going to make it hurt?” Who was I kidding? Nothing could hurt worse than a broken heart.
“Babe, the only thing I’m ever going to do to you is love you and try to get you to love me back.” He kissed my temple. I grasped his shirt and buried myself against him. It didn’t matter, something about being in his arms made me feel secure.
“Come home with me.”
I simply nodded. Go ahead and kill me. Who would care?
We never spoke on the way back to his house. I didn’t even think and hardly realized we had arrived until I felt his hand pull me from the car. He started to hug me, but paused. I glanced down at myself, splattered with my most recent hurling. I wanted to clean myself and mostly give my mind a breather. “Can I clean up first?”
“Yeah,” he answered.
“Can I borrow some clean clothes?” I finally glanced at his face. His brown eyes twinkled. I never cared for brown eyes before. But the contrast to his pale blond hair and the way his glimmered made them my favorite eyes ever.
“You can have any damn thing you want.” Ethan’s eyes closed. I could see the tension in his expression. Feeling the hardness of his shoulders, he started to calm under my fingertips.
He led me into the house and straight to the bathroom. He kissed my forehead. “I need you.”
Glad to finally have a moment to myself, I slowly ran the washcloth over my face. I couldn’t even wrap my mind around all that he had confessed. He was there to kill me, and that he loved me. Those two thoughts did not collide.
The creak of the door frightened me. Ethan poked his head in. “Can I come in?” He held some clothes in his hand, and worked his jaw back and forth. It was quite obvious, he was everything but okay. How I stood there calm and cool was beyond even me. I had grown accustom to not caring, but this even went beyond that. I cared, but felt safe. Insane often, Dylan? He pushed my hair behind my ear.
“My love, I won’t begin to tell you all the people I’ve hurt and honestly I don’t care what I did to them. But you, I would kill myself before I let anything happen to you.” He held out the clothes he was holding. As if he hadn’t just admitted to hurting other human beings, he started talking about the clothes. “It’s a tee-shirt and some jogging pants that are way too small for me.”
“Do you really love me?” Why I blurted out that question I’m not sure. But I loved him and would had over looked a lot to have him return that love.
His knees parted and slightly bent. He pulled me between his legs and kissed the hollow of my neck. “What I feel for you goes much deeper than the word love can ever explain. Change and I will try to explain everything to you.”
I had hidden my face against his chest, confused by all he was saying. He kissed the top of my head. “Change, Privy. I’ll meet you in the den.”
I raised my eyes and they locked with his. The fear and heartache I saw in his beautiful, almost too perfect face hurt me far more than any physical blow I had ever taken. I was accustomed to pain and humiliation. I could shut down everything and pretend it didn’t really happen to me. It was no more than a story I was reading. But standing there seeing him suffer was one pain I could never turn off. It didn’t matter what he had done he owned me completely. “I’m yours.” I whispered.
He tilted my chin and softly placed a kiss against my lips. “Privy, I have never went a day without thinking of you. I want to be the one to love you. I didn’t know how and still don’t.”
“You were mad the first day I saw you in the Pizza House?”
“I was always mad.”
“Did you know . . .” I started to ask.
“Yeah, beautiful, I did. It was so hard to ignore you. But there were a few other associates there. I couldn’t take the chance of them figuring out who you were.” He handed the clothes over. “Get dressed. I’ll be on the couch.”
I stood there long after he was gone. I threw the clothes to the floor, stripped, and marched to the living room. I stood before him naked and unsure.
“What do you see?” The tears clouded my eyes until I was unable to see. “The woman you almost took in your bed earlier or the young girl laid bare, exposed, and beaten out in that field.” I felt sick to my stomach as my heart rate elevated. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so nervous. His eyes turned to ice.
He threw a blanket at me. “Sit.”
Immediately, I collapsed on the edge of the sofa, tugging the blanket around me. Ethan stood over me. “My brother was an evil asshole. He hated me because my dad loved my mom. I was the chosen son. Instead of him trying to do what was right to gain dad’s attention, he did everything wrong.” He downed the drink he was holding and tossed the glass across the room. “I got a call one night from Devon, the little one. He told me what my brother had done and that he was about to kill this girl.” He took four deep breaths, no doubt trying to
calm down. “I rushed out there. We couldn’t have a murder traced back to us.”
“You didn’t care that he was hurting someone? You just didn’t want trouble?” I asked and started twisting my hands. I felt like I was going to throw up. I clutched the blanket tight around me and darted to the bathroom. I locked the door and fell to the ground. The door vibrated at my back as he pounded his fist onto it.
“Damn it, Dylan. You asked me what I saw when I look at you naked. I don’t just see a body I would like to fuck. I see the body I want to make love to for the rest of my life. I see the body I want lying by me when I take my last breath. I see the only body I would ever consider holding my children. When I think that is the body I saw bloody and mangled out in that field. Fuck, Dylan, I go crazy. Because beautiful, that is the only body I could ever love.” He said through the locked door. “Please babe, open the door. You have to stop running. I won’t let you push me away.”
I slipped on the tee-shirt he handed to me earlier and unlocked the door. I stood there, tugging on the hem of the shirt.
“You’re so beautiful. I still remember all that red hair sprawled over the dirt.” He reached for my hand and brought it to his lip, softly kissing it. “You saved me that day.” He shuddered and laid his face in my neck. “Put those pants on. I can only take so much tonight.”
I soothed his knitted brow with the pad of my thumb. “How did I save you?”
“Pants. Then we’ll talk.” He kissed my forehead and walked away.
I slipped on the pants and chased after him. I tripped over my own feet and tumbled onto him, knocking us both down. He busted out laughing, squashed me to him, and vibrated with laughter. He couldn’t stop laughing. He released all the pent-up emotions of the day in laughter. His laughter started to slow to suppressed breaths. He laughed as my world crumbled. I wanted to go back to being numb. Feeling was hard. I thought I had experienced them all, but hearing him laugh at my pain sent an entirely new gamut of emotions my way. I slapped him. He didn’t flinch. His laughing stopped, but he didn’t acknowledge the slap. I sat up and brought my fist back, slamming it hard against his face. Blood busted out of his nose. He sat up and kissed me. I pulled back and tasted the blood. “You bastard.” I pushed him against the ground.
He followed me to the kitchen, grabbing a shirt from somewhere on the way. He stood there with a cloth shoved under his nose and stared at me. “You asked me how you saved me. And didn’t I care that someone was getting hurt? That is how you saved me.”
I looked out the window over the sink, scrubbing my face with a wet washcloth, and tried absorbing what he was saying. “Huh?”
“I didn’t care. We had a business to run and if someone got hurt to carry out that business.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, well.” He pulled me into his arm. Holding the shirt under his nose with one hand, he crushed me against him with the other. “That was until you. They knew you were alive. You were whimpering. It was soft and sweet like a newborn puppy. Something snapped in me. I don’t know how but I knew that you had been hurting for years and it was not the physical pain that was killing you, but the mental pain. My protective instincts kicked in. I forced the three to leave. I still didn’t know what I was going to do with you.”
“Did you think of killing me yourself?” Stunned that I wasn’t crying. For the first time in my life, I didn’t cry. Tears couldn’t put what had been wronged back together.
He never stopped looking at me. I tried looking away but found it impossible. I couldn’t do anything that might make him uncomfortable. “No.” He shook his head. “You were shivering. All you had on was a tee-shirt and underwear and even that was torn. It was freezing that night. I took off my coat and wrapped you up in it. I still don’t know why, but in that moment you got under my skin and have never left.”
“It’s the red hair. They said you had a thing for gingers.”
“Because of you. I’ve never given a ginger a second look to you.” He diverted his eyes from mine. “I tried screwing you out of my system. I’ve never gone a day without thinking about you. I guess I was hoping if I slept with enough reds I could forget you.” He glanced back. “It didn’t work. My love, I wanted the feeling I got when I laid down by you that night and you snuggled your head onto my chest.”
“Huh?” I asked, burrowing my forehead into his shoulder. His hand was instantly in my hair. I should’ve moved away from him. But it was so damn comforting in his arms. I agreed nothing compared. But I shouldn’t have found comfort from him or anybody for that matter. One thing life had taught me was that I could only trust myself and even that was iffy.
“I got the two guys that came with me to fetch some water and a sleeping bag. I told them I would take care of you. They let everybody know I would be back in a week and not to worry. I had always taken care of business. I knew that no one would even give you a second thought. I still didn’t know what I was going to do with you to be honest.” He started stroking my arm. I watched his hands and for the briefest moment, without a doubt, I knew those hands would never harm me. “Your face was swollen. I could tell your nose and possibly your jaw was broken. Your arm was fractured in at least two places. I crushed up some pain pills I had and helped you swallow them. I might have been unsure what to do with you but I couldn’t stand seeing you hurt. I splinted up your arm, popped your nose back in place, and then kissed it.” He placed a peck on the tip of my nose and released me. ”I know this is too much to take in. But Privy, you need to hear it.”
He led me to the couch and sat down. He was raw. I had never understood how we connected on such an intimate level so fast. It was because we had fallen in love in that field five years earlier. I remembered the kisses. The way he held me. All those sweet words. My eyes were too swollen to see his face. It wasn’t his face I fell in love with. It was his heart. What I felt for him wasn’t wrong or fucked up. It was overwhelmingly right. I sat in his lap, straddling him.
“I don’t understand what you’ve done to me. But don’t stop.” He squashed my chin between his thumb and forefinger. “I still remember how wonderful it felt to hold you that first time. It was cold. So I worked and got us wrapped in the sleeping bag together.” He mashed my head against him. “You laid your face against my chest, gripped my shirt, and whispered, ‘Don’t hurt me. I can’t take anymore.’ I knew then, I would save you no matter what it cost me.” Ethan took a deep breath, then forcibly released it. “I couldn’t leave. I kept pumping you with pain medicines, because there was no letting you go, only protecting you. After three days, I had an idea. I called Devon and got him to bring me some LSD. It would make you delusional so no matter what you told them, they wouldn’t believe you. You would live and no one would be the wiser.” Ethan stilled my arm under his, and it wasn’t until then that I realized how badly I was shaking.
“I did remember.”
He slid his hand behind my neck and softly kissed me. “I know. I couldn’t give it to you. I promised you I wouldn’t hurt you and I couldn’t.” His expression was completely serene. “I still can’t. I gave you a shot of morphine.”
“Where did you get all the drugs?”
He snickered. “Family business. We own a few clubs, but they are a front for the real business. We deal in all kinds of drugs and guns. It’s quite profitable. That is how that animal that lived with you ended up owing us.”
“How did you end up being a lawyer for the good guys?”
“To keep the good guys in jail and get the bad guys out. I wasn’t kidding when I told you I wasn’t the good guy. Only for you, my love. Only you. Now back to the story. The morphine shot put you to sleep. I cleaned up the field around us, took the splint off your arm, kissed your cute little face, and did the hardest thing I have ever done.”
“What?”
“Walked away.” A single tear spilled down his face. “I still don’t know how I did it . . . I have a few friends in the sheriff’s office. I called ‘em and told ’em where to find you.” He
wrapped his hand around my neck, right below my ear, and brushed his thumb along my jaw. “I almost went crazy worrying about you. It had been a week and I hadn’t heard a word. It wasn’t in the news, no one was talking. I was scared they didn’t find you. I would wake up in the night in terror that you were left out there. I left you out there. It was like the world was lifted from my chest when the police showed up and arrested my brother and uncle. My family was being torn apart and all I cared about was you.”
Innocent Lies Page 11