by Tawny Weber
"So, now that you're going, and you don't have any idea when you'll be back... I know there's something you're afraid to tell me about what happened in Buhkai—"
"Amanda—"
"Wait, let me get this out. Emma's right downstairs. She and I talked about this and came up with an idea. Tell her whatever it is that you haven't told me, and if she thinks I'm ready to hear it, you can tell me before you leave. If she doesn't think I should hear it yet, I won't push you to tell me anymore. She will, when she thinks I'm ready. How does that sound?"
So much better then having to tell Amanda himself. "Okay. Deal."
"You look so relieved," she said. "Is it really that bad? What you have to tell me?"
"No. I don't know. I don't know what you know, what anyone told you. There's one part that... I think you might be uncomfortable."
"You saw me naked and bruised and—"
"No. Nothing like that." He was making this worse by being reluctant to talk about it, scaring her, he saw now, when he'd been trying to be so careful with her. "Nothing else really bad happened, Amanda. It's not something that happened that you don't know about. But I'll do what you want. I'll tell Emma, and from there, it's up to the two of you."
"Okay. Thank you. I'm sorry. This is so not how I wanted this to go."
"Forget about it. It doesn't matter."
"You're always so nice to me. I think I should go before I do anything else I'll regret. You have a couple of days, so if Emma thinks I'm up to hearing everything, I'll come back tomorrow. I don't think I can do any more big conversations today, all right?"
"Sure. Come on. I'll walk you out to your car, and then I'll talk to Emma."
"You don't have to walk me out," she said. "It's not dark."
"It's almost dark, and I walk every woman out who leaves after dark, so I am not treating you differently than any other woman here."
He followed Amanda to her car and opened her door. Another second or two, and she'd have been inside and on her way, but she looked so sad, so tired, he couldn't let her leave like that.
She moved to slip past him and into the car, but he blocked her path, found her hands, which were hanging loosely at her side, and took both of them in his. He waited until she looked up at him, and then very slowly leaned his head down to hers until the tip of his nose brushed along her temple at her hairline.
He knew he shouldn't have done it, but he drew in a breath of her as her hands tightened around his. He could feel the warmth of her body, even though he was careful not to touch her in any other way except with his hands in hers and his nose against the side of her face. She smelled so soft and sweet.
He'd let himself get too close, and he couldn't even say he was sorry. Not yet.
Will took his time about raising his head, kept his hold on her hands, and once she looked up at him, told her, "You smell really good, too."
She smiled up at him.
He squeezed her hands, then let them go, and stepped aside so she could get in the car.
"Goodnight, Will."
"Night."
Will didn't want to, but he went back inside to find Emma. She was just inside the front door, waiting for him. He wondered if she'd watched him walk Amanda to the car and if she'd say anything about that little move he'd made toward Amanda.
At least, he hadn't done what he'd wanted to do—take her in his arms, not let go, maybe promise her everything was going to be okay, that he'd make sure of it. Which would have only made things harder when he left.
Now he had to face Emma, who saw too damned much and knew too much about him.
"Are you sure this is a good idea?" he asked.
"I'm not sure. I don't know everything that you know."
"Yeah. I had that conversation with her."
"This is what she wants, Will. And it doesn't help her to put your own feelings about this onto her, that you think she's too fragile to hear this—"
"You're right. I am," he admitted.
"Okay, start talking. What haven't you told Amanda?"
So, he talked. Bare bones only.
"On the way out, in the helicopter, she got scared. The medics are used to combat injuries. Seconds matter. They move fast. She had two sets of hands on her, checking her over, pushing her clothes out of the way, and she panicked. I stopped it as fast as I could, but it must have reminded her of the rape."
"Okay. What else?"
"At the hospital, she didn't want to let them do the rape exam. I was the only person who was familiar to her at all." He gritted his teeth, then said, "The nurse ask me to try to calm her down and get her to let them do the exam. So I sat beside her and held her hand through the whole thing. Heard the whole thing, too, because the nurse, while she does the exam, describes the damage she finds. The bruises, the tearing. Stitches. Amanda needed stitches."
He still had nightmares about that, the way she'd cried, how heartbroken she sounded, how scared.
"Jesus, Em. Have you ever done anything like that?"
"Yes. It's awful."
Well, fuck.
Emma had done that. And men thought they were somehow stronger than women.
"Do I tell her that?" Will asked. "That I sat beside her and held her hand through that? And what about all those things the nurse said, what they found? Does she really need to know that?"
"I've seen her medical records from Africa and from Germany, and the physician here doing her follow-up treatment would have them, too. They would have told her about any physical damage they found. You don't have to tell her in detail about those things. That's for the doctor who's treating her."
"All right." Thank God for that, because he honestly didn't think he could do it. The rest was hard enough.
"But the fact that you sat with her while she went through that..."
"Isn't that just going to make her uncomfortable?"
"Maybe, but it happened. Would you want someone to know something like that about you? And you not know it yourself?"
"I don't know." He wanted it to not have happened. He wanted her never to have needed a rape exam. He wanted to have never been there to see her face or hear her crying while they did it.
"You'd hate not knowing something like that, Will."
"Okay. You're right." But he so did not want to do this.
"That's it?"
He nodded.
"Well, honestly, that wasn't as bad as I thought it might be. I think she'll feel the same way. It's not going to be easy to hear, but it's nothing new and awful. She can do this."
"If you say so."
"So, when are you going to talk to her?"
"Tomorrow, I guess."
"When you do, try to look like you think she's strong enough to hear this."
Will watched as Amanda walked up the stairs to the little apartment where he was staying. It was the most private space in the shelter, so they would talk here.
She looked uneasy but was smiling and, amazingly, trying to put him at ease, he thought.
Will feared he looked completely freaked out.
He did not do freak-outs.
But he felt as uncomfortable as he did when someone asked about his mother or how he grew up. He did not talk about it, not ever.
"Sorry about this. I know you don't want to do it," she said.
What could he do? Lie? He wasn't going to do that to her. "I can do it."
"It's going to be fine, Will. Emma said there's nothing really awful or new in what you know. Unless you didn't tell her—"
"I didn't lie to her about anything."
"And you won't with me?" she asked.
"No, I won't. I just..." Yeah, he was going to try to talk her out of it one more time. "Everybody says talking things out helps, but I've never found that to be true."
"So, the difficult things you've seen, the things you've done, you don't talk about them with anyone?"
"When somebody makes me. I write reports. I have to. We have mandatory debriefings about ops. We have mandatory
trauma debriefings, when things get really hairy and we lose somebody. Bad things happen sometimes. That's just the way it is. I don't see the point in all the talk about them."
"Okay. That's your job. What about in your personal life?"
"What about it?" he said, too sharply. He heard it the minute he got the words out. "Sorry. I shouldn't have said that."
"No. I shouldn't have asked."
And then he got that look from her, that look he feared he directed at her. That I'm-sorry, that-must-have-really-sucked look. He could just imagine why. And then he was just mad at the whole damned world.
It had started way back when he'd gotten Amanda out of Buhkai and seen the bruises on her, fully understood all the ways in which she'd been hurt. He'd managed to tamp it down and do his job, but the feelings had been there, and building ever since. He wasn't exactly sure why, but she got to him, and it felt like hell. His anger felt wild and out of control.
It didn't help that he was here, in this place, face to face, day in and day out, with these women and their kids, who'd been hurt and were so scared. He should not be here. If anyone but Sam had asked, he never would have done it, but Sam gave so much and never asked for anything, so Will had done it.
Still, shit.
"Someone told you about my mother," Will guessed.
Yeah, that was it. Her face instantly gave it away.
She'd obviously gotten some of his life story, and she felt sorry for him, thought he probably had a whole lot of shit stored up inside that needed to come out.
Well, how about that?
He was well and truly furious.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I just asked about your connection to the McRaes, and—"
"Somebody told you the whole story?"
"No."
"I got taken away from my mother, more than once. Not that the new places were ever that much better, until I was... eleven, I think, and I lived with Sam and Rachel for a while. They wanted to adopt me, but for reasons I will never understand, my mother wanted me back, and a judge sent me back to her again. End of story."
"Yes. Not even that much. That's what I heard. Will, I'm sorry—"
"Don't be," he said, still too sharply. She winced, and he felt like even more of an ass, but the words kept pouring out. "It's this place. Being here. It's a shelter for battered women. My mother was a battered woman, among other things. Many other things, and I—"
He had no business being here, being around these women and their sad-eyed, scared children or the ones who at six or eight or eleven were already old beyond their years, jaded and weary and acting tough, like they weren't scared of anything, when he knew damned well they were.
"I shouldn't be here," he said. "That's all."
"No, I shouldn't be here. I'm sorry. I'll go."
"Amanda, wait. I'm talking about me. I shouldn't be in this place. The shelter... I didn't even realize how much it had me wound up... Look, some people take things like this and talk and try to understand, try to turn it around and do something good with the crap that happened to them. Sam adopted three kids whose mother was a battered woman, so he does things like help renovate this building and serves on the board. Emma volunteers here counseling battered women. I think Zach does some volunteer legal hours here. Grace, I bet, will be here before long doing artwork with the kids. I'm sure they all see it as some nice, neat way of paying back a debt to the woman who gave birth to them, the woman who gave Sam and Rachel their children. Good for them. It's just not me. I should not be here. Especially since..."
Fuck! Was he really going to tell her that?
He was even more wound up than he'd realized.
Although, given how much it had freaked him out last week, she probably already knew, so what did it matter?
"That was her, last week at the cafe. The woman who walked by, the one begging for money on Main Street. That was my mother."
Amanda stared up at him with big, round eyes, and stood rooted to the spot, listening, waiting.
Was she scared of him? Of how angry he sounded?
Or just horrified by his past?
Jesus, what had he done?
"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't... I never talk about that. I don't know why I just did."
God.
Amanda.
He did not scare women. He did not hurt them. Not ever.
And he sure as shit didn't want them feeling sorry for him.
Not her, he told himself. Please, not her.
Amanda was scared.
A little bit.
She was shocked by the anger in his voice, in his expression, by the bitterness when he admitted that woman was his mother. He'd said it like a man turning his most painful secret over to her. And the way Will had wanted to help that woman, his mother, but knew he couldn't, that no one could? How lousy would that feel? To know the best you could do was put twenty dollars in her pocket and hope she'd get something to eat and not buy drugs?
Amanda couldn't imagine living with that. She also believed him when he said he didn't lose control like this.
"Getting me back for all the tears I cried in front of you?" she asked, as lightly as she could manage.
"No!" He looked stricken. "I would never—"
"Will? I'm kidding."
"Oh." He stood there, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans, shaking his head and looking like he was about to beg for her forgiveness again, and she didn't want him to do that.
But she understood better now why he had to leave. At least, he wouldn't be unexpectedly running into his mother—and all the things he couldn't change.
"I owe you," she said. "You've listened to all my emotional crap. You're more than welcome to pour out all of yours, if you ever want to. You're always saying I can tell you anything. It's only fair that you get to tell me anything you want, too. I'm sorry about your mother. I always thought life had treated me so unfairly, to lose mine when I was so young, but it sounds harder with your mother. Having her there but not really there, I mean. Gone but not really gone. You must think all the time about what you should have had with her."
"No," he insisted. "I don't think about her. Unless I'm here, sometimes. It's harder here."
She understood why that would be and dared to ask, "And your father?"
"No idea. Given my mother's taste in men, I'd say he's probably either dead or in prison or should be by now. What about yours? Did he manage to be... what you needed, when you lost your mother?"
"He did everything he could. I mean, he doesn't do the warm-fuzzy stuff well, but he made it this whole you-and-me-against-the-world thing. He sat me down and said we were partners, and we could do anything we needed to do to get by without her, that we were strong, capable, determined, and we'd figure it out. And we did."
"I'm glad."
"Me, too." She made herself breathe and try to smile. "I admire him so much, all that he does to try to smooth things over and keep our country on good terms with difficult countries around the world. It's one of the reasons I wanted to go to Buhkai to teach. I wanted to impress him. I wanted him to be proud of me. I just... Well, you know that story."
He nodded.
"I guess we're both nervous about... what we're going to talk about." And Amanda wanted to be strong, to not look like or sound like a victim. She wanted to walk out of here with him thinking she was brave, because having him say that about her had felt better than anything had since Buhkai. "Will, I can do this. Promise. So, please, just say it. Get it over with."
"Okay."
She sat on the couch where she had been the night before. This time, he turned the kitchen chair around and sat on it with his arms folded over the back, leaning forward so his chin was on one of his arms, watching her.
Regardless of what she'd said, she was more frightened than she expected to be, even started shaking, before he said the first word about what she still didn't know.
"Hey," Will said. "Want to go sit in the corner?"
He was grinn
ing, but she thought he meant it, that he really would sit in the corner with her, if it made her feel better.
"It's okay," she said. Not so bad that she had to actually do it.
But he tugged on her hand until she got to her feet, then led her to the corner anyway. "Pick a spot. Any one you want."
She sat on the floor against one wall, drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, her chin coming to rest against her knees. He sat with his back against the wall at a ninety-degree angle to her, his legs stretched out in front of him, the corner in between them.
"Better?" he asked.
"I feel silly."
"Why? I've sat in a few corners before."
"You don't have to say things like that just to make me feel better, Will."
"I did. Although, honestly, I probably spent more time under my bed. Felt safer there, you know? It's like a cave. Perfect for hiding. You always had a chance nobody would think to look under the bed. Of course, if you use that spot too much, it stops working that well. Any place does."
"Why did you need to hide at all?"
He shrugged. "Why does anybody hide? I didn't want to be where I was."
He looked calm, his gaze steady, his eyes dark and full of secrets. She suspected he was trying to make up for getting so angry before, and to show her it wasn't crazy to want to hide this way.
"My mother liked to drink. Well, it started out with that, then moved on to other substances, plus a lot of really bad choices in men, some of whom liked to hit her. Sometimes me, if they could find me or catch me."
"I'm sorry," she said.
"Don't be. It was a long time ago, and I'm fine."
It sounded like he was daring her to say he wasn't, when what she really wanted to know was whether this was why he kept his distance from people like Sam and the whole McRae family. And from everyone else.
"Okay." She'd drop it, for now. "So, tell me what I can't remember. Tell me everything."
"You know everything I know about the time you were inside the school."
"That you saved my life, and I had the nerve to yell at you for not doing enough."
"Just a little," he said. "It was better than you being... how you were when I first saw you."