Or maybe he went to look at places to get me out of his house. I hope he’s not going to fire me. I force myself to stop thinking about it and get to work so he won’t have a reason to fire me.
The next couple of days pass in a blur. Chance is civil, but I haven’t heard his laugh or seen his smile since the doctor’s appointment on Wednesday. When he’s not at work he’s away from the house much more often than he ever was before; often dropping me off after work and not coming home until after I’m in bed for the night. In the mornings, he now hands me my breakfast, then goes out on the porch and eats with Shadow beside him.
I feel incredibly lonely and sad that I’ve made him not want to be around me anymore. Worse still that I’ve made it so he’s not even comfortable in his own home. I can’t wait to get paid and save enough money to find a place. After that, I hope I’ll have enough time before Cadan comes to earn enough money to get the things he’ll need. I know it’s a gamble, but I’ve thought and thought about it and can’t seem to find any other solution. I have to get out of this house before Chance really hates me.
It’s Friday night and Shadow and I are hanging out on the back porch overlooking the lake. I don’t know where Chance goes when he drops me off at night, but I assume that like the last couple of nights he won’t be back until after I’m in bed. Shadow is asleep with his nose under my chair and I have my feet propped up on the table in front of me, Chance’s tablet resting on my belly as I read one of the many suspense novels he has loaded onto it.
He brought it to me the second day I was here and told me it was an older one he rarely uses and I could use it whenever I wanted, but I’d never used one before and didn’t want to break it so I didn’t bother with it. The last two days have been a study in loneliness though, and I have given in and forced myself to learn. It’s so nice to sit here and read, the breeze blowing across my over-heated skin and lifting my hair off my neck as I read. I get through several chapters before goose bumps rise on my arms. The evenings are getting cooler now and I leave the porch in search of something warmer to wear.
I go up to my room to find a sweater, but I don’t have any that fit. All of the bigger stuff I have is summer wear and I’ve gained so much weight since getting pregnant even the zip-up hoodies won’t fit my arms. Dammit.
I decide I’ll just have to stay in the house and am on my way out to get Shadow when I see Chance’s hoodie hanging on the hook by the door. I try it on and it fits perfectly. I could even zip it up if I wanted to, which surprises me because I’m pretty sure he’s sporting a six pack under those clothes. I know I should take it back off, but I’m also pretty sure he won’t be back until after I go to bed and I really want to sit on the porch. It’s not as if I’m going to hurt it. I decide to wear it just this one time and promise myself that in the morning I’ll ask him if he has an old sweatshirt I can borrow. I head back out to the porch and cuddle up in the chair with the tablet, ignoring the off and on knots in my stomach.
The next thing I’m aware of is the sensation of being lifted. My eyes snap open, as someone screams, “No, Travis!” and I’m immediately put back down. It’s too dark to see, but I hear Chance’s low, silky voice, “Alex, it’s me, Chance. You’re okay, Travis isn’t here. It’s Chance.”
I was the one screaming. “I’m sorry, Chance.” I try to clear my head, “I’m okay, now. I don’t know why I did that.” I sit up straight in the chair straining to see in the dark.
“It’s my fault,” he replies. “I was going to carry you to bed when I saw you fell asleep out here. I should have woke you up first. I’m sorry.” I feel his hand brush the side of my cheek, almost a caress. “Come on,” he says and his hand travels down my arm to my hand, where it lightly tugs me up. “Time for you to go to bed, I think.”
I offer no resistance as he tugs me lightly across the porch and into the house. When we step into the foyer I realize I’m still wearing his sweatshirt and am instantly humiliated. I feel the heat creep up my face as he turns to see why I’ve frozen in place and I see realization dawn in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Chance. So sorry. I was cold and none of my warmer clothes fit me anymore. I wasn’t stealing it or anything, I just didn’t want to come in off the porch yet, and I shouldn’t have even tried it on, but–,” he cuts me off as he puts his hands on my shoulders, bending until he’s so close I can’t see anything but him.
“Stop it, Alex,” his voice is a desperate whisper I haven’t heard before, eyes pleading in the glaring light of the fixture overhead. “I’m not mad at you and I’m not going to hurt you. I’m never going to hurt you. I’m not going to kick you out or get rid of you, I’m not going to hate you, and I don’t think the worst of you every time you say or do anything.” He lets go, turns away, then turns back, jerking his hat off, and throwing it on the bench next to him. He stands there, a hand on his forehead, staring at me for a few seconds, then makes a frustrated growl and continues.
“You want to know what I thought when I saw you in my sweatshirt? I thought my sweatshirt has never had it so good. I thought you looked adorable in it. I thought it makes me want to wrap around you and keep you warm the way my sweatshirt is. I thought, holy shit I’m jealous of my fucking sweatshirt! Which is idiotic and makes no sense at all, but that’s what I thought, Alex. Not – I can’t believe she stole my sweatshirt, how dare her!”
His hand falls from his forehead and his voice softens. He places his hands on my shoulders again, this time so softly I barely feel it. “The things that come out of your mouth sometimes just break my heart, Alex. And when they break my heart they make me want to break the people that hurt you so much. The people that made you think you have to apologize for borrowing a sweatshirt to keep warm while sitting on my porch.” He’s breathing heavily, chest heaving, and he drops his forehead to lean against mine as if too exhausted from his rant to hold his head up anymore.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Alex, and I’m not going to let anyone else hurt you again, either. Just trust me. Please.”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to make of what he’s saying. Does this mean he doesn’t think I’m going to be a terrible mother? He’s not trying to save Cadan from me? I don’t understand and I want to ask him, but I don’t want to upset him more or seem stupid so I just stand there, surrounded by his scent, and wait while his breathing settles. When it finally does, he stands back up and wraps me in a hug for a long moment, then asks me to join him in the kitchen.
When we get there, I realize it’s two in the morning and I’m shocked that I slept on the porch for so long, but I also wonder where he’s been all this time. The first thing that pops into my head is a bar, but he doesn’t smell like alcohol at all, so the next must be a girlfriend. I figure it’s not my place to ask though, so I don’t. He doesn’t owe me anything and I owe him absolutely everything. I sit down at the kitchen island and he gets a soda out of the fridge. He asks if I want one and I decline. He sits across from me and twirls the can between his hands. I stare down at the counter and trace the veins in the granite with a finger. I don’t know why he wants me in here, and I don’t know what to say to him after everything he just said to me in the foyer. We stay this way, like a couple of nervous kids, for a while before he finally speaks.
He clears his throat, “Remember before we went in to your appointment on Wednesday when I said I needed to know what happened with you and Travis?” he asks.
Oh god. Not this. I’m not ready for this conversation. I’m not ready to show him just how unworthy of his help I really am. A promise is a promise though, so I nod anyway, but can’t pull my gaze from the rivers of rock in the granite.
His hand gently cups my chin and he lifts my head until I look him in the eye. He speaks softly, “Alex, like I said before, I’m not going to judge you and I’m not asking to hurt you. I would never hurt you if I could help it. If I could just make it all go away, erase it from your mind, erase it from your world, I would do whatever it took to make that happen
, but I can’t. My only option is this. To have you tell me what happened, what exactly he’s capable of, so that I can be prepared, so I can make sure he never hurts you again. So I can make certain he never even gets the chance to hurt Cadan.” He smiles, but it’s a sad smile.
“I can’t begin to show you how much it hurts me to make you have to explain it all, to relive it all for me, but I need you to. Please.” The last word he says, more than anything else, breaks me. How could I ever deny him after everything he’s given me? I know I’ll do anything he asks of me, to the best of my ability.
I take a deep breath and lift my head as high as I can manage. Under the current circumstances, it feels only slightly higher than my knees, but I’ll take what I can get. He drops his hand from my chin, and I appreciate that, yet again, he seems to understand that I need to distance myself a bit if I’m going to make it through this. “Where do you want me to start? What do you want to know?” I ask.
He thinks about it and I am glad he doesn’t give the response people usually give of ‘Whatever you want to tell me’ or ‘Whatever you think I should know’ because I don’t know what he should know and I don’t want to tell him anything. “How did you meet him and how did you end up with him?” he asks.
At least this one is easy. “We went to school together. He was two years ahead of me and he was pretty popular. I kept to myself mostly and I didn’t think he knew I was alive. The majority of the time I didn’t know he was alive either though. My life was pretty damned crazy. One night while sleeping on the beach, I woke up around three in the morning to him running towards me. I scared the shit out of him when I jumped up, but once both of our hearts started beating again, we realized we recognized each other. We ended up talking until it was time to go to school.” My smile is genuine. These are the pleasant memories.
“He drove me there, and then he stayed on the beach with me the next night. That arrangement continued until summer when he turned eighteen and got his own place. He offered to let me move in with him and I didn’t have anywhere else to go. It was far better than sleeping on the beach every night, so I went.” He was listening so patiently I couldn’t seem to stop talking now.
“No, that’s not exactly true. He was my best friend. We had more in common than I thought I could have with anyone and he was good to me then. If he occasionally seemed to blow up at me for nothing, well he was under a lot of stress. Or I guess that’s how I rationalized it. I went to school and worked two part-time jobs, kept his house clean, and cooked. For him, but also because I wanted to learn. He worked and drank with the guys that used to hang out at the house a lot. We were friends though.”
I stand and walk to the fridge, deciding I could use a soda after all. Talking about the past makes my stomach hurt and my throat dry. “As to how I ended up with him? I’m not sure exactly if that was just opportunity or sincerity on either one of our parts. There was a night when one of his friends grabbed me in the hallway and kissed me. I wasn’t interested, so I was trying to shove him off, but he was drunk and he wasn’t getting the message very well. Travis heard the commotion and came rushing in like a freight train. He ripped his friend off me, beat the shit out of him, literally threw him out in the yard, and told him to leave ‘his girl’ alone. I asked him what he meant and he said that he thought of me as his girl, that he’d loved me for a while, just didn’t know how to tell me.” I take a drink, but studiously avoid looking at Chance.
“I didn’t really respond that night, but I thought about it the rest of that night and all the next day at work. When he brought it up again I had decided that the strong affection I felt for him must be love. I cared about him, I missed him when he wasn’t around, I valued his opinion on things, and I appreciated that he cared about me enough to want to protect me and stand up for me. That must be love, right? At least that’s what I thought. So, I told him I loved him back and we became a couple. About a month later he started to throw around the word marriage, I had met his family, and I slept with him for the first time. I thought we were going to be together forever.”
“How old were you then?” he interrupts.
“I was seventeen then and I had been living with him for about a year. We had had separate rooms up until that point and I had always contributed to the bills and held my own. I wasn’t using him or mooching off him in any way. I just needed a roof over my head and he had offered, so I took him up on it, but I paid my way, and not in sex like people liked to insinuate.”
“I didn’t insinuate a thing, Alex. I’m sure you paid your way just the way you said. I’m far more interested in how you came to be sleeping on a beach at the age of sixteen, with apparently nowhere to call home. And why no one thought to help you except for him. But as I said before, I’m only going to push you for Travis because I have to, you can tell me the rest when you’re ready. Okay?” he asks. I nod in answer, relieved that he isn’t going to push for the rest. “It sounds like things were okay at the point. You were seventeen, and if my math is right, he was nineteen, or almost nineteen. You’re sleeping together, you’re a couple, you’re both working and everything is fine. So tell me where it all goes wrong.”
My stomach clenches at just the thought of telling him the rest, but I continue. “The longer we were together the more often he started to blow up at me for things that didn’t make any sense. Once he screamed at me for forgetting to take clothes out of the dryer. Another time, for leaving my shampoo in the wrong place in the shower. Once for apparently looking at his friend wrong – he said I looked at him like I wanted to sleep with him, but I don’t recall thinking anything of the sort. Especially since the friend he was talking about was known as a total man whore and that’s really not the kind of thing that makes me hot, you know?”
I try to laugh, but I’m too nervous because the kind of thing that makes me hot is sitting across from me, soaking up every word I say, and it comes out as a croak. “By the time I turned eighteen I suspected he was cheating on me. It wasn’t long before that was confirmed, but in a way I never imagined.”
I pause for a drink and take a deep breath before continuing. “He wasn’t just cheating on me; he was cheating on me with no less than five different women, and on a very regular basis. I was disgusted and disgraced. I was the town joke.”
“Things only got worse from there on out. I attempted to leave him and move in with Bayleigh, but he caught me and roughed me up a little. Actually, maybe a little more than a little,” I try again to smile.
“I called the police, but since his father was the police chief, they pressed charges on me instead—”
“What! Why?” his voice is like thunder.
“For property damage. He broke a window and put a hole in the wall during the… incident, and that was blamed on me. And they said I had hurt myself while trying to destroy his things when I was leaving.” I watch as his hands clench and unclench on the counter. “His father came in and had a little ‘talk’ with me. He told me they would drop the charges against me if I just went on home with Travis where I belonged and behaved myself.” My stomach clenches again at the memory and I wince and rub it. “I didn’t know what to do, but I did know I wanted out of jail and I had to go to work in the morning, so I agreed. I went back to the place that Jim had called my home, but had now become my prison.”
Chance reaches out to place a hand over mine against my stomach. It’s comforting, and doesn’t hurt so much with his hand there. “That was the first time he’d put his hands on you?” he asks.
I nod. “Yes. Well, that was the first time he really hit me. He had shoved me a few times, yanked me by my hair a time or two, but had never actually hit me until then. He’d also taken to telling me how useless and worthless I was. That I couldn’t do anything right. I just fucked everything up, and most of the time the things I was fucking up were directly fucking things up for him. His words, more or less.”
I chuckle, but there’s little humor in it. “Like when I was leaving, he was g
oing to have to find someone else to cook and clean and pay part of the bills. When I called him out for cheating, I was being a stupid whore that couldn’t accept that I wasn’t good enough to satisfy him, so now he was going to have to find yet another girl to fill that need because I had chased one off with all of my unnecessary drama. He was sick of me, really, but he wasn’t ready to get rid of me yet, is what he said. Since his father was ready and willing to make my life hell until Travis was done with me I felt like I had no choice but to stay until he was.” Chance just keeps watching me as I talk. I see anger, but no judgment in his silver eyes, so I continue.
“Things just kept getting worse. I knew he was using, but then one night I came home from work to find him passed out in our room with a needle hanging out of his arm. I thought he was dead and for a moment, I was so happy. Next, I was terrified. Then I was disgusted, more with myself, for my terrible thoughts, than with him for his drug use. I didn’t know what kind of person I was turning into, but I didn’t like myself and I hated him. I didn’t how I was going to get out, but I knew I had to.”
“He was stealing money from me, his drug use was getting worse every day, and he was becoming a monster. I started hiding my money in a crevice inside the top of the doorframe of the bedroom closet door. I knew he knew something was happening to the money because there was suddenly less, but I stuck to my guns and continued to squirrel it away. I was going to need cash to start over. I continued to sleep with him though, because when I tried not to, he hit me, and would make me anyway.” Chance’s eyes darken, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t make a sound.
“I don’t know if his father actually would have stood for that because I never reported it, but his reaction to him hitting me made me guess that he didn’t care what Travis did to me. I knew that even as the beatings got worse his father continued to look the other way. When his parents would show up at the house or we went to family dinners, I often had an entire arm of bruises, a black eye, a split lip, something, and he would joke that I was the clumsiest girl on earth. His wife would just shake her head and I remember she had the saddest eyes. I always felt bad for her.” My stomach clenches again and I squeeze my eyes shut tight against the pain. Chance reaches over and holds my hand encouragingly.
Courage (Strength Series Book 1) Page 6