His hold loosened. His hands went to my arms, and slowly slid down. The tips of his fingers teased my own before he released me completely and took a step back. He was giving me every opportunity to try to leave, only now I couldn’t move.
“You’ve spent so long trying to be invisible, but I told you, I can’t stop seeing you. Stop trying to hide from me. Stop walking. Talk to—”
“I don’t want to be her.” The confession tumbled from my mouth like a dirty secret. Fast, soft, and full of shame.
“Who?” Deacon asked after a few seconds.
I turned to look at him, shaking my head as I did. “My mom blew through all of her money. If it weren’t for our grandparents, we would have starved. If it weren’t for Jagger, we wouldn’t have made it. If she had a dollar, then she spent five. I don’t want to be her, and I’m so terrified of turning into her. I have to think of Keith, always.”
“Charlie, buying a car isn’t going to turn you into your mom.”
One of my eyebrows arched, and a sad laugh sounded in my chest. “Are you sure? I mean, it’s like you said, I’ve already pawned my son off on my brother. I already took a huge step toward being like her.”
Deacon’s shoulders sagged as I threw his words back at him. As he finally understood why I didn’t want to have this conversation with him. His face tightened with regret and pain. “Fuck . . . Charlie. No, that—you can’t . . .” He trailed off and scrubbed his hands over his face. “God damn it.”
I tilted my head back toward the house. “Sometimes, when I’m walking away, you should let me walk. I can forgive you and try to forget things that you’ve said or done, but that trying becomes so hard when your words fueled lifelong fears.”
“I don’t expect you to forget what I said that day, but you have to know that I was wrong. All of it, everything was wrong.” He gestured to me, his eyes pleading with me. “Clearly. I was mad when I didn’t have the right to be. When I only had a fraction of the story. I get that now. But, Charlie, turning into your mom? That won’t happen. In the last three weeks alone, anyone could see that that won’t happen.”
I gritted my teeth when my jaw began to tremble, and blinked through the burning in my eyes, determined not to cry. But my voice shook with every emotion I felt, giving me away. “I have less than a week, Deacon. One week until we go back to court. I need to get my son, do you understand?” I gestured to the house with a hand. “He’s here. He’s with me, but I need him to be mine. I can’t risk messing that up.”
Confusion swept across Deacon’s face, and something close to panic filled his eyes when my voice broke on the last word. He reached out for me, and I let him pull me close as he struggled for something to say. “Charlie . . . what are you talking about?”
With how close he was to Grey, with how often they saw each other, I was sure he would have already known. “Keith. I don’t have custody of him, I never have.”
“What do you mean? Who does?”
My head slanted to the side as I tried to understand the frustration and determination that wove through Deacon’s words. “You really don’t know? Grey never told you?”
“Why would she have? If it had to do with Keith she probably knew I didn’t want to know. It’s not really a secret I don’t like kids.” When I flinched, he hurried to say, “You know he’s different.”
I blinked quickly and mentally shook away the quick stab of pain from his declaration. Like he’d said, it wasn’t a secret. “Um, my mom,” I began, and looked back up into his eyes. “Before I had Keith, she kept telling me that I wouldn’t be able to handle it, that I wasn’t ready, that I would ruin the baby’s life, that the baby would one day resent me. It was just . . . endless, and repeated every day until I believed her. Until I finally signed custody over to her. When Keith was two and Mom left, we went to court to try to change custody over to me. We had more than enough proof that my mom hadn’t ever been a fit mother anyway, but the judge said that he wasn’t sure that I was either.”
“What the hell?” Deacon growled in a dangerous tone.
“I was living in the back room of my brother’s warehouse and I didn’t have a job. I’d never gotten one because I needed to be there to take care of Keith since my mom always randomly left. The judge thought I needed to finish school and get my life in order before I was ready to get custody of Keith, and granted Jagger and Grey temporary custody until then.”
“Charlie Girl,” he whispered; his head shook subtly. “Fuck, Charlie, I’m sorry. But you’re not your mom.”
I smiled weakly. “Jagger felt like the judge helped his argument to get me to leave. So I left and finished school. I have a job, thanks to your grandma. And thanks to Graham, Keith and I now have our own place. I did exactly what the judge said, and I’m terrified that if I do one thing out of line, he’ll stop me from getting custody again. Keith is three and a half, Deacon. I want my son to be mine.”
Deacon’s hands cradled my face gently as his face dipped closer to mine. “So wrong about you,” he whispered against my lips, then pressed a feather-soft kiss there. “So damn wrong.”
I gasped against the force of his next kiss, and clung to his muscled forearms as he walked us toward the house. My back had barely touched the door before it was falling open and Deacon was moving us inside and kicking the door shut behind him.
Heat pooled low in my stomach when his mouth made a line down my throat, and cool tingles spread across my skin when he gently bit down there. The conflicting combination made me feel more alive than I had in years.
His lips replaced his teeth, but instead of continuing, he paused for a few seconds. His low laugh and voice rumbled against my throat. “Who are you today, kid?”
I blinked my eyes open, and tried to orient myself.
Before Deacon’s question could register in my mind, a soft, anxious voice came from beside us. Ice filled my veins when I heard Keith ask, “Are you gonna go to the grassy place?”
Keith, no!
All the air in my lungs came out in one fast, rough whoosh, and I shoved Deacon away from me as quickly as I could.
For once I was able to move him.
Deacon stumbled back, caught off guard by my sudden movement, but I couldn’t look at him.
Agony pierced at my chest and made it hard to pull in a breath at that innocent, innocent question.
I’d been so careful not to kiss Deacon in front of Keith the last few days, because one good-bye kiss from Deacon that first night had nearly devastated my son, and had absolutely destroyed me.
“Keith,” I said breathlessly. “When did you wake up?”
He looked up toward the ceiling for a second, then shrugged. “I donno. Deaton, are you—”
“Keith, stop!” I pled, and fell to my knees with the grief that slammed into me. I gripped Keith’s shoulders and pulled him close so Deacon wouldn’t hear the shaking in my voice. “Buddy, stop. Remember what I said? Remember? We don’t ask that. That isn’t going to happen.”
Again, it felt like my soul was grieving. I wanted to tear myself apart, rip myself away from Deacon and any man that might come into our lives in the future.
Keith’s nearly identical question on Wednesday night had destroyed me. I’d barely made it from his room to mine before I’d crumbled under my grief and the torrent of sobs.
I didn’t want to go through it again. Not now. Not when I couldn’t escape him or Deacon.
“What’s the grassy place?” Deacon asked warily, and my eyes shut in pain.
“Deacon, don’t,” I whispered my plea.
There was a pregnant pause before he asked hesitantly, “Does he want me to take him there?”
“Deacon!” I meant to shout his name, but I would have been surprised if he heard it at all. My head fell so I was staring at the ground when I said, “If I could, I would walk. Let me walk away.”
<
br /> For once, Deacon didn’t push, and I was thankful for it. I felt so beaten down from the past five minutes that I didn’t know if I could get myself standing again, and I knew I wouldn’t have been able to keep it together if Deacon forced me to talk again.
I drew in two deep breaths, trying to steady myself, then looked up at Keith. “We have to go. Do you need to use the bathroom?”
He shook his head quickly, and whispered, “Mommy. I don’t want Deaton to go to the grassy place. Is that okay? Mommy, don’t make him go.”
A choked cry forced from my chest before I could stop it. I didn’t know if I was nodding or shaking my head, only that it was moving. “Yes, that’s okay. I won’t, baby. I swear I won’t.”
I stood on weak, shaking legs, and avoided Deacon’s questioning stare as I left to go help Keith change clothes.
A few minutes later, when I approached the front door he was holding open, I glanced up and forced a smile that he didn’t return. “I’ll talk to you later.”
He nodded slowly. His face was guarded, but his eyes were searching, begging, questioning everything he’d just seen and heard.
I couldn’t give him an answer to any of the questions he had. Instead, I grabbed Keith’s hand and walked to my car.
. . . which was now no longer working again.
Deacon didn’t say anything about my needing a new car, or say anything at all. He just waited silently as I got Keith’s booster seat into his car, and kept quiet during the drive. By the time we got to Mama’s, I was ready to run from the awkward silence of Deacon’s car, but he gripped my hand in his as soon as he pulled into a parking spot.
He waited until I was looking up at him to say, “I will never force you to talk to me in front of Keith. If you want to walk from me in front of him, then I’ll let you walk—even if you physically can’t. But watching you go through that . . . damn it, Charlie. My fucking heart was breaking for you and I had no clue what was going on. I just had to stand there and watch because you pushed me away.”
My head shook slowly as he spoke. “This morning . . . I cannot handle this morning. It’s been one thing after another, and it isn’t even eight, Deacon.”
He arched a brow, and gently challenged, “So you’re gonna push it away until it comes back up? Keith normally doesn’t stop talking, and I couldn’t get him to talk or even look at me after the question about the grassy place.”
I swallowed past the tightness in my throat, and whispered, “It’s because he saw you kissing me.”
Deacon didn’t say anything for a few seconds. And I knew he was thinking back over the last four days. His confusion was apparent when he spoke again. “He saw me kiss you the night you moved into that house. He was coming out of his room when I was leaving. He didn’t care then.”
“He did. When I was putting him back in bed after you left, he asked if you were going to have to go to the grassy place. Then he asked me not to kiss you anymore.” I could see that the unknown half-answers and vague responses were starting to overwhelm Deacon. Before he could ask, I hurried to explain. “Die, Deacon. He thinks you’re going to die because I kissed you.”
Light brown eyes bored into mine, trying to uncover the meaning behind my words. “Why do I have a feeling that for once, what Keith was talking about had nothing to do with mutants or ladybugs?”
A startled laugh bubbled up from my chest, but quickly faded away to nothing. “No, Keith calls the cemetery the grassy place. He doesn’t understand why or how Ben died; he just knows that his daddy is in the grassy place. The night he saw us kiss, he asked me if you were going to have to go to the grassy place since I’d kissed you. I nearly lost my mind when that question left his little lips, but I tried to stay calm and just told him I didn’t understand.
“To Keith, only daddies kiss mommies, and since he saw you kiss me, he was making that connection. When I tried to explain to him that kissing didn’t necessarily mean people were married, he said that he couldn’t have a daddy because his daddies would always have to go to the grassy place.” I tried to steady the shaking in my voice when I continued, but knew from Deacon’s expression that I didn’t succeed. “Then he asked me not to kiss you anymore, because I’d already made ‘his Ben’ go there, and he didn’t want me to make you go to the grassy place too.”
“Charlie,” Deacon murmured, shock and pain for my son and me clear in that one word. “Shit, Charlie Girl, I’m sorry.”
“He doesn’t understand what he’s saying, but God, it hurts.”
Dozens of questions and emotions swirled through Deacon’s eyes and passed over his face as my words hung heavily in the space between us. When he finally settled on one, he was looking at me like he’d never considered the possibility of whatever it was he was thinking.
“What?” I nearly begged.
“He really meant a lot to you too, didn’t he?”
“Ben?”
But Deacon didn’t respond, just continued watching me, waiting.
“He meant . . .” I trailed off; my head shook quickly. “I loved him the way Jagger loved Grey: deeply and wholly, silently and from a distance.”
Again, clearly something Deacon hadn’t ever considered, and now, something else was mixing with the surprise and confusion. The corner of his mouth lifted and fell, and he exhaled quickly through his nose. “I never expected to be jealous of someone who wasn’t alive.”
“Jealous of Be—Deacon, why? He’s been gone for four years.”
“Doesn’t matter, Charlie. The way you reacted to what Keith asked, knowing now what it all meant . . .” He trailed off. “You were able to break my damn heart just by watching yours break, and it was over another guy.”
I shrugged weakly. “What do you want me to say? I won’t lie to you about—”
“No, Charlie, don’t you get it?” His brown eyes warmed and lit with amusement. “I’ve never been jealous of a guy in my life. And now I’ve had to restrain myself daily from punching one of my best friends, and I hate that a guy who died four years ago touched you.”
I jerked my head back and flattened my body against the door. “Punch one of your best friends—which one, and why?”
“Don’t let Graham kiss you again,” he said flatly. His eyes narrowed on my cheeks when blood quickly rushed to them, and a growl rumbled deep in his chest. “And don’t do that when I mention him.”
I tried to stop my blushing, but I had no control over it. Considering Graham made me think of Stranger, and when there were thoughts of Stranger, there was never-ending blush paired with a racing heart; I knew it was going to be impossible to get it to stop. Just like it was nearly impossible to stop thinking of Graham as Stranger when nearly every time I saw him, he said something that echoed Stranger’s words.
But there were no romantic feelings between Graham and me. No fluttering stomach or racing heart. No heat racing through my veins or deep, secret ache.
Everything I felt in Deacon’s presence, and the reason I only imagined the man sitting in front of me when I texted Stranger.
It didn’t matter that I knew it wasn’t Deacon; that wouldn’t stop me from wishing that he could be the kind of guy to say those things to me.
Again, Grey was probably onto something: romance novels were ruining the way I viewed men and relationships.
“Deacon, Graham’s done that forever. So has Knox. So did you until you started hating me.”
He leaned over the center console and gripped my chin in his fingers, and brought our faces so close that I was silently begging for him to close the rest of the distance between us. To press his mouth to mine and make me forget everything about this morning except the way he made me feel.
“For my sanity, and for the sake of our friendship, don’t let Graham kiss you again.” He passed his lips across mine in a kiss so soft, I wasn’t sure it happened at all. “Say
‘okay.’ ”
“Okay.”
He smiled against my lips, and whispered, “You’re late.” His deep laugh filled the car as I scrambled to get out of it, and his voice followed me out. “I’ll be here when you get off.”
I paused from shutting the door; an ominous feeling slid through my veins like ice. I turned my head slowly to look back at him, and asked, “Promise?”
“Where else would I be, Charlie Girl?” Deacon shot me a look that seemed to stop everything. Time, sound, my heart.
My breath caught in my throat, and a chill spread over my skin like a lover’s caress. I wanted to experience the feeling again and again.
Awareness came flooding back in with a rush, and I hurried to memorize the set of his eyes and his smile. Because I knew . . . I knew a look like that, I wanted to remember forever.
Chapter Fifteen
Charlie
June 24, 2016
I WATCHED KEITH from across the table at Bonfire, the grill in Thatch, my smile impossibly wide as he recounted his version of what had gone down today—complete with use of the Force, since he was, of course, Darth Vader.
He couldn’t go into the hearing unprotected against the ladybug judge, after all.
And I didn’t care.
I didn’t care if he wanted to be Darth Vader or Iron Man or Captain America or Wolverine. He could be whoever he wanted, fight whatever ladybugs he encountered.
Keith was officially mine.
The judge had barely asked more than a handful of questions, and had only glanced at the proof that I’d actually done all that he’d asked. He’d mostly relied on Grey and Jagger’s word, and had talked to Keith without any of us in the room.
Again, I didn’t care.
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