His Custody

by Tamsen Parker

  “Don’t I know it.”

  His comment made her proud. Even though she’d been a basket case for the couple of months and would continue to be one for the foreseeable future, Jasper could still see through that, could see she wasn’t weak. She just needed . . . help. Encouragement. To beat the hell out of something.

  And though she hadn’t been able to summon the feeling before under all the grief and anger and sadness she’d been buried under, she was struck by her gratitude for Jasper. He didn’t have to take her in, but he had. He didn’t have to fight for her, but he had. He didn’t have to do everything he could think of to help her, but he had.

  She hadn’t returned the favor with anything but more need, and it was possible she hadn’t even managed to thank him since this whole shitstorm had started. Jasper deserved more than she could muster up to give him at this moment, but she could at least do that. So she hugged him.

  “Thank you.” She was surprised he could hear her, her face was buried in his chest as it was, but he must have, because he paused for an awkward second, then hugged her back. “You’re welcome.”

  It was then she realized she was getting her sweat and nastiness all over him, and he was probably disgusted. She tried to pull away, but he left an arm draped over her shoulder while he offered Alice a handshake. So he didn’t mind that much. Probably because he had Ada to do his laundry.

  “Thanks, Alice. I appreciate it.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Chapter Five

  August

  Jasper woke up to a knocking at his door. He rolled over to check the clock, and the glow-in-the-dark dial read three a.m. Who the hell was banging down his bedroom door at three a.m.? He swung his legs over the side of the bed and mashed a hand over his face. Next step was trying to gather the sleep-scattered particles of his brain, and luckily he gathered enough to have the forethought to pull on a shirt before he answered the door.

  Keyne was standing there in sleep shorts and a camisole, hugging herself and weeping. He knew this might happen. She’d been taking sleeping pills for the past couple of months and they’d decided with her doctor and her therapist that maybe she shouldn’t anymore.

  “Bad dream?”

  She nodded and flung herself at him, making him glad he’d put on a shirt. Judge Pollard wouldn’t be excited about his attire, but it was better than nothing. Keyne’s hands fisted in the worn cotton at his back, her small frame heaving with violent sobs. He hesitated for a split second but then hugged her back. Of course he did. What kind of human being wouldn’t offer comfort to a sobbing girl?

  “Okay,” he murmured into the top of her head. “You’re okay.”

  When her keening had turned less convulsive, he pet her hair. It was soft and it smelled good. It had been a long time since anyone had let him hold them like this. Sarah wasn’t affectionate, and though he had hugged his family when he saw them, including the O’Connells, it hadn’t been like this. A quick, greeting squeeze, not a prolonged embrace. The longer he held her and the calmer she became, the more he became aware of her body pressed against his.

  Which was flat-out unacceptable. She’s a kid, Andersson. A child who woke up from a bad dream and sought out the only person who was around to offer her comfort because everyone else was dead.

  The thought lanced through him. He missed them. Terribly. He could go minutes without thinking about it, but he couldn’t count the number of times every day that he checked his phone, hoping for a voice mail from his mom asking if he was coming over for dinner or a text from Gavin asking if he wanted to go to a ballgame. No emails forwarded from his dad about business developments or a new car he had his eye on.

  Nor could he count the number of times per day that he shut that shit down, because only one person in this household was allowed to be hit so hard by sorrow that they could barely function, and clearly that was Keyne’s prerogative.

  He summoned memories of her to get his head on straight: Keyne and Gavin holding hands on their walk to the first day of kindergarten. Keyne’s small face covered with ice cream at a backyard barbecue. It was only last year she’d put away most of her stuffed animals and she still had that raggedy-ass Peter Pan doll that she kept tucked under her pillow because she didn’t want anyone else to see it. A child.

  So he stroked her hair and her back until her breathing evened out and her grip on his shirt went slack.

  “You want to tell me about it?” He wasn’t eager for her to say yes, but he wanted to at least offer if that’s what she needed. She rubbed her face against him and though it should’ve grossed him out, it didn’t. He loved the unself-conscious way she wiped her nose and dried her tears on his shirt. No hesitation. Such perfect trust. It eased some of his fear he’d been fucking this whole thing up, and her entire family getting killed would be the least of her problems.

  “They left me.”

  He could barely hear her from where her face was burrowed, but it was enough.

  “We were on the boat and they left. They left me alone, Jas. In the middle of the ocean. I looked everywhere but they weren’t there. They took all the lifeboats, and they left me.”

  Her voice was shaky with tears and it wore at his heart as surely as a stream of water wore at a stone.

  “Oh, sweetheart.” He held her tighter and she started to cry hard again. “No one left you. They wouldn’t have left you. Gavin would’ve walked across hot coals for you. There’s no way he would’ve left you.”

  “But they did, they did.”

  How could he argue with that? They did leave. And they wouldn’t be coming back. They never would’ve left her on purpose, but they were gone nonetheless. So he offered a pathetic consolation prize. “I’ll never leave you. I will always be here for you. I swear.”

  That seemed to soothe her, her keening dropped off to muffled whimpers. “I’m scared to go back to sleep.”

  Something inside of him twisted up and wrung out. She struggled during the day and if she couldn’t have the hours at night without suffering, what was the point? It would get better—at least that’s what he’d been trying to convince himself—but it was so fucking hard for her. He could understand why she might give up.

  He was already hiding the medications in the house. Not because she’d ever said or done anything that would lead him to believe she’d try to kill herself, but the possibility was enough to send him into spirals of paranoia. And not a little panic—what if she left him, too?

  The idea tightened his stomach and he fought off the gag because she didn’t need to catch even a whiff of that thought. His own panic, his own heartache couldn’t leak through. If he let his flood out along with hers, they’d both drown.

  It must’ve been the fear talking, the fear of what she might do if she couldn’t escape the misery ever, that made him say yes when she asked if she could sleep in his bed.

  In the morning he woke up spooning her, his hard-on digging into her back. He didn’t come up from unconsciousness quickly and instead of letting go like he should have, he held her tighter, dug his nose into her hair and pushed his hips into her ass before he broke the surface. And when he did, he wished he hadn’t. Jesus. Judge Pollard would have his balls for this, and rightly. He was a fucking pervert.

  Well, sure, he was a pervert, but the most honorable kind of pervert. The ones who call themselves perverts in the most mocking, affectionate way because what kind of pervert was he with the talking and the negotiating and the processing and the aftercare? There was a goddamn distinction between the kind of pervert he was and the kind of pervert who would wake up with a hard-on pressed against the back of his dead kid brother’s girlfriend who was half his age.

  Right now, he was the bad kind of pervert. The worst. And the very worst part was he wasn’t disgusted. His conscious brain was still waking up, but the lizard, pleasure-seeking part of him told it to hit the snooze butto
n, shut the fuck up, and go back to sleep.

  She was a warm body next to his, and it was okay to find comfort in being close to another human. It was okay that he liked how her hair smelled, how her ribcage rose and fell under his arm, how her soft breath was even in his ears. Most of all, he liked how when he was with her, she could sleep. She wasn’t afraid. And yeah, he liked it when she stirred and nestled closer to him.

  Which was why he needed to get up right the fuck now.

  He snaked his arm out from around her and rolled away, careful not to jostle her even though every last sane ounce of him was screaming to get away. He edged toward the side of the bed and snuck off, making sure his footfalls were soft in the carpet as he made a break for the bathroom through the pass-through closet. Nothing less than a freezing cold shower would do. Send that fucking idiot lizard brain into hibernation where it belonged.

  Easing the door of the bathroom shut so the snick of the catch wouldn’t wake her, he stripped off his shorts and T-shirt, tossing them on the floor before he flicked on the water and stepped under the stream. He swore under the cold drops plastering his skin, but thankfully it accomplished what he’d hoped. A few minutes later, traitorous dick deflated, mind clear, he wrapped a towel around his hips just in time to hear her.

  “Jasper?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be right out.”

  ***

  The dream was always the same. It had been a week since she’d stopped taking her sleeping pill, and still the dream came. It started with her and Gavin lounging on the deck at the front of the boat, having pushed the cushy lounge chairs together and facing them out to sea. Out here, without the city lights to spoil the view, the stars were bright and there were so many of them.

  Gavin would tell her over and over the constellations. No matter how many times he told her, she could never remember. They’d joke it was because she was storing that information with him. She didn’t need to know, because he did and they’d never be apart. They were two halves of a whole, responsible for each other in a way no one else seemed to get. But it made sense to them; it was the only way they knew how to live. So when she rolled closer and tapped Gavin on his chest, he looked down at her and read her mind. “Popcorn?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Be right back, Tiki.”

  He’d lope off to the galley to get their snack and she’d lie there, staring at the stars. She waited and waited. Gavin never took so long. Knew she hated cold popcorn. Maybe he’d run into someone on his way? But they wouldn’t keep him, not if they knew he was trying to get to her. He’d fidget, blue eyes darting in her direction until they let him go. It must have been twenty minutes before she looked for him. Maybe if she’d looked sooner she would’ve been able to find him.

  But there was no one on the bridge, no one on the decks, no one in the galley, no one in the cabins. She called out. “Gavin? Mom? Dad? Aunt Emily? Uncle Arvid?” She didn’t bother calling for Jasper. Yet. She called for the crew. They’d known her, doted on her, since she was a little girl. They didn’t answer either.

  She went down to the engine room but there was no one there and it was dark. The motor had stopped, there weren’t any sounds. That’s when fear tightened its grip on her stomach. If they were teasing her, playing some awful hide-and-seek trick, they wouldn’t have turned the engines off. She started to run, bare feet pounding across the changing surfaces. As she skidded to a stop on the deck, she noticed the lifeboats were gone. If they had to get off the boat, why hadn’t they told her? Shouldn’t there be alarms?

  She ran and ran and no one was there. That’s when she would start yelling for Jasper and she’d wake up with his name in her mouth.

  Flinging the door wide open—she didn’t care that it slammed against the wall—she flew down the hall, not stopping until there was only one thing left between them. “Jasper!”

  Between the pounding of her small fist on his door and her shouting, he was at the door, bleary-eyed and spiky-haired, in less than a minute. His arms had barely gone up before she pushed between them, wrapped her arms around his ribcage and held tight, her face pressed into his chest. He held her close, laid his stubbly face on the top of her head, hushed her.

  At her last birthday party, her school friends had had a lot to say about Jasper. The girls were divided between thinking he was really hot and really scary.

  “Scary? Jasper’s not scary. He’s nice.”

  “Keyne, are you serious? If he were in a movie, he would totally kill people.”

  Well, sure. But not everyone who killed people in movies was bad. He would be one of the good guys. She was sure of it. But even the girls who thought he was good looking were intimidated. “He’s so intense. How can you even talk to him? I can’t believe he’s Gavin’s brother.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s like my brother, too, so stop talking about how hot he is. You’re grossing me out.” That had been a white lie. It hadn’t grossed her out, but something about thinking of Jasper as handsome had made her uncomfortable in a way she couldn’t quite name.

  She’d never thought of Jasper as scary. She understood how other people could think he was scary with his big, blocky body and the way his forehead sloped into his brow-bone. He was like a human pit bull. But he’d never turned that snarl on her, no matter how obnoxious she was. Maybe his scariness was part of what made her feel safe with him.

  “You’re all right. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

  She clutched at Jasper through his shirt. She was getting accustomed to seeing him in his boxers and a T-shirt, the soft fabric clinging to him in surprising ways. Growing up, he’d just been there so she’d never thought much about his body. But she did now. How broad and muscular he was, how hairy his legs and his forearms were. And his chest. She could feel the springy hair under her cheek through his shirt. So different from Gavin. She wondered if someday Gavin’s lanky but soft frame would have grown, hardened into something like this. Would she have wanted it to?

  Gavin had made her feel adored, loved, like the prettiest, most special girl on earth. He had worshiped her. But Jasper . . . Jasper made her feel like it didn’t matter if she were pretty or smart or strong or any of the other things Gavin loved about her. He would protect her no matter what, because she was her. He was holding her, comforting her, because she was her. It calmed her. As did his deep voice that rumbled in his chest, and the way he swayed from side to side. It should’ve made her feel unsteady, like she was out at sea again, but Jasper wouldn’t be moved unless he wanted to be. He rocked her and she let him.

  “Dreaming again?”

  She nodded against him and her breath hitched, tears threatening to rise up again.

  “I’m sorry, Keyne.”

  God, he sounded sad. And despite her own crushing misery, she wanted to make him feel better. Despite having known him her whole life, she didn’t know much about Jasper, didn’t know how to comfort him the way he did her. He’d always been aloof, like he had everything he needed, as if he were entirely self-contained. But he’d never liked to see her upset or unhappy. The only thing she knew right now was he liked making her feel better.

  “Jas?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I stay with you tonight?”

  There was a small, almost inaudible huff, and she could feel him shake his head. “Keyne . . .”

  “Please? It’s the only way I don’t have nightmares. It’s the only way I can sleep.”

  He hesitated. Maybe tonight would be the night he turned her away, told her no, to go back to her own room and suffer through it. But he sighed into her hair and let her go to look in her eyes and rub her arms, his thumb coasting over the scar that was still angry and red.

  “We can’t keep doing this.”

  “I know. But . . .”

  “But for now, okay.”

  He led her to his bed, held the covers up fo
r her to climb in and then he lay down beside her, lifted his arm for her to slide under. She snuggled up against him. The heat of his body relaxed her, let her limbs go loose and her head go heavy. She was so tired, and her body hurt. Grief hurt, heartache was exhausting. But tonight, she could sleep in peace. For a while.

  Sometime in the morning she woke. There was sunlight streaming in where the sides of the curtain didn’t quite meet the window frame. Jasper was holding her close, his scruffy face buried against her neck, his arm resting heavy over her ribs and his . . . his . . . penis hard against her back.

  It seemed silly, but before that first morning when she’d woken up to his hardness against her, she hadn’t thought of Jasper as having a penis. She knew, of course, Jasper was a boy and of course he had boy parts, but it’s not like she walked around, looking at all the boys and men she knew, thinking, “Hey, that guy has a penis.” But she’d become very aware of Jasper’s penis over the past week.

  It had startled her the first time but hadn’t scared her. Now it was just a fact. She had been familiar with every inch of Gavin, including his penis. She’d explored it with her hands and with her mouth because she’d been curious. Had puzzled over it, studied it, tried to imagine what it would be like to have your desire, your want outside of your body instead of tucked away inside of you. She tried and she couldn’t, no matter how much she’d touched Gavin while he lay there or stood, letting her do whatever she wanted. He’d been so sweet to her.

  The first morning he’d woken up with a hard-on beside her, he’d been red-faced. Stammered, “Tiki, I’m sorry. It’s, you know, morning wood. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  But she’d wished it had. That he’d wanted her so badly, even in sleep, that his body made him ready to take her the second she was willing. She’d been willing. Gavin had wanted to wait. And now he’d never have her.

  Jasper made a sleepy grunt behind her and nuzzled at her hair. He’d be conscious soon and then he’d spirit himself off to the bathroom before he thought she was awake so she wouldn’t know about his penis. His morning wood. It didn’t mean anything.