Neither of them really looked at me before they left the house, just waved goodbye to the little girls.
“Want to bake cookies again?” I asked.
“Can we bake a cake?” Karla asked. “With icing? Lots of icing?”
“Let's see what we have,” I said. “I don't think we have any icing, but we can always look.”
Of course, I knew that there was a can of pink frosting – with sprinkles – hiding in the pantry, right at Karla's eye level. At least, there was if my father hadn't moved it.
It took the girls about a minute to find it and run to me, squealing with delight, demanding to bake the cake now-now-now.
It was the only thing that I wanted to do in the world.
When I got back to Beast's house, the roads were dark, but his house and yard were lit up like noon.
I got out of the car and slammed the door behind me, making the Toyota shake a little.
Beast was standing in the doorway, like the first night I'd stayed there, a dark shape against the bright house.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he demanded.
“I went to see the girls,” I said.
“It's almost midnight,” he shot back. He took a few steps down towards me, which let me see his face. There was so much anger there that it scared me, but more than anger, something else. Something I couldn't quite name, but I knew I'd seen on another face.
“Kandy and my father were out late,” I said. “I put the girls to bed and watched TV for a while.”
“And you didn't check your phone?” he demanded. “Seriously, Tabitha?”
“I forgot,” I said.
“Why were you so careless? I was goddamn worried, you just disappeared. Anything could have happened to you,” he said.
That was it. That was what I had read on his face. It had been so long since anyone had worried about me, I couldn't even recognize it.
I had no idea what to do with that.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure. You're worried about me. Like you were worried about the girl my father hit.”
“Dammit, Tabitha,” he said, running his hand through his hair and closing his eyes for a moment. He took a deep breath. It looked like he was searching for patience – and that just pissed me off more. It was late, I was tired, and I wanted to be done getting yelled at and just go to bed.
“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'll check with you before I take the car.”
“It's not that,” he said. He let loose a gusty sigh. “I'm not your warden or anything. You can use the car. I don't need to know exactly where you are. Just try not to totally disappear, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, flatly.
I knew I should probably reassure him, apologize, cry, tell him why everything was my fault, and probably offer him a blowjob for good measure.
I just didn't have the energy.
He took another deep breath. “It's late. I know. Let's talk about it tomorrow. I'm glad you're safe.”
I nodded, and he stepped aside so I could head into the house.
“Tabitha?” he asked, when he followed me into the living room and started turning the lights off.
“Yeah?”
“Will you... will you testify against your father?”
“No, Beast.”
I woke up, my mind racing, an hour later than usual.
Months of confusion had come together.
Before I even changed out of my pajamas, I was across the hall, pounding at Beast's door.
“What? Tabitha? You okay?” he called, groggy. It took him a matter of seconds before he was opening his door, wearing nothing but a pair of loose pajama pants, carrying a baseball bat.
“You're fucking serious,” I said, jabbing my finger into his chest.
It was definitely a gorgeous chest, but that wasn't the time for any of that. I took one glance at the way the morning light glinted off of his pecs and then went back to what was more important.
“You mean it, don't you?” I demanded.
“Mean what? Tabitha, it's six o'clock in the fucking morning,” he said.
“I thought you were fucking with me. Six months, I thought you were fucking with me. I thought you wanted me to say yes so you could tell him and it was some sort of fucked-up trap. I thought you were going to call him as soon as I said yes. Because I wanted to say yes.”
“What?”
“You really want to know if I would testify against my father, don't you?” I demanded. “You're working with the cops.”
“Yeah,” he said, frowning, squinting at me, still clearly wanting to be asleep.
“You are?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I couldn't tell you. I'm sorry. They'll ask on the stand and it would be perjury if I lied. If I said one thing and you said another, it would get confusing and destroy the case. Yeah. I work for the cops.”
I blinked at him.
“You're seriously working for the cops? You're doing some big, elaborate... thing?”
“Tabitha?” he asked. “Can I go put a shirt on, maybe get dressed? I mean, I want to have this talk, but I'm basically naked and asleep right now.”
I couldn't help it.
I glanced down.
He wasn't wearing pajamas, like I'd assumed, just a pair of boxers.
They didn't leave a whole lot to the imagination.
I tried not to think about it any further than that, and returned my gaze to his face as I blushed.
“I'll get coffee started,” I said.
“Perfect, thanks.”
He came out of his room after about three minutes, while I cracked eggs in a bowl to scramble for our breakfast.
“You're doing some big thing,” I prompted as I got out the sausage.
“Yeah,” he said, patiently. “They needed someone who had been in the area for a long-ass time and seemed legit to the local druggies. I was out, home free, but they said that they had reserved the right to press charges when my lab blew. They hadn't done it because I was jacked up so bad and got clean, but they came by every few months and reminded me that a suspended sentence isn't the same thing as being innocent and they could nail my ass to the ground any time they felt like it.”
“Why did they suspend your sentence?” I asked.
He looked embarrassed.
“There were kids,” he said. “Lots of witnesses. I went in the trailer, I saw that there were two kids, a toddler and maybe a little older, and I lost my shit.”
“Someone brought their kids to a lab?” I asked, horrified.
“Yeah, they just put them right in the other room. I wouldn't let an adult in there for more than ten minutes without a respirator or painter's mask or something, that place was dodgy as shit.”
“Who were the witnesses?”
“The other cooks, some buyers. It was way out in the country, so there was good privacy, so there were always, like, a dozen people hanging out. More, sometimes.” He took a deep breath. “I grabbed the kids and got them out to the yard right away and found someone who wasn't high to watch them while I went back in for their parents. I was gonna tell them that they couldn't come back if they did something that stupid again, and I better hear that their kids were okay or I'd cut them off. I had the best stuff for two hundred miles. I thought they'd listen.”
He took a deep, shaky breath.
“I was in the living room yelling at them to get out of there before they fucked something up, and... they fucked something up. I still don't know what. They all died. It could have been anything.”
“Was it just them in there?” I asked, when he was silent for long moments.
“No, my buddy, Jax, he was my partner. He cooked too. They were there with him.”
Beast's hands were clenched hard on the edge of the table. It looked like talking about it was the last thing on Earth he wanted to do, but he kept going.
“Jax and the idiots died. I heard him scream for a while. Everyone was screaming.”
I could only imagine. A trailer explod
ing into flames, dozens of people around, it must have been terrifying. I thought of the kids that were taken out just before then, thought of Karla and Krystal somewhere like that.
At the same time, I felt, almost, jealous. My father dragged me around to crappy trailers full of meth, places that smelled of ammonia and desperation, and no one ever gave him a piece of their mind.
No one ever tried to protect me like Beast protected those kids.
“I was in the living room, so I wasn't as badly... I walked away. I didn't walk far, I fell over in the yard, but I got out of the trailer before it got worse. I was... I was on fire. Seriously. Every part of me was burning.”
As I made breakfast and got him a cup of coffee, he painted a picture, in slow, halting speech, of thinking he was dying, of wishing he'd died, of months in a hospital. Of pain and bandages and physical therapy and of so many surgeries he's still not sure how many times he went under, how many doctors played a part in putting him back together.
“So, the kids,” he said, finally. “The cops said that they probably would have arrested me, injuries and all, except... everyone else there saw me take the kids out just in time. They saw how angry and scared I was for the kids. Everyone knew it was a goddamn fluke that I saved those kids, I didn't know the place was about to blow.”
“You knew they shouldn't be there,” I said, softly. I pulled a stool over to him and perched on it, reaching out to rest my hand on his shoulder. “Even without a fire, you know? You were protecting them from something small, and something big happened. You would have helped them either way, and you ended up helping them a lot. That's... that's wonderful.”
“They were in foster care for a little while, and when I was sort of presentable, they let them come see me. Sweet kids. They hugged me goodbye and after they left I screamed for about two hours.”
“You saved them,” I said, quietly.
His eyes were distant. I saw him blink every time I spoke, but he was too far away to respond to my words. There was more he wanted to say, and he had to get it out once he'd started. Had to keep talking.
“Their grandparents adopted them,” he said. “They sent me a nice note saying that they were trying to put their past behind them, asking me not to try to visit them again.”
“Ouch,” I said.
“Yeah, they probably thought I'd show up high and ask for money,” he said.
I kept my hand on his shoulder, rubbing little circles. It was the most I'd ever touched him, and I couldn't get over how good it felt. I knew I should be focusing on his story, I knew it was painful and sad, and I felt so bad for those kids, but some horrible part of me was giddy inside to be touching Beast.
“I wouldn't have,” he said, bitterly. “For a while, I was the only guy nearby who could make decent meth. You know? I got as much as I wanted, other burnouts like me would have done anything for me.”
“I bet you got all the girls,” I said, thoughtlessly.
He winced.
“Funny thing,” he said. “The girls you meet because you sell them meth are not exactly the type of girls you want to bring home to your mother.”
I didn't say anything. I didn't know anything about that.
There was no one I wanted to bring anyone home to – except, wait, of course there was. I pictured Krystal and Karla bringing Beast a princess DVD, him sitting through it with patient grace, and smiled.
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I think.”
“I wasn't anyone you would have brought home to your mother either, mind you,” he said. “I'm still not. Still the same loser I was, even if I'm not a junkie any more.”
“I think Krystal and Karla would really love you,” I said. “You'd watch Sofia the First with them and they'd feed you cookies.”
“That's -” he said. “Yeah, I would.”
He smiled a little.
“You're not anyone I'd be ashamed of knowing,” I said, quietly. “You're not anyone I'd be afraid or embarrassed for the girls to meet. You're a good guy, and I trust you.”
When his lips stretched into a real smile, he looked years younger. The scar on his face didn't hide the sparkle of his eye, the soft look he gave me.
I leaned in and brushed a kiss over his hair.
It sent a little electric shock, a little jolt of pleasure through me.
I bent a little further and my eyes fluttered shut of their own accord as our lips found each other. Before they met in the kiss that Beast and I had both been longing for, he pulled away.
“Tabitha,” he said. “This isn't the time.”
I swallowed and looked away.
I thought he'd said that he liked me, I thought he would want to kiss me.
I was so wrong, and I wanted to run and hide, never look at him again.
How could I have made a mistake like that?
“I want to,” he said, reaching out and taking hold of my hand, brushing his thumb over my knuckles. “Okay? I promise, I want to kiss you so bad.”
I still didn't say anything.
“I don't think either of us really slept last night, and we just had a really intense talk,” he said. I looked at him, saw his kind eyes willing me to understand. “It feels natural to kiss after a bit of soul-sharing, but I don't want that to be the only reason, okay?”
“You think we'll regret it?” I asked.
“Well, honestly, no. I don't. I hope not, at least, but if one of us did, it would suck so badly. I don't want either of us to doubt anything at all.”
“I can see that, I guess,” I said.
I took my hand away from his.
He stretched.
The moment was broken. I didn't feel like I could lean in for anything, let alone a kiss.
“Is the sausage burning?” he asked.
“No, I turned the burners to low,” I said, shaking my head. “I can get them fired back up and we can eat pretty soon.”
“That sounds great,” he said, relief lighting up his face. “Is that okay with you?”
“Yeah,” I said.
As he took the first few bites a few minutes later, his phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked it and made a face.
“I've gotta take this, sorry,” he said.
When I told him it wasn't a problem, he walked away from the table.
I stood up to check the sausage that was still in the pan, and realized that I could almost hear him through the vents of the old house.
I leaned forward and listened hard.
“-long enough,” Beast said. “I called you five times yesterday.”
Pause.
“Look, I know she says she's fine, but she wants to put Johnnie behind bars so bad it's all she can think about. I'm telling you, she's gotta pull out for a while and go to the doctor. Johnnie hit her pretty hard.”
Pause.
My father. Beast must be talking about the woman who got hit the day before. She was a cop, not a tweaker. There was a reason Beast didn't react. It was all according to someone's plan.
“Good.”
Pause.
“She's fine. I had to tell her this morning. She finally asked.”
Pause.
“I'm not sure. She seemed okay with it, but she didn't say much. I don't think she'd snitch, she's not like that.”
Pause.
“Uh-huh.”
Pause.
“Okay.”
Pause.
“Okay.”
Pause.
“Yeah, but-”
Pause.
“I'll tell her. You have my word. I didn't tell her I was mixed up in this until she asked, didn't I? I'll write down the exact time it happened, all of that. I won't neglect the paperwork. I haven't yet, have I? Can I go?”
After that, just a lot more listening and Beast grunting. I busied myself with cooking, trying to be sure he wouldn't know I'd been eavesdropping.
He walked back in the room as I was dishing up breakfast.
“Oh, good,” I said. “I was afraid it
would get cold.”
“Looks delicious,” he said. “Glad I'm just in time.”
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