“It’s late, I know,” Cole said after a short period of silence fell between us, “but I was hoping I could see you again tonight.” The faint smile that crossed his lips told me he was well aware of the heat flushing high in my cheeks. Somehow or another, I seemed to always be blushing when Cole was around.
I tied up the garbage bag from behind the bar and set it by the doorway to the back room so that I would remember to toss it into the dumpster behind the building when I left.
“I’d like that, Cole, but I really don’t think going out in a public place tonight is advisable. I had a beer spilled on my boots earlier and I am convinced I smell like a French fry.”
Cole chuckled quietly, nodding in surrender. “Okay, I get it. I don’t suppose you would want to come to my place for a drink then?”
I stopped and looked at him, my mind immediately sending off alarm bells at such a proposal. Cole was not the problem, I was. On the outside, I was merely fidgeting with pile of menus on the bar, my expression hopefully unreadable.
In my head, my brain was screaming at me. I knew I’d be safe with Cole. But there was a big difference between having coffee together in a public place and having a drink alone. How could I tell him that? He would never believe me if I used the old “it’s not you, it’s me” line. It was obvious he was trying to mend whatever riffs had been made yesterday.
I quickly blurted out the next best thing I could think of on the spot. “How about my place instead?”
He seemed to be gauging my facial expression before he nodded. “I’m okay with that if you are. Should I wait for you outside in the parking lot then? Just like old times?” he quipped. I shook my head at his feeble joke. He had waited for me there for the first time only a few days ago, but the act was already deemed an inside joke. I liked the idea of having an inside joke with someone, especially Cole.
I made my way over to the sign in the window and carefully turned it. “I’ll be out in about five minutes.”
“I’ll meet you at my truck whenever you’re ready, Ames,” he said, touching my arm gently as he walked out the door into the darkness.
***
I walked out the back door of the bar and zipped my jacket up. The wind seemed brisk tonight and had picked up since this morning. I smoothed my hair and hoped I looked better than I thought I did as I stepped around the corner.
Cole was leaning against the driver’s side door of his truck with his hands in his pockets, staring down at the ground. I could tell, even from way over here, he was a million miles away caught up in his own thoughts. I hiked my purse up farther onto my shoulder and cleared my throat to let him know that I was there. He looked up and smiled, but his uneasiness shone through.
“We don’t have to go to your place if you don’t want to,” he said to me when I reached the truck. “If you’re uncomfortable, I mean.” The nervousness in his voice did not escape me. He watched me carefully and it was then that I knew Ryan was right. Cole was a good man, and it was possible for me to tell him what I needed to without divulging every detail.
“I want to,” I said. “I want to talk to you.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I’d probably said the wrong thing.
No man ever heard a woman say she wanted to talk and believed that something good could come out of it. He handled it well though, giving me a reserved nod and walking around to the passenger side of the truck to open the door for me. I tried to give him an encouraging smile as I climbed into the cab, but Cole didn’t meet my gaze.
He drove to my house saying only a few words along the way. Thank God I didn’t live very far away from the bar. He was nervous, but judging from his noncommittal small talk and hesitation before each thing he said, I thought perhaps he had a few things he was waiting to say to me as well. I made a mental note to make the coffee good and strong when we got there. I didn’t know about Cole, but I knew I was going to need it.
“I bought you something today,” he said suddenly, breaking the silence as he pulled his truck into the driveway at my house.
“You did? You didn’t need to do that,” I said, immediately wondering what he could have purchased for me. I wasn’t a huge fan of surprises, and I was sure my tone of voice advised him of that fact.
“It’s nothing bad, or embarrassing, or mushy with hearts all over it,” he explained playfully, “so just accept it when I give it to you, okay?”
“Fine,” I said in a mockingly frigid voice. I was sure he could see I didn’t mean it.
“Let’s go inside first.”
I nodded and got out of the truck, trudging silently toward my front door as I fiddled with my keys to find the right one.
The motion sensor light blinked on brightly as we stepped onto the front porch. I took a quick glance around, but nothing seemed amiss. I could see Cole watching me in my peripheral vision, and I quietly let myself into the house with him following closely behind me.
“Ignore the mess,” I advised in a small voice, feeling my way across the wall just inside the door until I found the light switch and flicked it on.
The retro-looking kitchen lit up in a harsh yellowish light from behind the sink. In reality, my house was not necessarily a mess, but it was more disheveled than I was used to. The empty coffee mug and unpacked shopping bags from the previous day that were sitting in the middle of the kitchen table didn’t help the cluttered look of the room either.
I slipped my shoes off at the door and pushed my purse onto the table beside the plastic bags. “Coffee?” I asked Cole in an attempt to be hospitable despite the tension hanging in the air between us.
“I’d like that, Ames,” he said with a nod, shrugging off his jacket and hanging it on the back of one of the hideous orange and chrome chairs tucked in by the matching table.
I set to work putting a fresh filter into the coffee pot and filling it with more coffee than I usually would at this time of night. I always made my coffee strong, but tonight called for a heftier dose of caffeine. If Cole wanted to drink coffee with me in the middle of the night, he would have to try to keep up.
The coffee pot was new and digital. It was the only luxury I had allowed myself when I first moved here, but having endless amounts of good coffee was just about the only thing that made me look forward to coming home to my empty rundown house every night after work.
“This is a neat place you’ve got here,” Cole said, breaking me out of my idle thoughts.
I turned and looked at him after pressing the button on the coffee maker and hearing it start to heat the water I’d poured into it. He was obviously just being nice. No contractor would call this place neat and mean it.
“Teake,” I said bluntly, ignoring his comment about the house.
“What?”
“Teake,” I repeated, leaning against the kitchen counter. “That’s my last name, Teake.”
Cole pulled out a chair and sat on it, facing me. “Amy Teake. Good to finally meet you.”
I tried to play it out like it wasn’t a big deal. “Cole, you met me a few days ago. It’s just a name.”
“Is it your real one?”
I wrinkled my forehead, caught off guard by his question. “Yes,” I said hesitantly. “Why would you ask me that?”
“Because you’re running from him.” He didn’t take his eyes off me. “Aren’t you?”
I crossed my arms in front of me, the only sound in the room the sputtering of the fresh coffee being dripped into the coffee pot. We were silent for a long while; Cole just watched me.
Ryan’s words resonated in the corners of my mind and I found myself asking if I trusted Cole enough to tell him the whole truth. It surprised me to realize that I did. If there was any reason to believe he was a threat, surely I would have felt that before now. My instincts couldn’t possibly be so out of whack that I could no longer pick up on hints of acute danger in my life.
Besides, Ryan wouldn’t have given me that little push to spend time with his brother if he had known the
re was something about him that would be harmful to me in some way. No matter how I looked at it, I had a very hard time viewing Cole as someone I had to fear.
“Yes,” I finally said. “I’m running from him. Or rather, I ran from him.”
I watched Cole’s face intently and I could see him mulling my words over in his mind. He nodded as though confirming what he already knew, then got up without looking at me. For a moment, I thought he was going to come toward me and wrap his arms around me, and perhaps part of me wished he would, but instead he reached beyond me and plucked two coffee mugs from the dish rack beside the sink and set them right side up on the counter.
“You didn’t just break up, you ran. There’s a difference.”
I said nothing.
“That was probably really hard to say to me, Amy, so I appreciate the honesty. Let’s get you some coffee, and then we’ll talk about it.” He turned and gave me a consoling glance. “Only if you want to. Otherwise, we will discuss the dull ins and outs of my day on the construction site and you can pretend to be entranced by such a boring topic.”
He gave me a wink as he turned from me and opened the fridge, pulling out a carton of milk. The sugar was already on the counter, and he pulled two clean small spoons from the dish rack as well. I watched him pour the steaming coffee into the mugs and slide mine over toward me.
I smiled half-heartedly and began to put the milk and sugar into my mug in loosely measured amounts. I would drink coffee any way I could get it, but with the choice, I always put in a rough teaspoon of sugar and two of milk. Cole seemed to drink his with only milk, I noticed.
I led him into the living room, bending to turn on the lamp beside the couch which cast a yellowish glow across the room filled with very dated decor. I would have to purchase a few light bulbs with more wattage; these were definitely not bright enough. Of course, it was difficult to know that when I only came home long enough to sleep and get ready to go back to work again.
Cole sat down sideways on the couch, one foot planted firmly on the floor with his coffee mug in hand, and he motioned for me to sit with him. I boldly chose to sit close to him on the middle cushion of the couch instead of opting for the other end of the couch. If we were going to have this conversation, I was going to make sure I could tell how he was reacting to it.
“You told me he didn’t know you were leaving him,” Cole began, “and I’m still sorry for the comment I made the other night. I didn’t realize the situation was as bad as it was until after you set me straight.”
I took a sip of my coffee and let him continue.
“What you didn’t tell me was why you put up with it for so long, Amy. You deserve more than that. Anybody does. You must realize that, right?” Cole looked at me in an almost pleading manner. He had obviously been thinking about the tidbits of my past I had already mentioned.
“If it were that easy, Cole, I’d have left him a long time ago,” I said quietly, pausing for more coffee and to think my words through before I said them out loud. “I do suppose there was a time when I felt there was no way to get away from him, that being with him was the path I’d chosen and I would have to live with it. It was the bed I had made, so I had to lie in it, so to speak.”
I shrugged and watched Cole’s expression as he sat there silently. His face showed no judgment, no sign of emotion. Maybe it was a good thing, maybe bad. I wasn’t sure.
“I spent years living each day the way Ethan governed it. We met when I was seventeen. He was basically all I knew and I had nothing else to compare our relationship to. My dad had left my mom when I was young enough not to remember him, and she never remarried. She had a few relationships while I was growing up, but they never lasted long. She didn’t trust men, I guess. After my father leaving her with a baby the way he did, I suppose I couldn’t blame her.”
I paused again, collecting my thoughts. “Anyway, from the beginning, Ethan was possessive. If another guy so much as looked at me and that look could be construed as flirtatious or as an interest in me, Ethan had no reservations about instigating fights, both verbal and physical. It wasn’t long until other guys in high school wouldn’t even make eye contact with me in the hallways, let alone stop and talk to me. My social life was Ethan, and Ethan was my social life.”
Cole made a noise, more of a scoffing sound. “I’ve known guys like that,” he offered. “And you didn’t hear the warning bells back then?” His jaw was set in a clenched line.
If he was angered by my stupidity, it was only going to get worse. I would have to watch him carefully. “Of course I saw all the signs,” I stated testily, “but I was young and, you know…I thought I loved him. At that age, all girls think they’re in love when a good looking guy says all the right things and stands up for her in the hallways of a high school. By the time Ethan fully showed his true colors, I’d already been dealing with his obsessive antics for two years.” I stared fixedly at the wall. “It was then that he hit me for the first time.”
“That’s when you should have left him, Amy,” Cole whispered. He squeezed his eyes shut, but his resentment was very much bubbling to the surface.
“That’s why he hit me. I did try to leave.” I was surprised at the lack of emotion I was showing while recollecting my story. “I had packed what few things I had staying at his place and told him as gently as I could that I couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t want to be owned by him. I realized it didn’t have to be like that. I wasn’t in love with him and I was leaving town. He blackened one of my eyes and put his hands around my throat to choke me. He said if I ever tried to leave again, he’d make sure to squeeze my trachea until there was no chance of me being able to walk out that door of my own accord.”
Cole’s knuckles were so white I thought the coffee mug would shatter under his strength. He took my hand in his. “You spent the next six years with him after that,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
Even now, hearing Cole say it, it was hard to believe I really had spent six years more with a man who treated me the way Ethan had. In a way, it sounded like such a long period of time wasted on someone who wanted nothing more than to own me. In another sense, it seemed so relatively short in comparison to how old I actually felt. Eight years with Ethan had aged me mentally and emotionally. I merely nodded.
“I did. I know it’s easy from an objective standpoint to look at women who are abused by their boyfriends and assume they must be weak or stupid to choose to continue to live like that. But until you’ve stood in the shoes of a woman who is being told by a man who pledges to love her that he’ll kill her if she says or does one thing he deems as out of line, you have no idea what it’s like to live that way. There is no choice.” I realized I was gripping my coffee cup with the same fervor as Cole. Perhaps I was not so detached from the story of my time with Ethan after all.
“But you made the choice. To leave him, I mean.”
“Yes, I did, but that didn’t become a real option until I got to the point where it didn’t matter anymore whether I actually lived or died.” My gaze met Cole’s and the intense emotion I saw hit me like a tidal wave. “Either way, whether I stayed with him or attempted to leave him, I could end up dying because of it.”
“He’s not going to hurt you now, Amy,” Cole said in a low voice.
He said it a little too quickly, and I wondered if he actually meant to say it out loud. A veil of silence fell between us and I did not attempt to fill it. We both needed a chance for each other’s words to sink in.
“You didn’t care if he killed you?” he asked.
“The alternative was to continue living the way I was with him, and that wasn’t living at all.”
Cole looked down at his coffee cup and then bent forward to put the half-finished mug of cold coffee on the table in front of us. I immediately grabbed his cup and stood. I needed a break from this conversation; refilling our mugs with hot coffee seemed a good enough way to get it.
I dumped the cold coffee down the sink and
ran a bit of water from the tap to rinse it out. As I was pouring in the fresh coffee, I heard Cole’s voice break through the silence.
“What else did he do to you, Amy?”
I put the coffee pot back on its base and turned to look at him.
“There’s more. I can tell.” He took a few steps across the kitchen and stood in front of me. “You don’t have to tell me, Ames, but I think it might be good for you to tell someone, even though I can’t fathom how difficult that would be for you.”
He was standing so close to me I could feel the heat emanating from his body. I could hear his breathing, his heart beating. Then again, maybe it was my own I could hear. I was pretty sure it was pounding in my ears. He didn’t touch me though, thank God. I wasn’t sure I could stand physically touching him while reminiscing about Ethan and the life I had left behind.
“He owned me, Cole.” I spoke in a voice that was just above a whisper. “When you own something, what do you do with it? Exactly as you damn well please, right? Ethan’s ownership of me was no different. If he wanted me to do something for…or to him,” I looked down toward my shoes, “I did it. If I didn’t do it as soon as he asked it of me, or the exact way he wanted, there were consequences.” I swallowed as a knot began to form in my throat. “When he was drunk, it was worse.”
“Did he drink a lot?”
“More often than not. And those were the times he didn’t bother asking me to do things, he just took what he wanted. And I let him.”
I watched as Cole reached tentatively for me, and I quickly turned from him to prevent him from touching me. I was about to come undone, I could feel it. I grabbed my coffee mug from the counter top and switched the coffee pot off. I headed back into the living room without putting sugar or milk in my coffee and without looking at Cole again.
Until I'm Found Page 8