“And then you two would be in jail,” Sam said, despising the legal system with a sudden and fervent passion. “Manslaughter, most probably, but still…”
“Yep.” Annie sighed, shook her head. “So when Mom died, I fully expected him to just let loose on me. I mean, he said that he’d do it, and I thought if he got me alone at home, got into my bedroom, only one of us would walk out of that room… and it wasn’t going to be me, no matter how hard I fought.”
“So this is when you escaped,” Sam said; it wasn’t a question. “When you ran for your life.”
“Yes.”
“How? How the hell did you get away from that fucking human nightmare, honey?”
Annie paused in shock at the fact that Sam actually knew the word ‘fuck’, let alone used it in the correct context, then carried on:
“Mom and I had a secret joint account, just in our names. There wasn’t much in there, just over two hundred dollars, but I cleaned it out the day before the funeral, packed a small bag and hid it under the front porch, and then after the funeral, I waited at the neighbour across the street until Dick got drunk and passed out. When I was sure he was out, I snuck into the house and stole his car keys. Then I grabbed my bag, got into Dick’s car, went back to say goodbye to Mom one last time. And then I drove out of town, and kept driving until I hit Colorado.”
“You stole his car?”
“Yeah.”
“Good girl.” Sam wanted to high-five her, settled for clutching her hand a bit tighter. “I’m fucking thrilled.”
“Thanks,” she said, still unable to believe that she’d done that, even now, almost thirty years later. She’d never stolen anything in her life before that, hadn’t stolen anything since, but she figured that if she was only going to steal one damn thing in the whole of her life, at least she’d made it count. “I have to admit that it felt way better than it should have.”
“Nah,” Sam said. “I think it felt exactly as good as it should have.”
“Well… maybe.” Annie permitted herself a tiny smile. “Actually… most definitely.”
They shared a grin, then Annie sighed, carried on.
“Anyway. So. I drove through most of the evening, crossed the state line, and at about two a.m., I decided to look for a cheap motel with a bar. I figured that I deserved a drink and a decent sleep before taking Denver by storm. That’s when I met Billy.”
“Billy?”
“Billy Matthews.” Annie shrugged, resigned to what was going to happen next in the story. “Sarah and Noah’s Dad.”
“Ah, right.” Sam didn’t know much about the guy, but what he did know, he didn’t like, so remaining even neutral was proving a challenge. “What was he like? I mean that night that you met for the first time?”
“Oh, well.” Annie’s eyes softened, just a bit, and just for a few seconds. “He was gorgeous, and I was totally swept off my feet. You know? I was seventeen, and had never really had a boyfriend before because Dick scared any guy away from me, and Billy was – well. He was older by a good ten years, he was working full-time, he had money and a truck, and a tiny house all his own. He just seemed so amazing to me, so worldly, I suppose. Like he had it all figured out, in ways that I hadn’t even begun to look at or even think about.”
“Not many seventeen year olds have it all figured out, honey. Heck, most forty-seven year olds are still struggling to get some things together.”
“Yeah, well, I am forty-seven, and so I sure as hell know that to be true now, but back then, I was really looking for someone to… I don’t know. Take me under their wing? Guide me? Maybe even save me, just swoop in and take me off to a whole new life. I wanted to be then princess in the fairy tale, then who was waiting and waiting for the guy to show up and carry me off into the sunet, for my happily ever after life.”
“The knight in shining armor syndrome, huh?”
“Yep. A knight on a horse, with a big castle and sexy smile and great abs.”
Sam laughed. “And Billy had great abs?”
“Awesome abs. At least until he developed the beer gut.”
“So how did it all begin? Your fairy tale relationship?”
“Oh, I sashayed on in to this terrifying dive bar, all sass and attitude like you can only have when you’re seventeen and stupid, and went up to the bar and asked for a shot of whiskey. The bartender clocked me as underage, but it wasn’t the kind of place that cared much, so he served it up. Billy was standing there alone, and he just walked on over, bought me another shot even as I was coughing up a lung from the first one. And that was it, really. We talked and laughed and drank and danced, he took me to my motel across the highway, he stayed the night. Took my virginity with such gentleness, I think I fell in love with him there and then, just for doing that for me. The next day I was nursing a horrific hangover, and he brought me coffee and a sausage muffin thing – which was hands-down the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for me, in the whole my life – and asked me to see him again in Denver.”
Annie shrugged once more, absently ran her nail over Sam’s hand, just lightly, but he felt it with the force of an electrical current. God, he was putty in this woman’s hands.
“And I did see him in Denver.” Annie’s nail reached Sam’s wrist, stopped there as if checking his pulse. He wondered if she could feel his heart racing. “I saw him again and again. I moved in to his place within two weeks, he proposed to me within a month, I was pregnant one month after that. We married the day after I turned eighteen – almost exactly four months after he bought me that shot in that dive bar. It was all stupid-fast, but I was so, so in love with the man, and I truly thought it was going to be forever, you know? Handsome husband, house, baby… the whole thing.” Annie gave a self-deprecating laugh. “God, he even had a tiny white picket fence around the lawn, and a front porch. It was – well. It felt like a real-life fairy tale, you know? It was a living dream to a girl like me, after years of abuse and screaming and being afraid all the time.”
She stopped talking abruptly, looked pained. Sam braced himself for when things turned for the worse.
“It was a living dream, until it wasn’t.” She bit her full lip. “He – he was seeing other women when I was pregnant. It was a difficult pregnancy, twins almost always are, I suppose, and I couldn’t have sex, and he said his screwing around was my fault. But I suspect that he’d been seeing other women before my pregnancy advanced… I think he was always seeing other women, even up to our marriage.”
“Idiot,” Sam muttered.
“Yeah, well, so was I. I stayed.”
“You were young, and pregnant with twins, and had no job or support system in a new city,” Sam corrected her gently. “You were without any great options. Staying and having a roof over your head, and your babies’ heads, was the smart move, despite his affairs.”
“That’s what I told myself, every single damn day, and you know what?”
“What, honey?”
“I believed it, for a long, long time. It was… the lesser of many evils, you know? Stay and put up wth the cheating and lying, or go out with two tiny, helpless humans and figure out how to support them, and myself, and raise them and feed them and house them, all on my own. It just – I couldn’t do it.”
“Not many can, Annie.”
“The thing is, I think I could have made a go of it, once Sarah and Noah turned five or six, and started school. For sure, I could have held down something part-time, budgeted and figured it all out as a single Mom. It would have been hard and I knew that, but I’d have managed, one way or another. Women do it every single day, and I’d have just put on my big girl panties and put my head down and done it. But… well… Noah…” Her voice trailed off and she looked awkward; Sam knew that she felt terrible about coming across like she was blaming her son for anything, because she clearly wasn’t. But there was a hard, harsh reality
that Annie had had to factor into each and every decision of her life for almost three decades.
“Noah is autistic,” Sam finished for her. “And that’s a game-changer, in every way.”
“Yes.” Annie nodded, and he admired the warmth of her red hair in the light. “He couldn’t go to regular school, so that meant specialized programs and care, and he was home a lot. I did go to work at the diner then, just to pay for the special stuff he needed, but I never left him alone with Billy. I only scheduled shifts when Noah was out at the community centre, or with the autistic kids group, or whatever.”
“Was Billy abusive towards Noah?” Sam asked, almost afraid of the answer. He knew far too well for his liking just how vulnerable mentally- and physically-challenged people were to abuse, and special-needs children were too-often the focus of their parents’ frustration and anger. “Or you or Sarah?”
“Never.”
“No?” Sam was surprised to the point of being stunned. “Even when he got drunk, he never lost control?”
“No. Billy struggled with Noah from the beginning, that’s for sure, but he never hurt his son. Not once, not ever. I mean, I can accuse the man of many, many things, but smacking any us around is not one of them. In a way, that’s almost too bad.”
“What?” Sam stared at her, appalled. “You’d have wanted him to hit you and the kids?”
“Oh, God, no. Never.” Annie looked horrified. “That’s not what I meant, at all. I just meant – well. After Dick, I promised myself that if any man ever touched me in violence again, I’d leave so fast, his head would spin. It was the one thing that I wasn’t going to accept, and I know that if Billy had so much as laid his baby finger on any of us, I’d have bolted for the damn door faster than a blink.”
“OK.”
“But that’s the one thing that he didn’t do – though he made a point of doing everything else – and as it turns out, I could hack everything else.” She shook her head, and he saw her disgust at herself. “The name-calling, the emotional abuse, the drinking, the slow, steady grinding down of any joy or love I’d ever had or known with him, until it was all gone. The poisonous silences and then hateful spewing of anger and rage, the smashed furniture and broken dishes in the mornings after a drunken rampage… all of that, I could put up with, and I did, for years. And a part of me wishes that he’d backhanded me, just once. Just to get my pathetic, wishy-washy ass out the door, and my kids away. I always wonder… I still wonder what our lives might have been if I’d just sucked it up and left, whatever my excuses or reasons for staying and pretending.”
“Annie… honey…” Sam clasped her hand in both of his now. “That’s not how emotional abuse works.”
“No, I know. I do. I just – I guess when I was in it, all I saw was getting through the day without broken glass, but now… now I have hindsight, and all I see now is the wasted time, the years and years of just putting one foot in front of the other, never looking up to get my bearings. Especially since he was the one to leave, in the end, so things didn’t even finish on my terms, after all of that.”
“When did he leave?”
“The day after the kids turned eighteen,” Annie said. “Funny – they were exactly the same age that I was when I got married, and I’d thought I was so damn grown up when I said ‘I do’. But all I saw, when Sarah realized that Billy had gone and wasn’t coming back, was how young and vulnerable and afraid she was. She needed her Mom so badly, and even though Sarah pulled herself through and up, and she’s tough as hell in so many ways, she really hurt for a long time.”
“He just left without any warning?”
“Yep. Took off in the car, and I just assumed he went on a beer run, and maybe he did… but if so, the beer was in another state, ‘cause he never came back. No call, no note, no nothing. Just there one day, gone the next, leaving us alone and totally confused. Sarah was especially devastated, and couldn’t understand how a man could just leave like that. I think it messed with her head badly, and I know it made her very suspicious of men.”
“I’m sure,” Sam said. “And Noah?”
“He actually barely mentioned Billy after he’d gone. I don’t think he’d ever felt attached to his father, so his loss wasn’t an earth-shattering thing for him.”
“As sad as that is, that’s a blessing in some ways.”
“Huge,” Annie agreed. “So, we coped, all of us. I took on many more hours at the diner, Sarah took night classes at a community college, then started her own web design business and worked from home, Noah finally got approved for some home care a few times a week, and Sarah took care of him the rest of the time. We – we managed, even without the income from Billy’s factory job. Barely, most of the time, and we had more than one occasion when the lights were turned off or the heat was cut, but that had happened often enough when Billy was there and drinking up the bill money, so we were well used to it. And really, it was an incredible thing to wake up every day and not have to worry about setting him off because I’d overcooked the bacon, or forgotten the milk for his coffee, or breathed the fucking wrong way when the big game was on. We just – we did it, you know? Just teamed up and had each other’s backs, and we did it.”
“And here you are now,” Sam said gently. “You’ve all made it through.”
“Yep.” Annie drank some more wine, and Sam watched as her tongue snaked out to lick her lips; his cock leapt up in helpless response, as he imagined that soft, pink tongue lapping at the tip of his hardness. “In one piece, for the most part.”
“Oh, I’d say you’re all in better shape than that.” Sam tried to ignore the hard-on in his pants, to no great success. “I’d say you’re all doing great.”
“Well, the kids are,” Annie said wryly. “Me, maybe not so much.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, I’m still just a diner waitress, aren’t I? Living in a run-down house in the crappiest neighborhood in Denver.”
“Is it his house?” Sam asked. “Billy’s?”
“Oh, no.” Annie gave a strangely twisted, bitter smile. “No. He sold the house that we were living in – it was in his name, so it was his to do with as he pleased – just sold it out from under us, and we didn’t have a clue until the new owners show up with all the papers and told us to get the hell out within three hours, or they’d be calling the cops. That was the first moment when I think I truly began to hate my husband… until he did that, I thought he was an asshole, for sure. But to throw us out onto the streets in the dead of winter, and I mean all of that literally – to make his children homeless in fucking December, just before Christmas – that was monstrous. That was – it was fucking unforgivable.”
“Oh, my God. Honey…I don’t know what say.”
“Yeah. So, we packed what we could carry, Sarah almost killed herself to keep Noah calm and distracted with the sudden change, and we walked out into the winter night. No car, no home, no food except a few peanut butter sandwiches that I’d made in a blind panic.”
“Where did you go?”
“The diner. It was warm and safe enough, and my boss wasn’t around, so my friend Talia who also works there had the cook feed us for free, and everyone looked the other way. We stayed with Talia for about five weeks, until Sarah finally found a house that we could just about afford to rent, between the two of us. That’s where we ended up, and that’s where I still am.”
“You ever thought about moving? I mean, if you dislike the area that much?”
“Oh, sure. I’m looking around right now, but you know… every place that I really love is closer to the city centre and is expensive, and places that I can easily afford aren’t in great neighborhoods, anyway, so I might as well save my moving expenses and all the hassle and stay where I am.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“Anyway.” Annie gave him that smile now, that amazing, brilliant, b
reath-stealing smile. “Life is definitely better now, and I’m working on figuring it out. I always take the long way around, have done all my life, but I get there in the end.”
“That’s the important thing, honey. Getting there in the end, that’s what really matters. That’s all that really matters, I think.”
Annie looked over at Sam, just looked at him long and hard. The evening was drawing to a close now, and she knew that their time together was reaching its end. She’d enjoyed every second of her time in this kind, smart, funny man’s company, and even though she’d give anything to see him again, she knew that wasn’t on the cards for her. She’d gotten a single dinner, one evening, a few hours, and that was all that she could expect from this gorgeous, amazing man.
“Oh, the fortune cookies,” Sam said as he set the money on the table. He pushed the plate towards her, and with nothing but regret, she took back her hand, pulled back her heart. “Open yours, Annie.”
“OK,” Annie said with a mental shrug as she cracked the hard dough. She unrolled the tiny paper inside, glanced at it, paused. “Uh…”
“What?” Sam had opened his cookie as well and was blinking down at his own fortune. “What’s it say?”
“Ahem.” She cleared her throat. “‘A new love is approaching, as silent and sure as a morning mist over a lake. Do not miss the mist; do not miss the dawn of the new’.” She almost rolled her eyes, contemplating how her ‘approaching love’ sounded like a psychopathic stalker, or a serial killer, but refrained from actually rolling them because of course her ‘love’ was a maniac. “You?”
“‘She does not believe, but she wants to believe. She needs to believe as strongly as she needs to breathe. Belief is her breath’.”
He raised his eyes to hers, and just like that, Annie was caught in his gaze. It wasn’t Sam’s usual kind, open, intelligent look. No, this one was hot, fierce, bright. It was the look that he’d levelled her with over coffee, when he’d growled at her to not dare call him ‘sweet’ again.
Lush Curves (Dangerous Curves Book 8) Page 8