Evie didn’t put me through any psychoanalysis after that. We just went through the rest of our day, with her serving at the café and me bussing tables. I was so addle-brained that I almost crashed into Juanita, Rainey, and Evie a couple times on the floor.
What should I do about Micah now? Ignore that he’d taken some punches for me? That seemed crappy. But if I thanked him for his gallantry or whatever it was, I’d be opening a can of worms.
Stay away from him, my common sense was telling me.
But something else—and it wasn’t my libido this time—made a strong argument. What kind of ingrate doesn’t say a thank you to someone who stood up for her? What kind of dick lets that kind of protective act pass without a comment?
After the viciousness I’d encountered at the boutique, I knew I should appreciate anyone who stood up for me. But why did it have to be him?
Evie noticed my lack of coordination and, since she was the first to be scheduled to go home, she caught me in the backroom, near the sinks.
“Get out of here before you crash into a wall or something,” she said. “My tables are taken care of, so I’ll take your shift over and bus until closing.”
“I can’t have you doing double the work.”
“Hey.” She turned me to face her. “You’ll return the favor for me someday when I’m sick or too distracted to deal. Go home and get some down time.”
Since I was more of a disaster here than at home, I took her up on her offer, promising I’d come over to clean her room or something. She was extremely in favor of that as I gathered my things, kissed Mom goodnight, and took off.
Really, I intended to go home, too.
But the voice in my head that was shouting ingrate won out, and I found myself driving toward the lake, toward Micah’s house. I’d come up with a plan, though: I would write a note on some paper I kept in the dashboard. Thank him for his help. Leave it in the mailbox on the side of the road. No wait—anyone could find it there. I’d leave it on one of those cars in the shed since that was his space and probably no one else went in there. I hoped.
Yet the more I drove, the more I felt like a chicken. All I could see in my mind’s eye were those women in the clothes store today, the clerk accusing me of something I hadn’t done, making me hide my head in the sand yet again.
I couldn’t be that girl anymore.
As I turned into the gravel lane leading to the twins’ brick house, I saw lights on, a warm shade of yellow behind the curtains. Was Micah in there, playing with Henry?
The twins’ trucks were in the drive, so I knew they were home, but Micah kept his Camaro in the closed garage. Was he even here?
Then I noticed the light in the car shed, and my pulse stuttered. Adrenaline raced through me as I pulled to a stop.
A shadow on the ground. A man walking out of the shed.
Micah, slowing down as he saw me.
The light was behind him, so I couldn’t see his face, but from the way his muscled arms curved at his sides, I could picture him coming to my defense in a crowded, sweaty bar.
So I was here. Was I just going to stay in my pickup the whole time?
Taking in a fortifying breath, I opened my door. My legs shook, and I prayed they would hold me up after I slid to the ground and shut my door.
The smell of cooled grass and country air surrounded me, and I took it all in, needing every ounce of oxygen I could get as I moved toward him.
“Well, look at that,” Micah said as a night breeze rustled the oak leaves near the house. “Seems like playing hard-to-get with you is definitely the way to go.”
Yes, I was coming to him this time instead of the other way around, but did he really have to point it out? Being here was hard enough.
I continued to walk toward him, hoping to get a better view of his face from the shed’s light. He turned with me, keeping himself in the slant of darkness. Even the moonlight didn’t illuminate him.
“I heard what happened at the Lonesome Star,” I said. “I wanted to see if you were okay.”
“Hell, if I’d known that taking a few punches would—”
“Micah, let me see your face.”
I circled him some more, but he only kept turning, his voice still amused. “I get why you’re here. You’ve accused me of gloating before, but I think you’re the one in the mood for it now.”
“I’m not gloating about you getting in a bar fight. God. Would you just stand still?”
He finally did, and I came closer—close enough so that I could see a wicked black eye and a nasty bruise near his mouth.
“Jeez,” I whispered.
He touched the bruise, like he was making sure it hadn’t gone away. When he squinted in discomfort, I was sure he regretted it.
“I’ve had worse,” he said.
Was he trying to tell me that he’d done this for a girl before?
I crossed my arms. “My reputation’s taken a few knocks lately, and I’ve survived. Why didn’t you just ignore Orin and his idiot friends?”
Pride seemed to fill him, making him raise his chin. “You weren’t there to hear what that piece of shit said. I wasn’t going to stand for that kind of talk.”
“So you’re my protector now?”
He smiled, then made a soft sound of displeasure that made him close his eyes. He slowly opened them. “I like protecting you, Shelby.”
His confession made my foolish heart bop around. “I don’t want to be ungrateful, so thank you. But please, don’t do this again. You could’ve gotten arrested or hurt much worse.”
“That wouldn’t be a first, either.”
He tried to laugh without smiling, then took a wide stance, tucking his hands under his armpits. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was suddenly very protective—but of himself this time, not me.
“When Orin started up,” he said, “there was no doubt in my mind that teaching him a lesson was the right thing to do. I brought this on you and, honestly, if anyone had started talking that kind of smack about Jadyn, I would’ve done the same. You could say that you’ve brought a crisis of conscience on me, Angel, and I’m willing to take my knocks for what I’ve done.”
He sounded so flip, like he was trying to pull a sleight of hand with me. About what, though?
Did he actually . . . care about me?
No way.
His thoughts seemed to have gone in the same direction, because he shook his head and moved into the shed, where the convertible I’d seen parked here had its hood open, a portable lamp hooked on it. When he grabbed a wrench he’d set to the side, then began tooling around in the engine, I realized that he’d closed out the discussion.
“Are you about to tell me to get out of here?” I asked. “That’d be a first.”
“You can stay if you want.”
“Are you sure about that? Because I’m getting the impression you don’t want to see me. Then again, you threw some punches defending my honor last night, so I’m not sure what to think.”
“I care to see you. I would’ve seen you these past couple of days, but the shop’s been busy.”
So he hadn’t been strategizing, trying to show me I’d miss him so I’d make the next move and come to him?
He changed the subject. “Did you ever find out what was wrong with your engine?”
Boy, he was like a rabbit scurrying around a hole-filled yard. He really didn’t want to talk about the fight.
“I skimmed the manual,” I said, indulging him, “but I didn’t immediately think of anything that might be making the pickup blow gray smoke. I’ll figure it out, though.”
He glanced at my ride parked in the dark, but didn’t say anything else, merely adjusting some doo-dad in the engine.
I took the opportunity to get closer to him, to really see his injuries. And, yikes—they were both really sw
ollen.
Without thinking, I reached up to touch his face.
He shied away. “You act like you’ve never seen a shiner before. Damn, Shelby, this really is nothing.”
“When have you gotten meated up like this before?”
He gave me a long, hard look, like he was thinking about laying something heavy on me. “God, you’re innocent. You’ve always had your quarterbacks and artsy friends to surround you, like a circle that kept out a lot of ugly sights until lately.”
Where was he going with this? And why did he sound angry that I was still here?
“Are you pissed because you had to punch someone out for me?” I asked.
He tossed the wrench into a toolbox on the ground. The clatter made me flinch.
“I’m pissed because . . .” He cursed, then shut off the portable light, like he didn’t want anything to illuminate him.
“Because what?”
Then he stared at the engine, silent and immovable in the bare moonlight that crept inside the shed. “I don’t know why I’m angry. Maybe it’s because I didn’t expect to be in a situation where I wanted to hurt anyone who bad-talked you.” I could faintly see his lip curl, and he withstood the pain. “You should already know that I’m a lover, not a fighter. Haven’t you heard that about me?”
He fixed his gaze on me, so intense that I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t do anything but feel like a living heartbeat, all his.
“I haven’t heard anything about you fighting,” I said. “You’re right about that.”
“Yeah, well it’s not as true as you’d think.” He turned his back on me, facing a workbench with tools hanging from a pegboard, everything put away in its place. “Let’s just say there’s a certain irony when it comes to you and me.”
Even before he said it, I knew it was going to be dark.
His voice was gritty. “You have a father you wish you could remember, and I have one I’d give anything to forget.”
15
As the air grew heavy in that shed—heavier than the day’s humidity or any of the tension that’d ever come between me and Micah—I remembered what he’d said when I’d discovered those pictures of him and his mom.
Her anniversary passed less than a week ago . . . There’re already too many people who deserve to be sorry for it . . .
Maybe I was jumping to conclusions, connecting the wrong dots, but I had a bad feeling that he wasn’t only talking about the bruises he’d gotten “somewhere” before—he was talking about a father who’d done something much worse. And, in Micah’s typically blunt way, he wasn’t hiding anything. He was only searching my face in the moonlit dimness.
“Shelby, what’re you thinking.” It wasn’t exactly a question.
“That you and your dad have a history that includes black eyes. That you don’t like having to fight nowadays because it brings back bad memories.”
“Perceptive.” He picked up the toolbox from the ground, swinging it to the workbench like this was any old conversation. The only thing that indicated trouble was the tightness in his voice.
He kept his back to me. “My dad wasn’t half-bad when he was sober. I remember going to stock car races with him, going fishing near our house in Horseshoe Bay, laughing with him, missing him when he’d disappear for days at a time and my mom would cry in her room, thinking I couldn’t hear. Too bad she cried even harder whenever he came back.”
“You don’t have to tell me this.”
“You wanted to know.”
I didn’t have the heart to go anywhere, even if it would’ve been smart to just remove myself from a situation I’d never been prepared for with Micah. He was right, though. I did have a tangled curiosity about him and those pictures with his mom.
He went on. “Dad was a raging asshole when he drank, and I was too young to do anything about it. I didn’t have big brothers or even my cousins to step in when he’d appear in the middle of a bender, tearing through the drawers in the kitchen or the bedrooms, looking for money, because it wasn’t only booze he was addicted to—he was into the hard stuff. Him and some friends, construction workers mostly, had themselves some real rowdy weekends, thanks to coke. But that doesn’t come cheap. And Mom’s paycheck from working the register at the department store didn’t cover the nose candy. In his view, it was all her fault she couldn’t keep him high and loaded.”
I realized that I’d never seen Micah drunk or drinking. I wasn’t even sure he’d been that way at the Lonesome Star when he’d gotten that black eye. Just because he hung out at bars didn’t mean he was like his dad, and I was beginning to think that was no accident.
“I was eight when the worst of it happened,” he said, still facing away from me in the near dark. “I’d gotten nearly as tall as Mom by then, so whenever Dad came home, she was having a harder and harder time stowing me away in my room so I could wait out the storm and Dad could leave. Up until that point, he’d never beaten her. He’d come close, threatening her, smashing things and throwing stuff at her, but he came home in really bad shape this time.”
This time. I crossed my arms over my stomach because it was turning.
“My uncle Terence was there.” He’d braced his hands on the bench now, and even though there was some tension, I could tell he had accepted who his dad was a long time ago. “He was in town looking for work, and I wished he would stay, mostly because I knew Dad would come back some time.” His voice lowered, oddly wistful. “Terence wasn’t a big guy. Hell, I could give him a contest in arm wrestling, even at that age.”
“Did Terence get hurt?” I asked, dreading what I knew would come next. I felt it in my gut.
“Yeah.” Micah’s tone went flat. “My dad came home real messed up, and after Mom forced me in my room and locked the door, Terence tried to reason with him. But if there’s one thing you learn living with a guy like Marvin Wyatt, it’s that you don’t reason. You leave if you can. Mom never did that, though. She never did tell me why; she probably thought I was too young to have that particular talk with me. But I think she had hope for Dad, and that’s why she always stayed.” He exhaled. “This time, when my dad put on his asshole act, Terence tried to step in, and he got the hell beaten out of him.”
“Micah . . .” I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. What could I say?
It was like he hadn’t heard me, anyway. “My uncle ended up in the ER, but Mom was the one who got the short end of the stick. She ended up in the morgue while she was trying to defend her brother.” His voice gnarled with emotion. “I could hear everything—the screams, the pounding, the crashing, the moans. I was even screaming to get out of that locked room, and I did, too. I kicked at that door so hard I finally got it open, and I ran into the hall and . . .”
He’d stopped altogether, and I found myself walking over to him, wanting to touch him, but thinking that he might shrug me off.
As if he felt me there, he tensed up, so I kept to myself, my hand halfway in the air. I lowered it as he started up again.
“After I got out of that room, my dad was just standing there in the hallway, looking like he was waiting for me. He had blood on his fists and, when he saw me, he told me to get back in my room. He sounded like an animal, his voice . . . It was wounded, like he’d been the injured one. I was crazy with anger and fear, and I rushed him, not knowing it was already too late for Mom, and he slammed his fists into me, beating me to the floor, until all I could do was defend myself. Then he said to me, ‘Don’t move, Micah. You stay right there or you’ll get hurt even more.’ I thought he meant he was going to beat the shit out of me, but now I wonder if he was trying to keep me from seeing what he’d done to Mom and Terence. He even sat down right there next to me in the hallway while I held my stomach, beaten to a pulp. I heard the sirens, but all he did was wait there for the ambulance and the cops to pick him up. He must’ve known he wouldn’t get away with what he’d don
e. The neighbors had heard the screaming.”
What then? I thought, but I let him tell me in his own time.
“He was taken away,” he finally said, “and I was shipped off to second cousins I barely knew in Dallas. They were kind enough to take me in and raised me as well as they could. Uncle Terence would visit every so often, but he seemed so broken whenever he’d see me. And just from looking at him, I’d feel numb.”
A stray thought snuck into my head. Had Micah been numb until he started messing around with women, feeling in the only way he could after all that?
“Terence stopped coming around eventually,” Micah said. “I haven’t seen him for years. As for Dad, wouldn’t you know—there was a technicality. Someone didn’t read him his Miranda Rights and he got off. Scot-free for a murder and a beating—a great package deal.”
“He’s . . . still out there?” I was glad Micah wasn’t facing me, because I could hear the horror in my question. Who knows how much it showed on my face.
He looked partway over his shoulder, although he didn’t meet my gaze in the dimness. “Surprise, right? When he was young, he used to hang around this town every once in a while, but I think people have forgotten about him. I’m not sure they noticed him even when he does show up. The twins try their best to forget, even if he’s their uncle. Last time I saw Marvin was a month ago, near a convenience store by the highway. At least, I think it was him but I didn’t stop the car to make sure. Before that, I was living on my own in Odessa, and he paid a visit there. That’s when I moved away to Aidan Falls. The twins invited me, saying we should stick together since Dad visits them sometimes, because he knows they have a little money socked away. He still asks for that money all the time because he’s into something else besides booze and coke. Meth. No one ever gives him a penny—especially me.”
My heart felt choked. “I’m sorry you have to go through all this. So sorry.”
“He doesn’t hurt me anymore. Nothing he can do would ever hurt me.”
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