by Petrova, Em
Ben sighed. “Sure Patrick. Can you just give Joss and I a little bit of time? I’m not sure if you know, my dad passed away a few weeks ago. Joss and I are still...grieving.” Saying the words pained his heart. As detached as he sought to remain about Morgan’s death, Josselyn had softened his heart towards the man.
Patrick’s eyes widened. “I am so sorry, Ben. I had absolutely no idea. If I had known...but I didn’t.”
“It’s okay. My dad was ill for some time. I wouldn’t expect you to know. We’ll get together soon. In the meantime, I really need to get back to Joss.”
Chapter Seven
“Josselyn, can we talk?”
She looked up from her magazine. Seeing the distinct look of sadness across his handsome face, she tossed the magazine aside. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, really. It’s just Patrick didn’t know about my dad dying, and he jabbered on and on about us coming to help him out at the medical practice.”
“I’m sorry; come here.” She patted the bed beside her.
When he sat beside her, she took him into her arms and held him tight even though the pain in her neck and shoulder made her lightheaded. She was happy Ben felt something over his father’s death. He had so much pain and anger buried deep inside to be downright dangerous.
Her lips brushed across his brow, and she rested her soft cheek against his stubbled one. No words needed to be exchanged. All she wanted was for Ben to realize she was there for him and shared his grief and pain. When his lips slipped down to the pulse of her throat, Josselyn shivered and clutched him tighter.
“Joss?” His lips muffled her name.
“Hmmm?”
“Tell me who hurt you so badly.”
At once, the passion building within her ebbed, and she tensed against him. She could talk about anything with him for hours at a time—Anything but that.
“My past isn’t important. Only right now matters.”
“I saw all your broken bones on the x-rays. They weren’t all accidents.”
Although she had seen a kinder more loving side of Ben, it still didn’t change the fact he once called her a gold-digging grifter, a con who had scammed his vulnerable father. If she let down her defenses and allowed him into her past, would he somehow be able to twist it and use the knowledge against her in his quest to take her home away?
“That all happened a long time ago. I don’t want to remember it.” She hoped the shortness of her answer would be enough to diffuse his curiosity.
Slowly, he pulled back and connected his gaze with hers. “Our pasts shape us and make us who we are in the present.”
“If that’s what you truly believe, then someone like you could never come to like someone like me.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” He cupped his hand to her cheek. “I already like you.”
“Nothing, Ben.” She shook off his touch. “I’m just tired.”
He shrugged. “You know, Josselyn, I’m trying my hardest to understand the grand scheme of things in regard to how you and I got tossed into this situation we share. After the insanely bad start we got off to, I’m just beginning to know you, and I like what I’m finding. I thought maybe you felt the same. I guess I was just grossly mistaken.” He vaulted off the bed.
She rigidly held back the tears desperately wanting to flow from her eyes. “Ben, please don’t be this way. Things between us have been so nice. I don’t want that to end. I thought...” Her voice trailed off.
He spun back around to face her with a tired finality in his voice. “What is it that you thought, Josselyn?”
Had she ruined the relationship they were slowly building? “Nothing, Ben. Never mind.”
***
Josselyn spent the afternoon in her bedroom behind a closed door, immersed in deep thought. Was her traumatic past always going to inhibit a happy future? She was thirty-four years old. Not a kid anymore who could spectacularly fail and still look optimistically toward tomorrow.
If she told Ben the truth, would it change how he looked at her? Would she become nothing more than the girl who was the daughter of criminals in his mind? Would he smile in her face, but smugly think to himself, I knew it all along! She’s the gold-digging grifter I always suspected! What’s the old saying, the apple never falls far from the tree?
Or was it possible he would understand everything. How could she take a chance? She knew someday she was going to have to trust someone, or she would never be anything more than a professional success, but a personal failure. More than anything she wanted to be honest with Ben.
Josselyn descended the stairs to find Ben in the living room stretched out comfortably on the couch watching baseball his huge high-definition television.
“Watching the Mets?” She hoped to start a conversation.
“Padres and Cardinals.”
“Is there room for one more?” she asked.
“Sure.” He sat up on the couch to make room for her.
After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, Josselyn looked straight at the colorfully dressed baseball players on the television and said aloud, “To answer your earlier question, my brother pushed me down a flight of stairs when I was seventeen. That’s how I broke my neck.”
Ben grabbed the remote from the glass and chrome coffee table, pushed the mute button, and silence fell over the room. “What do you mean, ‘he pushed you’?”
Josselyn placed her palms on her bare knees to keep them from shaking.
“He had anger management issues.”
He. Even after all of these years she couldn’t say her brother’s name out loud. Her brother was known as he; her parents as they. Maybe they didn’t deserve to have names.
“I just had the misfortune of being in his way when he was mad.”
Ben slid closer to her, but she held her eyes to the television screen.
“Josselyn, he could have killed you.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I know.”
“Did your parents call the police?”
She chuckled bitterly. “He was their son. He was the only one who mattered. I was an afterthought.”
“But the hospital staff—they had to know from all of your broken bones you were abused. It was their duty to report it to the police.”
“You have to have a complaining witness. I was conditioned from birth to protect my family regardless of what they did. Needless to say, I took a lot of falls as a child.”
Taking her by the waist, Ben gently turned her body to face him. “What did they do to you?”
She let out a deep sigh, pushed her hair back from her face, and tried to figure out where to even begin trying to explain the first twenty years of her life.
“First, Ben, before I go any further, are you sure you want to hear any of this?”
He took her hands in a warm and comfortable gesture, putting her at ease. “I want to know everything about you, Josselyn Adler. Help me to understand you.”
“And second, I need to say from day one I have been totally honest with you. Lying is not a part of me. If you can’t accept, for whatever reason, anything I tell you, I understand. All I ask in return from you is not to use anything I tell you to hurt me.”
He squeezed her hands. “Joss, I ...”
“Shhh, don’t say anything. Just listen. I suppose I’ll start at the beginning. I won’t bore you with a lot of details. My parents, an older brother, and I lived in a dilapidated two story house that had bullet holes in the facade. The drywall had holes from fists and feet, and the carpets were so dirty if you walked across them without shoes the bottoms of your feet turned black.
“The odd thing is even though the house was a pig sty and my father never worked a real job, he always had a brand new pick-up truck every year, a boat, and season tickets to every major sport.”
She stopped and shook her head. She really didn’t want to make this trip down memory lane. Ben was so captivated she couldn’t stop.
“My father was always in
volved in some scheme or another, always swindling someone. He was a mean, horrible man—a bully who used his fists to get whatever he wanted. I was nothing to him until I was in my teens and he realized I was a saleable piece of flesh he could barter. See my face?” She touched her fingertips to her pale cheeks. “Did you notice I have no broken nose or missing teeth? He knew not to damage the merchandise.”
“Josselyn did he...” Ben tried to interrupt, but she silenced him with a fingertip to his lips.
“When I was, I don’t know, fourteen or fifteen, my father was involved in the armed robbery of a convenience store. When the police caught up with them, his accomplice took the fall and said my father wasn’t involved. In return, my father promised when he got out of prison or I turned eighteen, whatever came first, he got me.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but where was your mother all that time?”
“She would never say or do anything against him. She worshipped the man. No matter what he did, she made her excuses for him. I’ll get to her in a moment. Anyway, after I broke my neck, my family abandoned me at the hospital. I suppose they were afraid of police involvement. Maybe it was just convenient to skip out on the bill and get rid of me once and for all.”
She paused and reached for Ben’s soda from the table. Taking a sip, she collected her thoughts.
“I was so scared at the hospital. The doctor’s immobilized my head and neck using weights. I had to stare at the ceiling for days before they operated.
While I was there, the man my father promised me appeared one afternoon. Imagine, I’m totally immobilized and alone, and this person comes into this little cubbyhole of a room. I suppose he was sent by my parents to gather information; I don’t know. I pretended I was really, really sick.”
“You were sick. You’re lucky you weren’t paralyzed or killed,” Ben interrupted.
“Maybe, I guess so. He brought me chocolate bars. I gave them to a nurse. Do you know I haven’t eaten chocolate since? I guess a part of me equates chocolate with pain and unhappiness.”
“I’m going to take you somewhere for some serious chocolate temptation. We could jump on a plane and go to Belgium or maybe to Switzerland.”
She patted his hand. “Anyway, when I sufficiently recovered, Social Services got involved and moved me to a group home for disabled children and teenagers.”
Ben’s eyes grew soft. “I’m so sorry. I’ve heard group homes are the worst.”
“No, Ben, it was the most wonderful thing to ever happen in my life. I got counseling, and not just for my mental health. I had counselors who helped me with my education. I met all these children and teens afflicted all types of illnesses and disabilities who were abandoned or abused by their parents. Yet, these children thrived in the atmosphere of the home.
It was then I realized I wanted to be a nurse. I got all the encouragement and support I needed to get my high school diploma and be accepted into nursing school. I was lucky enough to be able to go to school and work part time at the home. They let me continue to live there until I graduated from nursing school.
Afterward, they gave me a reference to get my first homecare job—a little boy with Muscular Dystrophy. I stayed with him for four years, and moved on to whoever was in need of a full time homecare nurse. Eventually, I went to work for your father.”
Josselyn felt something within her shift. She felt lighter and more liberated than ever before, but Ben frowned. Maybe the story of her life was too much for him to take.
“What are you thinking about, Ben?” she asked.
“I’m thinking you’ve never really had a home to call your own, have you? You went from an unhealthy, horrendous, non-nurturing environment to a being cared for in a group home, to become a nurse living in other people’s homes.” He raked a hand through his blond hair. “I finally understand why this house means so much to you; a home of your own is something you’ve never had. I have to ask, whatever became of your parents and your brother?”
As depressing as speaking about them was, she wanted to make sure nothing was left unsaid. “After my surgery, two police detectives came to visit me. They told me both of my parents were involved in a shooting. My father thought my mother was messing around on him, and he dragged her by her hair to the guy’s house, and either my father or my mother shot him. I’m not real clear on the details.”
Ben winced, but she continued.
“They were both going to be charged with first-degree murder, but accepted manslaughter pleas to avoid a life sentence. I suppose they knew their luck had run out. The first month in prison, my father met up with an even bigger bully than himself and was stabbed with a homemade shank. He’s dead,” she said flatly. “My mother, I only heard from her when she needed money. She finally gave up asking. As for my brother, I have no idea what happened to him, and I don’t care.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
“After so many years have passed, my feelings toward them are ambivalent.”
“You’ve had to have hated them at one time. In your case, I think ambivalence is a good thing.”
“I don’t think there is much more. I’ve probably told you more than you ever wanted to know.”
“Just one more thing if that’s okay.”
“Sure.”
“After everything you went through in your life, how did you turn out to be so lovely and so caring?”
She smiled and reached out to smooth back his hair. “That’s sweet. The truth is I made conscious decisions: I would never be like my parents, and I wouldn’t ever lie or hurt anyone if I could help it. Life is too precious.”
He leaned over and covered her lips with his. To her dismay, it wasn’t a kiss of passion; it was soft and sweet—a kiss from a friend.
No matter, she thought. She finally found a way to break free from the chains of her past, and maybe, another wall had been torn down between them.
***
Sunday morning Josselyn was surprised to open the front door to Caleb Smith. Tall and good looking with his red hair, piercing green eyes. His muscles bulged beneath a tight fitting t-shirt. He carried an armload of pink and yellow roses.
“Caleb, please be careful on the steps. They’re being replaced tomorrow.”
He stepped over what was left of the steps, deteriorated to no more than a massive pile of broken bricks and concrete. Once inside the house, he handed her the roses.
“Thank you, they’re beautiful!”
He looked around the redecorated living room. “Wow, this room looks fantastic! It’s a far cry from the last time I was here.”
“Thanks,” she said proudly. The room did look great, and how nice to have someone notice.
“I bet that monster television wasn’t your idea,” he commented.
“No, the television belongs to Ben. He watches baseball on it. We watch baseball on it.” She walked into the kitchen and opened a cupboard. Reaching up on her tip-toes, she felt around the shelf for the vase left behind by a former tenant.
Caleb’s hand came over the top of hers and removed the vase from the shelf. Ducking from beneath his arm, she took the vase from him and walked to the sink to fill it with water, hoping to depict an ease she did not feel. She didn’t like anyone crowding her personal space—especially men. No matter how harmless or well-meaning they were. This man was powerfully built and towered over her petite figure, and he unintentionally intimidated her.
“That is one nasty bruise.” He lightly touched her shoulder.
She flinched, but continued to arrange the flowers. “It looks a lot worse than it really is. Dr. Leighton gave me a daytime non-drowsy pain medication, and it’s working wonderfully. He says I’m perfectly fine.”
“Actually, Josselyn, I came here today to find out the truth from you about your fall.”
“I told you the truth, Caleb. It really was an accident,” she insisted, popping a coffee filter into the automatic drip and spooned coffee inside. “I was coming home from the Quality-Ma
rt, and the steps just gave out from beneath my feet. Those steps were an accident just waiting to happen.” She hoped the explanation was enough to satisfy him.
“If Ben is in any way responsible for your fall, it’s not too late to change your story, you know. I can take another report. Tomorrow morning, you can file for a temporary restraining order to force him to stay away from you, and this house.”
“I appreciate your concern, Caleb, but—”
“You don’t need to be afraid of Ben Parnell,” he interrupted.
“I’m not afraid of him,” she said sharply. “Ben and I have reached an understanding.”
“What exactly does ‘you’ve reached an understanding’ mean?”
“It means until the matter regarding the ownership of this house is resolved, we are simply not discussing it. So far, it’s working out very well.”
“So, the two of you just go about redecorating this house and pretend nothing is wrong? Josselyn, this charade with Ben is going to blow up all over your pretty little face. Unless, of course, the two of you are planning to fall madly in love, get married, and live happily after. Well, honey, if that’s the case, I hate to be the one to tell you those kind of endings really only happen in the movies.”
What she really wanted to tell Caleb was to butt out of her business. She knew he didn’t like Ben, and she certainly didn’t need him coming around the house trying to stir up problems between them. She didn’t want to alienate Caleb, either. In his own way, he was trying to look out for her safety and well-being.
She turned on a fake smile and said, “Coffee’s ready.”
***
Ben walked into the house, incensed to see Caleb Smith sitting at his kitchen table having coffee with Josselyn. Most likely, Caleb was trying his hardest to poison her mind against him.
“Hi, Ben,” she said brightly.
She was so lovely with her big brown eyes and sweet smile. No wonder Caleb was coming around; he was just as mesmerized by her.
“Hi, Joss.” He looked hard at Caleb. “What are you doing here, Caleb? Shouldn’t you be out filling your monthly quota of parking tickets?” he asked dryly.