by Kat Bastion
“If something should happen to me, please promise me you’ll still do our business the way we talked about. The at-risk kids, the donations...everything.”
She frowned. “What’s gonna happen to you?”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter. Could be anything.” With Ben teetering on the edge, with me needing to fix his something MORE, with our week ending and me not knowing what the next would bring, I hadn’t a clue.
When she hesitated, lips parting as if to finally ask the questions she’d been holding back, I gave her an unyielding look. “Promise me. Promise me you’ll have my back if I can’t be here.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You will be here. Nothing’s gonna happen to you. But if some crazy thing happens, yeah” —she gave another solid nod— “of course, I’ve got your back. Anything you need.” She dropped her chin a little, gaze boring into mine. “Anything.”
“Good. Thank you.” I breathed out a sigh of relief.
Because I have a sinking feeling some crazy thing might happen.
Ben…
“You don’t need to.” I frowned.
Shay didn’t need to prove a damn thing to me.
Her adventurous spirit? Selfless actions? Bright soul and generous heart?
All I need to know.
What I remained clueless about was why she’d insisted on bringing me to Glenhaven’s prestigious Hidden Manor subdivision.
We stood on a shorn patch of grass near their automatic entry gate. Twilight had begun to gray the sky, but with our elevated view and the remaining light, we could still make out the features of nearly every house. Each expressed a different architectural style: colonial, tutor, French provincial.
“Yeah, I do.” She drew in a full breath, then exhaled slowly. She’d been rooting around in her small backpack, had finally pulled out a thin credit card holder, pinched a laminated card between her fingers, and tugged it free. She held that card in front of her at eye level, stared at the information on it, then lifted her gaze to stare at the houses below us.
After a beat, she reached her hand out, brushing over my forearm, and offered the card to me. It was her driver’s license: the one thing I’d asked for at the very beginning, evidence I no longer needed.
But ever since she’d returned from Kiki’s, she’d been dead serious and vitally focused on a private mission. And based on her grave demeanor, the motivator had to be about more than her age. A deeper truth needed to be set free.
And she’d chosen to share it with me.
I won’t let you down.
“I believe in you.” Not merely my trust. Unwavering support. No matter what she needed to unload.
Her gaze tore away from the neighborhood below and met mine. Gratitude and warmth glittered in those beautiful emerald depths. The intensity of her look alone said she believed in me too, without having to utter a word.
“It’s the Tuscan house.” She stared down at the neighborhood again, dipped a nod toward a two-story that had a tan stucco façade with iron railings on its window balconies.
“What is?” I didn’t follow.
“The address. The one I put on my driver’s license. It’s the Tuscan house.”
I held the card, because she’d given it to me. But I didn’t glance down at it. The incredibly important thing she needed to reveal had nothing to do with the plastic in my hand.
“And that means something.” I felt her apprehension and the gravity of the moment heavy in the air between us, in the weighted tone of her voice. She’d never done anything by half measures, not without good reason. And she hadn’t kept her driver’s license from me just because of an address.
Since we’d arrived almost ten minutes ago, she’d stood beside me, but at arm’s length, feet planted shoulder width apart, arms crossed, confident—unbreakable. But in the last seconds, her crossed arms had shifted, hands sliding to her ribs into a consoling self-hug. Her head had lowered a few inches, gaze unfocused.
I gave her the small amount of space she needed, the independence to be able to battle whatever demons she faced herself, on her own terms.
“Yeah.” Her voice broke. She cleared her throat and squared her shoulders, but tightened her arms around herself. “It’s where I ran from. A place I used to call home.” She swayed a little.
No. Fuck independence. You brought me here for a reason.
I closed the distance and wrapped my arms around her. “It’s okay, Shay. I’ve got your back. Tell me everything. If you want to, if you need to. We can handle it together.”
She sucked in a deep breath, then stared out toward that Tuscan house.
“Every night, he’d tuck us in and read a bedtime story. For as long as I could remember, he’d sit on Brennan’s bed. She was three years older, and the two of us were inseparable. We always had grand adventures, played out all the fairy tales read to us in our bedtime stories; we became the princesses.” Her voice trailed off.
Then she glanced up at me. “Look at my ID.”
I loosened my hold only enough to pull the card up. I did as she asked, scanned over the identity information: her picture, address on Hidden Manor Lane, birthday last Saturday. Yep. Nineteen. Just like you said. Her real ID, not the fake birthday-margarita one.
Her finger tapped the top edge. “At my name.”
Shannon Morgan.
She didn’t say it aloud, which also meant something. Distance. Disassociation. Keeping her ID from me from the very beginning had been about burying who she’d been. She demanded to be defined by who she was, how she lived: out loud and vibrant.
I touched a finger under her chin and lifted gently until her watery gaze met mine. “You’ll always be Shay to me.”
After a shaky breath, she gave a barely perceptible nod. “Thank you. For accepting me as I am.”
I stared down at her, chest aching with emotion. And then it hit me. What she meant to me. How deep it went. And not one part of me wanted to hide it. “I accept every part of you...because I love you.”
Her lower lip began to quiver until she bit down on it. Then her eyes searched mine. “Sure you want to know what happened?”
“Only if you want me to. Only if it helps you for me to know.” I had a feeling it’d been bad. But I didn’t need to know the details, not for me.
She gave a firm nod. Then her expression hardened, and she glared toward the house. “It was a month before my eleventh birthday. Instead of sitting on Brennan’s bed, he moved to mine. She seemed relieved, curled onto her side to face the wall and fell asleep long before he finished the story. Then he put the book down, and he began to straighten my nightgown, but he kept smoothing it down from my shoulders to hips. Gradually, it changed to be from my belly button down. Over and over.”
Her entire body began to tremble. She held her breath and went rigid in my arms.
I drew in a tense breath and kissed the top of her head, gently rubbed her back. “Breathe.”
Fisted hands clutched at the back of my shirt as she sucked in a lungful of air.
She swallowed hard. “His heavy hand stopped at the top of my legs, then pressed down, hard, between them. He said I had a grown-up birthday coming, and he wanted to give me a special gift. If I was a good girl, he’d even give it to me early.”
Sick twisted fucking bastard.
My protective hold tightened around her.
“I panicked, kicked off against the wall, and stumbled out of bed over his legs. He tumbled to the ground with a loud thump. I backed out into the hall and kept repeating ‘no...no...no’ again and again, my voice growing louder and louder, until I was shouting in the middle of the hallway.”
She exhaled, long and slow. “But no one heard me. My sister came out from our room, eyes wide with panic. My mother opened her bedroom door with a deep scowl, but didn’t come any closer. I pointed at the man still sitting on my bedroom floor—the one I’d trusted, the one that had kept me safe all those years—and told them he’d touched me in a bad way. ‘Tell someo
ne.’ That’s what they’d taught us in school, how to protect us from predators.”
“Good.” I had no idea whether she’d ever shared her story before, but I got the strong feeling she hadn’t. I wanted her to know she hadn’t screwed up. “You did the right thing.” I’d have beaten the shit out of him. Want to now. But she’d only been a little girl.
“You would think.” She shook her head. “Both my sister and mother told me it was all okay. Like I’d misunderstood or something. That it was a good kind of touching. Brennan stared at my mom for a couple of seconds before glancing in at him. Then Brennan looked at me with these pleading puppy-dog eyes and told me that it was a good birthday present, that it would only hurt a little but feel good a lot. My whole family was in on it. My mom had been letting him touch Brennan for years.”
I gusted out a breath. “Jesus. No wonder you ran away. They all betrayed you.”
“That night I refused to sleep in my bed, in the room I shared with Brennan. I flipped out at the thought of even sleeping under the same roof as them. And they gave in to my demands. I put shorts and a shirt on, laced up my tennis shoes, and stormed out of the house to sleep in a giant kid-sized dollhouse they’d built out back. When all went quiet and the house had been dark for a while, I literally ran into the woods and kept running until my legs ached, my lungs burned, and I collapsed on the bench I brought you to on Tuesday.”
Thought that bench had been significant. It’d been her first safe haven. “And you’ve been on your own ever since,” I murmured.
Firm hands pressed to my chest as she eased out of my hold. She stared up at me with moisture glittering in her eyes. “Safer that way.”
An unexpected undertone in her words rattled me. It sounded like she was breaking the news to me about how it is, not how it was. Uncertain, I volunteered some clarification. “Until now.”
The corners of her lips twitched a little until they curved into a wobbly smile. “Until you,” she whispered.
Good.
I fully wrapped my arms around her again, holding her tight. And just as desperately, she clung to me.
But even though I’d been there for her through her deepest confession, it still seemed like she held a vital part of herself back.
It’s okay, Shay. I can handle whatever you need to do. Whatever makes you safe.
I let out a resigned sigh.
Sure as hell hope that includes me.
Shay…
“Well, how’d we do?” Ben tipped back the remainder of his second beer. But just like he’d done with the first bottle, he eyed a small amount of remaining liquid at the bottom before he slipped it into its cardboard six-pack slot, right next to his first.
“With what?” I finally got past the European-craft aroma wafting out of my bottle and took a small sip of my first beer ever. Uck. Definitely an acquired taste.
He twisted the cap off a third with his forearm, then gave me a pointed look. “With our agreement. It’s Friday” —he glanced at his watch— “hour and a half till midnight.”
“Well, since you’re contributing to my underage drinking” —I clicked bottle necks with him when he held his beer up— “I’d say were doing spectacularly.”
He angled an affirmative nod toward me, then took a drink.
I arched a brow at him. “And it’s not a done deal yet. Still got two days and one night.”
But he’d been quiet since I’d shown him my childhood home, confessed why I’d run from it. No negative judgy or rejection vibes rolled off him, just...sad, maybe. Which sucked. Because the last thing I wanted was for him to feel sorry for me. A part of me also wondered if it was just mental exhaustion. Maybe our hacking-crime weighed on his mind to such a degree, he didn’t have the capacity to process any heavy new thing...not right away, anyway.
He hadn’t pulled back physically, though. In fact, it seemed like he touched me more than ever: hand firmly on my back even when he’d opened the convenience store’s door, arm pressed alongside mine when he paid the cashier, fingers entwined as we drove to the country club, walked along its pathways—trespassed across two fairways.
And as we sat on a high knoll that overlooked an empty high school football field, his casually extended leg had been resting against mine for a while, the warmth of his thigh radiating through both layers of denim.
He took another long pull of his beer, then raised the side of the bottle up to his right eye, squinted his left, and peered through the remaining three inches of liquid out toward the abandoned field still lit up by its massive overhead lights.
I took another experimental sip of mine, scrunched my face at its weird wheat-y taste, then slid it into the carton beside his nearly emptied two.
“Why do you do that?” I stared at his discarded bottles. “Leave an inch in each one?”
He swung his bottle-spyglass toward me and examined me through the amber liquid with a huge eyeball. After a hard blink...or maybe a wink...he withdrew the bottle from his eye, drank it down to his obligatory inch, then nestled his almost-empty in a line following his other two. He stared at them, but made no move to grab a fourth.
“My dad’s a functioning alcoholic, has been ever since I can remember.” His gaze swung toward the stadium lights when they went dark. “He emotionally abused my mom. But sometimes things got physical.”
He fell silent for a few seconds...then a handful of seconds more.
I put a gentle hand on his forearm, anchoring him. “Bad?” Obviously. But he’d gotten stuck somewhere inside a powerful memory.
After a slight start, he glanced at me. “Yeah. Bad enough. And right before I met you at the bar—”
“—when you fired me...”
He blinked heavily. Then his lips twitched a little. “Yeah. The night I’d been a total ass. I’d just bailed after two weeks of the worst it’s ever been. She had begged me to stay there, try and help him. Stupid me agreed. Turned out, he didn’t want help, of any kind. And all attempts I made to get her to see reason, leave the bastard to save herself—like I’d done my entire life—fell on her chronically deaf ears.”
The entitled woman who’d raked me over the coals at our meet-the-parents dinner had ironically been victimized herself, struggled for control too.
“Alcoholism is supposed to be hereditary. But I swore never to be like him. Never be addicted.” He shot an unforgiving glare at the beer bottles. “The liquid left at the bottom, quarter-inch for liquor, inch or so for beer, is there to remind me. Make me respect. Make me think hard before drinking another. Keep control.”
What we all seem to be fighting for.
He lifted a discarded bottle out, examining its last inch. Then he released it back into its slot and glanced at me. “Think it’s fucked up?”
“Hell, I break into my parents’ house once a year on my birthday. Who am I to judge?”
“Saturday?” He hiked a thumb back between our shoulders, as if to indicate the past.
“Yep.” No need to tell him the frightening details—about how I’d almost gotten caught in my own childhood home.
Instead, I nodded at his alcohol-control test. “Tastes like crap anyway.”
He shrugged, said nothing.
Something didn’t compute. “Why did you open a bar, then?”
“Wasn’t just me, Cade and I came up with the business plan. There’s a shitload of money to be made with a well-run bar. The idea started out as a joke...the reality turned out to be family.”
Silence followed between us, the comfortable kind. I tapped my sandaled foot against his shin. He absently scratched his fingernails over the fabric of my jeans.
After a few minutes, he opened a fourth beer and took a long pull from it, expression faraway as he stared over the football field. “Pretty sure my father got perp-walked today.”
Good. The image rang true for the crime. “Damn sure my father should be.”
“Well, we’re a pair.”
Two peas in a survival-pod. “In spite of o
ur sucky ancestors.”
“Let’s go do it, then.” He clinked his half-empty fourth into a slot, grabbed the whole six-pack, then stood, offering me his other hand.
“Do what?” I slid my palm over his, wrapped my fingers around his large thumb, and heaved myself up from the ground with a grunt.
“Go be who we are. Go do something we’ve never done before and have a blast at it.”
He stated our mission with conviction, but with almost too much force, like he tried to convince himself blast-worthy fun was possible against the overwhelming melancholy odds.
No big. Don’t read into it. After all, he was brand-new to the whole lawbreaking thing.
I scuffed a hand back and forth over the seat of my jeans. “Great. Now I’m all wet and grassy.”
He leaned closer as he guided me down the hill toward one end of the football field. Warm breath fogged up the side of my neck until soft lips pressed a kiss to the top of my ear. “Perfect. Then we need to get you out of those clothes.”
A heated shiver danced through my body at the sensation, and his suggestion.
I tangled my hand together with his and glanced at the low-slung block building we approached. Then I shifted my gaze to him, eyes widening. “Why, Benjamin Bishop, are you suggesting we get naughty while breaking and entering?”
Maybe you’re accepting your criminal side better than I realized.
At the corner of the building, he gave me a brisk kiss, pointed two fingers at his eyes, then swept those fingers wide across the space behind us.
Got it. Lookout. I dropped him a single nod.
He gave my hand a firm squeeze before breaking away. As he walked off, he leaned over a wide gray trashcan at the corner, discarded his six-pack, then approached double metal doors.
I scanned down the long block wall, over branching sidewalks, and across the football field.
All clear.
But all it took was a simple thumb press, a solid grip, and a heavy pull for the door to open.
He shrugged. “Sorry, babe. Only trespass tonight.”