The man who’d gone to prison for beating her father nearly to death was in the same house with him, and the import of that had missed her completely.
She hovered over the sink as a new spike of pain went through her eye, and her stomach revolted. It settled down without rejecting the half a bite of cake she’d had. Shutting off the tap, she turned, slowly, keeping her bearings, and went to make sure no violence was brewing.
Maverick came into the kitchen before she’d crossed the room.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. I have them in charge of taking all the plastic parts off the forms and sorting them out. We’ll see how that goes. I want to ask you to do me a favor.”
“What?”
“I want you to go to bed. I’ll get you a cool washcloth. You look like hell, Jen. You need to close your eyes and rest.”
She shook her head. “I’ll get through it. It’s happened before, and it’ll happen again.”
He came up to her and closed her arms in his hands, gently. “What are you afraid of? I’m not going to run off with her. I’ll build her house and let her play with Maisie, and when you’re feeling better, I’ll go. I’m not going to hurt her, Jen. Or you. Ever.”
“My dad...”
A shadow moved through his eyes. “I’ll keep my distance. I’m not going to hurt an invalid, either.”
An invalid he’d made. Jenny remembered her father’s agitation when she’d spoken to Kelsey about Maverick. He knew more than he could say. He had a child’s mind, but clearly, there were things he remembered and understood, even if his understanding had been compromised. He remembered enough to be angry. Or afraid—for her father, those two emotions had always been so similar that they might as well have been the same.
“Mav, I can’t.” As she said it, nausea overwhelmed her, and she spun toward the sink. Vertigo nearly brought her to her knees as she puked into the empty side.
He was right behind her, holding her ponytail, rubbing her back. “Now you’re being stubborn and stupid. Jesus Christ, Jen. Let me help. Please.”
He was making the stress worse, which was making the headache worse, but at this point, his leaving wouldn’t make anything better. Kelsey would be sad, and she’d be guilty, and it was all more than she could take.
“Okay,” she gasped and ran the tap to rinse her mouth and wash her sick down the disposal. “Okay.”
~oOo~
She pulled her heavy drapes so that the room was as dark as she could get it, and she turned the box fan on right in front of the air conditioning vent so that the room would be as cool as she could get it. She stripped down to her panties and took a knit camisole from a drawer. Ideally, she’d be naked—even the touch of fabric was too much sensation when she was in pain like this—but she couldn’t risk Maverick coming in and seeing her.
Which he did, knocking but opening the door without waiting, as she pulled the camisole down over her chest. He stopped and stood there, holding out a washcloth.
Hurting too much to make a fuss about it, she slid into bed. He came and got down on his knees at her side. “Do you take anything for them now?”
“Nothing works. I took some Excedrin. Sometimes that takes the point off, but I think it’s too late to do anything with this one but survive it.”
“Okay. Close your eyes.”
She did, and he laid the washcloth—cool and damp but not too wet, just as she needed it to be—over her forehead and eyes. She sighed. Though it didn’t help the pain, there was comfort in it.
Before his lips touched her, she felt him coming, in the shift of the mattress and the nearing heat of his body, in the caress of his breath. He kissed her lightly at the corner of her mouth and lingered there.
“I’m here if you need me. I’ll take good care of our girl.”
He got up and left, closing the door so carefully that Jenny had to lift the washcloth and check to know he’d done it. He still knew exactly what she needed during an attack. He still knew how to take care of her. She knew he would take care of Kelsey. She even trusted him to stay away from her father.
For the first time in four years, she could collapse under the weight of a migraine, could give in and rest while Kelsey was home, and know that everything would be okay.
If Maverick had asked her right then to move in with him, to forgive him and pretend that they’d been living the life they’d wanted for the past four years, she very likely would have said yes.
What he did better than anything else was take care. Until that last day, when she’d needed him, he’d been there. He wasn’t much for proclamations of feeling; they’d started keeping count because he’d hardly ever said ‘I love you,’ and she’d told him she needed to hear it at least once every day. But when he was needed, he was always right there.
She’d understood that she loved him—and that he loved her—the first time she’d had a migraine with him. It had been a particularly bad one, the kind that made her lose her mind. Though he never got headaches of any sort, he hadn’t minimized her pain; he hadn’t called it ‘only a headache.’ He’d accepted the pain as real. He’d asked her what she needed, and he’d done it.
That was how he showed his love: by taking loving care. By being there, and by wanting to be.
It was also how he’d betrayed it: by leaving her on her own.
But right now, that seemed insignificant. Right now, feeling cared for in her need, she could only be glad he was with her, could only remember how it felt to be loved.
January 1992
The pain was so bad she couldn’t be still. But moving made it hurt more. But she couldn’t be still and just lie there while her brain was pureed. She had to move. She had to get away from it. God, why wouldn’t this just kill her and be done with it? Just let her rest.
Jenny paced around Maverick’s apartment, trying to keep enough sense together to keep her hand from rising up to punch her head. That was crazy, that little voice of sense insisted. That would hurt more. But fuck her head! It needed to stop! To stop! Stop!
She tried to lie back down on the sofa and put the washcloth over her eyes, but it had gotten warm, so she threw it across the room and got back up. The floor tilted sharply, and she barely made it to the toilet. All that was left was dry heaves and foamy bile, and each retch was like venomous fangs carving through her brain.
When she was done, she let herself fall to the floor. At least the tile was cool.
The pain pulsed in her right eye, making it swell and recede, swell and recede. Her heartbeat slammed in her ears like a bass drum.
She wanted to be away from this. Anywhere else, even hell, as long as the pain didn’t follow.
~oOo~
The light flashed on, and Jenny came back to consciousness screaming. She slammed her hands over her face and rolled away from the pain.
“Shit!” Maverick switched the light back off. “Jen? Babe, what’s wrong? Jesus!”
He was on the floor at her side, picking her up. Her head was still trapped in its horror, but sense dawned a little, and she tried to talk. “Hurts.”
“I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“No. It’s...migraine. I get migraines. Hospital won’t help me. Need to deal.”
“Passed out on the bathroom floor isn’t dealing, Jenny.”
With sense, the nonsensical conviction she could escape the pain receded, and all that was left was despair. She knew the hurt would end eventually, but right now, if she’d had a cyanide capsule, she’d have bitten the shit out of it. She was trapped, and that always made her cry.
“It just fucking hurts. It hurts!”
“Okay.” He gathered her up and stood. “Let’s get you to bed, at least.”
He carried her to his room, laid her on his bed, and set her head gently on the pillow. “What can I do?”
She hurt too much to answer. When his fingers brushed over her forehead, she flinched from the touch, and he backed off. After a second or two, she hear
d him leave the room.
He was back after not much time. Jenny wasn’t sure how long; the clock moved erratically when she was so focused on the horror show inside her skull. But the first thing she felt was a cool washcloth over her eyes. She whimpered at the fragile fragment of ease it gave her.
“Babe,” he whispered at her ear. “I talked to Maddie. She gets these things, too. She said you need dark, cool, quiet, and still. It’s dark outside now, but I closed the curtains anyway. I turned the furnace down. I’m not going to bug you. I’ll check in and make sure you’re okay, and you call out if you need anything. I’m not leaving.”
He was supposed to fight tonight. That random fact pushed through the haze. “Fight. You and Gun.”
“Not tonight. Gun’s gonna have to watch his own ass tonight. I’m here with you.”
He kissed her lightly at the corner of her mouth, and Jenny felt each hair of his beard. When he began to stand up, she flailed her hand out and grabbed his. Normally, she needed to be totally alone with her migraine, with as little as possible touching her or stimulating her in any way at all. But suddenly, right now, what she needed was Maverick’s arms.
“Jen?”
“Hold me?”
“You got it.”
She heard his boots and clothes come off. He slid slowly into the bed, like she’d break at the slightest jostle—and that was how she felt. He maneuvered his body so that he sheltered her without encroaching on her. And he was perfectly still, giving her exactly what she needed.
Jenny knew then that she loved him. She opened her mouth to say the words, but the ease he’d given her had made her sleepy, and she only thought them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Kelsey looked up as Maverick came back into her room. “Is Mommy’s head ouchie?”
He sat down on the floor between the two girls. “Yeah, it is. Does that still happen a lot?”
His little girl nodded seriously. “Sometimes it makes her make her mad face. Sometimes she has to go to bed and cry. Sometimes she wears her sunny glasses inside. We have to talk real soft like this.” She breathed out the last words, hunching her shoulders to make herself small.
“Okay,” he whispered back. “Do you think we can build your house quietly?”
“It’s not my house, silly. It’s Barbie’s house. My house is at your house.” Kelsey and Maisie giggled in that way women had when they thought a guy had done something particularly dumb—they learned that this young? Maverick grinned and brushed his hand over her soft, soft hair. It really was the color of butterscotch, a golden brown so rich his mouth watered to see it, and fairer, almost white, at her hairline.
At his touch, she smiled at him. His own little girl. Jesus.
“Daddy, can we make the house now?” Impatience nipped lightly in her whisper.
“Yeah, yeah. Let’s get Barbie set up in her fancy crib.”
“Cribs are for babies,” Maisie corrected. “Barbie has a bed.” She picked up an elaborate pink and purple plastic thing. “It has a cap-ony. Like for a princess.”
Pink and purple and princesses and ‘caponies.’ He had a lot to learn about little girls.
~oOo~
When he had the dollhouse put together, he left the girls playing in Kelsey’s room and went to check on Jenny, who was sleeping quietly in that disconcerting way she had during a migraine—on her back, still as a post, her hands straight at her sides, her face completely slack, her chest rising in short, shallow breaths. But for her breathing, she looked like a damn corpse, and it freaked him out, though he’d seen it plenty of times before.
He checked her washcloth; it had warmed to her body temperature, so he eased it from her forehead and went to wet it again. She didn’t stir when he brought it back, except to take a slower, calmer breath when the cool touched her head.
Knowing that she still got those headbangers, and that she’d had to function despite them because she’d been alone, made Maverick even more guilty for being away. It also made him more angry at her—she hadn’t needed to be alone; there was a whole club full of people who would have made sure she had everything she needed—and it made him admire her more, too. She was stronger than he’d realized. He thought she was stronger than she’d realized, too.
It was this house that made her weak. This house and the bastard who owned it. He hated that she was back here, and that she’d been raising their daughter in this place, around that man.
He’d told Jenny he’d keep his distance, but Maverick went looking for Earl Wagner anyway. He just wanted to get an eyeful of the man who was the real reason his life and Jenny’s had gone to shit.
The closed door across from Kelsey’s was, he knew, the old man’s room. Maverick opened it, turning the knob slowly, and pushed it inward. Earl lay on a hospital bed, naked from the waist down, showing a desiccated body. A bulky nurse was cleaning him.
She was changing his diaper.
She saw Maverick standing there, and protective anger clenched her face. “Excuse me!”
Maverick didn’t apologize. He barely noticed the nurse as she came to push the door closed again. He kept his attention on Jenny’s father, whose head had turned to follow his nurse. His eyes met Maverick’s and went wide.
As the door closed, Maverick heard a guttural grunt, and he smiled.
~oOo~
Jenny was still asleep when Mrs. Turner from next door came over to pick up Maisie. She recognized Maverick and was surprised, to say the least, to see him standing at Jenny’s front door. The old broad asked an arm-long list of questions before she was content to accept Kelsey’s assurance that ‘My daddy is taking care of me because Mommy’s head is ouchie.’ She left with her granddaughter’s hand firmly clamped in her own, with stern instructions to Kelsey to ‘Come over if you need anything, chickie. Anything at all,’ and with a threatening glare at Maverick.
Safe to say he was not the most popular person on North Joplin Avenue tonight.
Around the same time, there was a shift change with Earl’s nurses, and he got to do the whole suspicion/confusion thing again, this time with a big black guy who had a couple inches on him and thirty or forty pounds. Darnell, Earl’s second shift nurse.
And still, Jenny slept. That wasn’t unusual. Sleep was about the only relief she got, and when the pain got bad enough, her body simply turned itself off until whatever was wrong got fixed.
How she took care of Kelsey through one of those things, he couldn’t fathom. Hell, it sounded like she worked through them, too.
The only head pain Maverick had ever experienced had come from injury—getting punched in the face or cracked in the head, some trauma or another that his life had inflicted on him or he’d gone out seeking. He’d never had any kind of headache that had just come out of the blue, just his head trying to kill him on its own.
He’d had several concussions, and that pain was no joke. So he thought he could understand at least a little. Jenny and Maddie, Ox’s old lady, had explained it in similar terms, which amounted, in his mind, to an auger boring, incrementally, through their eyes and into their brains.
Yeah, that was no joke.
With Jenny sleeping, and Earl agitated whenever he was in his sightline, Maverick devoted all of his attention to Kelsey. He rooted around in the kitchen and made her a sandwich for supper. He helped her tidy her room and get ready for bed. He learned that she liked to choose from her vast collection of stuffed animals to bring one into her bed each night for a ‘slumber party.’ On this night, she selected the giraffe he’d bought her at the zoo that afternoon, whom she’d named ‘Miss Goldie.’
He didn’t give her a bath, because she told him that her mommy helped her do it, and he...well, he worried that Jenny would freak out if Kelsey got naked in front of him. It was ridiculous; Kelsey was his daughter. But he was on eggshells, especially in this house, and he decided that she didn’t need a bath from him until everybody was comfortable with him being around.
It was a disruption to h
er nighttime routine, which caused some consternation, but the whole day had been a disruption of routine, and she rolled with it pretty quickly.
He sat on her bed with her and read her one of the books she’d gotten for her birthday, about a young yellow snake who didn’t want to become an ‘old green.’ She stopped him on almost every page to talk about the snake and what he was doing, asking a lot of questions about his feelings about snakes.
When the book was finished—she made him read the last page, with some scientific information about snakes, and had even more questions he didn’t know the answers to—he set it on the top of her little bookcase and stood up.
“Okay, Kelsey. I think it’s time to get some shuteye.” He pulled the light quilt up over her shoulders.
“What’s shuteye?”
“It’s a word for sleep.”
“Oh! Because you shut your eyes when you sleep, like this!” She closed her eyes tightly, her eyebrows clenching and her lids creasing.
“Just like that,” he laughed. “Good night, sweetheart. Thank you for letting me be with you on your birthday.”
“You’re welcome. You can come to all my birthdays now, because you’re my daddy and you came home. You took care of me when Mommy’s head was ouchie, and you took care of her, too. That makes you a good daddy.”
“I hope so.” He bent down and kissed her head. “Sleep tight.”
“Wait! You have to turn the flower light on.”
Maverick followed her pointed finger to a big pink daisy on her wall. He found the toggle switch on the cord and turned it on, and the daisy glowed. When he flipped off the overhead and saw the true effect, her room aglow with soft, warm pink light, he smiled. “Pretty.”
“Too pretty for monsters.”
“That’s right. Hey, Kelse?”
“Yeah, Daddy?” She’d settled and snuggled into her pillow, and her voice was muffled with coming sleep.
“I love you.” Was it too soon to say that to her, true as it was? He didn’t care. The words wouldn’t be denied. He’d loved her since before she was born. Getting to know her damn sure wasn’t making him love her less.
Slam (The Brazen Bulls MC #3) Page 17