She thought of what he’d told her, of the things he’d gone through in prison, of the horror and powerlessness he’d experienced, and her heart broke that he’d been alone, abandoned, for all those years. She had left him alone. She had abandoned him.
He had left her, too, but to a different kind of torment. An easier kind.
So much of what they’d had before had been good and right—what they had now was a testament to what had been good before—but it had been built on an uneven, unstable foundation. What they’d both needed then they still needed now, but they hadn’t known how to get there—he’d known only how to lead, and she’d known only how to follow. They’d been like two half-selves, unable to make a whole. In their loneliness since, in their turmoil, they’d learned the rest of themselves and come back together on stable ground.
They’d finally made their whole together.
She shifted under him, settling her legs on either side of his hips, and he groaned as her movement pressed his cock against her mound. She wore only his Bulls t-shirt, and he wore only a pair of sweatpants. She slid her hand down his side and pushed at his waistband, reaching between them to find and free his ready cock.
“Fuck me, Mav. I need you inside me.”
He obliged without a word, letting her take hold of him, letting her feed him into herself, and his mouth locked on hers as he thrust deep. Swallowing her moan, lapping it up with his tongue, he rocked his hips, and Jenny pushed her hands into the back his sweatpants and grabbed, digging her fingers into the flexing, muscular meat of his ass.
As Jenny felt her nerves begin to twist together into the pattern of their ecstasy, felt the hot flood of need loosen her joints, she broke free of his mouth, desperate for breath, and bit down on his shoulder.
Maverick grunted and slammed into her. In a sudden move, he tossed a back cushion from the couch, making more room on the seat, and grabbed her head, dragging a fistful of her hair, yanking her mouth from his shoulder and claiming it for his own again.
In her hands, his muscles flexed and released, harder and faster each time until the sofa began to move under them, short, stuttering shifts with each slam of their hips together.
Jenny was coming, sweet God, she was coming, and she needed to breathe, but she didn’t want to lose any part of their union, not even their tongues, and she was going to pass out, and she didn’t care. She could hear that he was close, too—his breathing was as desperate and insufficient as hers, great noisy drags of air through his nose, but he wasn’t going anywhere, either.
When the climax landed, she couldn’t control anything, and she screamed into his mouth. He grunted wildly at the same time, almost a scream of his own, and her eyes flew open—and she found herself starting right into his. He’d already been watching her.
They came down together, gradually slowing to a stop, pulling back from their mad kiss at the same time, swallowing heaps of air together. Then, when satiation brought sanity back, they lay together, still connected, and stared into each other’s Christmas-lit eyes.
She lifted her head and kissed his nose. “This is what I saw, too,” she murmured.
He smiled and brushed his lips over hers. When he pulled out, she hung on, unwilling to let him go far, but she needn’t have worried. He simply adjusted his sweatpants, tossed the other back cushion to the floor, pulled the knitted throw that had had been a gift from Mrs. Turner over them, and settled in behind her, with his arms around her.
Jenny fell asleep cocooned in his strong embrace, feeling the cozy glow of their Christmas tree on her face.
~oOo~
“Mommy. Mommy, it’s Christmas!”
Jenny’s eyes fluttered open. Kelsey had her face right up in hers, barely an inch between them.
“Morning, pix,” she yawned and blinked herself to wakefulness. Maverick’s arms still held her snugly, but she could feel him waking, too.
“It’s not morning, it’s CHRISTMAS!” Kelsey corrected, jumping up and down in her flannel holiday nightgown. Miss Shorty, trapped in her arms, seemed surprisingly comfortable with all the ruckus. “Daddy, it’s CHRISTMAS, AND THERE ARE SO MANY PRESENTS! Are they for me?”
Maverick kissed Jenny’s shoulder and sat up, bringing her with him. “A lot of them are, I think. But there’s some for Mommy, too, and some to take to Grammo and Grampop’s house later, too.”
“And some for Daddy, too. Can you find your name on the tags, Kelse?” Jenny asked. She needed to distract her for a few minutes, because she had a mission to complete before the gift-opening got started.
“Uh-huh. K-E-L-S-E-Y. That spells Kelsey.”
“Good girl. Okay—you find the Kelsey presents, and Daddy and I will be right back.”
Maverick cocked an eyebrow at her, but she simply grabbed his hand and pulled him back to their bedroom.
Once there, he tried to catch her, thinking she meant more fooling around. She pushed him away. “Easy, tiger. That’s for later. Just hold on a second.” She went into the closet and pulled the old lockbox down from the shelf. Her father had used it long ago, when he’d brought the till home with him every night after he’d closed the bar. Its lock had been broken for years, but Jenny used it to keep special mementos of Kelsey’s life—things like their hospital bracelets from her birth. A lock of hair from her first haircut, tied in a thin scrap of satin ribbon.
A little sparkly silver gift box.
Standing in the closet, she took that box out, put the lockbox back in its place, and went back into the bedroom, where Maverick waited, clearly perplexed.
“What’s goin’ on, babe?” he asked, wearing an uncertain smile.
“I love you,” she said, holding the box behind her back.
His smile widened. “That’s one.”
“We don’t have to keep count anymore. I know how you feel, and you tell me in so many ways, including with words.”
He came up and tried to take both her hands, but she only gave him her free one. “I like keeping count. It’s our thing. And I want you always to know for sure, every night when you close your eyes, that you heard those words on that day. On every day for the rest of your life. I love you.”
God, she loved him so much. “Okay, then. That’s one.” She brought her hand forward and held out the little silver box.
He knew what it was at once. His eyes widened and came back to hers. “Jen. You kept it?”
“Of course I did. I never gave it to her because...well. I didn’t. Besides, it’s yours to give to her, nobody else’s. It’s the first gift you ever got her.”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, and Jenny saw with a start that he was near tears. In all the time they were together before, she’d never seen him cry. He was not a man who gave quarter to tears—unless the reason for them was his love for their daughter.
He hadn’t taken the box from her yet, so she lifted his hand and set it on his palm, curling his fingers around it. “There are bows in that bag in the corner, if you want to dress it up. But I think the box is pretty enough just as it is.”
He lifted the lid and stared down at the tiny silver heart. “Jesus Christ, babe.”
“You were always her daddy. I always knew that.” She stepped close, bringing her body against his, and closed him up in her arms. He laid his head on her shoulder, and they stood quietly, together.
“Mommy! Daddy!” Kelsey was just on the other side of their closed door. “COME ON!”
Maverick laughed and pulled back. He hadn’t cried, but his eyes glittered, and he took a deep, sniffling breath. “Let’s go. We’ve got a first Christmas to get started.”
He kissed her, closed up the box, and went to open the door. “Merry Christmas, Kelsey. I love you.”
“I love you, too. That’s one, Daddy. Merry Christmas!”
“Let’s go see what’s under the tree.”
Jenny stayed back and watched him sweep their daughter up and set her on his hip. Kelsey put her little arms around his neck, and Jenny was slammed
by a memory, striking her so hard she put her hand over her heart—seeing, only a fantasy in her mind’s eye, exactly that, Maverick with a pretty little girl on his hip, her arms locked around him just so. She’d been standing in the women’s section of Wal-Mart, six years ago, when her mind had conjured that image.
As he carried Kelsey toward the living room, Jenny saw him talking, and he handed his little girl the silver box.
She’d leave that memory to just the two of them, and she’d hold her own close to her heart.
A first Christmas, he’d said. It wasn’t, really. It wasn’t their first Christmas together as a couple, and it wasn’t Kelsey’s first Christmas. That day had been sour and dark, full of longing for the life she’d lost and despair for the life she’d had.
On that day, she’d been at her weakest. But she’d survived. And Maverick had survived. Their love had survived. And now they all had the life and family they wanted.
Maybe this was a first Christmas after all.
December 1993
Jenny’s father grunted as he fell awkwardly back into his wheelchair. “Sorry, Dad.” She lowered his bed a little more, until the mechanism wouldn’t go any farther, and tried again. Tucking her head and shoulder under his arm—it made her think of Maverick’s thing, head down, shoulder to the day—she wrapped her arms around him and heaved.
This time, he landed on the bed, at least well enough that she could wrestle him around and get him on it right eventually. He’d been home for two months, but she still hadn’t mastered getting him between his bed and his wheelchair.
He wasn’t paralyzed, but he might as well have been. He was like an infant, with little ability to control his body. He’d been a strong but not a large man, and he’d lost a lot of weight since he’d been hurt, but he was still bigger than Jenny and just about more than she could handle.
But she couldn’t afford full-time nursing, so she had to handle him one shift a day, and on weekends, and on holidays. Holidays like Christmas. Like today. Christmas Day. Kelsey’s first Christmas. Ho, ho, fucking ho.
During the week, she could leave him in bed for her overnight shift, but she couldn’t do that on the weekends. She’d tried once, and when Darnell had come back on shift, he’d been able to tell and had been firm with her about the danger of bed sores. So she struggled to do it right and get better at it.
Once he was mostly on the bed, she pulled and pushed, as gently as she could, getting him to the middle and his legs and arms and head oriented properly. While she worked, he lay there, inert, his eyes following her back and forth around the bed.
“Okay. Okay. Let’s get you changed.” That was a sentence she found herself uttering several times a day, to her infant daughter and her invalid father both. As she lifted his hospital gown—she hadn’t figured out how to dress him when she was in charge, so she left him in the gowns he slept in—and took a long, steadying breath before she began to open his diaper. Just like Kelsey’s, only much, much bigger, and with more Velcro tabs.
The combination of soft foods he could eat and the meds he was on made his stools soft, sometimes nearly liquid. Would she ever get used to changing her father’s diaper, to cleaning his flaccid dick in its spare grey thatch, to heaving up his legs to wipe his ass, a grotesque parody of her care for her daughter?
No. She absolutely would not.
Just then, Kelsey woke and began to scream from her crib, that awful, head-splitting, heartbreaking wail she’d developed over the past few days, worse than even her colic shrieks. She had a bad cold, with a sinus infection and both ears infected as well, and she was in more pain than Tylenol infant drops could manage.
Jenny tried to hurry her father’s change, but it was impossible to hurry when she was maneuvering a man who still weighed substantially more than she did. While she went as quickly as she could, Kelsey’s screams became more and more desperate. She couldn’t breathe from her nose, and each long, terrified, agonized whoop stuttered out into horrifying silence.
Finally, Jenny slapped the last new tab closed and slammed the bedrails up. Leaving the noxious used diaper open on the table beside the bed, Jenny ran down the hall, into the bathroom to wash her hands as fast as she could, then to Kelsey’s room, yanking her shirt and bra open as she went.
Steam from the humidifier had made the dark room muggy. “I’m here, pixie. I’m here.”
Kelsey’s nose was crusted with yellow gunk, and the tears streaming from her eyes weren’t clear. Jenny didn’t bother to check her diaper. She picked her daughter up and swiped her face with the end of her shirt, pinching her nose lightly as she did it, trying to clear it out. Then she offered a breast. Kelsey settled as she latched, and Jenny sat down in the rocker.
Congested as she was, Kelsey couldn’t hold the latch, but Jenny kept wiping her nose and offering her breast, back and forth, until she was fed and soothed. Jenny rocked as her little girl fell back to a restless, but hopefully healing, sleep.
“Jen! Jen! Jen!” Her father called, like a recorded message. The only word he could say.
Jenny tried to ignore him. She rocked and held her daughter, and she stared at the elaborate, absurd round canopy crib. She didn’t cry; she was too tired and beaten down to cry.
This was not the life she and Kelsey were supposed to have.
~oOo~
That night, while both her charges were asleep, Jenny threw away the few Christmas decorations she’d bothered to put up. She hadn’t really liked Christmas since she was a little girl, but it had been Kelsey’s first, and she’d had a momentary urge to make something of it. Dumb—Kelsey was four months old. What did she know?
She considered the tub of cookies and fudge that Mrs. Turner had brought over from next door, with a pretty little card showing a baby girl in Santa’s arms. Merry First Christmas, Sweetheart! the glittery text read. That right there, cookies from Mrs. Turner, was the only gift that had come into this house. She hadn’t even gotten herself together enough to buy her own daughter a gift. So much for making something of her first Christmas.
Jenny tore open the lid, stomped on the foot lever to the garbage can, and dumped the contents. She tossed the tub in the sink and snatched the card and its red envelope, meaning to send it in right after the cookies. But she stopped, seeing Mrs. Turner’s perfect, Palmer-method handwriting, and opened the card.
She’d opened it when Mrs. Turner had come over, but she’d only made a show of reading it and being grateful. Now she read it. A message for her as much as for her daughter.
Sweet Kelsey, we’ve loved your mama since she was little as you, and you’re a lucky girl, because she’s full of love and strength, and she’ll give all that to you. Always remember, beautiful flowers grow in the darkest dirt. Your mama is a beautiful rose, with a thick, strong stem, and you will be, too. Happy first Christmas! Love, Mr. & Mrs. T.
Ps. Next door is home, too. For you both.
Discovering that, in fact, she was not too tired and beaten down to cry, Jenny collapsed into a chair at the table and wept.
~oOo~
That card from the Turners was the only memento of Kelsey’s first Christmas there was. The day had been awful, but it had held this bright spot, this sole reminder that there was more in their lives than misery. There was love, too. Jenny slid the card into its envelope and took it back to her room.
She took down the old lockbox from her closet shelf and sat on her bed. She’d begun to keep mementos of Kelsey’s life in it. She hadn’t collected many, yet; little so far had felt worthy of remembrance. The strip of ultrasound photos. Their hospital bracelets, and the pink bassinet card, from her birth. The Polaroid that Willa, the nurse, had taken for her, which was the only photo she had of the day Kelsey was born.
The silver box. Maverick had bought it for the baby right after she’d found out she was pregnant, and he’d shown her at Christmas. Just the year before. Jenny opened the box now and took out the silver pendant and chain. Daddy’s Little Girl.
&nbs
p; So like Maverick. She’d been barely pregnant, but he’d been totally positive that the baby was a girl. So positive, he’d bought this necklace for the daughter he hadn’t had yet.
She tried hard not to think of Maverick with any emotion except anger. Only anger got her through these days. But now, feeling broken and vulnerable, with Mrs. Turner’s sweet message of encouragement trying to bolster a mood that had been damn close to suicidal, she let herself wonder what Maverick’s first Christmas in prison was like. Was he alone, too?
Well, yeah. He was in prison. Even surrounded by people, even if the Bulls visited every single day, he was alone. He wasn’t where he belonged.
He belonged with her and Kelsey.
He would have been a good father. He’d loved Kelsey from the moment the test stick had turned. He’d been lavish in his devotion while they were planning for her arrival, and he would have been lavish in his devotion now.
He’d torn it all down, but if he hadn’t, Kelsey would have been surrounded and swaddled in love.
Jenny hated him so much because she loved him so much. There was no good life without him in it.
She supposed he knew about Kelsey; the Bulls knew, so he must. But Jenny had never written to tell him anything. Was that fair? No, it was not.
She put the pendant back in its box and returned it to the lockbox. Why was she keeping it? A memento of what could have been, but not what was, brought only pain. But she couldn’t throw it away. If she did, then even the shade of could-have-been, even the fantasy of might-still-be, would be lost, and Jenny would be lost with it.
The Polaroid rested beside the silver box. Turning her brain off before it could think, she took the photo out and brought it to her desk. She pulled a plain white envelope from her bill-paying drawer and dug the Oklahoma State Penitentiary card out of her address book. She addressed the envelope to Richard Helm, listing his inmate number—written on the back of the OSP card—and the address. She put a Santa stamp on the envelope
Slam (The Brazen Bulls MC #3) Page 34