Daddy Next Door - The Complete Series Box Set (A Single Dad Navy SEAL Romance)

by Claire Adams

  I tried to focus in class and tried to make myself just put the question of Johnny and his involvement in the suicide aside. But thoughts of what he could possibly have done to the girl he had dated to contribute to her committing suicide popped in, intruding on the lecture. What if he abused her? What if he beat her up — and those other boys helped? They had done something. They went to jail. Someone said that Johnny should be in jail, too. What did he do?

  I was so lost in my own thoughts that I nearly shouted in surprise when my phone vibrated in my pocket. My heart was pounding in my chest. I took my phone out carefully — the professor hated seeing a phone out in her class. I breathed in deeply, trying to calm down. If my hands shook so much that my phone fell out of them, I’d be just as doomed. The screen flashed with Johnny’s contact ID and a message notification. I closed my eyes. Of course it was him; it wouldn’t be anyone else, not at this time of day. Mom or Dad would have called, they wouldn’t have texted. I looked around to make sure no one was watching me and then opened the text message. Hey, Becky-baby, it read. Can’t wait to see you again. What are you up to tonight? I swallowed against the tight feeling in my throat and closed the message without responding. I had no idea what to do or say. I couldn’t just agree to spend time with him. I couldn’t be around Johnny again until I had figured out just what I was getting into and what kind of crazed person he might be. And even then — did I want to be with someone who could help drive someone to suicide and then lie about it? Another text came in, and I cringed before I looked at it. Let’s do dinner at least, if nothing else. I couldn’t make myself respond to it, even if I knew I should write something. I couldn’t think of what I should say. I couldn’t think of what I wanted to do. I had no idea how to feel — other than the fact that I was confused and I was deeply, deeply afraid of the possible monster I had been dating so happily.

  Chapter Two

  I went through the day, feeling alternately numb all over and as if every nerve in my body was about to explode. I didn’t know what to do and didn’t know how to think, and just like before, when I had been plagued by thoughts about whether or not Johnny was interested in me and after the stupid girl from the dining hall had brought Claire White to my attention in the first place, I couldn’t focus. I only heard one word out of ten if I was lucky in my lectures. I had no idea what I’d be able to make of my notes when I went to study later or do homework. As far as I was concerned, I might as well have not bothered going to class — except for the class participation points, which made up part of all of my grades.

  I got lunch at some point in the day, though Georgia couldn’t meet with me; instead of sitting in the dining hall, I grabbed a sandwich and a to-go cup of soup and retreated into the dorm. I didn’t want to risk running into Johnny. I couldn’t deal with the idea of even seeing him, not with everything weighing on my mind the way it was. I wouldn’t know how to tell him what was wrong if I had to look up at his face. Everything would come tumbling out of me.

  It was like living in a nightmare. I had no idea how to make my brain stop swirling around, how to make my heart stop pounding. Part of me wanted to ask Johnny point blank what had happened to the girl. See if he would tell me anything more. But he already gave you his story and it doesn’t match up to what everyone else is saying about him. How can you trust what he would tell you? How well do you really know him? The fact that he had been talking about spending the rest of our lives together, about getting married and having kids, when we had only been seeing each other maybe a couple of weeks, suddenly didn’t seem charming at all, but somehow weirdly sinister. What college-aged guy really thought about getting married? What guy in his early twenties wanted to settle down with someone for the rest of his life and have kids?

  I went back to my room without knowing how I was going to manage anything. I never replied to Johnny’s text, and I still didn’t know, even after a full day of classes, what I would say to him. Georgia came into the room as I was pretending to study, cheerful as always; for once, she didn’t have anything to say about Johnny and me — about how envious she was that I had nabbed the hottest guy on campus or how lucky I was to have run into him. She had had a good time flirting with one of the guys in her Bio class and it had turned into a date for that night. I was happy for her, and somehow managed to avoid unloading all of the stress of what I had discovered the night before onto her shoulders. Georgia didn’t know; she had no idea. I couldn’t ruin the good news of her date with something like that.

  I watched her getting ready, darting in and out of her room, going back and forth to the split bathroom: showering, putting on makeup, changing outfits and asking for my approval on each piece she chose. The entire time my stomach was in knots, and I could only barely pretend like I was remotely okay as I kept my eyes on either the TV or the book in front of me.

  By the time Georgia left, my skin was crawling and I was more than happy to finally be alone again. I thought that if I was around her for even a moment longer, the entire crazy, terrifying story would come tumbling out of me. Did he really just want to have sex with me and that was why he got me into the closet or is it some kind of crazy weird thing? I had loved it when we’d done it — I had been so pleased with myself putting it over on the Country Club, sticking a metaphorical middle finger up at the stuffiness, at my own pretentious parents and everyone they associated with. But knowing that Johnny was apparently involved in some poor girl’s suicide — what had he done? — made me feel like there was something else going on with that tryst.

  My stomach was churning inside of me. My lunch hadn’t done much for me; I had eaten because I knew I had to eat, but I hadn’t been hungry at all. I had been nauseated. I still felt nauseated. I was on birth control, my mother had insisted on it, but it had never bothered my stomach before. I gulped as I thought about the possibility of Johnny knocking me up. Any form of birth control could fail. Oh God, what if he already had? My mind spun out of control with speculation that I knew was sheer insanity. I was letting my imagination get the better of me, as my mom would have said.

  My phone rang and I nearly fell off of the couch, startled out of my wheeling, rambling thoughts. It was Johnny. I bit my bottom lip; could I dare not to answer it? I hadn’t answered his text messages from before. If I avoided him, he might come to find me. It wasn’t quiet hours, and I kind of thought that Johnny would have no problem talking himself into the building, even if the RAs had a rule against it. Who could tell Johnny Steel no? I swallowed against the rising anxiety I felt. I had to answer it. It would be easier to talk to him over the phone than it would be in person if he decided to come and see me. “Hey, Johnny,” I said, struggling to come up with a smile.

  “Becky-baby!” He sounded so normal. How could he sound so normal, so sweet, and so kind? If he had driven a girl to suicide, how could he act like such a great guy around me? Was he going to drive me to suicide? Had it been a suicide at all? I heard Johnny talking and knew that I had to pay attention to what he was saying. I shook my head as if that would stop my reeling thoughts.

  “Sorry, babe — what?” Johnny laughed.

  “I said, aren’t you coming to dinner? I’ve been waiting to see you all day. Going through withdrawals.” I smiled weakly.

  “Oh, is it dinner?” Johnny chuckled again.

  “What are you up to? You’re never this distracted.” Part of me wanted to retort that Johnny hadn’t known me long enough to know how distracted I could be. I was exhausted. I was more anxious than I had been in years.

  “I’m just not feeling very well. Kind of nauseated. Probably have some kind of bug — you know how these dorms are.” I tried to make my voice sound weak and it was much easier than I would have thought.

  “Poor baby,” Johnny said, his voice so sympathetic, so full of affection. It made no sense. Sociopaths are supposed to be so charismatic. Of course he’s sweet. Of course he’s charming. “I could come and bring you up some soup. I think the DH has chicken noodle tonight.
” I felt my eyes stinging. Was I totally wrong about him? Was everyone wrong? I couldn’t believe that someone could be so horrible as the comments on Claire White’s memorial page suggested, but so kind and so thoughtful. It just didn’t make sense.

  “Gigi is taking care of me,” I said, looking around as if I expected her to pop up out of nowhere and exclaim that I was lying. She wouldn’t be back from her date for hours. I was losing my mind.

  “Well as long as you’re not suffering alone, I guess that’s okay,” Johnny said. “Just call me if you change your mind. I’ll come and cuddle you and bring you anything you want to eat.” I smiled again, wishing that I could just accept Johnny’s kindness, that I wasn’t sitting on the couch, thinking of terrible things he might be involved in. My life would be so much easier if I had never heard anything about Claire White.

  “I’ll totally call you right away,” I said. Johnny said something else that I barely heard, something sweet and gentle and kind, and I felt my heart skipping inside of my chest. I made an excuse and finally got off of the phone, echoing Johnny’s parting, affectionate comment.

  I looked around the living room, trying to decide what I wanted to do. Eating anything seemed out of the question completely. Even the thought of crackers was enough to make my stomach flop over inside of me and give me a greasy, low feeling. I decided that I’d just go to bed. Obviously, I wasn’t going to get any kind of practical studying done and there was nothing on TV compelling enough to distract me from the bone-deep fatigue and the whirling of my thoughts. I would just go to bed, hopefully succumb to the deep need for sleep, and then in the morning, if I was lucky, this would all have been some stupid fevered dream that never really happened. At least, maybe, I would know what to think about all of it.

  Stupid as it was, I climbed into my bed and found myself wishing that Johnny was there. Part of me remembered his comfortable sweetness and the kind gentleness he had shown me every time we had been together. It was totally incompatible with the kind of guy who could torment a girl to her death. I tossed and turned, trying to calm myself down, trying to sort out just what I could — what I should — believe about Johnny. The commenter had said that what he had done to her wasn’t love. Johnny had said that he had been in love with her, that he hadn’t been able to save her from herself.

  I fell into a dizzy, uneasy sleep, with the muscles in my legs twitching even as the blackness of exhaustion started to fill up my mind. I didn’t know the moment that I had shifted between falling asleep and being asleep, plunging into the darkness of oblivion.

  I was back in the woods. Deep down the trail Johnny had driven down, in the darkness, able to see without knowing where the light was coming from. I heard dull, echoing thuds, groans, growls, and a sharp scream. Oh God, what’s happening? My heart started pounding in my chest. I ran, following the noises; I had to know what was going on. Everything around me seemed unreal and terrifyingly vivid all at once — trees whipping at me with their branches, and yet I didn’t feel them. My legs moving underneath me as fast as I could manage, but somehow I was moving along the trail as slowly as molasses, trying to reach the agonizing screams.

  I came into the clearing where Johnny had built the fire and saw him standing there, in his hockey gear. Another scream ripped through my ears, cutting through my brain, and I saw him bring his hockey stick down onto someone, over and over again. That had been the thudding I had heard — the sick sound of the wooden stick hitting a person. I staggered backwards, staring at Johnny as he laughed, bringing his stick down again, blood spattering across his uniform. He was singing something — words I didn’t know, a song I couldn’t recognize — as he laid into whomever he was beating, and it was so completely horrifying that I screamed.

  “Oh hey, baby,” Johnny said, turning towards me. “Just have to take care of this real quick.” He turned away and started beating the person at his feet even more viciously, chuckling under his breath. Realizing the screams were feminine, I looked down at the broken, bloody person, curled in on herself. The next moment, the person’s face turned towards me and through the streaming blood, I saw to my horror that it was Claire White. I screamed again and again, trying to get away from the fire, from the sight of Johnny beating the poor defenseless girl. My legs wouldn’t work and I thrashed around me, trying to cover my face, trying not to see what was in front of me. It couldn’t be Johnny. It couldn’t be Claire. It couldn’t be real — Claire had killed herself, she hadn’t been murdered by Johnny. I heard a sickening crunch, a thud, and turned away, trying to run, trying to escape.

  I woke up all at once, dripping with cold sweat, sitting up in my bed, my heart pounding in my chest. God. God. What was that? I shook from head to toe, reeling from the vividness of the nightmare. My throat hurt — had I screamed for real or just in the dream? I swallowed and tried to get a grip on myself. It had only been a dream. It had been terrifying, but no matter what Johnny had done to drive a girl to kill herself, he obviously hadn’t actually beaten her — not like that. If he had, there would have been no way for him to escape punishment for it.

  I climbed out of bed, deciding that I needed a drink of water. I needed to talk to someone. But Georgia’s room was deserted — she wasn’t back from her date. It wasn’t even midnight. I shook as I tried to open a water bottle and spilled half of its contents all over myself. I’m exhausted, I’m stressed out, and I went to bed hungry, I told myself firmly. No wonder I had a nightmare. I fumbled in the darkness of the common area and found a box of crackers, cramming them into my mouth and washing them down with the last of the water. My stomach was still unsteady, but my heart started to finally slow down and I climbed back into bed.

  My mind still reeled with what my dream had shown me. It wasn’t real. Johnny didn’t do that to her. Whatever else I could manage to believe about him, I couldn’t believe that he could beat a girl to death and then go on to college as if nothing had happened. I finished off the water and tossed the bottle towards the recycling bin in my room without even caring whether or not it actually landed inside. I decided the only thing I could do was try and go back to sleep, as terrifying as the prospect of another nightmare was. I was so tired. I was so confused. I closed my eyes and drifted off gradually, telling myself that I would think of nothing but pleasant things. I started to call up the nicest things I could think of. Kittens and puppies. The cookies my grandmother had made when I was a kid. The smell of laundry fresh out of the dryer. Eventually, I drifted off without knowing what I was thinking of, without knowing I was actually falling asleep.

  Chapter Three

  The next day, I had more or less shaken the nightmare I’d had the night before. I was still anxious; I still didn’t know how to feel about Johnny. I managed to get the sleep I had missed out on the night before, so at least when I woke up in the morning — the interruption of my sleep notwithstanding — I didn’t feel like a zombie. I got out of bed and got dressed, still thinking about what I had discovered.

  What had I really found, though? I had found out that Johnny was somehow involved in Claire White’s suicide. There had been a group of boys who were also involved. How do a group of boys drive a girl to suicide? It could have been bullying. It could have been hacking into her phone or somewhere and finding incriminating pictures. But Johnny had admitted to me that he had been Claire’s boyfriend. That she had been his first. Had he been her first? I shivered, wondering. The words from the comments on Claire’s page came back to me. The boys who had gone to jail had obviously done something awful, but I couldn’t think of what Claire’s own boyfriend could possibly have done that was as bad — unless Johnny was abusive.

  I thought about what my high school health class teacher had taught us about abusive boyfriends and girlfriends. At first they tended to be very charming, very friendly and they often were even once the abuse started, when they were in a “reconciliation” phase. The image of “The Cycle of Abuse” appeared in my mind as I wandered aimlessly through the dining
hall to grab some breakfast. The abuser would be charm itself; they would be sweet and kind and attentive. Gradually, as the relationship progressed, things would start to go bad. They’d explode and become frighteningly angry and then, just as suddenly, they’d back off and be sweet again, even kinder and gentler than before, contrite and careful. They’d bring you gifts or go out of their way to be kind to you. You would assume that the explosions were just an isolated incident and that as long as things never worked up quite that tensely…

  But then over time, the teacher had told us with the health counselor nodding solemn agreement, those isolated incidents would happen more and more. The threshold for the explosions would get lower and lower. What started out happening maybe once a month or even more rarely would start to become a weekly event, sometimes even daily. The abuser would try to control more and more aspects of your life to compensate for what was out of control in their own and try and make you stay in spite of every impulse in your mind to go. If you let them, they would convince you that the real person inside was the kind and gentle, sweet and charming person they had shown you at first. The ugliness, the rage, was something that you had caused — whether you meant to or not. That was why so many battered men and women stayed; their abusers convinced them that they were the ones who were wrong, not the abuser.

  If I could trust that Johnny’s story about Claire being his first sexual partner was true — if I could trust anything he had told me at all — I couldn’t imagine that he and Claire hadn’t been together for a long time before that. Plenty of time for him to become abusive towards her, if that was what had happened. What he did to her wasn’t love. That was what the anonymous commenter had said about Johnny. That pointed to abuse of some kind — abuse that the other boys who had been sent to jail must have somehow aided and participated in.