by Erin Wright
Adam had thought before that he knew what hate was. He hated getting stepped on by a cow. He hated lima beans. He hated not getting everything done in a day that he needed to.
But this…this was hatred that went bone deep. Beyond reasoning, beyond thought, beyond explanation, he hated Norman. Adam had never thought of himself as being a particularly violent man but in that moment, all he could think about was if he ever met this Norman, he’d kill him.
He’d kill him, and it’d be worth it. Because anyone who did this to a sweet person like Kylie…they didn’t deserve to live anymore.
“After he left,” she said dully, her words breaking into his anger and hatred, drawing him back into the moment, “I picked myself up off the floor. Everything moved okay, and I realized that he didn’t break anything. So I started packing. He knew where I lived and where I worked; I couldn’t stay there. I wasn’t about to have an abortion of my baby. My roommate came home in the middle of it and totally freaked out because I looked like a mess, but I just kept packing. I took everything I could fit into my suitcase, left everything else behind, and bought a ticket home on the Greyhound bus. I used his money to escape him. I think the irony is rather well deserved, to be honest.”
She stopped talking and just lay there, bones loose, face pale and streaked with tears, staring off into the distance. She had nothing left in her. He continued to stroke down her body, pushing her hair away from her face, holding her, loving her.
“I haven’t told anyone what happened,” she whispered, breaking into the silence surrounding them. “Well, my roommate guessed, of course, but she promised not to say anything. When I got here to Sawyer, I just told my mom about the baby and him being married, but nothing else. You know how Mom is.” She waved her hand in the air dismissively. “She would’ve wanted to file a police report and drag his ass into court and get him behind bars, but I know him. I know how charismatic and charming he can be, and it’d just be my word against his. So what if I had a few bruises on my body? I could be a clumsy person. I could’ve been robbed by a maniac on the street. How can I prove that it was him who did it to me? Plus…” She drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “I was a wimp when he first showed up that night. I didn’t want to tell him and ruin the beautiful relationship that we had.”
She rolled her eyes at herself. “I had myself convinced that he was going to propose to me when he heard the news, but there was some deeper part of me that knew that this revelation would be destructive. So instead of just telling him the truth right away, we had sex first. I was the one who initiated it. I wanted to just forget everything for a minute. So yeah, we had consensual sex and then he beat on me. A defense lawyer could say that maybe I just liked things rough and it was part of our sexual relationship.” She shrugged. “So, he gets away with it.”
Adam knew that it was his job to listen and to console, not to try to solve the problem, if there even was a solution for it. Short of tracking the guy down and doing some dental work on him, it was too late to file a police report against him or press charges. Sure, it wasn’t too late under the law, but without pictures to prove injuries, it would be a horribly difficult case to prove at this point.
Despite knowing that, it was still unreasonably difficult to keep his anger in check. What if Norm was doing this to other women? Defenseless women who were smaller and weaker than him? He was a stereotypical bully – he’d never pick on someone who could actually put up a fair fight. That wouldn’t be any fun at all. But fun-sized Kylie…she made an easy target.
How many other Kylies were there out there?
Adam was sick at the thought.
“I’ll be leaving now,” she said dully. “I can pack up my stuff and be out by morning.” She swung her legs off the bed, trying to push herself upright. “My mom will help me move out, so you don’t need to let me use your truck again.”
Adam’s hand snaked out and grabbed Kylie’s arm. “What?” he asked, totally bewildered. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ve been sitting there, trying to think of how to tell me to get out of your life,” she said, her eyes dead, her voice wooden. “I’m trying to make it easy on you. Isn’t that what all men want? For the women in their lives to just shut up and go away and stop being so needy all the time?” She let out a short, humorless laugh. “Please take your clothes and get dressed elsewhere, though. I’d like to get dressed now, and I don’t want to do it in front of you.”
“Kylie, darlin’, we need to take a step back for just a moment,” Adam said, trying to maintain the calm demeanor he’d been using all along. It began to slip on him, though, when he faced the thought of losing her. “I haven’t been sitting here, trying to think of how to get rid of you. I’ve been sitting here, trying to understand how monsters like Norman still exist. There’s a large part of me that wants to track him down and do some dental work on him, but I know that—”
“Dental work?” she interrupted him, eyebrows creased, looking puzzled. It was the first time she looked anything but robotic since he forced this topic out into the open, and Adam clung to that small improvement like a lifeline tossed from the Titanic.
“Yeah. You know, rearrange his teeth a little. Punch him in the face. Show him what it feels like to be on the receiving end for once.”
She looked genuinely puzzled, as if Adam had begun speaking Swahili on her, and he reached out his hand to stroke her cheek, laughing a little as he did so. “Honey, falling in love with a charming, narcissistic asshole doesn’t mean that you deserve to be treated like shit. It just means that he was convincing and manipulative, and you, being the sweet person that you are, believed him. It’s a commentary on him, not on you.”
“Don’t call me ‘honey,’” she said quietly.
He cocked an eyebrow, waiting patiently for her to explain her request, because there was absolutely a story behind that one.
“It was his nickname for me. It’s common, of course, but I don’t think he called me Kylie but once or twice. It was always ‘honey.’ Now that I know the truth, I think he did it because it was easier for him to just call everyone ‘honey.’ What if he’d accidentally screwed up and called me by his wife’s name or something?”
“I imagine for a serial philanderer, it’s a difficult problem to manage,” Adam said with a small laugh. “I’d pretend to have sympathy for him, but I’m afraid I don’t have much at this point.”
“Yeah. Me either.” Kylie shot him a grimace that he guessed was supposed to be a smile, and then they sat in silence for a minute. Adam wanted to make sure she’d said all that she wanted to say. This was her time to get this shit off her chest, and he wasn’t going to interrupt her if she had anything left to spill.
When she didn’t say anything else, though, he reached out his hand and stroked it over her cheek, staring up into her red-rimmed eyes. “Darlin’, God only knows that this is easier said than done, but I’m telling you right now: Whatever bullshit that man told you, he was wrong. You need to not only know that, but believe that. With me, right here, right now, I want to start over.”
He drew in a deep breath for courage, and then plunged on.
“When I tell you that I love you, when I tell you that you’re the world to me, when I tell you that I’d give up almost anything to make you smile, I damn well mean it. I don’t play games. It isn’t in my DNA. My mother loved one man her whole life. She’ll be the first to say that she’s a ‘one man woman!’ and she shakes her finger in the air when she says it. I’m up to two, but yeah. I’m definitely my mother’s son.”
“Two?” Kylie asked, confused. “I thought you loved Wendy and Chloe before me.”
“Wendy – absolutely. Wholeheartedly. I loved her since I knew what love was. But Chloe…I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. I helped her give birth on the side of the road, in the middle of a blizzard, and then was a big part of her life for nine years. She friend-zoned me out of the gate, though, and I never really had a chance with her.<
br />
“To be honest, I think she was more attractive to me because of that. She was safe. We would never go anywhere as a couple, and after Wendy’s death, that’s actually what I wanted, even if I didn’t know it myself. I wasn’t ready to move on yet, so I put her up on this pedestal, a pedestal that no woman could actually live up to. If you never really get to know someone, then they can appear perfect. It was easy to retain that illusion from afar. But no one is truly perfect.”
“What?!” Kylie gasped in mock outrage, a bit of a laugh sneaking into her voice that had been missing since this whole awful discussion began. “Are you trying to imply, sir, that I am not perfect? Tell me, in which way do I fall short of perfection?”
“Well, speaking of being short, you obviously didn’t eat your Wheaties growing up, a terrible failure on your part.” He ignored her protests that being compared to a giant just wasn’t fair, and continued on. “Then there’s your insane predilection towards carrots instead of donuts, which is obviously a sign of some sort of mental defect—”
“Mental defect?!” she half yelled, half laughed. “Just because I think that eating healthy is—”
“And then, of course,” he continued on, bowling right over her, “you have this unhealthy obsession with mops and brooms and Windex. I mean, have you seen the floor of the clinic lately? I swear to God, you could eat off it. It just isn’t right.” He shook his head mournfully. “Oh, for the days of cobwebs and gray walls and dirt-encrusted everything. Don’t hate me too much, spiders – I wasn’t the one who took your home away.”
Kylie was laughing so hard, she couldn’t even protest anymore, but rather collapsed onto the bed, holding her sides as she roared with laughter.
“I don’t even know how it is,” he said softly, hovering over her with a gentle smile, “that I can put up with you.” He kissed her and she looked up at him, laughter and a bittersweet happiness in her pale green eyes. “Not with such a terrible list of flaws like you have,” he whispered.
“It is awfully kind of you,” she said solemnly. He could see that she was drifting in that in-between world, between laughter and crying, and just the slightest push could send her spinning back the other direction. She was fragile in that moment; far beyond the fragility of her small frame, but rather it was a deep fragility, a hairline crack running through her emotions that could be broken with just the slightest pressure. “Speaking of being kind,” she whispered, “would you be so kind as to just hold me for a minute?”
“Anytime,” he whispered, and pulled her against him, wrapping his arm tight around her waist, drifting through the summer evening with her in his arms.
Chapter 38
Adam
Adam opened the front door of his mom’s house quietly, hoping she was still asleep by some miracle. He’d ended up falling asleep at Kylie’s on accident and didn’t wake up until her alarm went off this morning. Unfortunately, Kylie got up later than he did, so he was running behind even more than usual, which was saying something.
His mom looked up from the dining room table and without a word, folded up the Franklin Gazette and set it off to the side.
Shit. He’d been caught by his mother, trying to sneak into the house without her noticing, and of course, she’d noticed. He swallowed his groan. He was way too old to put up with this sort of thing from his mother, for hell’s sakes.
But when she opened her mouth, she surprised him. “Adam, I want to apologize,” she said solemnly.
He felt his jaw hit the deck. His mother? Apologize? This wasn’t exactly something that she did regularly. Or, ever, to be more precise.
“You can wipe that look of shock off your face,” she said mildly. “I’ve apologized to you before.”
About what? And when? But he decided that if he was ever going to actually hear this apology of hers, he should keep his sarcastic thoughts to himself.
Instead, he slid into his chair kitty corner from his mom’s and took her soft, spotted hand in his. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“The other day, when you talked to me about the retirement home, I didn’t take it well.”
The corners of Adam’s mouth threatened to curl up at that one, but he fought hard to keep a straight face. To be fair to his mother, she didn’t exactly have a lot of experience apologizing to other people. He needed to cut her some slack. But still… “Not well”? Sure, and he’d heard that the Titanic’s maiden voyage didn’t “go well,” either.
“This whole arthritis thing has really been difficult, but I kept telling myself at least I was staying in my home. It was my consolation prize – maybe I can’t crochet anymore, but darn it all, I can sleep in my own bed under my own roof.”
She shook her head, her faded blue eyes downcast as she pulled her hand away from Adam’s and began fiddling with the head of her cane. “Asking you to move in with me…I should’ve known from that, that I wasn’t going to last much longer here. Well, I guess in the end, it did give me quite a few more years, but still, I shouldn’t have even asked you to move in here. That was me being selfish and wanting to extend my independence for as long as possible.
“Zara…she’s wonderful. And I really appreciate her coming over, and I appreciate you arranging for that.” She leaned over and squeezed his hand. “But she’s a girl and she needs to live in her own house with her parents, not here with me, and…I need more help than some afternoons a couple of times a week.” She swallowed hard, looking rather like she’d just bit into a wormy apple. “Margaret and Susan both live up at the retirement home, and they love it. They volunteer down at the second-hand store and say it’s the best part of their week. I’d like to go outside and do something for other people. I feel so worthless, just sitting around and reading all the time. I want to help other people. I want to be wanted.”
This was exactly what Kylie had told me. She knew my mother better than I did.
She let out a big, shuddering sigh, and then said softly, “I’m not going to tell you that I want to do something just yet, but will you take me over to the center? I want to look around, and then think about it. Would you be kind enough to take me there, even after I behaved so badly to you?”
Adam pulled in a deep breath. “I would love to, Mom, but we need to talk about what you said about Kylie. If I’m lucky, I’ll marry her someday, and I won’t have my mother talking about my wife like that. Did you mean what you said, or were you just angry?”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t even remember what I said.” She grimaced. “I was mad and wanted to make you mad. Which is a sad state of affairs for someone as old as me to find herself in, ‘cause I should be old enough to know better. My momma raised me better than that. I…I was scared.” She shrugged her thin shoulders.
Adam wasn’t about to let her off the hook so easily, though. “You said she was trying to get rid of you so she could have me all to herself. You were also angry about the car being sold to her.”
His mother’s pale cheeks turned a bright red. “Oh my, oh my,” she whispered, distressed. “I didn’t mean it, I promise. You didn’t tell her any of that, did you?”
“I generally don’t start World War III before breakfast if I can help it,” he said dryly. “No, I knew you weren’t yourself in that moment, and I wasn’t about to report any of that to Kylie. She is just trying to help. She likes you a lot, and I want to keep it that way.”
His mom reached out her liver-spotted hands to pat his. “Thank you,” she said softly. “I really like Kylie, too – she makes you happy, and for that, I’d love her even if she were a three-headed monster who ate cats for breakfast, although I have to say that her being sweet and hardworking certainly doesn’t hurt her case.”
“Sassy, did you hear that?” Adam called out. She lifted her calico head and stared at him, yawning as he talked. “Your momma says it’s okay if a three-headed monster eats you for breakfast.”
Deciding that nothing of interest was happening, Sassy snuggled back down into the couch an
d went right back to sleep.
“She’s terrified,” Adam said, turning back to his mom.
“I can see that,” his mom said dryly, and laughed. “I don’t know what your schedule looks like this week,” she said, returning to the topic at hand, “but if you can take me over to the home at some point, I’d like to tour it with you. Then I can decide.”
Adam’s mind skipped back to his “Let’s play hooky” attitude yesterday afternoon. Had it really only been 18 hours ago? It felt like a lifetime ago. But because he’d skipped his appointments yesterday, that meant he was even more behind today.
And yet…
“Let’s go right now,” he said impulsively. “I’ll have Kylie move my appointments from this morning. I don’t have anything pressing going on – no one is giving birth or dying on me – so what I’m doing can be moved by a day or two.”
“Today?” Mom said, her eyes lighting up with excitement. “Well then, I best get ready! I can’t go there looking like this.” At Adam’s blank look – she looked like she always did – she shook her head in disgust. “Men,” she muttered, and then pushed herself to her feet. “I’ll be back in a jiffy,” she promised him, pushing her walker down the hallway as she hurried as fast as her old bones would allow her.
She came back wearing a string of pearls, a matching pantsuit he hadn’t seen in ages, and bright red lipstick. “C’mon,” she said, winding her arm through his, “if we hurry, we might be able to catch breakfast. I want to see what they consider to be a meal. Bad food will kill me off faster than you can say ‘Kentucky.’”
As Adam escorted his mother to his truck, helping to get her into the passenger seat safely, he couldn’t wipe the grin off his face. Really, life couldn’t be much better than this.
Chapter 39