Please, J.D. See what I am offering you. See what could be.
“He called you my whore,” J.D. said.
She knew what he was doing and she couldn’t bear it. Don’t do this, she wanted to cry. Don’t do this to us.
“Conti, when he left, he actually called you worse than my whore.”
“I’m not,” she said, her voice shaking, her entire body shaking, knowing that a terrible pain was coming. It was only a matter of moments. Her mouth was dry. Her courage gone and now she was desperate. She was scared and sad and made out of glass that was shattering. “I would be your wife. I would have your kids.”
If you’d let me. She couldn’t say the words.
J.D. swayed backward, his face for one moment revealing a hurt so profound. But then he righted himself, closed himself off. Sutured that wound.
“I won’t be back,” he said, turning. He grabbed his duffel bag and breezed past her.
“You aren’t this man, J.D. This isn’t you!” she cried.
The door slammed.
Sam couldn’t breathe for a moment. She collapsed against the wall, clutching her stomach as pain exploded in every part of her body.
After a moment she heard his car start then drive away. She listened as long and as hard as she could until the silence roared in her ears.
J. D. Kronos was gone.
14
With lead feet and a broken heart, Sam climbed the stairs to her apartment. Spence sat, white-faced and still, on top of his made bed. His little overnight bag at his feet. His notebook on his lap.
“I want to go home,” he said. “I want my mom.”
Sam’s breath broke as more pain sliced through her. Feeling a million years old, she sat down next to him. “She’ll be here in two days.”
“Can’t we call her?” he asked. “Tell her to come and get me?”
Sam blinked back tears. “I suppose we can,” she said. “If that’s what you really want to do?”
Spence was quiet for a long time and Sam guessed that this was only normal. Natural. That she lost everything all at once was probably better than losing J.D. and then Spence days later. One cataclysmic rip in her life. She could handle that. She could. She was strong. Tough.
Oh, but the hurt was so much bigger than her. So much heavier than she could carry.
“Is J.D. gone?” Spence asked and she nodded, her throat thick.
“Is that scary guy gone?”
“Yes,” she said quickly, looking right into his eyes, desperate to assure him. “And he won’t be back. Ever.”
Spence took a deep breath and looked down at his notebook.
“J.D. was going to hurt that man, wasn’t he?”
Sam thought about it and shook her head. “I don’t think he would have done it. But he thought he was protecting us, like Daisy.”
“J.D. is a guard dog?”
Sam smiled, barely. “Sort of.”
“Why did he leave?”
Because he’s a coward. Because he’s in too much pain. Because he can’t see the future I see. “It’s complicated,” she said.
“Was it because of me?” Spence asked.
“No,” Sam lied slightly. “Not at all, Spence.”
“I think I hurt his feelings,” Spence said, tracing the skateboarder on the notebook with his finger. “I was really scared.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Everything is going to be okay.” Which was such utter nonsense, she doubted he was actually going to be comforted. But then the little boy’s head dropped onto her shoulder, a sad weight.
“Do you still want to call your mom?” she asked, pressing her cheek to the top of his silky hair, unable to stop the tears that ran down her cheeks.
“Not right now,” he whispered and he settled in a little better against her shoulder.
Daisy flopped down across their feet and nobody moved.
Not for a very long time.
The next morning Sam and Spence were ghosts. They sat at tables. Walked through rooms. Talked to people as if they were there, but they weren’t really. Sam held up her hand and wondered why she couldn’t see through it.
“Sam?” Deb asked, coming up behind her as Sam stared out the front picture window, her coffee growing cold. “You all right?”
“Sure,” she said, with no conviction. The sky was the color of J.D.’s eyes and she couldn’t look away. Couldn’t blink in fear that it might change and she’d never see that color again.
“You’ve got that nutrition class in about twenty minutes.”
Sam nodded and without turning to Deb she did something she hadn’t done in years. “I am going to need some time off,” she said.
“When?” Deb asked, her hand a warm weight on Sam’s shoulder. She liked Deb for a lot of reasons, but she loved her right now for not asking about J.D.
“Right now,” she said, blinking back tears. “I just can’t…” …do anything, she thought. I can barely stand here.
“No problem,” Deb said, right away. “I can cover your classes.”
Sam nodded, feeling the boundaries of her world fall down. Shake loose. Everything that had been right in her world before—living here, working here, never, ever leaving here—all seemed so terribly wrong. Sick even.
“Do you want my apartment?” Sam asked, watching a plastic bag blow down the street. “I’m moving out.”
“What? Why?” Deb asked. “You live here.”
“Ten years is long enough,” she said.
“You quitting the shelter?” Deb asked.
“I can still be the director and not live here,” Sam said, not exactly sure how to do that, but she could figure it out. She had to, because she couldn’t live like this anymore. “I think it would be better for me.”
“Amen to that,” Deb said.
“So do you want the apartment?”
“Hell, no.” Deb shook her head, laughing. “I believe in life-work balance,” she said and Sam felt her ears burn.
Life-work balance was something she hadn’t had in ten years. She wasn’t even sure what that would be like.
“You know, it’s not like we’ve got women beating down our doors to stay here. Juny and Sue stayed for months because there was no one coming to take their place. In the past two years we’ve had about six women stay here. Maybe we can use the rooms to teach a few more classes since we’re running those at about capacity,” Deb suggested. “And if women do show up needing a place to stay we can work something out.”
Sam nodded, too wrung out to think of ideas now.
“We can figure it out later,” Deb said, giving Sam’s shoulder a squeeze before leaving.
She saw Spence’s reflection in the window as he stepped into the doorway from the kitchen.
“You want to go swimming?” she asked and his reflection smiled, wide and bright.
It was stupidly easy to find Christina and her boyfriend. Brett Trachten used his father’s stolen credit card to get a room at the Tides Motor Lodge outside of Virginia Beach.
After some minor computer hacking J.D. was on his way to the coast.
Four hours and one quick call to Greg later he stood in front of the dented aluminum door of room twelve at one of the dingiest roadside motels he’d ever seen. And he’d seen a lot.
Looking at the waterless swimming pool that someone was trying to fill with crushed Budweiser cans, he was glad Sam wasn’t here to see this. It would break her heart to see where Christina had run to.
He stared up at the unrelenting midafternoon sun and tried not to wonder what Sam and Spence were doing right now.
What he would be doing if he was with them.
He pounded his fist against the door and listened to the frantic murmured voices inside the room and the scuffle and thump of someone tripping on their way out of bed.
God save me from stupid kids.
“Christina. Brett,” he said, looking into the peephole, directly, he was sure, into the eyeball of one Brett Trachten. “Open up.”<
br />
More scuffling. More voices. Finally, the door cracked and Christina’s face poked out under the chain. “What are you doing here, J.D.?”
Her efforts at coolness were slightly heartbreaking, here among the ruins of the Tides Motel.
“Taking in the sights,” he said sardonically. “You’ve got a lot of people worried about you.”
“I left Sam a note and—”
Just hearing her name was a searing pain behind his eyes. “Your parents came looking for you,” he interrupted out of self-preservation.
That got the girl’s attention. Her eyes went wide and she ducked back, shutting the door while she undid the chain. She stepped out of the shadowed room. “It’s okay, Brett,” she said, over her shoulder. In the heat and away from the shelter, she managed to look a little tougher. A little harder, as though the decisions she was making were already having an effect.
The baggy Killers concert T-shirt she wore only made her look more pregnant, and younger.
The combination was scary and he wanted to pick her up and take her out of here, back where Sam could take care of her.
“They were at the shelter?” she asked.
He nodded.
Christina licked her lips, picked at the crumbling paint on the doorway. “My dad?”
Even miles away from the man she was scared, he could see it in the tense corners of her mouth, the way she put a hand over her belly.
“He was there,” was all he said and she still went pale.
Christina sighed and pushed her fingers through her chin-length hair, piling it up on her head, revealing blond roots from her sloppy dye job. Glancing back at the door then back at J.D., she seemed to be coming to a decision.
“You’re here to take me back to the Serenity House?”
He shook his head. He’d been thinking a lot about what kind of man he was. He’d been thinking about it until his head ached and his body felt like cement and his heart stopped beating in his chest. He’d never be Sam’s man. But he couldn’t be the man he was before, either.
J.D. had felt this crossroads coming. Even as he left Serenity, the diamond ring burning a hole in his pocket, he’d known this moment would happen.
The old J.D. wouldn’t even be standing here talking to her. He’d have her in the car, bound and gagged if he had to. To hell with what she wanted.
But the man who spent the past weekend with Spencer… With Sam. Christina. He couldn’t do it.
“I’m here to give you a choice,” he said.
“She won’t go back to her folks.” Brett, a strong, tall kid who looked older than seventeen, stepped out of the room. He measured J.D. from head to foot and glared at him. The kid meant business. “It’s not safe. Not for her. Not for the baby.”
“Or you,” Christina said, watching him with wide eyes.
The emotion between these two was thick and the pregnancy and on-the-run situation they were in pushed it past the standard teenager variety.
Brett reached out and stroked her hair, cupping a hand around her neck.
“You can’t stay here, Christina,” J.D. told her, interrupting the teenage lovefest with a little dose of the tough reality they were currently floundering in. Christina glanced around, taking in the motel’s chipping paint and cracked asphalt in the parking lot.
“It seemed kind of romantic last night,” she whispered, a blush on her cheeks.
“Sure, I can see that,” he said, watching a seagull peck at a cigarette butt.
“I’ll go back to the shelter,” she said firmly, but clearly reluctant to leave Brett.
“You can’t go back to Serenity,” he told her. There was no way he was putting Sam back in the path of Frank Conti again.
“Then we’ll just keep moving,” Brett said, his arm around her. His chin came up, like he was ready to fight for his girl and the baby. While J.D. could respect the intention, it was a bit stupid considering their situation.
“Your father’s credit card has been reported stolen,” J.D. told them, bursting their bubble, but not confessing to having done the reporting. “So, unless you have some other way to get money, you won’t get far.”
“I shouldn’t have given Sam my ring,” she whispered to Brett, her distress clearly growing. J.D. knew they could feel the walls closing in on them, because he had designed them to do that. “We could have hocked it.”
J.D. tugged the ring free from his pocket and handed it to them. “It’s a nice ring, but it still won’t get you far.”
“Well, I’m not going back to my parents,” she nearly cried, her cheeks going red with sudden anger. She grabbed the ring out of his hand. “This will just have to work for a while.”
“There’s another way,” he said, looking at Brett and seeing the knowledge in his eyes.
“What?” Tina looked back at Brett. “What’s he talking about?”
“A guy from the FBI talked to me a few days ago,” Brett said, stroking her hair, reaching for her when she pulled away, shaking her head.
“About what?”
“That run I took for your dad up to New York City,” he said. “The thing with the cigarettes.” His eyes flickered over to J.D., and he saw something in them. Something dark and scared and older than his years. “And the guy.”
“Oh, my God.” She started breathing hard. “Oh, my God, you were going to rat out my dad.”
“Do you blame me?” he asked. “He was going to kill me when we told your folks we were pregnant.”
“But now he will for sure,” she cried, tugging on his arm. “We’ve got to go.”
“I didn’t talk to them,” he said. “This agent wanted me to go into a protection program and I couldn’t do that without you so I ran.”
“That agent is a friend of mine,” J.D. said. “And the offer still stands. Whatever you know about your father’s business activities and in return they can promise you complete protection.”
“Right,” she cried, her eyes wild. “Like that’s possible.”
“It is,” he said. “They can take care of you. They can take care of your child.”
She put her face in her hands and J.D. wished Sam was here to say the right thing. To comfort her, because J.D. didn’t know how to do it.
“You should at least talk to my friend,” he told her. “Hear him out.”
Brett and Tina looked at each other for a long time, saying nothing, but communicating all the same. He watched them and thought of Sam at the pond the other day. The way she’d looked at all of them with love and bewilderment in her eyes, as if she didn’t know how they all came to be together. He thought of that and how he’d known exactly what she was thinking, just by the way she tilted her head.
“You need to be going to the doctor’s and taking vitamins,” Brett said, snapping J.D. out of his useless memories. “I mean, you are really pregnant and if something happened—” He shook his head, his face white. “I’m so scared. And if they can help…?” His expression was pleading and finally Christina launched herself at Brett, nearly knocking him over with her belly.
“Call him,” Brett said, over her shoulder, before burying his head in Tina’s hair.
That night J.D. lay in his bed, stared up at his ceiling and tried to control himself. He watched the lights of passing cars outside his apartment showcase the bone-white ceiling, the empty room. He could hear the Perisons downstairs screaming, and he thought briefly of the quiet at Serenity House. The thick, palpable quiet.
The way it would wrap around him, soak into him. Insulate him from anything outside of Serenity House.
The phone on his bare chest weighed a thousand pounds and with every breath he felt the weight press harder into his rib cage, until it seemed easier to just not breathe.
Quickly, as fast as he possibly could, as if it were a snake ready to strike, he grabbed the phone, opened it and dialed Sam’s phone number.
“J.D.?” Her voice sliced through him like shrapnel and he closed his eyes. “What’s—”
> “Christina is fine,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she asked. “Is she home? What—”
“She’s safe,” he said, then hung up.
A sadness so painful it felt like anger flooded him and he sat up, hurling the phone against the wall.
“It’s over,” he said, breathing hard. “Over.”
And then he yelled it.
15
Sam looked at Spence and tried to see him as Jennifer would see him. He was clean. That was good. His shirt wasn’t too wrinkled. His hair was combed. He had a sunburn across the top of his nose and cheeks from their two days spent at the pond.
Sam thought it made the kid look healthy.
Jennifer would probably take him to the hospital upon seeing it.
But the best part was the notebook that had been attached to his side was upstairs in his backpack. He hadn’t carried it around at all yesterday and today it didn’t even come down for breakfast.
“You excited?” she asked him needlessly. Spence didn’t even turn away from his lookout at the front window.
“Yep,” he said, scanning left and right for Jennifer’s silver Jetta.
Sam stepped up beside him and brushed her fingers through his hair, messing it up a little, but she was unable to resist.
He was leaving.
And she didn’t really know what that meant.
“I had a lot of fun with you,” she said, watching him watch for his mother. The excitement in his eyes was a little like sandpaper against her heart, but she couldn’t look away.
“Me, too,” he said. “I had a lot of fun.” He glanced up at her. “Most of the time.”
Right, she thought. About that…
“Maybe we shouldn’t bring up that scary guy. Or J.D.”
He shot her a look like she was the dumbest person on the planet. “Duh,” he said. “My mom would have a heart attack.”
Sam tried not to laugh, but couldn’t help it. Man, she was going to miss Spence.
“There she is!” he cried, jumping up at the sight of a car turning down the road.
The Story Of Us: A Secret Baby Romance (Serenity House Book 1) Page 17