by Glines, Abbi
Henley’s expression didn’t change. “You’re afraid you and Cullen could be in danger, but you’re not sure?” she asked me matter-of-factly.
I nodded.
She looked back at Rio and said nothing. He, however, seemed to understand what she was saying without words. He gave one nod, and she turned back to me.
“I’ll look into things. I can find out if your sister left behind any debt,” Rio said.
“Thank you,” I replied, not sure how he would do that but thankful he could and was willing to.
“He will also stay here tonight to make sure you’re safe,” Henley added.
“He d-d-d-doesn’t n-need to do th-that,” I stammered, feeling my face heat at Rio’s reaction to that.
He would not want to be here or help me.
“If Tory owes someone, then, yeah, I do,” Rio said.
Henley smiled, obviously pleased with the plan.
I stood there, confused by him agreeing to stay and afraid to try to argue. My words were once again a struggle. I stared at Rio, torn between wanting the security of him being here and hating the idea of owing him anything. Even gratitude.
Chapter Seventeen
Rio
What the fuck had I just agreed to? I looked over at the kid. He was supposed to be watching the movie, but his gaze locked with mine. He knew he’d been caught listening, and his eyes went wide before he swung his attention back to the television.
How many times had people come knocking on our trailer door, demanding money from my mother that she didn’t have? How many times had I hidden in my room, under my bed, in my closet, while she paid them back with sex acts that I could hear? How many times had she left with them and not come home for days? How many fucking times had Tory done this to her son?
I turned my attention back to Bryn. “I’ll stay just to be sure no one comes tonight. Then, tomorrow, I will handle things. I know who she was tied up with, and most of them were arrested. They won’t stay locked up forever, but when they are free, Tory should be, too, and she can clean up her mess.”
Bryn massaged her temples, then sighed before finally looking at me. “Whatever n-n-needs to be done to-to-to keep Cullen s-safe,” she said.
She hadn’t said anything about herself. She hadn’t said us . Just Cullen. Henley was right about one thing; I seriously doubted Bryn was using drugs too. She didn’t act like someone using.
“That’s settled then,” Henley said. “I will call tomorrow and see what I can do to help out. Just let me know when you go back to work.” She turned and walked to the door then.
“I’m walking you to the car,” I said. There was no way I was letting her walk out there alone, coming from this apartment.
She didn’t argue, and I was relieved. Cullen was still listening to us. The tilt of his head said as much. The less he knew about the world his mother lived in, the better his life would be. I didn’t know how much Bryn had managed to shelter him from, but from what I could tell, she had done everything but take him away from his mother. Which, in my opinion, was what she should have done a long time ago.
“Lock the door behind me. I’ll knock when I’m back,” I told Bryn, not looking back at her.
The walk out to the car and the few moments away from her would give me time to think. Being in there and watching her had my head messed up. My concern was for the boy. Bryn could take care of herself. She had been doing so for a long time.
When we were far enough away from the apartment, Henley looked back at me. “She’s not what you think she is. She might have lived some awful life, growing up, that you think I wouldn’t understand, but it made her strong. She’s tough. She’s resilient. She doesn’t fall apart when things get bad. She does what she has to for those she loves. She is protective and nurturing to Cullen. He is well taken care of. Whatever you think her life did to her, you’re wrong. That woman is not a drug user. I just hope you see it before you do too much damage to undo it.”
Sighing, I looked down at her. “What damage am I doing? I’m staying, aren’t I? Keeping them safe,” I reminded her.
We reached the car, and Henley turned to me. She pointed a finger at my chest and glared up at me. “The kind of damage that ruins any chance you might have at getting to know her again. She’s under your skin, and I think she has been since you were kids. You can’t shake it, and you ignore it. But I see the way you look at her. Under all that fake crap, there is something there, and you hate it. Well, you’re gonna hate it more if you lose it.”
Henley had no idea what she was talking about. I didn’t trust Bryn, but I wasn’t going to tell my sister I suspected she had tracked me down and was probably desperate.
“Text me when you’re back at the house,” I told her. “So I know you made it safely.”
She smiled and climbed inside the car. I waited until she pulled out of the parking lot to turn and head back to the apartment.
Henley was wrong. There was a past with Bryn and me. When I looked at her, memories of the girl she had been came back, and I couldn’t help that. It was hard to keep this Bryn and the girl she had once been separate. We had just been kids, but Bryn had been special.
Henley was reading things into the memories that haunted me and nothing more. Well, except the attraction, but I was a man, and Bryn was impossible to overlook. Her face, hair, body, the way her top lip was slightly bigger than her bottom, smooth and tan skin that appeared too perfect. Yeah, I fucking looked at her, but it was lust that Henley saw in my gaze. Nothing more.
I knocked on the door and noticed the curtain covering the window move. I was glad she was being careful. For the kid’s sake at least. From the way things looked, Bryn was all he had in this world. He clung to her as if he understood that. Where the fuck was his dad?
Bryn opened the door, paused, and studied me a moment. I thought perhaps she was going to tell me she didn’t need me to stay now that Henley wasn’t here to demand it. If that had been on her mind, she pushed it aside and moved back so that I could come in.
I was glad she’d made it easy because her telling me to leave wouldn’t have done any good. We would have just ended up fighting, and I would have won.
She glanced back at the sofa, and I followed her gaze. Cullen had fallen asleep and was now slumped over.
“I need to get him in bed. The kitchen is right through there. Make yourself at home,” she said without once stuttering, then walked over to the sofa. She moved the blanket off Cullen, then went to pick him up.
“Do you want me to do that?” I asked her.
She shook her head and scooped him into her arms, then headed for the hallway. I waited until they disappeared into a bedroom before heading toward the kitchen. I noticed the chocolate chip cookies that sat on a cake plate by the stove. I wondered if that was something Bryn had made with Cullen.
There were drawings and artwork covering the front of the fridge door. The drawings all had the sky, sun, grass, and stick people. All but one of them only had two people in them. The drawing that was on the very top had three. It was clear that it was Cullen, Bryn, and Tory. A much smaller figure stood between two others, and they were all holding hands.
I looked down at the next drawing and studied it. The much shorter figure was holding an ice cream cone in his hand. The taller one was smiling beside him. The brown hair told me who it was, and as I studied the other drawings, the taller figure was always the same. Bryn. Never his mother, who he would have given blonde hair. Although both sisters were blondes, Bryn’s was a darker blonde, almost a golden brown. Tory was a paler blonde.
“I have to rotate the artwork every other week. Cullen loves to draw, and there isn’t enough room on the fridge for all of it. I started putting the ones I take down in a scrapbook for memories. Years from now, we can go back and look at how his drawing evolved and changed through the pages.”
I glanced back at Bryn, who wasn’t looking at me, but at Cullen’s art, smiling.
“That sounds lik
e a lot of work,” I replied. Unable to admit I was impressed with her dedication to making sure Cullen had memories from his childhood. Neither she nor I had that, and neither of us wanted to remember that time either.
She shrugged, then walked past me toward the sink. “Not really. He takes the time to create them. I can take the time to display them and keep them.”
I stood, watching her as she filled a glass with water. It was things like this that didn’t fit into the Bryn I knew now. The crazy one who’d beaten the hell out of my truck. The one who served drinks, topless.
She took a drink, her gaze now locked on me. “You know, Rio, the image in your head you have of me is wrong. I think deep down, you already know that,” she said without stammering over her words once.
She hadn’t stuttered since I’d walked back in the apartment. Her control of it was impressive. It wasn’t something I had witnessed until now.
She continued to study me, and I wasn’t going to defend myself by pointing out why I had the image in my head of her that I did. This was her apartment, and I was here because I wanted the kid to be safe. Tomorrow, I would leave and handle things to make sure there wouldn’t be any more of these nights.
“When did your stutter begin to fade?” I asked her, changing the subject.
“It didn’t fade. I learned some techniques to help control it,” she replied, taking another drink of water.
“I think this is the first time I’ve heard you speak without one at all,” I said.
She shrugged. “That’s because you make it hard for me, and then speaking becomes difficult.”
“How?” I asked her.
She raised an eyebrow and set her glass down on the counter. “By being a complete ass,” she replied, then gave me a smile that didn’t meet her eyes before walking past me and leaving the kitchen.
I listened to her footsteps as she walked away and back down the hallway. There had been no response to that anyway. I was glad she had left. Talking about things with her would lead nowhere good. We just had to get through tonight.
Opening the fridge, I found a small bottle of apple juice and took it.
“First bedroom on the right is yours for the night. If you need a shower, the bathroom is the very next door down. Towels are under the sink,” Bryn told me, and I turned to see her standing in the doorway again. “Eat some of those cookies. Cullen wanted to make them, and we will never eat them all,” she added. Then, once again, she walked away, leaving me there, alone in her kitchen.
Chapter Eighteen
Bryn
The screaming woke me, and I swung my feet out of bed. When they hit the cold hardwood, I noticed the clock by my bed said 2:08. This was about the same time Cullen had experienced his last night terror. Jerking open my bedroom door, I ran to his room. Cullen’s face was illuminated by the Spider-Man night-light I always left on for him and the moonlight cascading through the windows.
He was sitting up in bed, eyes wide open, screaming but not moving or acknowledging my being there. The first time this had happened, it had terrified me. I was sure something awful was wrong with him. The pediatrician had assured me that night terrors were common and not to be alarmed.
I went to his bed and had a seat beside him, then pulled him into my arms. His screaming didn’t stop, and like the times before, my heart hurt because I couldn’t stop this for him. I wasn’t surprised when I heard the other bedroom door in the apartment swing open. There was no sleeping through one of Cullen’s night terrors.
Rio’s tall form filled the doorway. “What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice thick with sleep but alert for someone who wasn’t used to being woken up in the middle of the night.
“Night terror,” I replied. “He has them occasionally.”
Rio didn’t ask any more questions. I had expected him to, but instead, he walked farther into the room and stood at the foot of the bed. I rocked Cullen back and forth as his screaming began to subside and his eyes closed. He leaned back against me, and we remained that way for several moments.
“He’s fine now,” I told Rio. “I’ll stay with him the rest of the night. It seems to calm him more in his sleep if he’s not alone.”
Rio didn’t move, and I thought I was going to have to tell him to leave when he finally nodded. “Okay. Can I get you anything?” he asked me.
That was such a foreign question to me. I blinked several times, then shook my head. I had never been asked if I needed something before. Times like this, I had always figured things out on my own. Tory hadn’t been here the last three times he had his night terrors, and I was beginning to think that was what triggered them. Her absence and his uncertainty about when she would come home.
“I’ll leave this door open and mine. If you need anything, just call for me. I’m a light sleeper,” he said.
“Thank you,” I managed to say.
Telling Rio March thank you wasn’t something I’d thought I would be saying and truly meaning anytime soon. Sure, he had stayed tonight, but Henley wouldn’t have given him an option. This kindness was something he was doing all on his own. It reminded me of the Rio I’d once known, and that was a dangerous slope.
I was tired and exhausted mentally from this day. That was all. I laid Cullen back down, then crawled under the covers beside him, keeping my arm around him so that he felt secure. I didn’t watch Rio leave but closed my eyes instead. However, I knew the moment he left, and I sighed wearily. Tomorrow, he would be gone, and this would be over.
It wasn’t the bright sun streaming through the blinds that woke me that morning. I was sleeping too deeply for something such as light to bother me. The small finger tapping my forehead was what pulled me from my slumber. Slowly, I opened my eyes to see Cullen’s small hand in front of my face as he continued to rap my head with his pointer finger.
“Umhmm,” I grunted, and he stopped.
“I’m hungry,” he said, fully alert, and I wondered how long he had been lying there, waiting on me to wake up.
“M’kay,” I muttered, then yawned, covering my mouth and stretching.
“Why are you in my bed? Did I have the bad terror dreams again?” he asked me, and I heard the concern in his voice even if my vision wasn’t great just yet.
I rubbed my eyes, then opened them to look at him. He had been with me at the doctor, and he knew about the night terrors even if he didn’t remember them.
“Yeah,” I told him.
He frowned. “You can go back to sleep if you’re tired,” he said.
The guilt he was feeling at having woken me last night was something no four-year-old should experience or even understand.
I threw back the covers and smiled brightly. “No way! I’m starving. How about waffles?”
“With silly faces?” he asked hopefully.
I had used berries to make a face on his waffles last time in hopes that he would eat the berries. He had as long as I added the syrup and whipped cream for the hair.
“Absolutely,” I told him.
“Yay!” he cheered and bounced out of bed, wearing his Spider-Man pajamas.
“Let me go to my room and put on some clothes instead of my pajamas, and I will meet you in there.”
“But you always cook breakfast in your pajamas,” he replied.
“Yes, but we don’t always have company,” I told him.
Although Rio had seen me in them last night, it had been dark in the room, and I had been holding Cullen. It wasn’t that they were revealing, but I didn’t feel comfortable, wearing silk pajama shorts and a silk tank top in front of him. Sure, he had seen me in much less at work, but that had been different. At least, in my head, it was different.
Cullen’s eyes widened when he was reminded of our company, and he hurried to the door. “Do you think he’s awake?” he asked me, stopping at his open bedroom door.
I doubted it, but what did I know of Rio’s sleeping habits? I shrugged. For all I knew, he could be gone already. If he had left without telling C
ullen good-bye, I was going to need to add chocolate chips to those waffles and exchange the regular syrup for chocolate syrup to brighten his mood.
I was just walking out of the bedroom when Cullen called out, “He’s up! He’s in the kitchen, drinking coffee!”
I didn’t reply. I went to my bedroom to get on a pair of cutoff sweats and a T-shirt before joining them in the kitchen. He would be leaving soon enough to handle the problem Tory might have left behind. I just hoped he was right and could fix things like he seemed to think he could. I only had two weeks off work, and then I would go back, and Cullen would have to get into a new routine.
Thankfully, I had more money in savings than I’d thought I would see in this lifetime, but I didn’t know if Tory had some debt in the drug world that I was going to have to pay. I also wanted to keep that money in savings and not use it to live on. It was the first time in my life I had some security, and I wanted to keep it that way.
Going back to work and taking Henley up on the babysitting wasn’t going to be an option for me though. Rio would not be okay with that, and I couldn’t ask that of her even if I paid her. Besides, I didn’t know what went on at the house Henley lived in. She was nice, but there could be parties and guys over there, drinking with her boyfriend. I would protect Cullen the way I hadn’t been protected.
Figuring out how to go back to work was something I had less than two weeks to work out.
Chapter Nineteen
Rio
This was fate’s way of laughing at me and telling me to fuck myself. Or at least, it felt that way. No woman should look that damn good after just waking up, especially when she’d had an interrupted night’s sleep and then spent the rest of the night on a twin bed with a kid.
Damn, damn, fucking hell! I didn’t want this image in my head. I was dealing with enough shit.
Then, she smiled at me. It wasn’t a flirty smile or even a happy to see you smile. It was more of a good morning , oh, you’re still here , and I don’t know what to say smile. But dammit, she made even that look good.