Chapter 23 Soft
Soft
Jenny
I barely had a half a second to register the bleak look on Deacon’s face as I ran past him, but it punched me in the gut just the same.
My heart urged me to throw caution to the wind and launch myself into his arms, but the rest of me desperately wanted to run away.
And I was thankful he didn’t try to stop me.
Sobbing, I ran around the back where the steps led up to my apartment, then flew past them, unable to wait to get into the shower.
Viciously yanking my hair away from my neck, I exposed my skin to the rain.
I scrubbed the spot on my neck where that man’s slimy mouth touched me but only managed to transfer his touch to my hand.
Moaning, I wiped my fingers off on my dress, contaminating that as well before going back to scrub my neck some more.
What was I thinking putting on a pretty dress?
My stomach churned at how easily he could have taken what he wanted.
Adam didn’t see me as a person deserving of basic decency and respect. He was so many of my mother’s boyfriends.
How many of them had tried to grope me over the years?
Some of them before I even reached my teens.
It never mattered what I wanted, what I said, how far I ran.
I always had to go back.
One thing my mother had done right, at least until I turned eighteen, was protect me from those men. As soon as they tried, she gave them the boot.
But at eighteen?
I became competition.
I stopped at the back of the lot and wrapped my arms around my torso.
I tipped my head back, a silent scream scorching my throat as I let the rain lash away the tears on my face.
Was Deacon the rest of her boyfriends? Explosive anger and swinging fists coming out of nowhere?
It took him less than a minute to leave Adam bleeding on the floor, and Adam was a large man.
What could he do to me?
I shivered and it wasn’t from the cold.
Pacing in a circle, I held my head in my hands.
I didn’t want a hard life; a life of fighting and punching and drinking and crying my eyes out in the dark.
I couldn’t be my mother.
I just couldn’t.
There are girls they marry and girls they fuck. I’ll let you guess which one we are.
That’s how they saw me.
That’s how they treated me.
The rain beat down on my head, the coldest of cold showers, and I welcomed every fat drop that bounced off my shoulders and the top of my head.
Every drop that stung my face.
Every drop that plastered my dress to my body.
I needed to get away from Moose Lake; leave and never come back.
Deacon.
“Oh, God, Deacon,” I cried, shaking my head and covering my ears to dislodge the sound of Adam’s nose breaking, his grunt of pain when his tooth hit the floor.
Turning around to head home, I looked up in time to see Deacon step through my door and jog down the stairs.
As soon as he clocked me watching him, he slowed his pace, sticking his hands in his front pockets.
I stood and faced him.
He was everything to me, he always had been.
My mouth trembled.
Could I be with a man like him? A hard man to whom violence came so easily?
I’d worked so hard to build a life where I could be soft.
He stopped a few paces away. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t like what you did,” I began, my voice shaking.
“I know,” he replied evenly, dipping his chin to meet my eyes.
The whole ordeal replayed in my mind.
My body trembled with the echo of Deacon’s fist slamming into Adam’s face.
I looked to him for comfort even as I planned to run away from him as far away and fast as I could.
His soaked button-down shirt turned transparent and adhered to his wide chest. His jeans turned navy while his dark eyes, warm and concerned, fractured with pain old and new, locked on mine.
“Oh, God,” I cried, scrubbing at my neck once more before smacking the heel of my hand to my forehead. “I can still hear it!”
“Hear what, baby?” He stepped closer, that wide chest shielding me from the pelting rain.
“His nose,” I gagged and covered my mouth as the nauseating sound of cartilage crumpling under Deacon’s fist assaulted my mind.
The arc of his blood.
His tooth hitting the floor.
In my pretty, little kitchen.
My safe place.
My stomach rolled. I spun around just in time and threw up in one of the last remaining snowbanks.
Deacon’s hands covered me, one steadying me at my shoulder, the other rubbing slow easy circles over my back as I retched.
Stomach emptied, I braced my hands on my thighs and hung my head. “I don’t want a hard life,” I pleaded. “I want softness and peace and soft—”
“And I’m going to ensure you have it,” he stated, pulling me upright and wiping my mouth with his sleeve before tucking me against his chest.
My arms shot up between us, a barricade, but he was so warm, and I’d waited for him for so long.
I stared up at him, stricken. “With your fists?”
“When necessary,” he answered, his jaw hard, gaze unyielding.
“You have to use your words!” I cried. “We could have called Sergeant Elliott!”
I turned my face away, but neither hell nor high water could pull the rest of my body from his embrace.
“Sometimes words aren’t enough, baby,” he murmured low, his large hand braced against my lower back.
“I can’t handle it, Deacon,” I admitted.
His hands moved up to cup my face, turning me to meet his midnight eyes, nothing but warmth and sweet concern reflected in their depths.
I latched onto his wrists.
He stared down at me, dark eyes serious. “You’re searching for excuses to end this. I’m not saying I’m not a violent man, Jenny. I am. But I will never use violence against you or our children.”
I sucked in a breath. “Children?”
How can he be thinking of children at a time like this?
“Children.”
I dropped my gaze.
Children?
A little girl with his dark eyes and that long dimple I’d barely seen since he came back into my life. A boy with his full lips and wide smile, his chubby arms wrapping around my neck as he smacks a wet baby kiss on my cheek.
I love you, Momma.
His thumbs caressed my temples. “I’ll protect them and you. Always. Do you want children with me, Jenny?”
I raised my eyes to meet the hope in his and swallowed. It was time. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
He erased the final bit of distance between us, pulling my front flush to his.
I sobbed with something akin to relief and dropped my forehead onto his chest.
“Okay, sweetheart,” he murmured, bending to scoop me up in his arms. “But first we’re going to warm you up.”
He carried me up the outside steps to my apartment and didn’t stop until we stood in my bathroom.
Sniffing, I stripped off the dress I bought for Deacon and dropped it on the floor.
Taking my hand, Deacon helped me into the shower where I stood under the hot, healing, spray of water.
“Very pretty dress, baby,” he said as he picked it up off the floor. “I’m sorry things didn’t go the way we planned.”
I shook my head, grabbed my loofah, and slathered it with body wash before taking it to my neck. That dress was going in the garbage.
“No, baby,” he took the loofah from my hands. “Nothing about you is dirty, not a single thing. You’re in here because you got cold. You deserve to be warm and safe, and I’m going to ensure you are both.”
I turned my head slightly, seeing him out of the corner of my eye. “You’re getting wet.”
“I’m fine,” he murmured. “I have a bag with me, and I’ll run out to get it as soon as you’re dry.”
He handed me out of the shower and wrapped me in my giant, fluffy towel. Then, with a smaller towel, he proceeded to dry my hair, tugging my head this way and that.
I began to laugh.
His eyebrows crunched together as he dipped his head to peer at me under the towel. “Are you okay?”
I laughed harder. “I’m not hysterical.”
Or maybe I was.
The corner of his mouth quirked. “Why are you laughing?”
I peered through the tangle of hair hanging over my face due to his ministrations and pointed to the towel on my head. “You’ll never make it as a hairdresser.”
He grinned back at me, that sweet dimple flashing. The relief in his eyes shone bright as he dropped the towel and smoothed my hair off my face.
Voice low and amused, he added, “Probably wouldn’t make it as a Hairy Larry exterminator either.”
“Never!” I chuckled again, feeling light and happy.
Was I hysterical?
My mood swung from one extreme to the other, but all I could see was Deacon’s beauty. The boy I’d loved had turned into a man, but I could see him there still.
And he’d protected me.
Even if it was with his fists.
I shuddered to think how bad it might have been if he’d arrived ten minutes later.
“Are we okay?” he asked, his voice soft.
Adam deserved it.
I didn’t deserve it the few times I got in between my mother and one of her losers.
She didn’t either.
But Adam did.
“We’re okay,” I murmured. “Go get your bag.”
I wound my hair into a messy bun and secured it to the top of my head.
Digging though my drawers, I found my softest trackpants and an oversized hoodie that once upon a time belonged to Miller of all people.
Maxine took it off Miller’s body and yanked it over my head the first time Adam showed up unwanted.
It had always made me feel a little less alone.
I slipped on thick socks and padded out to the family room to find Deacon sitting on the couch in his sweats, bathed in the warmth of the lamp on the side table, two mugs of hot chocolate on the coffee table.
Rain pummeled the window, the afternoon dark as the storm gathered strength.
He patted the couch beside him. “Come sit.”
I turned on the lamp and sat down sideways, my drawn-up knees a barrier between us, and took my first sip of hot chocolate. Eyebrows rising, I teased, “Not bad.”
“Jenny,” he admonished gently. “Don’t pretend everything is okay. You must have been terrified.” He paused. “Do you want to press charges?”
I shook my head and just barely stopped myself from snorting. “You and I both know how these things go. He’s from a respected family, and I’m me. I think you gave him the only justice I’ll ever see.”
“I would do it again in a heartbeat,” he growled, his eyes steady on mine.
My hand trembled, ripples chasing each other across the surface of my drink. “I should have locked the door.”
“It’s not your fault,” he asserted.
I reached over and set it back down on the coffee table.
My voice shook. “He thought I’d—"
“It’s not your shame,” he grated. “It’s his. Don’t take it in and make it yours.”
I nodded, thinking about everything that came between us. Not a single thing was my shame.
Not Adam. Not Deacon’s parents. Not Baxter’s father. Not my mother.
None of it.
No more secrets, Jenny.
‘Deacon?” I gulped.
“Yes, baby?”
I stared down at my clasped hands in my lap.
This was going to kill him.
Did he need to know? What good would it do now?
Was I trying to hurt him?
That didn’t ring true. But it didn’t exactly feel entirely off base either.
Regardless, too many people knew, and the truth had a way of showing up at the worst possible time.
I gathered my courage in my hands and whispered, “I was pregnant when you left.”
Raising my eyes to his face, I watched as shock, disbelief, and then horror flickered across his face.
I watched as his eyes gauged the truth in mine.
I watched as realization hit.
And then I watched him fall apart.
“What?” he rasped, licking his dry lips.
His eyes swung wildly from one corner of the room to the other before coming back to mine.
Fractured.
“What happened?”
Familiar tears sprang to my eyes for the baby I’d desperately wanted. The baby I’d planned to raise on my own if Deacon wanted no part of us. The baby that would give me a family of my own.
“I think it was the drugs Baxter’s father gave me, or maybe it was the stress of—” I cut myself off.
His hands flew to his head. He gripped his hair, his knuckles turning white. “Of me leaving on top of everything else,” he finished for me.
“I’m pretty sure it was the drugs,” I whispered. “And the terror of not knowing what he was going to do to me.”
His eyes skittered back and forth between mine like I had the answer he sought.
“It’s okay,” I whispered.
He leapt to his feet and paced away, his body vibrating like a live wire.
“Fuck,” he hissed. “Jenny, I can’t, I can’t fix any of this.”
He stabbed his fingers into his hair, his eyes wide and furious as he processed.
“How far along were you?” he asked, his voice gruff.
“Nine weeks.”
Hands bracing both sides of his head, he turned to look at me, his eyes tortured. “Did it hurt?”
I hadn’t thought we’d get into this much detail.
I hadn’t remembered in this much detail in a long time.
Tipping my chin down, I gave a single short nod. “It hurt.”
“Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” he chanted, pacing around in a tight circle before striding back to the couch.
Sitting back down beside me, head hanging down, one elbow braced on his knee, the other knee bouncing, he held out his hand out toward me, palm up.
Without a thought, I gave him my hand. What was a hand when he already held my heart?
He shuddered and closed his fingers over mine.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you,” I murmured.
He shook his head. “I never want you carrying your pain on your own, but this is my pain, too. I lost something, something huge. Just because I didn’t know, doesn’t make it less true.”
I squeezed his hand, pressing my palm into his as if to fuse us together.
“But the biggest loss,” his voice broke, “was not being here to hold you through it.”
He held my hand in a death-grip, his head hanging low as his knee stilled. “I can’t think about everything you’ve gone through on your own without wanting to burn the whole fucking world to the ground,” he admitted gruffly.
He lifted his head and met my eyes. “And I fucking will, baby. I’ll burn the whole fucking world to the ground if that’s what I need to do, but you are going to live soft.” He pinched my chin between his thumb and his forefinger.
His eyes filled and his voice broke. “You’re going to live soft. You hear me?”
I nodded, unable to speak.
He exhaled, his breath shuddering as he took both my hands in his and pressed his forehead to mine.
He pressed my hands to his chest and bowed his head. “You’re going to live soft.”