Chapter Twelve Bram
Chapter Twelve
Bram
If I’ve ever wondered what it would take to make my curvy brat docile, two back-to-back orgasms seem to do the trick.
Because fifteen minutes later, we are back in the chair, both of us in old Astra University shirts and comfy sweatpants.
Maddie is holding a cup of coffee with both hands while she’s cuddled sweetly against my chest. I can see that she’s still a little upset, but when I gently clear my throat to indicate I’m about to speak, she doesn’t bolt, which feels like a good sign.
“I’m not upset you used my shower,” I say, “and I’m sorry for being so brusque earlier. I should have remembered the playdate, and more importantly, I should have trusted that you had everything under control.”
She seems surprised—taking a minute to sip the coffee and then frown down at her hands. “Thank you,” she says slowly. “I wasn’t expecting a— You don’t need to apologize. You were worried about your kids, and I was doing something kind of—” Even from this angle, I can see her wince. “Invasive.”
“You can use anything at the house,” I assure her. “Although I wasn’t expecting to find you wearing only a towel.” The tips of my ears burn a little and I’m glad she’s still looking down at her coffee right now. “But it wasn’t . . . unpleasant.”
She huffs a tired little laugh. “The only pleasant part of my day.”
I think about her crumpling face, her tears and how they spilled down to fall on her chest. Those body-shaking sobs as she wept in my arms.
“Tell me about your day, Maddie.”
She hesitates. “It was a little chaotic,” she answers. “That’s all.”
I can practically feel her reaching for her armor, trying to cover up all the soft and vulnerable parts of her—and no, she’s not allowed to do that, I’m not allowing it today.
Right now, here in my lap with her body loose from the pleasure I gave it, her hair smelling like my shampoo and her hands cradled around my coffee mug, she’s mine to take care of.
Even if it’s only for the next fifteen minutes.
I take care of what’s mine.
“Maddie.” My voice is firm. “Start with the shower and work your way backward.”
She takes a deep breath. Blows it out.
And then she tells me about her day.
I’m frustrated for her when I hear about her car being towed; I’m irritated on her behalf when she tells me about the shitty students in her class.
But when she gets to the part about the student health center being closed, I’m genuinely confused.
“Why does the closure mean you couldn’t take a shower this morning? ”
Her thumb moves nervously on the coffee mug. “I don’t have a shower where I live.”
What?
“Where do you live?”
She ducks her head a little, so I can’t see her face. “In my car,” she says in a very small voice.
I inhale so sharply that my ribs hurt; something like rage and fear and a . . . a vast protectiveness fills me, swells me, unravels my neatly tied edges.
“You’ve been sleeping in your car?” I ask, and even I can hear how grim I sound, how dangerous.
Maddie shifts, like she’s trying to scoot off my lap, and I seize her and drag her back. She’s not going anywhere.
“Where have you been parking at night?” I demand. I’m shaking now, my hands, my thighs. My chest. I feel like an entire earthquake. “While you’ve been alone in the dark, unconscious and completely exposed?”
“I had the doors locked,” Maddie protests, but the protest is thin, faint, like she knows it’s not good enough. Which it isn’t.
“Where, Maddie?” I demand.
“A Walmart parking lot,” she admits. “And, um, this rest stop—”
I want to roar in pure animal outrage. I want to go to the rest stop right now and tear it down with my bare hands. I want to start pacing around her like a guard dog, snapping and rumbling warnings at anyone who dares to get too close.
She seems to sense this, because she’s gone very still in my lap.
“And why are you sleeping in your car at a rest stop? Why, when you have two jobs, do you not have a place to stay?”
“Two bullshit jobs,” she corrects, the words all the more corrosive for how accurate they are.
“I make ninety-five hundred dollars a semester teaching—less than ten thousand dollars before taxes, and I’m not complaining about what you pay me, but I only work for you three hours a day and the agency takes their cut out of that too.
And before I came here, I was a full-time student for the last three years, because my entire raison d’être after I met Gentry was to become the perfect politician’s wife, and so I spent those years volunteering at the Wade Foundation and serving on stupid student boards and spending every spare second schmoozing with him at horrible, schmoozy events instead of clerking or doing paralegal work to earn cash.
I lived with Gentry, I used student loans for tuition and clothes and my cell phone bill because he told me that his family would pay them off for me, and so when he had his campaign adviser dump me with no warning, I had nothing to call my own but my degree and my car.
I had a little money squirreled away from the work-study programs I did, and that was enough to get me out here and feed me until my first paycheck.
I couldn’t afford to stay in California without asking for my brother’s help, and now it turns out I can’t afford to live in Kansas either.
At least until next month, when I’ll finally have enough for a security deposit, and even then, I have no fucking idea what I’m going to do in December when that first student loan bill comes due. ”
She’s breathing hard now, fast, the coffee threatening to slosh over the sides of her mug as she trembles with emotion.
“But I’m doing fine. I don’t need anyone’s help, and I don’t need anything to change, and I am not letting that cheating asshole turn me into a charity case when he’s already taken so much from me.
He’s taken my goals and my pride and my favorite lipstick color and even my—stupid—hair because he needed me to look the part and that meant not looking like myself. ”
She’s crying again. I carefully take the coffee mug from her and set it down on the floor.
“Your arms are so long,” she complains tearfully. “You’re too big.”
“That’s what Leo says. He’s irritated he can’t bully me anymore.”
More sniffles. “He used to bully you?”
“Mercilessly. Then I had a growth spurt in eleventh grade and gave him a black eye, which for some reason he interpreted as an overture of friendship.* Now I can’t get rid of him.”
She’s still crying but there’s a half laugh among the sniffles now.
I find her chin and tilt her face so she has to look at me. “You live here. Starting today.”
She stiffens. “What? No!”
“A live-in childcare provider would be easier anyway.”
“Bram, no. Did you not hear the part about how I don’t want help? About how I’m fine?”
I press on. “It’ll make our schedules more convenient, and I have the extra room, actually two extra rooms, if you count the finished part of the attic.”
“Bram. I can’t live with you.” I can feel a defensive pride roiling in her; she tries to move her head so she doesn’t have to look up at me anymore. I don’t let her.
“Why not?” I ask, searching her face. “I have the space, and we’ll make boundaries around your time helping with the kids. And it’s not forever, only until you have what you need to get into an apartment.”
“Just . . . no.” Her full mouth is set in a stubborn sulk. “I don’t need any help.”
“You’re sleeping in parking lots and at rest stops. It’s getting cold at night, and today has proven that you’re one obscure parking rule away from spending money you don’t have on a hotel that will certainly have bedbugs. What was your plan for tonight? If you couldn’t afford to get a hotel?”
Her eyes drop. Tears are caught on her long eyelashes—dark lashes, matching the near-black roots of her hair. “I was going to try to sleep in the adjunct office,” she mumbles. “Or hide in the library.”
“Absolutely not.”
“At least no one is forcing their pity on me there,” she says, acid in her gaze as she looks back up to me, and I recognize it for what it is. A defense mechanism, a reflexive clawing at some dignity.
Another tear slides down to my fingers, and I want to kill somebody. (Somebody named Gentry.)
Also, I think I’d like to give Maddie a stern talking-to.
Preferably while she’s bent over a desk with her skirt above her hips.
She is absolutely not allowed to put herself in danger, and she is not allowed to act like everything is fine when she’s living in her car.
She’s not allowed to make everyone around her comfortable while she’s hanging on by a thread.
She’s worth more than that. She deserves more than that.
But I look at her, all tangled defiance and vulnerability and restlessness, and ask, bluntly, “Do you want Gentry to pity you?”
Shock blanches her expression. “Of course not! What the fuck, Bram.”
I let go of her chin so I can cradle her face in my hands. “Then why are you letting him have this much power over your life? Over your future? You refuse to let him turn you into a charity case, but you’d rather he leave you homeless, desperate, and struggling to do your job?”
Heat reddens her cheeks, and her eyes are sparking with indignant fury.
Good. Good.
“Where do you see yourself at the end of this term? At the end of next term? Where will you be in five years if it takes you one year—or two or three—just to get your feet underneath you? What if you could get started on the rest of your life right now, and be building your future exactly the way you want it, and show the world exactly what you’re fucking capable of?
All for the scant price of sleeping in an unused room, in a place that’s warm and safe and free of shopping carts?
Don’t live here because you’re accepting my help, Maddie.
Live here as a giant fuck you to Gentry and that campaign adviser and anyone else who made you feel like your time belonged to him.
Live here so you can make everybody regret the fucking day they made Maddie Kowalczk feel small and alone. ”
Her eyes are burning into mine, bright green, alive, the same color as the inside of my greenhouse on a hot summer’s day, and her lips are parted.
She’s breathing fast and swallowing hard and her nipples are poking against her borrowed T-shirt so prominently that I can see them even in my peripheral vision.
So my brat gets off on spite and revenge. Good to know.
“Okay,” she whispers, nodding into my hands. “Okay.”
“You’ll live here?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll stop sleeping in cold parking lots?”
A nod. “Yes.”
“You’ll let me help you when you need it, so you can stop letting that asshole control your life?”
“Yes, Bram.” And then, “You’re swearing a lot right now. It’s very sexy.”
I give her a be serious, Ms. Kowalczk look.
She pouts.
“But I do think,” I say, and this part I say a little reluctantly, “that this means we shouldn’t . . . be . . . together. Again.”
“Why? It’s not against university policy and it’s only a little bit against the agency’s policy.”
I drop my hands from her face and gently run them up and down her upper arms. She’s soft and warm and I want to hold her until the stars come out.
I want to haul her over to my bed, tie her to it, and drag out promise after whimpered promise that she’ll be good for me, my good girl, after she’s done being so very filthy and bad.
But this is more important.
“It’s more than a little against the agency’s policy, and anyway, I want you to feel safe here. I don’t want you to feel like living here is contingent on sex. I don’t want you to think that I expect payment in kind.”
Her lips come together in a mulish shape. “I wouldn’t think that.”
“Still.”
“Why are you helping me?” she asks. “You don’t have any reason to.”
“You could think of it as me supporting a colleague. Or maybe keeping my childcare options secure.”
Her eyes flick over my face. “But that’s not it, is it?”
Of course that’s not it.
But I can’t exactly say what it is, because it would terrify her and maybe terrify me too.
The way I feel about Maddie—protective and tender and greedy and stern—it’s not the kind of thing that would help either of us to admit.
It wouldn’t help her because she’s just gone through an awful breakup, because she’s employed by me, because she doesn’t need Mid-Thirties Single Dad Baggage while she’s making a fresh start.
And it wouldn’t help me because . . . because I don’t know the last time I’ve felt like this.
I don’t know that I’ve ever felt like this.
Maddie slumps against my chest, and I take a moment to treasure it, what I assume will be the last time I have her in my arms.
“You’re not going to answer me, are you?” she murmurs, but she sounds resigned to my reticence.
“I’m helping because I want to, Maddie. That will have to be good enough.” Because telling you the truth will send you running, and I need you here, warm and safe.
“If only you could help me with those asshole students,” she grumbles. “I know it’s not the most important thing right now, but I’m just dreading going back in there and facing them.”
“Actually,” I say, sitting up a little. “I think I can help with that.”