Chapter 9 #2
“Well, I heard you wanted to be romanced.” His lips turned down and misery entered his intelligent gray eyes.
“And I need that to be with me. I can’t stand the idea of you with another man.
Dammit, Jasmine. I just…couldn’t stand seeing you so small and sad in that hospital bed.
I didn’t want to leave you, but the nurses forced me out of your room.
Ever since Aya got that phone call, it’s eaten at me, you being hurt. ”
His obvious distress softened me. “That wasn’t your choice. It was mine. And it’s not your decision to feel bad about my choices.”
“I get what you’re saying.” He shifted his bulk. Oh, he was just too cute. “But…”
“Come in. We don’t want to let all the cool air outside.”
I shut the door, sighing with relief that I didn’t have another overzealous asshole to fend off.
Steve was safe…to my physical well-being, just not to my heart.
Not at all to my heart. My hand shook where I leaned it against the wood.
“We can have some coffee in the kitchen and talk over this nonsense—”
“I steered clear of you all these months because I’m not good enough for you.” Steve stood, chin lifted, shoulders back. Military proud, just like Camden. Just like Jensen. Steve’s military bearing made my knees weak.
“I beg to differ with that statement,” I said.
He tapped the pretty bouquet against his thigh, sending some petals raining down onto the rug that, thankfully, the jerk wad hadn’t bled on. I’d been worried after I bashed him those extra times. I really shouldn’t have done that, but I’d been so terrified…
“You with me?” Steve asked, his voice soft.
“Huh?”
With a mental shake, I brought Steve back into focus.
“You with me, Jasmine? You went white, seemed to fade off.”
“Oh! Yes. I’m fine.”
I noted he was still tapping the flowers against his leg, so I swooped in and grabbed the stems, prying his fist away.
I noted the tremors in his hand. Instead of heading into the kitchen to put the flowers into a vase, laid them gently on the nearest surface—the couch’s cushion. Then, I leaned into his chest.
“I’m mostly fine,” I said, my voice hitching. “It’s a delayed reaction, I suppose. I have these moments where the memory creeps over me.”
I wrapped my arms around his waist, desperate for his reassuring touch. After a terrifyingly long moment, he relaxed enough to hug me back.
“You were so brave,” he said against my hair.
“Didn’t feel brave,” I said. “There was simply no way I would let that…that…garbage of a man hurt my girls.”
He tightened his arms around me and swayed me gently. “That right there, Jasmine. That fire in you—you’re so fierce in your love. So damn fierce. It’s such a turn on.”
Tipping my head back, I peered at him. “I can’t imagine why. I’m hardheaded. Stubborn, I think you called me.”
“That’s true. And I love that about you.”
I thrilled at the word, but instead of commenting, I pressed my cheek back to his chest.
“If my mother had been a fighter like you are, Jasmine, I think my life would have been very different.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Is that where you went?”
“Back to my hometown, yeah. Like I said, I needed to lay the past to rest. Finally. It’s been…I didn’t realize how much of an anchor it had become. I was up all night the night you got hurt. All I could think about was how much I wanted to come to you, to hold you, to promise to protect you.”
“You did come, and I appreciated that,” I said.
“I’m glad. But…” He trailed off.
“When you’re ready,” I murmured.
His exhale was long and ponderous. Noting his jitters, I let him go and stepped back. Giving him some space to gather himself.
“I needed to see my father’s grave, let him know what I thought of him…and then to sit by my mother’s grave.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and paced between my two couches, long legs eating up the space. “I joined the army at seventeen. I would have cheated the system and left earlier, but my mother needed me.”
He meant to be a stand in. To take the beating she should never have been forced to endure. Steve either. I shivered as I remembered the pain and fear of my recent assault. Nothing prepares a person to be hurt. Nothing.
I’d been thinking a lot about Laurence over the past few days, and I’d realized that when he’d snapped at Cam, when he’d belittled him or yelled at him, Laurence had hurt me.
I bit my lip, wondering, as I often did, if that’s why Laurence did what he did.
If so, it made him an even smaller man in my eyes.
“My father…” Steve heaved a breath, clearly struggling.
I stepped back in and squeezed my arms around his waist. His hands came up and cradled me with gentle care. I sighed, soothed, and I hoped he was, too. The tick-tick-tick of the wall-mounted clock in the living room continued, as did the steady thump of his heart against my cheek.
“He beat your mother,” I said. “You told me that before.”
His heart rate sped up and he tensed.
“Don’t,” I murmured. “I’m right here. Not looking. There’s no judgment from me, Steve. Finish the story.”
“He hurt us both. Bad. Often.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and gripped him tighter.
“I hated the man. The number of times I begged my mother to leave him—just get in the car and go…it became a daily thing. Almost routine. She never would, though I told her I was old enough to work. We’d start over.
She couldn’t…at least, she wouldn’t. I didn’t understand why…
The sheriff explained how my grandfather threatened her by threatening me.
So she stayed to save me. Even though he was killing her. ”
That was its own form of bravery—of love. And Steve had begun to process the horror of her choices, but that would take time. In her way, his mother had shown as much—more love for him than I had for the girls when Frank, the Scum Bag, came at me.
“Then…then, one night, my father. He…he wouldn’t stop hitting me. I must have blacked out. I don’t know. When I woke…” He choked. Huffed. Swallowed thickly. His arms trembled, but he clutched me tighter, yet still with tenderness.
“When I woke, it was light outside. My mother was next to me on the living room floor. She was dead.”
He’d said that before, on my porch all those months ago. “Oh, Steve.” I swayed a little, just as I used to do with the boys and Kate, now with Cash. He moved with me, and I hoped the slight motion soothed him.
“He must have gotten in the car and left. My guess is he thought he’d killed us both.
Knowing him, he would not own up to his crimes.
He disappeared. I went looking for him. Found him and the car in a ditch.
I…I remember little of that, but the rage…
it swept over me. I’ve never felt such consuming rage.
” Steve’s swallow was thick. “He laughed,” he whispered.
“He laughed and said I was finally understanding what it was to be a man.”
The horror dripped off the words and swirled around us. Unable to do more, I simply held Steve as he shook, his body repulsed by the memories.
“I left him there, bloodied. Instead of helping him, I took the car, drove it as far as Fort Worth, where I spent a few days in the hospital. I refused to answer questions about my parents. What was I going to say? I lit out of there as soon as I was sure I wasn’t dying and then, like I told you, I signed up with the Army so I’d have a place to sleep, a job. ”
I turned and pressed my nose into his sternum. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
He cupped my shoulders. “I went back to the house to see it.” His eyes held shattered bits of memories deep inside. “It’s smaller than I remember. It’s just a house. A sad one, in disrepair. I talked to the sheriff. He filled in some empty spaces for me.”
“Did that help?” Steve nodded, but he was still stiff, still miserable.
“Hunters found my father in a ditch. Maybe he planned to head back home, maybe he planned to walk away. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, really.”
But it did to Steve. “You told him what your father did to you and your mom,” I said.
“Oh, the whole town knew. They just weren’t willing to step in. Not until…”
Until his mother died. I frowned. That was horrible.
“I knew I couldn’t get close to anyone. Not if I could fall into such a rage, just like my father.”
Ah. The pieces clicked together. He’d been young—a boy—when he’d lived through absolute hell.
Of course, the trauma stuck fast. He hadn’t understood that his reaction then, to finally fighting back against his father, had been a mixture of grief and anger and guilt and myriad other emotions that overrode his “thinking brain.” Of course it did.
He was a child still, and without a decent role model.
Knowing Steve, he’d absorbed that lesson, created his life choices around the horrors of it.
The poor, poor dear. He’d been younger than my Camden. Hurt worse and with no one to turn to. My heart ached for him, for the lanky, sun-kissed youth he must have been.
“You know that’s not true now,” I pressed.
“I do now, but it took learning about you getting hurt.” He sighed and dropped his chin to rest atop my head. “I didn’t rage at Nash or hurt Levi—”
“Of course you didn’t! Oh, Steve. That must have been such a worry, such a terrible weight to carry.”
“My mother died because I didn’t fight back. And when I did fight back, I lost all control.”
“You were young, and you were hurt. No one’s at their best then. Moreover, you’d just lost your mother.”
“All true. And, yes, I can see that now. But it…clung. You know?”
I did. “Then what?” I whispered because he was too tense for his story to have ended there.
And if he’d let an act that happened over thirty years ago shape his adulthood, I knew there was more.
We always tried to protect ourselves from hurts, and Steve had suffered terrible ones.
I was sure he’d made other choices that stemmed from his mother’s death.
“Dammit. I hate myself for this.”