Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
HARPER
I jolt awake to the phantom sensation of a gun barrel pressed against my ribs.
My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my back teeth, and it takes three full seconds in the dark to remember where I am.
Not Z’s bed.
No, the man sleeping beside me has never once in his life touched me like he hated me.
Caleb.
My racing heartbeat slows down as soon as I recognize his familiar shape.
He’s sprawled on his stomach with one arm thrown across my pillow, face turned toward me, features completely peaceful.
I sigh looking at those ridiculously thick, dark eyelashes brushing against his cheekbones.
The chiseled jaw I've been fantasizing about since I was seventeen is slack now. All the careful control he carries in his waking face is just—gone. He looks like someone who’s never had a reason to brace himself.
I look at him for a long moment and try to slow my breathing to match his.
The nightmare is still right there, coating the inside of my skull. Z’s voice, slurred and mean in the dark.
You always close your eyes when I fuck you. Is it so you can pretend I’m him?
My stomach turns with the specific nausea of a memory you’ve spent years not looking at directly, because looking at it directly means accepting the full shape of it.
Z’s weight at my back at three in the morning, shoving down my underwear without bothering to slow down enough to ask.
My own stillness—not consent, just survival math. The cold calculation that submitting was quieter than arguing, while Bruiser was asleep in the next room with nothing but particleboard between us.
Condom was the only word I always managed.
My one pathetic flag planted in the ground.
Z’d slap my ass like that was the funniest thing he’d heard. Like my one attempt at self-preservation was cute.
I press my palms against my eyes until I see red.
The memories don’t care. They keep coming.
Z’s too-rough hands. The way he’d sometimes grunt some casually cruel remark about my body at the same time he was using it.
Then the particular viciousness at the end, the kind he knew would hurt, like he wasn’t really satisfied until I was crying, only then finishing almost immediately.
Every time. Like hurting me was the point, and everything before it was just the setup.
You’d have to hate someone to do that to them. Or never see them as a person at all. After ten years, I still don’t know which is worse.
I yank my own hair. Hard. The sharp pain at my scalp grounds me back to the present in this room, in this bed, with this man who is not him.
Z is gone.
Z pulled a gun on me and my son, and I shot him.
He is not in this room. He is not in any room I will ever be in again.
My eyes return to Caleb’s sleeping face. Caleb who doesn’t touch me like he hates me. He touches me like I’m something he wants to be oh so careful with. Like every time I let him into my body it’s a gift he’s still not sure he deserves.
That thought cracks something open in my chest I immediately want sealed shut again.
Because here’s what nobody tells you about gentleness after a long time of cruelty: it doesn’t feel like relief.
It feels like standing in a room with no walls.
Like suddenly I’m aware of how small and hunched over I’ve become, how much I learned to brace my body in careful stillness. I’m not sure I know how to… To just exist in space without waiting for the next shock to the system.
And underneath all of it—underneath the nightmare and the relief and the particular vertigo of waking up in Caleb Graham’s bed after a shocking orgasm that I actually stayed in my body for—there’s the thing I’ve been carrying ever since I left Dallas.
Caleb is Bruiser’s father.
The photos at Helen’s memorial. Caleb’s childhood face, the identical twin of my son’s, and the bottom dropping out of my entire understanding of the last ten years.
I’ve been running it over and over in my head how Z could’ve done it. Because I looked at those official paternity results straight from my email.
On the phone I shared with Z.
And while Z might not be as smart as I always gave him credit for, he loves computers and has always been a competent gamer and basic programmer. He must have doctored the results before I saw them.
He was my oldest friend, and I trusted him more than anyone else in the universe. A fact he constantly used against me, clearly. It never once occurred to me that he would—
Clearly it never occurred to me.
I was too overwhelmed to tell Caleb right away.
But now… God, I’m a bitch for keeping it from him this long. Sure, I was locked in a closet, and had a gun pulled on me, and was running from a dangerous motorcycle club, but still.
Every time I’ve opened my mouth to tell Caleb the truth, I found some fresh excuse not to.
And now I’ve slept with him multiple times without telling him the truth.
I drop my face into my hands.
When exactly was I supposed to tell him? My brain still rings with excuses. Hey, great work with the tactical response leaping through the window like a sexy commando. By the way, that cool kid you just met is actually yours. Congrats, you’re a father! So sorry I didn’t lead with that.
The sarcasm doesn’t help. It never actually helps; it just gives me something to do with the anxiety while I avoid dealing with the thing causing it.
Caleb has money. He has resources. He has friends who own security companies.
What happens if he decides to fight me for custody when he finds out? I’d have no shot against the kind of lawyers his friends could help him afford.
Then what happens to the life I’ve built with nothing but my own hands, if he decides I’m an unfit mother? Especially considering all the evidence of the last week alone?
Are you an unfit mother?
The question burns in my chest like a hot coal.
I landed my son in a situation where a gun was pointed at him. I spent ten years with a man who named my child with a motorcycle club nickname before he could walk.
I built a life for us that turned out to have a lie at the foundation so large it retroactively changes the shape of everything. And I didn’t see it coming until a dead woman’s memorial photos showed me a face I should have recognized years ago.
If I were objective about this, I would say: yes. Probably. The jury is in unanimous agreement.
I’m a shit mom.
Goddammit, I need to get out of this bed.
I slip out of the sheets without waking Caleb and tiptoe across the living room and down the hall to press my ear to Bruiser’s door. When I hear the small, steady sound of Bruiser’s snoring, I breathe out in relief.
The awful squeezing sensation in my chest eases two degrees.
Whatever else I’ve done wrong, my kiddo is alive and breathing and in one piece.
I want to take a shower but don’t dare in the shared bathroom across from Bruiser’s room in case it disturbs or wakes him.
So I slink back to Caleb’s room and into his ensuite, closing the door carefully behind me. The bathroom is aggressively bright, decorated with white subway tile and a rainfall showerhead big enough to stand under without touching the glass walls.
I turn the water on hot and step in before it’s fully warm, standing there with my face tipped up into the spray.
My body is sore in ways that have nothing to do with the mad flight away from Z.
My muscles are achy in good ways that belong entirely to choices I made with my whole chest. There’s no shame layered into the soreness or grime the water needs to burn away.
It’s a new enough sensation to still feel surprising.
Could I actually get used to this feeling? Passionate safety in Caleb’s arms?
The steam builds around me and I don’t fight against the rage that’s been boiling underneath everything.
Because finally, that feels safe to release, too.
I think maybe I’m only beginning to suspect all the tectonic rage that’s been bubbling after living on a foundation built on someone else’s lies.
Z took years from me. Almost my entire twenties.
He did it in large dramatic ways and in small subtle ways that barely registered at the time.
Z always made out like he was so generous and patient with my failures. My many failures. He did such consistent, quiet work to make sure I understood the depth of those letdowns, so that I always tried harder and harder to please him.
As if I was the problem.
I was too busy managing my own guilt to see what he was actually doing the whole time.
And the worst thing is, I did love him. I might not have been in love with him, but I loved him so deep in a way I thought still meant something—
A sob chokes its way out of my chest, surprising me with its vehemence.
Furiously, I grab the shampoo, squirt it out, then scrub it into my hair. I gave Z everything I had to spare after Bruiser.
I certainly didn’t save anything for myself.
I don’t even know who Harper Tucker is outside of being Bruiser’s mother and Z’s dog.
That’s the part that guts me most—not the betrayal, not even the lie about being Bruiser’s father, but the fact that I went along with my own diminishment for years and called it “making it work.” Being practical.
Just doing what I’d done since I was a Goddamn kid.
Surviving.
The steam is dense now, the glass of the shower long since fogged over. I close my eyes and let the heat work into my shoulders.
“I don’t suppose I could offer to help wash your hair.”
I spin around so fast I nearly slip on the wet tile.
Caleb is standing just outside the glass door, head ducked around the opening, eyes very firmly shut. Ever the gentleman. His hair is sleep-rumpled, and he’s holding the door handle like he’s prepared to retreat immediately if requested. Even now, even here, he’s asking.
He’s always asking. Never demanding or taking.
“You can open your eyes,” I say, my voice coming out soft. I’m glad the shower spray hides the tears on my cheeks.