“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I whispered, because that’s all I was capable of. I felt as broken on the inside as she was on the outside.
“I was ashamed. And embarrassed,” she answered.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You would have been the last person I would have told,” she said, and before I could launch into a why the heck not?, she cut me off. “Because when you looked at me, you saw this person I’d always wanted to become. You saw the me I would have become if I hadn’t let others and myself screw up my life.” She sighed, leaning into me. “I loved the way you looked at me, and I had this fear that if I told you I was one of those women who found themselves trapped in an abusive relationship, you’d never look at me the same way again. You’d never even look at me again.” Her voice, for the first time since entering the shower, sounded sad.
Coming around in front of her, I tilted her chin up, waiting for her eyes to find mine. They finally did.
“Am I looking at you any differently right now?”
She studied me, all the way into the dark and cobwebbed places of my soul, and then she smiled. A fresh bead of blood broke through the split on her lower lip. “No.”
“That’s right,” I said, polishing the blood away from her lip. “And to save you the suspense, there’s nothing you can reveal to me about your past or do in your future that will change the way I look at you. I flippin’ worship you, Emma Scarlett. And that’s never, ever, in a million billion years going to change. Promise,” I added, because this, too, was a promise I could keep with unfailing certainty.
The thing about the kind of love I had for Emma was that it was as unequivocal as it was permanent. That’s the way love, in its pure, undiluted form was—it accepted a person’s bad with their good, their failures with their successes, their past with a boyfriend that beat the shit out of them with their future with a man who would love the shit out of them.
“I know that now,” she said, pressing her lips into mine. “Sorry I didn’t realize it sooner.”
I wanted to kiss her again, so damn badly I was tempted to turn the shower as cold as it would go, so I thought of something else that might work instead. “Your brothers never suspected anything?”
It worked. The mere mention of Emma’s four brothers extinguished the fires.
“Of course not,” she said. “If they did, do you think they would have hesitated to take that baseball bat to him sooner?” We both knew the answer to that. “No, Ty was careful. He made sure the bruises formed in spots that were easy to cover, and he never raised a hand to me when anyone was around. But lately, he started getting sloppy, less careful.”
How many of those less “thoughtfully” placed bruises had I witnessed this month and taken her word that vicious volleyballs were to blame? I was a fool.
“Because of me,” I provided, stepping behind her and rinsing her hair for the third time. The water was almost running clear.
She didn’t provide an answer to that; she didn’t need to. We both knew the truth.
“God, Emma. I’m sorry,” I said, my arms going limp at my sides. “If I’d have known this was going on, I wouldn’t have been my persistent self and made things worse for you.” I had to lean into the tile wall for support.
“And then I would have killed him,” I added.
She chuckled a nervous little one. I didn’t.
“You want to hear the last point in the best day of my life outline?” she asked, turning to face me, the water beating in the space separating us.
She waited for an answer, but I couldn’t come up with one. I didn’t want to hear any more as much as I did.
Refusing to wait any longer, she touched her forehead to mine. I could feel the heat of the gash above her eyebrow against my skin.
“You,” she said.
My head felt heavy against hers. I did not deserve to be a proof in her reasoning for a best day.
“Yes,” she argued with my silent response. “You are everything I always wanted, but never believed I deserved. I still didn’t believe it up to a few hours ago, but I suppose you could say you made me see the light.”
I was still wordless, it was happening a lot lately, so I wrapped my arms around her battered, bruised, perfect body and gripped her to me like I could suck all the pain out of her.
“For someone like you, who could have their pick of any woman on the seven continents, to pick me . . .”—her chest heaved heavy against mine—“well, that must mean I’m something special, right? Even if I don’t see it quite yet.”
I saw the beauty then. I was able to look past the pain framing the moment and get to the core of the moment. I wouldn’t forget tonight for several reasons, but the one that would shine above the others was this one right here. The woman I loved resting in my arms, acknowledging she was more than what she’d always believed she was.
“You’re the most something special I’ve ever come across,” I said into her hair, clutching her tighter. If I never let her go, I could always keep her safe. That was the only thing I wanted to do right then.
Never let her go. Protect her. And love her above all.
“Hey, guys.” A trio of knocks thumped outside the bathroom door. Julia sounded just as frazzled as before. “My dad’s here now. No rush, though.”
“We’ll be right there,” Emma answered against my shoulder, not moving an inch.
I pressed a kiss into the bruise exploding over her forehead. “Time to get you to a doc,” I said, shutting off the water and reaching for the bundle of towels piled on the bench. I bundled Emma’s hair into a leaning tower beehive and cinched the other towel around the rest of her before lifting her into my arms.
“I’m good to walk now,” she said, looping an arm around my neck. “That shower and the pills made me a new woman.”
“I know,” I answered, unlocking the door and stepping through it. “But I’m not ready to let you go.”
“Good enough reason for me.”
She made a pillow of my chest as I sloshed down the hall, my hair, suit, and the rest of me so drenched I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be dry again. It was one of the proudest walks I’d made.
The door was waiting open for us, and inside I found a silvering man the polar opposite to Julia. He wasn’t a Dr. Jekyll at all, but like the small town docs that used to make middle of the night home visits when I was growing up in the South. He even had the old school black leather bag William and Joseph still carried around with them.
“My god,” he said like a curse when his eyes floated to Emma. “What happened to you, child?”
“My ex,” she replied as I situated her on her bed.
His hands glided down her arms, drawing an imaginary line between the bruises. Then he looked at her face and his face twisted. “Did he come at you with a hammer?” he asked, swearing under his breath. There was the first indication he and Julia shared the same DNA.
“You should have gone to the emergency room right away, Emma,” he said, scolding her in that non-threatening, affectionate way a father does. “And I’m presuming you’ve called the authorities to get the monster behind bars?”
Doc Grey and I were going to get along just fine.
“Not yet,” Emma answered, focusing on the ceiling.
“Why, pardon my French, the hell not?” He was already reaching for the phone in his pocket, about to do what Emma couldn’t right now, and I wouldn’t because she’d begged me not to.
“I will,” she said, closing her eyes. “I promise I will, just not quite yet.”
“Not quite yet?” Doc Grey repeated, his face formed in disbelief. “Emma, your body was beaten as close to death as a body can be before giving over to it. This isn’t something you wait to report a week later.”
Her head moved against the pillow. “I’ll report it tonight, I swear. I just can’t handle more than one thing at a time right now. Let me get through this,”—her eyes pointed at his opened bag—“and I’ll call them aft
er. I don’t want to go into an interrogation room bleeding and gaping open in spots. I don’t want to be pitied.”
Her eyes fogged over, travelling back in time to a certain night when she’d lost both her parents in different ways. “Fix me up, patch what needs to be patched, so I can go in there with my head held high.”
“Child,” Doctor Grey said, patting her hand, “you came through that door with your head high.” He didn’t push calling the men in blue right then after that, he just began riffling through his bag in silence.
“Julia, my dear?” Doctor Grey said into his bag. “I think you are in serious need of some fresh air.”
That, and a new pair of nails, judging from where she’d gnawed them down to. Poor Julia, this night had really taken it out of her. The hollows beneath her eyes were blacker than usual and her eyes scampered around more neurotically than normal. She was doing justice to her goth heritage right now.
“Young man,” he said, glancing at me once.
“Hayward,” I provided, extending my hand. “Patrick Hayward.”
Doctor Grey set a roll of bandages on Emma’s bed to shake my hand. “Am I to assume you are the new man in Emma’s life who would never so much as raise your voice to her?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered.
Putting two fingers to Emma’s pulse, he nodded once. “You don’t need to be here for this,” he said, his fingers moving just outside the largest gash gaping over Emma’s cheekbone. “Would you mind escorting my daughter outside and watching after her? It seems Stanford is not the safe haven I was foolish enough to think it was.”
That was an impossible question to answer without offending someone. Why would I want to leave with Julia when Emma was here? Wherever Emma’s here was was where I belonged.
“Go ahead,” Emma said, interrupting my thoughts. “You can grab some dry clothes out of Austin and Dallas’s room on the first floor on your way out.” She wove her fingers through mine then, squeezing them, seeing I was not in the mood to go anywhere. “I’m in good hands. Trust me.”
And there were those words. I did trust her, but I didn’t want to if it meant leaving her. Trust was a complicated thing that could really screw with your head. In the end, though, I decided to follow through on trusting her.
“All right,” I relented, looking at the doc. “Call me if you need anything. Anything. And call me the instant you’re done if we’re not back before.”
“It’s a few stitches and a handful of bandages, son,” Doctor Grey said, meaning to assure me, but it did the opposite. “It’s not open heart surgery.”
That was an ironic phrase to use because that’s just like what I felt was taking place on me.
Heaving a sigh, I opened the door, holding it open for Julia. “Be right back,” I promised, kissing Emma’s hand as I followed Julia out the door.
“Be right here,” she replied as I closed the door behind us.
Julia was already halfway down the hallway, walking with the disjointed movements of a zombie. I followed a few steps behind her all the way to Austin and Dallas’s room on the first floor.
“Do you have a key?” I asked in front of their door.
Twisting the handle, the door clicked open. “The Scarlett boys don’t have to lock their door. The first and last guy who borrowed a pen without asking ended up naked, tied to a tree in the middle of campus, and coated in honey and feathers.”
I trailed Julia into the very college guy dorm room, right down to the beer posters featuring models bursting from their bikinis and the stale scent of body odor and laundry piled in the corner. “No one would dare step foot in this room uninvited unless they were prepared to face extreme public humiliation.”
“Except for us,” I said, smiling tightly at her, as I shuffled through the few clean garments shoved into a dresser drawer.
“Yeah, except for us,” she said, heaving down onto a bed. I’d guess it was Dallas’s due to the Dallas cheerleader poster above the bed on the ceiling, but that seemed too cliché even for a guy like him. “This is a night of firsts, right?” The few note laugh she let out was sharp and neurotic.
“Jules?” I said, selecting the lesser outfit of two evils—boardshorts and a Stanford sweatshirt were only about a thousand times better than baggy jeans and a bedazzled muscle tee. “How are you holding up?”
“Let’s see,” she said, clicking the heels of her shiny purple boots together like she wanted to catch the nearest tornado out of this dark land of Oz. “My friend looks like she was mauled by a tiger, I ignored that internal voice that’s been telling me since freshman year that something just wasn’t on the up and up with Ty’s and Emma’s relationship, and I failed my friend in all the important ways, so I guess I’d have to say I’m holding up about as well as a house of cards in a hurricane.” She sighed, tapping her heels together faster. “Thanks for asking.”
“Jules,” I said again, slipping out of the clothes plastered to my body right in front of her because she was focused on staring two holes in the ceiling. The gothiest of goth men could have been twisting his nipple rings a foot in front of her and she wouldn’t have noticed.
“This is all my fault, Patrick,” she whispered, her boot clacking diminishing. “I should have told someone. I should have confronted Ty. I could have asked her if my suspicions were right. I could have at least asked her,” she repeated in a self-incriminating tone.
“Crap, Jules,” I said, cinching the shorts tight since Dallas’s or Austin’s shorts were size extra-beefy. “You feel like you’re to blame, and I feel like I’m to blame. And maybe we are in some way because we failed to act when we could have, but there’s no maybe about who holds all the blame for failing Emma in every way a person can.”
“I should have kneed that guy in the balls every time the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end when he was around,” she said, sitting up in bed, looking at me like she didn’t even notice I’d changed. “That would have been on a daily basis.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of catching up to do,” I said, plopping beside her and squeezing her knee.
“Damn straight,” she muttered, leaning her head on my shoulder in a way that felt child-like. “I hope Emma’s brothers save a piece I can take it out on.”
The door exploded open right then, bouncing off the wall it smashed against. Three grim faced Scarlett brothers barged in, blood smatters creating patterns over their clothes and faces. They barely took any notice of Julia and me sitting on the edge of the bed, so I suppose it was safe to assume we’d been issued a get out of jail free card given the gravity of tonight.
“We are finished. Ruined,” Austin said under his breath, sliding his hands behind his head and gripping it like he was going to rip his hair off.
“Give it a rest, Austin,” Tex sneered over at him, looking up and down the hall before closing the door. “The only thing you lost tonight was a career in middle management. Dallas is going to lose any chance he had of working for the government as a certified genius who screws supermodels, and I lost any chance I had of playing in the big times.” Tex gave Austin’s chest a half-hearted shove. “So do me a favor and shut the hell up.”
And this was the point I felt was a good time to interrupt. “What happened?” I asked, already deducing from their conversation and clothing they’d found Ty and delivered a message.
Dallas’s eyes narrowed into mine. “Revenge happened.”
“We messed him up good, man,” Austin said, pacing around the room with his hands still laced behind his head.
“What did you do to him?” I asked slowly, looking to Tex since he seemed the calmest of the three.
“Nothing that he didn’t deserve,” he sneered.
I swallowed, continuing to look at Tex. “Did you kill him?” I was already at war with myself over which answer I wanted to hear. I didn’t want to arrive at an answer before Tex gave me his.
“He had a pulse when we left,” was his answer. Seemed cryptic was going t
o be the tone of things tonight.
“Yeah, barely,” Austin said, stopping to glare at Tex before resuming his pacing. “Who knows if he still did by the time the ambulance arrived.”
“You guys called an ambulance?” I asked, wondering just how deep the Scarlett brother stupidity ran.
Tex nodded once. “I’d rather face aggravated assault charges than manslaughter.”
The mood of the room went from sullen to heavy. Suffocating heavy. The Scarlett boys had done just what I’d wanted them to do, what I’d wanted to do myself—ram Ty’s face so hard against the wall separating life from death that he’d regret every last strike he’d landed on Emma.
The difference between me and them, though, was that I knew just how many hits a man could take to put him a toe from death before putting him a toe over. It was a skill that was an art, one that required an exorbitant amount of restraint and finesse, neither of which the three brothers before me possessed.
They were going to be spending some time behind bars for either nearly killing or killing a man. Because of me. Because I’d let them go in my place. Because I stayed behind with their sister while they dealt out a mountain of revenge on the monster that had haunted her. They were going to lose everything they’d worked for since they’d been children in an abusive household because I’d failed to act when I knew I should have.
“It was nice pretending we were going to end up doing something other than pressing license plates,” Dallas said, reaching into the mini-fridge and cracking open a beer. “I guess the piece of shit dad gene caught up with us after all.”
Austin lurched in his face, slapping the beer Dallas was upending out of his hand. It smashed against the wall, causing an eruption of liquid.
“You’re making jokes?” Austin seethed, going red-faced. “You’re making jokes? Maybe you don’t like reaping the rewards of the hard work we put in growing up, but I do. I didn’t plan to end up wasting away my twenties in a jail cell.”