Laid Bare

  “Get her to put a chain lock on, will you? I like her, she sucks at cards, but she never gives up. Strong.” Ben opened the door and stepped inside, where he punched numbers into an internal keypad stationed behind a pretty wall panel. “Go. I’m out of here. Call me if you need anything.”

  Todd took a deep breath, sent a thank-you to Ben and shut and locked the door behind himself.

  “Erin?” he called out. He tried to calm himself enough to walk slowly, but his fear, the fear born of walking into more than one crime scene and finding disaster, made him jog into the main room.

  A mess. Not her normal level of artsy-fartsy chaos—scribbled song lyrics, colorful batik-patterned scarves, bags, books and bass and acoustic guitars. No, this was disquieting. Takeout containers left on countertops. Empty soda cans. Clearly her descent had been happening for several days. Even as she’d been working and smiling to his face, she’d been aching inside.

  He walked through and a stack of photographs caught his eye. He picked them up and saw Erin with short, inky-black hair, holding a chubby, cake-faced one-year-old. The baby had her mother’s eyes, and mischief as well as frosting on her face. Erin in the picture was the Erin he’d met ten years ago. Fearless because she held the best thing on Earth.

  “Erin? Goddammit, where are you?” He put the picture down carefully and stepped over a pile of stuff to head back down the hall where the bedroom was.

  Her office was empty, but thank god it wasn’t trashed.

  He heard something in her room and rushed inside. She was there, lying on her bed. An empty vodka bottle lay on the floor to one side.

  Her shoulders shook and he moved to her, his heart breaking to see her like this.

  “Erin? Honey, it’s Todd,” he said softly as he moved to her. He’d yelled her name loud enough that she should have heard him, shouldn’t be startled or scared by his appearance. But she had to be on edge, more so than usual, so he took it slow even though he wanted to dive on her and hold her now that he saw she was all right.

  She burrowed her face deeper into the covers, still crying. “G’way,” she slurred quite loudly, around a snuffle.

  “We both know that’s not going to happen.” He moved to the bed and got on it next to her. “Honey, let me in. I want to be here for you.”

  “I canhanle it,” she stammered, her head still beneath the blanket.

  He pulled the blanket back and pushed the hair from her sweaty face. She was pale, clammy and three-sheets-to-the-wind drunk.

  “Bright!” she squealed and dove back under the covers.

  He got up and pulled her curtains closed. The room closed in, dark and cool. “Okay, let’s get you cleaned up. It’s dark now. I’m going to turn on your shower to get the water heated up.”

  “G’way!”

  He laughed, even as he hurt for her. “Told you, that’s not going to happen.”

  He cleaned up her bathroom enough to get to the bathtub and tossed the towels and dirty clothes into a washing machine he’d seen on an earlier visit.

  Divesting himself of his clothes, he moved back to the bed and grabbed a foot and pulled her free of her cocoon again. “For a pretty thing, you do not smell good,” he muttered as he peeled her tiny tank top off before picking her up carefully.

  “Gonna puke.”

  “You’d better not, missy. That’s an order.”

  “Canorder me.”

  He managed to lever her to get her panties off and took her into the shower stall with him. She sputtered and jumped from his arms to scramble out and to the toilet, where she did indeed puke.

  Stepping out of the stall, he pulled her hair away from her face and let her get it all up. No doubt she’d feel better.

  She curled into a ball on the floor, crying again, and he simply picked her back up and returned them both to the shower.

  “It’d be a lot easier if you stood so I can get you clean,” he said. “Hold on to me if you have to—hell, even if you don’t. I like you holding on to me.”

  She sighed, but held his hips once he set her on her feet. She stood still while he lathered her hair and soaped her body, all the while trying not to think about how beautiful she looked there, even as she cried.

  “Don’ need you here. I’m not the grr fuh you. Can’t protect anyone.”

  He paused at the raw grief and guilt in her voice. With a bracing breath, he rinsed the last of the soap from their bodies before getting out to towel them both dry.”

  “Brush your teeth, you’ll feel better.” He pointed her in the direction of the sink. “And then we’ll talk. Where do you keep the sheets? Clean ones.”

  “Why?” she asked, trying to get toothpaste on her toothbrush but getting it on her hand instead.

  He sighed, taking the toothbrush and paste from her to do it himself. He wiped her hand off and gave her the brush back.

  “Because your bed smells like puke and vodka. Not a nice combination.”

  She groaned and he left the room. He looked through several drawers and found spare bedding in a closet in the hall. Quickly he stripped the bed and remade it with clean, cool sheets and blankets. While he was at it, he put a pair of boxers on. Even with her so upset, his cock responded every time she came near him.

  When he’d finished, he looked up to see her standing in her bathroom doorway, staring at him, looking lost.

  He went to her, gathering her to his body, and guided her into bed, snuggling down after her.

  “Do you want to sleep?”

  “Ever’ time I close my eyes I see it.”

  “The day when you lost Adele?”

  She flinched, but he wanted her to get it all out. She nodded. “I didn’t do my job. I didn’t protect her.” Her slurring had cleared a bit after the shower, but tears had made her words thick.

  “Do you have super powers? You had a fucking bodyguard, Erin. You had a bodyguard and you never went anywhere without him. It was Adele’s well-baby visit at the pediatrician. Were you supposed to stop living altogether?”

  Erin wanted so badly to just sleep and not think on it anymore. She wanted a day where the mere thought of her child didn’t make her want to sink to her knees and howl.

  “I see you did your homework,” she said, feeling sullen, annoyed and yet comforted by his presence all at once.

  “I asked you to share, you told me to use my imagination. My imagination had you dying in the street and I hated that vision, so I used the Internet instead. And fuck, you nearly did die in the street.” His body radiated tension and for a moment she was able to focus on his distress instead of her own.

  She felt a wave of something—safety, yes, that was it. Against his body like an anchor to keep her from drifting off into oblivion.

  He must have sensed that, because he stroked a hand over her hair gently. “Sleep. I’m here to catch you.”

  When she woke up, she had a horrible headache from crying and from booze. She smelled coffee and Todd.

  “Hey there,” he said, nuzzling her neck and kissing her. “Feeling pretty shitty? I made coffee. You’ll need to eat. Then, you’ll need to tell me.”

  She looked at him and the world shifted because she loved him, and there was no going back to not loving him. Maybe there’d never been.

  “I’ve got to brush my teeth. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

  He watched her go; she felt his eyes on her, not as a weight but as a cloak, protective.

  She took in her reflection in the bathroom as she brushed her hair. She wasn’t twenty-two anymore, that was for sure. She’d gone past the age where she could binge drink for an entire day and a half and not look it.

  Pink tufts of hair stuck up every which way from going back to sleep with it wet. She ran a brush through it and used a headband to keep it out of her eyes. He’d seen her puke; she may not have looked like a magazine ad right then, but if he’d stayed after puking, he must have been telling the truth about loving her.

  She came out and he looked so good
it hurt. Closing her eyes against it didn’t help. He was there, in her mind’s eye, his scent layered on her skin, letting her know he’d slept against her.

  When she opened her eyes, he smiled and indicated for her to sit at the table. “Toast, coffee and fruit. Let’s start there and see how it goes. Once you’ve eaten you can take something for that headache you must have.”

  “Why?” she asked, sitting down and sipping the coffee.

  “Why do you have a headache? I’d take a guess and say hours of crying interspersed with that giant bottle of vodka I found next to your bed.”

  She picked up the sunglasses on the table and shoved them over her eyes, and the broken glass in her eyes seemed to stop hurting so much. “You know what I mean.”

  He took her hand and kissed it. “You know why.”

  “You love me.” She said it but left a bit of question in the words.

  “I do. I think, to be honest with you, that I’ve loved you since the first day I saw you. And I ran because I was afraid of you. Of how fearless you were in embracing who you were. It only made me cowardly by comparison. I didn’t see that it simply would have given me the freedom to be as fearless.” He snorted a derisive laugh. “I love you and I’m not leaving. I love that you see me, all of me, and you embrace it. I’m free to be what I am. You get me, Erin. In a way no one ever has. I love you, all of you. I want you to share with me because you trust me to protect you, to take the pain and bear part of it. Not because I can possibly know what it’s like to have endured what you have. How could I? But because in telling, you lighten your load just a small bit. I’d like to . . .” He hesitated. “I’d like to hear about Adele. I saw the pictures you left out. She was beautiful.”

  God, he knew just how to get to her.

  “So about a year or so after we got to LA, we got that big break everyone hopes for.” She ate slowly, sipping her coffee and the water, feeling her body respond. “Anyway, it was big right out of the gate. Our first CD just blew up. We lived in the worst little shithole apartment in Hollywood. Junkies in the alleys, hookers turning tricks in the scraggly bushes outside. And I was never afraid. That’s how stupid I was. Anyway. We went on tour. We stayed on tour for nearly two years except for the time when we were in the studio making the second CD, which also hit big. In the midst of this, Jeremy, our manager, and I, started seeing each other. Secretly at first but then I got pregnant. It was a surprise, but not one I was regretful of.

  “We bought a house near Griffith Park. Big. My god. He wanted to marry me, but I didn’t think I was ready. I liked Jeremy, I loved him even, but not in that way I thought you should love someone you married.” She shook her head and looked at Todd, thankful for the sunglasses.

  “It was good. Fame, so much money. They let us have a lot of freedom in the studio. Adele came and it was like a dream. And then the first letters began to arrive. It seems that along with the money and the house, I’d acquired a stalker. And as Adrian pointed out, I never did anything halfway, so my stalker wasn’t just sort of crazy, he was fully homicidal. We got guard dogs and they ended up being shot. Other dead animals were mailed to me, left outside the studio. It kept escalating. And now I had real fear because I had something precious to lose.”

  She’d thought she was out of tears, but no. Todd handed her some tissues and she took the sunglasses off to use them.

  “The label got a bodyguard for me. Two actually, and they worked on twelve-hour shifts. The cops were on it; they did really truly try to find him. And it sort of died down. The letters stopped, the phone calls stopped. But I still kept a guard with me at all times.

  “On that day, yes, Adele had her two-year well-baby visit and, damn it, I wanted her to have as normal a life as possible, so we headed out in this ridiculous SUV Jeremy insisted on.”

  Her hands had begun to shake, so she put her coffee down. Instead, Todd reached across to take them in his hands.

  Erin took a deep breath and continued. “So about three miles from the doctor’s office, there was an accident at a stoplight. Our car was hit, but two others were too. John—that was our guard—saw the lady in the car in front of us in the intersection. She was hurt really badly; you could see it. I told him to go and help. I called 911 on my cell, and I guess that’s what enabled them to find us because the phone had a satellite chip in it. Suddenly someone jumped in the car and drove off. It took all of like forty seconds. I can’t even remember it all at this point. It’s all feelings. Terror.

  “The cell phone fell and slid back under the seats. He drove so fast. I tried to get around the seats to Adele. She was screaming.” Erin still saw that face, Adele’s eyes wide, scared, her cries. “He—Charles Cabot, my stalker—hit me on the side of the head with something. I don’t know what it was, but they think it might have been John’s coffee mug, this big porcelain thing he carried around with him everywhere. I knew I had to stay conscious, but I saw stars and blood kept getting in my eyes. I remembered what the self-defense people said about not letting a kidnapper take you, no matter what. Adele was in her car seat. I didn’t know what to do, but doing nothing was wrong, so I kicked him. I levered up and kicked him in the head, and we ended up on the sidewalk. The SUV was already damaged, and he couldn’t get it restarted.

  “I’d managed to get over the seat into the back with Adele. I put myself between them. He jumped over, on me. He kept hitting me and kicking me and”—she burst into full sobs—“he pulled her from her car seat and dragged us both into the lobby of this building we’d essentially crashed into. People had scrambled. I heard sirens, but he kept hitting me and then he shot me. He shot me and I begged him to let Adele go. I told him I’d go with him anywhere. On my knees, slipping in blood, begging him, and he still held her. He shot me again in the back as I slipped and fell forward. I couldn’t breathe. I was failing her; she needed me. I heard sirens and I prayed and prayed that they’d save her. He ran from the building, holding her and shooting. I crawled; people tried to help me, and I got to the doorway. I knew I was going to die. I felt it, you know? Just my hold on things was slipping, and that’s when I saw him drop her. She was bleeding and I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t work my arms, and she died and I wasn’t there. She wasn’t with me. She was scared, and I wasn’t there to protect her. I failed.”

  He fell to his knees and pulled her to him; they both cried.

  Through sobs so hard she had to run to the bathroom to vomit again, she told him the rest. How her relationship with Jeremy had fallen apart because she’d distanced herself and he hadn’t known how to reach her. The horror of the trial and finally moving back to Seattle and trying to start over.

  And when she’d told him everything, she did feel lighter. The pain was still there. She still had a hole in her heart Adele should have filled with laughter, but it wasn’t an ugly secret weighing on her heart every moment anymore.

  Even if he hated her after the telling or couldn’t deal with her baggage or whatever, she’d unburdened herself and she could breathe.

  Todd had of course read the newspaper accounts, but hearing her tell it, watching her sob at helplessly witnessing her daughter’s death as she nearly died herself—it tore him up.

  “Erin, honey, I—There aren’t words. I’m sorry. Tomorrow is the anniversary?”

  She nodded as he helped her to sit again.

  “Is she up here?”

  Another nod.

  “Let’s go then. Tomorrow we’ll take flowers and go. That is, if you’ll let me go along with you.”

  She touched his cheek. “Okay.”

  “Your brothers are worried about you. I want you to know I did call Brody while you were sleeping. Would you call them now? So they can hear from you that you’re all right? Or as all right as you can be anyway?”

  She blinked. “You did? You spoke to Brody?”

  “I’m sorry if you think it’s interfering but . . .”

  “No, it’s not that. I—well, thank you. It means a lot to me that you’d
call him.” She briefly put her head on his shoulder before picking the phone up.

  While she spoke to her brothers, he cleaned her kitchen and changed over the clothes from the washer to the dryer. Earlier, he’d watched her sleep and then gotten up to call Brody. While he was up, he’d cleaned up the clutter and done her laundry, before setting her coffeepot for some hours later. The circumstances were not so sexy, but, in truth, they meant a lot. Yes, he’d had to essentially break into her place, but she’d finally turned to him and let him help.

  15

  Erin looked up at the chiming of the bells over the door of her café and smiled. “I wasn’t expecting to see you until later tonight.”

  “I thought I’d come by and see if you wanted help closing up.” He held up a small shopping bag. “And to bring you this. I want you to wear everything in this bag tonight.”

  She raised a brow but took the bag.

  “No peeking yet.”

  “Hmpf. All right, joykiller. I’m fine, you know. I can close up without being scared. It’s still daylight, Brody is next door.” After placing the bag on the counter, she crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him.

  He wore that grin of his and she couldn’t stop her body from responding.

  “Stop being so defensive. I know you can close without being afraid. I just thought you’d like the company.”

  “I need to do this stuff on my own. I appreciate this, I do.” She softened because she knew he did it out of concern for her. Out of love. In the weeks since she’d told him the whole story about Adele, they’d gotten much closer. “But I told you, I need to get my life back. These baby steps may not seem like a big deal to you, but they are to me. This place is concrete proof that I can have a life.”

  He turned and locked the door, flipping the CLOSED sign, and then was on her in two steps.

  “I love you.”

  “I know.” She hadn’t told him she loved him yet, even though she knew she did. It wasn’t as if she held it back to punish or reward him. She just kept trying to find the perfect time. She realized there was no perfect time. None more perfect than simple, everyday stuff. “I love you too,” she said into the front of his T-shirt.