Audrey's Promise (14 page)

Audrey blanched, but covered it by reaching for another tissue and handing it to Adelaide. “First, if you loved Brace, and he loved you, then sex would never be a condition of your relationship. If you think Brace will leave you just because you stop having sex, then it’s not love. And you’re better off without him. And your whole bit ‘on the pill prevents pregnancy’ is only the tip of the iceberg.”

Adelaide rolled her eyes and wiped her face again. “Nothing’s going to happen. I’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, those were the exact words I used, too.”

Finally, that got her attention.

“Look, I know I can’t stop you from doing what you want. But at least listen to my warning. From someone who understands the agony of what could happen from what you think is harmless. The consequences are far worse than you can imagine. And I don’t want you to suffer the same way I did.”

“You just left,” Adelaide sniffled. “I thought when you got better, things would go back to the way it was before. But you just left.”

The childlike tone in which Adelaide used nearly ripped Audrey’s heart to shreds. The tears built again and Audrey bit her cheek to hold them back.

“I’m sorry I let you down, Addy. But I didn’t leave.” She paused, debating whether she should tell the full truth. The last thing she wanted to do was place blame, but Adelaide needed to hear it. “I was sent away. That way you could live your own life and not follow in my wake.”

“What do you mean?”

“If I stayed here, people would have judged you and held you back from your dreams simply because I was your sister. I’m the reminder of what was lost. And we didn’t want people to hurt you because of my mistakes.”

“Mom and Dad sent you away? What is this, the Dark Ages?”

“No, it’s East Texas. And right now you have one foot on the same high-speed railroad tracks I went down. Please step off of it.”

Adelaide stared hard out the now-foggy window for long moments. The tears had stopped, but her face was still red and puffy. “Are you gonna tell Mom?”

She should. Everything she’d read about adolescent deviant behavior instructed her to tell their parents, but something in her gut stopped her. Maybe this talk was enough. Enough to get her thinking, anyway. “No,” she finally answered. “I love you. I won’t say anything. I’m going to trust you, and hope you’ll do the right thing.”

Adelaide shifted slowly across the window seat and wrapped her arms around Audrey’s shoulders. The hug tightened as Audrey smoothed her hand over Adelaide’s soft hair. A moment later she pulled away and wiped her face again.

Audrey stood and noticed a pair of white underwear peeking out from underneath the bed. “Addy—” Audrey pointed at them and smirked. “Make sure Mom doesn’t see Brace’s tightie-whities.”

****

The clock on the nightstand struck 11:30 as Ethan stared at his laptop, the blank document cursor blinking at him. Every beat blinked in rhythm with the coaxing in his mind.
Just…write…it. I dare you.

This was major. Colossal. A senate candidate was just accused of murder by her own brother. All it took was a definitive source and the article of Ethan’s career would practically be written for him. And he’d be on his way to New York. Just as he dreamed. Premier journalist for a major publication was one exposé away.

But for the first time in his life, Ethan struggled with some splinter buried at the back of his psyche. He couldn’t even identify what it was, or what it signaled, but he didn’t like it. Maybe it was his body’s retaliation for smelling beer tonight, or Audrey’s empty wine glass, and Ethan’s refusal to join in. They had once been his best friends, but now coffee was his surrogate confidant. Or the painful joystick between his legs left unattended in Audrey’s bedroom.

All he could see was Audrey’s smile and the tiny sparkle in the middle of those sapphire eyes as they stared back into his. His fingers craved to pull the clip out of her hair again, and watch the dark waves drape down her shoulders. And his loins ached when he watched her nipples push against her T-shirt. Did she notice his dick stand to attention?

When she ground her hips against him, he almost lost it. The first time he would have ever lost control, when sober. The woman knew exactly how desirable she was, and those pink cheeks and wet lips were enough to make a man beg. Which he was almost forced to do in the hallway. He wanted to ease the pain in a hot shower, but decided against it after the display in Adelaide’s bedroom. Whacking off at that point would have made him feel like a pedophile, even if Audrey was the Biddinger that filled his imagination.

The laptop beckoned his fingers to open his internet browser, but every window came up blank. The annoying error message splayed across the screen. “No Internet Connection Detected.”

Stupid rural towns.
How did people survive without internet? And what kind of childhood was Adelaide suffering through without it? No email? No social media?

The library was definitely his first stop in the morning.

How long can a sister’s lecture on safe sex take?
Surely an hour was enough. Oh, wait. Audrey’s pet project was a Women’s Crisis Center. This could take
days,
let alone hours.

Ethan couldn’t see what the big deal was. As long as the two horny kids were being safe, who cared? Sex was about pleasure. Instant gratification in its most primal form. Women were the ones who dragged
feelings
into it and grew attached. Besides, how else were these kids going to learn to navigate their twenties? There were sick people out there who exploited the ignorant ones. Audrey should be glad Adelaide wasn’t jostling with an older guy, or worse, a pageant judge or consultant. That really messed things up.

By the time his thoughts returned to Audrey’s T-shirt, or rather the curves he imagined beneath them, a ruckus sounded through his window. First were creaking brakes from the street, and then pounding footsteps across wooden planks, followed by muddled voices. The view from his window spanned across the side yard where darkness enfolded the large oak tree, but the beams of truck lights were unmistakable.

Then glass shattered. A lot of it.

In Audrey’s bedroom.

Squealing tires filled the air outside his window and the lights faded.

Ethan jumped off the bed, dashed out of the bedroom, and raced into Audrey’s room.

Glass and chunks of brick littered the wood floor and across the bed. A cold air blew through the window, fluttering the ripped curtains, and Ethan saw the jagged lines of a broken pane.

Audrey wasn’t there.

Where is she?

Panic gripped him and he stepped forward to look out the window, bare feet be damned. He couldn’t think of anything except a prayer that Audrey hadn’t fallen, or worse…

Before he could take another step onto the broken glass, Audrey’s perfume filled the air. She appeared beside him and gasped.

Without a thought, he wrapped her in his arms and fought to stop shaking.

“What happened?” she whispered.

“Something shattered the window. I thought you…”

She pulled back and stared into his face, eyes wide and lips parted. Only when he took a deep breath, did she peer around him and saw the damage.

“Everything okay?” Paul’s clipped voice called from the stairs.

“We’re okay,” Audrey called back. “Are you?” she directed to Ethan.

“Sure,” he replied with a steady voice he didn’t feel.

When his hands stopped shaking, he turned back to the room and spotted an old brick, red and faded with a paper rubber banded around the largest piece. Careful not to step on the shards of glass, Ethan moved the few feet to grab it. “I assume this is Brace pissed off for being caught?”

Audrey took the paper off the rubber band before Ethan could read what was scribbled in black marker. Her jaw tensed and she shook her head. “No. Much more pathetic.” She crumpled the note and turned out of the bedroom, trekking to the stairs. Ethan could only follow.

From the top of the stairs, he saw the front door sitting open and Paul messed with something on the porch, a faint glow in front of him. Myrna gripped her robe and watched him with a disgusted grimace on her face.

By the time Audrey and Ethan reached the bottom of the stairs, a rancid smell overtook his senses and he covered his nose.
Burning shit.
Paul stepped to the side of the house to grab something. A brown paper sack on fire no more than two feet from their threshold. Ethan didn’t have to guess what was inside.

Paul returned from the side of the house, hose in hand. He doused the flames and used the high spray to push the remnants into the grass. Eventually, he came back into the house, muttering something about “stupid kids” and “minding their own business.” The stench still hung in the air, but mitigated when he closed the door.

“You two all right?” he asked. “Which window?”

“Mine,” she answered quietly and squeezed the paper in her fingers.

Her father’s eyes dropped to her hand and his jaw tightened. “Give it here.”

Audrey hesitated, swallowing back whatever she was about to say. Instead, she descended a few steps and handed over the note. As it exchanged hands, Ethan read the big letters scratched across the paper.

RUN AWAY, MURDERER

His jaw dropped.

Paul’s brow furrowed. The pain couldn’t be masked by the growl he swallowed.

Myrna appeared beside him with a broom and dustpan, and then stopped when she saw the note. There wasn’t enough make-up to cover the embarrassment and torture on her face.

She pulled her daughter into a sideways hug and patted her shoulder. “We’ll get this cleaned up and go back to bed.”

Paul muttered something else that Ethan didn’t catch, but Audrey had. She stepped forward and stood before her father. He stood a good foot and a half over her, making Audrey look younger than she was. He touched her chin and checked for cuts or scrapes, like every father would.

Every father but mine.

In one motion, Paul wrapped one arm around her and pulled her close. He glanced up at Ethan and then grimaced. With a final kiss on the cheek and a strangled sigh, his impassive self returned.

“Does this happen often?” Ethan’s question suspended in the entry hall, waiting for someone to say “Of course not. Who gets bricks through windows and fiery bags of shit on their front porches like this?” But no one said it.

Audrey didn’t look scared anymore. Only disappointed. She gave her mother one last sideways hug, took the broom and dustpan from her hands, and climbed the stairs. She brushed past Ethan’s shoulder and her own sweet perfume briefly allowed a reprieve of the horrible smell from the porch. But she never looked at him and just kept climbing. Myrna retreated to her bedroom in the back of the house while Paul lingered behind with Ethan.

“Adam isn’t alone in his interpretation.” Ethan finally broached the subject.

Paul sighed heavily, as if the world’s judgment rested on his house.

“Mackineer is probably the only town where Audrey Allen won’t receive a single vote.”

“Not even yours?”

“I don’t vote.”

Unbelievable.
It was the kind of answer Ethan expected from his own father, who’d never given him a day’s worth of validation or compassion in his life. But he had hard time accepting Paul Biddinger as the same type of cowardly man. The brief moment of concern he showed his daughter was proof of that. But it still wasn’t enough. Not to Ethan.

“Well then, how do you expect her to do it?” he asked.
Prove me wrong.

“Do what?”

“Go through life without her father’s support?”

Ethan’s accusation appeared to hit Paul like a bale of feathers. A pathetic pillow fight, imploded on impact. And he just stood there.

“I may be a vicious, scandal-seeking writer, but even I expect all parents to support their kids in whatever they do.”

This pillow was filled with a lot more than feathers. More like lead marbles.
What would it take to get a reaction out of him?
A red face, clenched knuckles, a series of profanities shouted at the guest who dared insult the man in his own home about his parenting skills. Something.

But Paul just stood there, emotionless. “This isn’t the first window I’ve had to replace. Or the first wash-off of my porch. She didn’t ask for this kind of treatment, but there’s nothing I can do about it, either.”

“That could have been a shot gun shell instead of a brick,” he barked. “Stand up to it. If you know who did it, why not press charges?”

He sighed and scowled. “She hasn’t told you yet. Or, did you even dare to ask?”

Ethan blanched. As much as this man liked to shut out the world, he had a sturdy grasp on the meaning of things.

“If you did,” Paul continued. “You’ve got more guts than I expected. But if she hasn’t told you now, she never will. Especially after this.”

“You seem to know her really well for a father who hasn’t seen her in, what…ten years?”

“I know Audrey Biddinger. She has too much pride to admit faults after something like this. It only persuades her to fight more.”

“And what about Audrey Allen?”

Paul stared back him, his piercing gaze unwilling to admit defeat.

If her own father wouldn’t stand up for her, Ethan felt the necessity to do it for him. Why? He doubted he could ever explain it to himself, but something compelled him to open his mouth and say the words her father couldn’t.

“Audrey Allen has accomplished a lot. Probably more than Audrey Biddinger could have hoped for. One of the youngest state senate candidates ever, and a woman, doubly hard. Even more incredible, a lot of people expect her to win. You might be surprised at what else she can accomplish if she didn’t have to worry about bricks being thrown at her. If she had a little more support from you.”

Paul’s deep sigh finally triggered the animosity Ethan expected.

“Good night, Ethan,” he bit out, tying his housecoat with one final glare before he trudged off.

Chapter Fifteen

The breeze through Audrey’s window was frigid, but there was nothing worse than her stiff backside while they cleaned up the debris in her room. He desperately wanted to talk to her, to wrap his arms around her and forget the horrible sound of shattering glass. It was the one time he cursed the vivid imagination of a journalist.