Promise (32 page)

She’s got her hair twisted up off her face, which only ignites the look of girlish wonder about her. She’s wearing some crazy sexy peach colored wrap dress, with these little canvas shoes that have little cherries embroidered on them. She’s a little girl wrapped in a pin-up woman, and the mixture is almost more than I can stand.

I want to teach her what it means to be kissed like she should be kissed. With lips and tongue on the softest parts of her neck and behind her ear until she forgets to take her next breath. I see her sidelong glances toward me, shifting her weight back and forth while Louis talks her ear off.

I can still feel her wrapped around me even from across the room. Louis says something that makes her smile, and it lights up my heart. Seeing her happy is the greatest gift she can give me. Her smile—my new reason for waking up every day.

And to never have to wipe away more tears.

She’d cried more when I told her about Dad than I did.

Wait, I didn’t cry at all.

And, I wasn’t sure which hurt worse, watching her cry or silently grieving for him myself . . . for what I’d missed with him, for what could have been.

She’d wanted something more for us. It had been right there if only I’d gotten my ass home fifteen minutes sooner. What could have been? What could have been fixed?

But now, I’ve got other wars waging. She’s more a part of me that even my own father ever was.

“Hey.” I pull her into me, the feeling of comforting her, comforts me.

“Thanks for keeping an eye on her.” I slap Louis on the shoulder.

“Sure thing.” He’s staring away from us, his voice flat and lifeless.

I glance from Promise to my best friend. She looks relaxed. Louis looks like he’s in distress. He clears his throat and won’t meet my eye.

“Okay, man. I should go. Work is calling.” Louis pulls his phone out, but I detect an unusual discomfort in his voice.

“It was nice to meet you.” Promise holds her hand out, and Louis holds onto it a few seconds longer than necessary.

“You, too.” He doesn’t look at her, and his words are clipped. In all the years I’ve known him, all the situations I’ve been in with him, he’s always been on the verge of a smile. I can’t remember ever seeing him upset, but I think he is right now.

He spins on his heel and lays his hand on my shoulder before heading toward the door, eyes down without another word.

His hasty exit leaves me perplexed, but my little ivory princess has my cock twitching even as I realize how inappropriate it is to be getting a hard-on at my own father’s funeral.

“What were you guys talking about?” I draw in a breath right next to her ear, and she shrugs her shoulder up toward my mouth. I want to smell her forever, her softness and gentle nature match the sweet scent of whatever perfume she’s wearing.

She lets me into her neck when she loosens her shoulder back down, and I put my lips just under the corner of her jaw so I can feel her heartbeat.

“Not much. He was asking me where I was from. I asked what he did. He was telling me about his security company, then something about a bar, and then you walked up. That’s about it. He seems like a very nice man.” I see nothing but genuine kindness in her eyes.

Whatever was going on with Louis, she is clueless.

“He’s the best.”

I lean my head back away because I want to look at more of her, and I wonder again if she can handle everything I want from her and everything I will need to give her . . .

Do
with her.

To
her.

She crinkles her nose a little under my stare. I wish she could look through my eyes, even for a moment, and see the beauty I do.

Maybe it’s losing my dad. Maybe it’s seeing the guys again and remembering some of us ended up in a room like this way before our time.

I’m overwhelmed with the need to tell her what I’m feeling.

“How many days have we spent time together?”

She raises her head from my chest and gives me a quizzical look.

“Ummmm . . . five? Six?” She fidgets with a loose thread on the front of her dress. She always seems to want to pull on little things like that. A nervous habit when she doesn’t know what else to do with her hands.

I can give her something to do.

I force my sex-seared brain back into the moment. “Right. Six. Six days. Did you think it would be possible to fall in love with someone in six days?”

Ten years, to be honest, give or take a few months.

I twirl a renegade strand of her hair in my fingers and watch the way her cheeks flush pink as she looks up at me nervously, trying to figure out if I’m playing with her.

“What?” She’s trying not to smile as she presses her knuckles against her lips.

“That’s my backward ass way of telling you I’m falling in love with you. Scratch that. I’m done with the falling part. I’ve fallen.”

I spin her around and pull her toward me. She’s stiff, shuffling her feet. “I’m not so sure that’s such a good idea.” She’s fighting it, but I don’t back down.

“Doesn’t matter. Good idea or bad, it’s the truth. Come on. I need to take you to my place and show you something. Well, show you a couple things. Good and bad. And I
don’t
want you to say you love me, so don’t worry about that. If you don’t yet, you will. It’s all part of my evil plan.” I smile, making sure her eyes are on mine.

She shakes her head and rolls her eyes.

I kiss the top of her head.

“You are a very strange man. You know that?”

I could be about to blow up the one thing I’ve waited for my whole life, but for her, I have to lead with honor, so here goes nothing. I need to show her more of me because that is what I want from her.

Back at the loft, her fingers trace over the piles of drawings I’ve laid out for her. I’ve spent the last hour explaining what all the piles of notebooks and letters mean. She touches them for a few minutes before I see the first tears drop from her chin.

She stares at me for a long moment, her lips open to speak, then as though she forgot what she was doing, her eyes are back on an open notebook with a silhouette, pencil sketch of a dark haired, little boy with glasses probably around three years old.

Never would I have dreamed that all the years between us would come together like this.

Right now.

With her.

It started the day I sat in the back of the courtroom waiting for the judge to set me free. The little, white haired girl took the stand, looking out into the faces that dotted the wooden benches, looking for a champion but finding none.

Her words came out like a voice from the grave.

Yes.

No.

I don’t remember.

She'd met every question with a soft answer. Her pale, blue, opalescent eyes had darted everywhere as though she was staring out into nothingness, her gaze never lighting on anyone or anything for more than a second.

She’d looked like a mouse desperate to scurry to safety in a room full of cats.

“Why did you hide your face that day?” she asks, finally looking up from the table toward where I’m standing, her arms crossed as I wait, ready to catch her if she falls too far into the sadness of what’s on the tables.

“I don’t know. I just did. I didn’t want you to see me; I just didn’t.” I take a second to remember that moment. Then I revise my statement. “You were scared enough and if you’d seen my face . . . well, I didn’t want to scare you is all.”

“I remember when you slipped the drawing into my hand when I was walking out of the courtroom. You pulled your hoodie across your face and then jogged down the hall.”

“From the second you walked into that room, I knew you were someone to me. Someone I would never forget. It was like looking at an old picture of someone you knew from a long time ago. Then, you look up and there they are, and you can’t describe the feeling.”

“How do you read all of these? They’re so sad. So horrible. How do you do this?”

Saltwater is coursing down her cheeks, and my chest is constricting, watching the pain in her face.

She holds a piece of lined notebook paper in front of her, the shaky blue writing filling half the page, the envelope with a LOVE stamp and the picture of an infant in a dark blue sleeper stapled to the top. I remember the letter. I remember the blurry image of the little, dark haired boy. I remember them all.

“I knew the day I let him drink the milk bottle with the vodka, added so he would sleep through the night, that I ceased to be his mother. His little body went soft. I remember the burn of my own gulp as I held him as he went silent. When I woke up, he was gray. His lips were purple, and I still reached for my own bottle. His name was Timothy.”

Those words cover the little sketch of the baby, my pencil embedding the words into his face. The final admission from the one person in the world who should have been his greatest protector.

“I need to. Someone does. I don’t do it to give them some sort of absolution. I do it so that the children will know they were the wronged. That someone knows the truth. So they know the shadows aren’t protecting the wrong doers anymore.”

“How did you get the parents to write to you?”

I shrug and cross my arms. “After that day with you, I started spending more time at the courthouse. Just sitting there and drawing the little faces. Then the parents would come in and start telling their stories, and I would write down little bits and pieces of what they said. I did that on and off all the years before I deployed. Then, about three years ago while I was overseas, I started a website.”

I settle next to her, leaning on the table and watching her face.

She’s slowly paging through a notebook with one hand, her other hand hovering over her nose and mouth as her eyes well and spill over with each sketch.

I keep my voice steady, struggling against memories of some of the stories that left me with a deep awareness of what true evil is. “Anyway, I started this website where parents, or whoever, could write in anonymously and send their pictures and tell their stories. I just kept drawing, and I posted the sketches on my website, the drawings going out into the ether. It just evolved from there. Once a few of my drawings got posted on a few big blogs, it blew up, and I couldn’t keep up with all the stories. That's what a lot of this is, all the stories I haven't drawn yet.”

“Why do you think they want to tell you? The parents or whoever, I mean. The ones that hurt them left their own children.”

“I think they are looking for some kind of absolution.” I scoot closer. I don’t want to interrupt her, but I need to be near her.

“And that day, in the courtroom, it was me you drew.” She shakes her head and sounds as though she can’t believe she was the beginning of all of this. “I still have the drawing you gave me. In all the times I moved, I never lost it. That’s sort of amazing, isn’t it?”

“I know. I saw it in your bedroom.”

I push off the table and step behind her, my arms pulling her back to my chest.

“So, you’ve been following me? I mean, before. When we were younger. You said you saw me other times as I got older.”

“I didn’t so much as follow you. The first couple times you just sort of kept turning up. First in court that day. Then a month later when they switched my social worker to Jeremy.”

Her body turns into a board under my arms.

“You know him?” Her voice is full of questions.

“Yep. Not well. He was my social worker for a few months. We didn’t hit it off.”

“So
he
knows
you too
.”

“Yep. This isn’t a face you easily forget.” I chuckle even though it’s not funny.

Her hands come up from the letters to rest on my forearms, and her head leans back against me. I take a deep breath, the floral scent of her hair swirling and making it difficult to keep my mind away from all the other ways I want to be touching her right now.

She stares at the table where I’ve spread out my open notebooks. Each page, a pencil sketch of a child. Their face covered in script. The dark words of painful admission from the parent or caregiver sworn to protect them.

“Do you ever meet any of them?”

“Occasionally. More so back in the early days when I was in the courts. But, not so much now. With being away so much on duty, it’s not like I had a lot of opportunities to swoop in from whatever hole they had us in and look up where some of them ended up. I have been surprised how many parents want to tell their stories. Some of them are bad.
Really
bad.”

My lips press into the top of her head as I loosen my arms before turning her around to look at her.

“How many homes were you in?” I ask. Her eyes are tinted with red but her face is warm, and it’s all I can do not to think about all the things I want to do with her lips.

“Nine or ten,” she answers.

“I was in seven. No, eight, I think.”

She raises her hands, then wraps her arms around my neck. Having her this close turns my brain off and my dick on. It can’t be helped.

Then the most beautiful thing happens, the little porcelain doll that carved her name into my heart all those years ago raises up onto tiptoes and covers my mouth with hers. Her fingers move up to the back of my head and pull me hard against her.