Hawk (A Stepbrother Romance #3)(34)

Her left hand is a sight to see. She grabbed a knife blade to save herself and it bit down to the bone, making her fingers mostly useless. There’s a big puckered scar along the base of all her fingers, which have oddly thinned out and the skin grown close to the bone.

I don’t know how she survived that.

“How long has he been in town?”

I know who she means. She knows more about how I feel about Hawk than anybody. I told some of it to her husband but not all. It was such a relief to say something to somebody, and not May.

May annoys me with her optimism sometimes. Long after I gave up hope, she’d tell me that Hawk has to come back sometime, he has a reason, he wouldn’t just leave us. After a few arguments we just stopped talking about it. Now he is back, and I don’t know what to do.

“Since yesterday I guess,” I sigh. “That’s the first time I saw him anyway.”

I tell her what happened, about the hot dog and the alley. I don’t tell her everything but she’s smart, she’ll fill in the gaps. I don’t have to explain, she just nods.

“You feel like he betrayed you.”

“Yes,” I sigh, my chest tightening. “I hate myself for feeling that way.”

“It’s all right to feel betrayed. I can’t say I’m happy with him just up and leaving you without a word and never contacting you again.”

“You’re not?” I glance at her. “Of course you’re not. I can’t just take him back.”

“Why not?”

I stop and shrug. “How am I supposed to ever trust him again?”

“I’m not going to tell you what to do. You have to find that on your own.”

She must see the look on my face. She sighs and touches my shoulder with her bad hand.

“I know how you feel. There was a time when I couldn’t trust any man, not any one in particular. It took a lot of work for me to bring Jacob into my life. I wouldn’t wish what I’ve been through on anyone.”

I nod.

She starts walking again. “Sometimes we think we’re in the right place and we’re not. I was married once before.”

“I remember. Your husband…”

“Yes. The bridge.”

“My dad.”

“I know, hon.”

“After that.” I stop to look through a gap in the trees. The sun is shining on the meadow where the fireworks display went off last night. “Hawk was the only thing in my life that was right. May needed me, I couldn’t lean on her. He never asked anything in return. He gave me whatever I needed after my dad died.”

She steps beside me and listens. She’s good at that. Listening.

“Why was I so stupid? It took until the last day of school before I knew what it was. Just… something in the way he looked at me that day was different. He looked at me like he’d…”

“Never seen you before,” Jennifer says, softly.

“Yeah. I pretended to sleep on the bus so I could hold him.”

“I remember. I was there.”

I blink a few times. “Yeah, you were, weren’t you?”

“I should have said something. Public displays of affection and all that, but I decided, who cares? It’s not like it mattered. You’d effectively graduated and it made me happy to see two young people happy with each other. That was a dark time for me. The next four years were dark. Little spots like that got me through it.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

She looks at me with one eyebrow raised, and folds her arms over her chest. “I think you do.”

“I don’t feel like it.”

“If he’s right for you, if it’s right for you, then you just know. Sometimes that feeling isn’t as strong as our fears, but it’s there, and no matter how many reasons you find to fight it, it never goes away. Once that torch is lit, it never goes out.”

“Never?”

She shakes her head.

“How long did it take you to figure it out with Jacob?”

“Figure it out? Too long. It was there the first day, though. He looked at me like he’d never seen me before.”

To my own surprise, I sniff a little and rub at my eyes.

“What do I do?”

She sighs. “I just told you… okay, look. Why don’t you trust him?”

“What, like specifically? He wouldn’t tell me why he left.”

“Nothing at all?”

“He said if he told me I’d be in danger.”

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

I start to answer but go quiet.

“I don’t know. It sounds like an excuse.”

Jennifer shrugs. “Lots of times, things sound like an excuse when they’re not. Lots of excuses sound true, or they wouldn’t work. Maybe you should try asking him again. It sounds like he’s trying to protect you.”

My own fingers dig into my arms. “Protect me? Where was he to protect me when I needed him, Jennifer? They strapped me to a table and injected me with drugs. I wanted him so bad it hurt. All I wanted was for him to come get me and get me out of there and take me away and make it better.”

She doesn’t say anything for a while. A squirrel runs in circles at the base of a tree in front of us. Birds chirp. Jennifer sighs.