Crash (Brazen Bulls MC #1)(21)

The Willa in this story wasn’t strong or smart. She was stupid and weak. The Willa sitting on the sofa with Rad, in the house she loved and had made her own, hated that girl.

But he was regarding her with a kind of fixed confidence, and it seemed to pulse out of him and pull her in. As much as she hated to tell this story, it didn’t occur to her, this time, to refuse.

She wanted him to know.

She reached over and picked up her bottle. With a big swallow of beer for fortitude, she began again. “Like I said, it was more or less okay after the scene with the desk attendant. I figured out that if I gave him enough notice about when I wouldn’t be home, because I had to study, or, later, because I had practicum hours at the hospital, and if I made sure to call him when I said I would, he’d cope well enough. And I sent a card or letter home to him every day. I must have spent a thousand dollars at the campus bookstore on dumb ‘miss you’ and ‘love you’ cards. But he didn’t make any more scenes. When I was home, I spent just about every free second with him. He could be sweet and loving, he usually was, but he was controlling as hell. He was never super violent to me, like some guys were to their women, but he could still be scary. If I did what he wanted, everything was calm and he was sweet, so I did what he wanted. It got so I could barely stand to be home, and I practically burned rubber whenever it was time to go back to school.

“My senior year, he started talking about getting married. He wanted to do it as soon as I graduated. But I’d been away from home long enough to be able to start to see a different way to be. I didn’t have to marry a Duchy boy and live in a trailer while he worked his daddy’s farm and I worked in the doctor’s office, taking kids’ temperatures. I didn’t have to keep my head down and be what a man expected me to be. If I could get out of Duchy, I’d be free.”

Feeling like she’d been talking for hours and getting nowhere, bored by the sound of her own voice, Willa stopped. “You sure you want to hear the long, drawn-out version?”

Rad brought his head down and then back up. It wasn’t until he was looking at her again that she realized that had been a very slow nod. “That’s what I said. Keep goin’. I’m with you. Can I ask a question?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t your folks see how he was? Or your friends?”

“Like I said, on the top of things, he didn’t seem much different from any other guy in Duchy. Better than most, even. I’m the only one in my senior class or the one before it who went away to college. A couple people from high school took some classes at the junior college in Odessa, but that was it. High school was the end of school for most everybody, if they got even that far. Couples got married right after graduation, had their first kid within a year. Guys worked family farms, or hired on as hands on somebody else’s, or worked the oilfields. Or did the kind of work that doesn’t come with a W-2. Girls went to ring up groceries at the market, or just got pregnant and stayed home. At church, we all heard about husbands having dominion over their families, and wives being their helpmeets. It’s still the Fifties in Duchy, Texas. It’ll always be the Fifties in Duchy. All anybody thought about Jesse was that I was lucky to have a man so in love with me. He’s good looking, and all the girls were jealous. When it ended, everybody was mad at me, or disappointed in me. Even my folks. It wasn’t until—”

Willa broke off. What she’d been about to say was jumping ahead—and she needed more time to work up to that part.

She took a big breath. “I didn’t want to get married, not to him or anybody, but I was afraid what he’d do if I said no, so whenever he brought it up, I kept trying to be vague about it. I don’t know what I thought I was accomplishing—just being chicken shit, I guess. Then he gave me a ring for Christmas, made a big production out of proposing in front of our families, and I still tried to be vague. I said I needed time to think. He broke up with me while he was still on one knee. We haven’t been a couple since that day. I was so f*cking relieved. I went back to school for my last semester, and I thought I was free.”

“But you weren’t.” Rad’s hands were moving up and down her legs, caressing her with tender firmness. The touch was intimate but not sexual. Willa could feel a shift of tension in his hands, as if he sensed that her story was about to become more interesting. And it was.

“No. He showed up in Austin about three weeks into the semester. I came back to my room after class, and he was sitting on my bed. My roommate wasn’t there. I found out later that he forced his way in and she ran, but the RA wasn’t around to ask for help, so she just left Jesse in there.”

“RA?”

“Resident Assistant. Like the grownup in charge of the dorm.”

A grimace twitched on Rad’s face, up and gone. “I thought he was banned. Nobody helped you?”

Nobody had, and she hadn’t gone looking. She shook her head. “At the time, I was scared, but I didn’t think I needed help. I was more worried about another scene. He was crying. He begged me to get back together, to take the ring. In Austin, I was braver. I told him I didn’t want to live that life. I wanted to be a nurse in a hospital, and I couldn’t do that in Duchy. He said he’d go wherever I wanted. I knew that wasn’t true—and anyway, it wasn’t about that. I didn’t love him. I don’t think I ever really did. I thought I did at the beginning, but it was the crazy high-school kind of love, the kind that feels like it runs all through you but’s really only on the surface. I guess that’s the kind of love all our friends were getting married in, though. I just saw it differently after being away. I told him there wasn’t any way we weren’t over.”