Promise Me This (Between Breaths 4)

My mother’s keening cry, the dull thud of a fist, the crisp slap of a palm. My brother bracing my shoulders tightly, whispering that we couldn’t interrupt or he might beat us, too.

“But what if he kills her?” I had asked my brother, as my entire body shook head to toe.

“He won’t,” my brother said, shushing me. “She shouldn’t have talked back to him.”

And that night was the turning point for me in two different ways. My father had become someone I absolutely hated with all of my being. Before, he was an enigma, a larger-than-life person. He wanted my respect, demanded it even. But you couldn’t respect a person whom you feared might kill you with their bare hands.

In addition, I had begun to see the signs of who my brother would ultimately become. He began siding with my father and viewing my mother as something else—an object, almost. A thing. Someone unworthy.

But wasn’t that exactly how I viewed women now? I rushed my fingers through my hair in frustration. My internal struggle was definitely that, a struggle.

I wouldn’t allow a girl close enough to me to become real; that was my problem. The difference was, I would never scare them or abuse them. I took care of their physical needs and mine, too—up to a point—and then I walked away.

Luke was older, and as a teenager began disrespecting my mother and her rules. When my dad went out of town, my brother would stay out until all hours of the night. My mother would threaten to tell my father but never followed through because she didn’t want him to terrorize Luke the same way he terrorized her.

But as it turned out that would never happen because Luke had become my father’s favorite.

“Hey,” Jessie said, her warm fingers on my arm. “Where did you drift off to on me?”

“Sorry,” I said. “You just got me thinking about my childhood.”

“Was . . .” she sounded hesitant. It was true we never had deep conversations before. But we also had never been alone in a car for hours before. “Was it a happy childhood?”

I felt a shot of pain stab through my chest. How did I respond?

“No,” I said, honestly. “At least not always.”

She scrutinized me under thick eyelashes, looking somewhat concerned. Guess I’ve been ruining her preconceived notions of me one frown at a time.

She pulled into a service station off the exit for some gas. “Sorry, forgot to fill up last night.”

“Let me do it for you,” I offered.

“Nope. I’m a big girl, thanks,” she said, her eyes still softened by my earlier comment. “But you can go in and get us more coffee from their fancy cappuccino machine. I’ll even take a French vanilla.”

Grinning, I took off into the store, pushed the button on the machine, and waited for our drinks. Jessie was sitting on the passenger side with the door open when I emerged. It wasn’t until I got closer that I noticed she had her camera raised and was aiming at me.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Relax, just taking a test shot,” she said, her fingers curling around the edges of the sleek device. “You’re not one of those pretty boys who has to have his hair perfectly coiffed before he gets his photo taken, are you?”

“Very funny,” I said, before setting the coffees on the hood of the car and running my fingers through my hair so that it stuck up all over the place. Then I mugged for the camera, flexing my muscles and making crazy faces. “Make sure to get my good side.”

After a good laugh, we got on the road again. I tried to jump in the driver’s seat but she wasn’t having it.

“Tell me one amazing memory,” Jessie said after a few minutes of silence. “You know, from your childhood.”

She was intent on going back there again. I shut my eyes momentarily and took a deep breath. Did I even have any amazing memories? Of course I did, I just needed to dig deep.

“There was a pond near our house where my brother and I always hung out,” I said. “A tire hung from this huge tree and the two of us would swing high over the water and jump in. We did it over and over again all damn day.”

“That sounds amazingly cool, Square,” she said. “And completely country. I mean, I didn’t have some random body of water by me in the city. I had to use the public pool.”

“Well, at least it was sanitized,” I said, shrugging. “We’d find all kinds of crap floating around in that lake, especially after a good rain.”

“I’d still take the fresh smell of a lake after a hard rain over hard-core chlorine that always made my eyes burn.”

“Point taken,” I said, jiggling my knee again. I just needed to keep moving. It was how I organized my thoughts, my brain. Of course, my little tick was also magnified by how amped up I felt, being around Jessie like this, in close quarters. I could smell her and it wasn’t some kind of sugary perfume.

She had this exotic scent—like when my mother picked a bouquet of wildflowers from the garden. A concoction of eucalyptus, baby powder, and honey all melded together. It was intoxicating and made me want to move closer to that soft patch of skin in the hollow of her throat, in order to take a deeper lungful.

The night she stumbled in the bathroom was the closest I’d ever gotten to her and it was the first time I’d gotten a good whiff, that’s how subtle the scent was. But now it was all I could think about.

“Why do you think that day by the lake was one of your favorites?” she asked.