“Awww, Christ,” Jake said, getting a box of tissues for me, and awkwardly patting my shoulder. “Don’t. Don’t cry Nicky. I’m sorry. I’m an asshole.”
Desperately trying to stop sobbing into my hands, I sniffled, “It—it’s fine.”
“Nothing about this is fine,” Jake said, sliding next to me on the sofa. “You’re scared and hurt, and here I am blaming the victim.”
“I’m not a victim!”
“Yeah. You are. So why don’t you start from the beginning, and tell me what happened. And this time I promise to just shut up and listen and not to be an asshole about it…”
~~~
He mostly kept his promise. As I stammered my way through the story of how I got a job serving drinks at the local strip club, and fell into bed with its bad-boy owner, Jake shut up. He listened. And he wasn’t an asshole about it until I got to the part where Carlos slapped me the first time.
“And you stayed with him?” he asked, practically twitching with agitation, making a fist of the bag of frozen peas he’d fetched for me to press against my swelling jaw.
“Yeah,” I confessed, in a whisper.
I took the peas from him and held them against my face, feeling the need to explain. “I mean—he’s Latino. He’s hot-tempered. And I guess…I guess I thought it meant that Carlos loved me. That he loved me so much he couldn’t control himself at the thought of losing me to some other guy.” I swallowed and looked away, knowing I sounded like a complete idiot. “I know it’s stupid, but I want someone to feel that way about me. To be that passionate about me. And it felt like passion. It didn’t feel like abuse. At least not until tonight.”
Jake clenched his jaw in total disapproval. “Well. Now you know. It’s abuse. And it ends now. You’re not going back to him.”
That much, we agreed on. It was over with Carlos. Whatever love I felt for my boyfriend had been knocked loose along with a tooth or two. “We’re done,” I agreed. “But…I’ve gotta go back and get my stuff.”
“The hell you do,” Jake said, leaning forward intently. “What you’ve gotta do is call the police.”
Not this again. Seriously? Between the throbbing pain in my jaw and soreness in my heart, I just couldn’t deal with the thought of going over it all again. Especially not with some cop who likely remembered me as the daughter of a convicted felon and wouldn’t give two craps about what happened to me. “I—I just can’t. Not tonight. My head hurts so much I just want to curl up on your couch and close my eyes and sleep for a little bit. Would that be okay?”
Jake frowned. “No.”
Frustrated, I put the peas down on the storage trunk he was using as a coffee table. “Oh. My. God. I know we aren’t like, real family or anything, but I think even a complete stranger would let me—”
“You can’t close your eyes and sleep on my couch because you might have a concussion, Nicole. And I should really take you to the hospital.”
“I’m broke,” I said. “I can’t afford to go to the hospital.”
Jake wasn’t having it. “Yes you can. You’re only twenty-two. You’re still on mom and dad’s insurance.”
“There’s still a deductible,” I argued. “And the only money I’ve got is the tips I earned tonight before my boyfriend decided to beat me up.”
“I’ll pay the goddamned bill,” Jake said, insistently. He earned an income from the garage where he worked fixing cars and probably still got paid for inactive duty. But he wasn’t rolling in cash, and I knew he was saving up and putting himself through college—something my mom always bragged about by way of encouraging me to do something with my life.
“Look, I know I don’t have a concussion,” I said.
“How do you know? Based on what? I’ve seen a lot of brain injuries in the sandbox and in the boxing ring. I know the symptoms. Do you?”
Damn him.
“No,” I admitted, with a yawn. “But if you know the symptoms, why don’t you tell me what they are?”
“Tiredness, for one.”
“It’s three in the morning.” I looked at the clock on his wall and groaned. “Four, now. I think it’s pretty normal to be tired in the middle of the night.”
“Okay, smart-ass,” he said, reaching for me.
Reflexively, I jolted away in fear. And Jake’s face fell, as if just realizing how badly I’d been traumatized.
I guess I was just realizing it too.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said, his tone changing. Softening. Everything about him seeming to come a little unravelled. “I’m not going to hurt you, Nicky. I just need to look into your eyes to see if one of your pupils is dilated more than the other.”
I nodded, feeling sheepish, letting him draw closer. He slipped his hand into my hair and gently tipped my head back. And for a moment, I remembered our first kiss all those years ago. The way it made me feel both excited and safe at the same time.
“Do you feel dizzy?” he asked.
Well, I hadn’t until that moment. But now that he mentioned it… God, he was good looking. Not just the deep, dark, intense brown eyes. But also the bare, toned, muscular chest. Any woman would be attracted to him. And I would have been, too, if my lady parts were working right. But the fact that this good looking, half-undressed man was looking so deeply into my eyes because another guy punched me was a mood killer for sure.
“I’m ok, really,” I said.
Jake stared down at me, intently. “Well, your pupils seem fine. I’d really feel better if you’d let me take you to the hospital to get checked out, but if you won’t go, at least let me take you home to mom and dad’s.”
“You mean my mom’s. Your dad’s.”
His eye twitched in annoyance. “You know what I mean.”
“You already have a mother,” I said, realizing that I sounded kind of like a brat. But it’d always seemed so fake the way he just latched onto my mother. “Why do you call my mom that?”
“Because she asked me to,” he said, a hint of annoyance returning. “Renee has always been really nice to me, even before she married my dad. So if it makes her happy to be called mom, why wouldn’t I?”
Because it makes us sound like we’re brother and sister, I thought. And we’re not. Because it made things weird between us. Because…because my mom was the only blood relation I had, and deep down maybe I didn’t want to share
her. But all of that sounded petty so I just said, “I really can’t go home tonight. I can’t deal with the questions and everything else. I swear, if you just let me stay here until morning, I’ll curl up in a corner of your couch and you won’t even know that I’m here.”
“You’re not sleeping on my couch.” Jake gave a shake of his head, forcing me to look him in the eye. “I’ve got a rule, you know. Any girl who stays in my house, ends up in my bed.”
~~~
I awakened to the scent of coffee bacon—the two best scents in the world. Turning over on Jake’s pillow, in a tee-shirt and a pair of my stepbrother’s plaid pajama bottoms, I inhaled a little unsteadily, then blinked against the sun.
Oh, wow. How late had I slept?
Wrapping up in my stepbrother’s blue and silver comforter, I trailed out of the bedroom into the living room, expecting him to be long gone. Jake had been a perfect gentleman, insisting that I sleep in his bed while he slept on the couch. But he’d warned me that he’d have to be at work first thing, and said that I could just let myself out.
But if the clock was to believed, it was already eleven and there he was in jeans and an undershirt, his back to me as he cracked eggs into a frying pan.
Hearing me shuffle in, he glanced over his shoulder. “Hey.”
I must’ve been feeling better, because God. At the sight of Jake’s tight ass in those low slung jeans, my lady parts fired on all cylinders. Did he have to be so hot? “W-what are you doing here?”
“I live here,” he said, but then, before I could feel too stupid, he added, “I called in sick to work.”
I nearly gasped. Jake never even skipped a day of high school, much less a day of work. “…are you sick?” I asked, because I couldn’t imagine any possibility where someone as upright and uptight as my stepbrother would ever call in sick under false pretenses. Even if it was just at the garage.