Authors: Lauren Gilley
She was on her feet, breath held, palm braced against the table when the door opened. Mike came in first, face red from the cold, and then Tam filled her field of vision and everything else faded into the periphery.
His hair was a windblown mess, his cheeks flushed. His expression was something haunted she didn’t understand, but he was whole, and looked unhurt, and she dove into the hug he offered with outstretched arms.
He squeezed her hard, one hand tangling in her hair, pressing her cheek against the slick, cold front of his leather jacket.
“You’re alright?” she asked.
He kissed the top of her head. “Better now.”
She tilted her chin up to search out his face, and instead found Jordan’s over Tam’s shoulder.
“Oh, God, Jordie!”
The right side of his face was shiny with dark, drying blood. His jacket was ripped at the place where his sleeve joined the body. A hundred short, jagged scrapes stood out black beneath the blood on his cheek.
“It looks worse than it is,” he said as she pulled away from Tam and went to him.
“Have you seen it?” She hovered a hand above his damaged skin. “’Cause it looks terrible!” Her relief was fast being elbowed aside by a fresh wave of panic. “What in the hell happened, you guys?”
**
Without her summer suntan, Jo’s skin was delicate fine china. The blue was just a shadow, an echo of an impact coming up down her ribs, against her hip, creeping along the front of her rounded stomach. It would be darker in the days to come, but the first signs of bruising were enough to send a tremor up Tam’s arm as he reached to trace a thumb across the ridge of her hip bone.
“I’ve had worse playing football,” she said, and dropped her shirttail. It was one of his old shirts that she’d been sleeping in, and it fell down to mid-thigh, catching around his wrist where he still touched her.
He passed his thumb along the satin waistband of her panties and stared at the little bit of bruise he could still see like he might be able to will it away. He swallowed for what felt like the millionth time that night. “Are you sure you don’t need to go get checked out?”
“I can go to the doctor tomorrow if it’ll make you feel better. But I’m not going to the ER over a couple bumps.”
He glanced up to her face – she’d washed away the faint mascara streaks that she’d been wearing right after the attack – and thought she didn’t look as brave as she was pretending to be. “It wasn’t just a couple bumps.”
She exhaled in a loud, shaky rush. “I know.” His hand fell away as she sat down beside him on the edge of her bed, close so their thighs touched and her shoulder brushed his. One of her tiny hands reached up and she threaded her fingers through the hair above his ear. “I know,” Jo repeated. “But - ” Her voice became careful, gentle. “We don’t have to worry about that anymore.”
Tam studied his hands, the ragged, chewed nails and rough, dry patches along his knuckles.
“Tam,” Jo said, again gently. “I can’t…I can’t even
imagine
what’s going on in your head right now - ”
“Good. You don’t want to.”
There was another deep breath from her. “But, sorry if this sounds morbid, isn’t it a…a good thing? It’s not like I wished this would happen but he - ”
He glanced at her, her hair a messy tangle around her shoulders, her blue-green eyes big and searching.
“He brought this on himself, baby,” she said. “He made bad decisions. If it wasn’t tonight, it would have been sometime, in some other painful way.”
In some ways, he admired how pure her thoughts of him were. “You think I’m upset he’s dead?” he asked evenly. “I’m upset Jordie could have been dead. I’m upset I didn’t get to kill the bastard myself.”
Her head tilted. “Tam.”
“A
car
, Joey. Everything he did to my mother and a random
car
hits him. Tell me where the hell the justice is in that. I can’t do shit right. I have no money, no house…I have
nothing
to give you, and I can’t even keep you safe. I need a goddamn Toyota to do that for me.”
He didn’t realize his voice had risen to a near shout until he felt her hand against the side of his face. “Sweetie,” she said, and the muscles in her throat worked when she swallowed. “Be glad for the ‘goddamn Toyota.’ You don’t want a murder on your already guilty conscience.”
He opened his mouth to retort, but no sound came out.
“You don’t ever have to worry about him again,” Jo continued as if she were talking to a child. “And you don’t have to live with the burden of what happened to him.”
“Jordie was
right there
.” He had a knot in his throat that wouldn’t go away. “He could have - ”
“But he didn’t.”
“I was afraid this would happen. I was afraid you’d get hurt and - ”
“Baby.” She got up on her knees beside him on the bed. Her thumb swept across his cheek and stopped at the corner of his mouth. She leaned in close until her big, sparkling eyes were all he could see. “Please,
please
, stop talking.”
When she kissed him, he wanted to push her away; he had this violent, frightening urge to shake her and scream at her and make her understand the kind of snarls his brain was in, the way guilt had a hundred faces that were all mocking him. But instead he kissed her back. She tasted like her Colgate whitening toothpaste; her lips were soft with Chapstick.
For all the reasons she shouldn’t love him, he had never been more glad that none of them mattered to her as he pulled her up into his lap and threaded his fingers through the heavy hair at the nape of her neck. She leaned into him and he could feel the soft swells of her breasts, the tight roundness of her belly.
She was his, and under the pattern of bruises along her side, despite Hank’s best efforts, she was, in fact,
fine
. Tam didn’t know if the guilt would ever recede, but maybe it was okay to slide his hands up under his wife’s shirt and bask in the knowledge that never again would his father put his family in danger.
36
H
e’d killed a man.
Not directly. Not intentionally. But chasing Hank Wales down the street had resulted in death, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that. For two nights Jordan tossed his way through nightmares full of headlights and sick thumping sounds. By the third night, staring at his dated popcorn ceiling, the sheets tangled around his waist, the right side of his face stiff as the oozing scrapes began to scab, he realized it wasn’t the sight of Hank Wales with his neck bent back at a wrong angle that was keeping him up. Because even though his mom had picked the gravel out of his cheek and James had assured them that no one at the PD would be investigating Hank’s death further, even though his job was safe and his runners were talking about getting him Christmas presents, the week was sorely lacking something in particular.
He wanted Ellie to touch her fingertips to his face and say, “Oh, Jordan,” with eyes full of worry. When he couldn’t sleep, he wanted to roll over and slide an arm around her little waist, to feel her stir against him when he kissed the back of her neck. He wanted to hear her voice, wanted to argue semantics with her over the dinner she’d made and watch her gray eyes dance and go silver in the kitchen light.
He missed her, and the guilt for what he’d said to her on the street in front of her parents’ house was more consuming than the guilt of chasing a man to his death.
Jordan climbed out of bed at ten after two a.m. and pulled a t-shirt on over his boxers. Barefoot, he found his way down the dark staircase by memory and when he rounded the post at the bottom, he saw a light on in the kitchen.
Tam was at the breakfast bar in a white tank top and sweatpants, his hair sticking up at crazy angles. He had a deck of cards and was playing solitaire by the dim, flickering light of the fluorescent tube above the cooktop, a can of Coors Light at his elbow.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Jordan announced, and Tam nodded toward the fridge.
He grabbed a beer and pulled a stool around to the opposite side of the bar, fell onto it more than sat because even if he was restless, his body was exhausted from the extra miles he’d forced into his daily runs and workouts with his guys. He popped the tab on his beer and sucked the drops off his fingers afterward. “Didn’t really take you for a solitaire guy.”
Tam shrugged and laid the next three cards in his hand down on the pile. “Can’t exactly play Texas Hold ‘Em by myself.”
“True.”
“Very true.”
The light over the stove was the cruel, white-washed stuff of morgues and horror movies; it outlined the shadow of each invisible little stress line on Tam’s face and made him look a decade older, tired and weighed down. “How’re you doing?” Jordan asked and took a sip of his beer. It was too cold and too fizzy and not really what he wanted. The heartburn was almost instant.
Tam snorted and put up a ten of hearts. “I’m playing cards in the middle of the night.” Translation:
does that look good to you?
“Right.”
“What about you?” He darted a fast glance across the bar and then returned to his game, eyes a quick flash of blue. “How’s the face?”
Jordan shrugged. “It itches.”
Tam took a long, slow, deep breath and let it back out again. Jordan swore he could hear an apology in it, Tam’s not-so-well-suppressed fretful nature saying
sorry, Jordie
for the hundredth time.
“I think you might be a chick,” Jordan said, and earned a sharp look for it, which was good. Sharp was better than mopey. “I think I’d be spiking the ball if I thought I’d finally gotten that asshole.”
Tam looked like he wanted to smile, but one corner of his mouth could only twitch. “I didn’t ‘get’ him,” he corrected, sorting through cards still. “I let my guard down. Let Jo get…” He still had trouble saying it. “And then I let you throw yourself in front of a car for me. All I did was put too many people at risk.”
Jordan sighed. “Did you tell me to chase after him?”
He frowned.
“No. That was me.”
Because we grew up together and you should know you don’t have to ask me for things like that
. “And Jo put herself at risk because she kept quiet about him following her.”
“Why would she do that?” His hands stilled, a three of clubs between thumb and forefinger that were going white with the strain of pressing them together. “Why in the hell would she think she could just
handle
him on her own?”
“Because…” She hadn’t told him for the same reason Ellie hadn’t told him about the gothic horror of her family, nor about her medical standing. His stomach doubled over on itself. “Because she didn’t want to get you upset.”
Tam sighed, shoulders drooping, and he slapped the three down in its place. “She frustrates the hell out of me sometimes.”
“No she doesn’t.”
“No, she doesn’t,” he agreed. Something that looked almost like a smile skittered across his face. “Sometimes I don’t understand how she can care the way she does, you know?” The curious look that lifted up through his lashes was proof that certain childhood wounds never healed completely. The two people in Tam’s world who should have loved him the most had failed him epically, and he still wrestled with the thought that Jo loved him the way she did.