“Since you’ve seen so many of those,” I said, squeezing a gob of coconut scented goop into my palm.
“I consider myself an expert on that particular genre of movie,” she teased, letting her head fall back to get her hair wet. Another bright burst of red floated toward the drain.
“Em? Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re kind of freaking me out,” I said, focusing on lathering the shampoo in my hands. “I don’t know whether to be relieved you’re smiling and laughing and making jokes an hour after you were beat within an inch of your life or to be seriously concerned.”
Her laughter died, but her smile stayed securely in place. “Contrary to what you might think due to recent events,” she explained with a sweeping gaze down her body, “today has been the hands down best day of my life.”
Staring at her broken face, I wanted to cry just then, so I stepped around her so I wouldn’t have to look at what the best day of her life had done to her.
“I’m going to need a serious explanation for that,” I said, clearing my throat. “Like a detailed outline, followed by a thesis the size of the San Francisco Bay area phone book.” I gathered her hair on top of her head and began sudsing away. The shampoo froth almost immediately took on a pinkish hue.
“For the first time in six years, actually, for the first time since I met him,” Emma began, trying to look over her shoulder at me. She didn’t make it very far before her jaw clenched in pain. “I stood up to Ty. I gave him a piece of my mind with no buffers or filters. I got in his face and made sure he heard me. For the very first time,” she said.
“That worked out magically for you,” I said under my breath, rinsing away part of the outcome of her standing up to him.
“It could have been worse,” she said with a barely there shrug. “I never really imagined my life winding down into old age and a gentle passing into the hereafter. I, somewhere deep in the places I didn’t want to acknowledge, but recognized them just the same, expected I’d pass from this life into the next at the end of a fist.”
The shampoo bottle I was gripping in my hand burst open. I hadn’t realized I’d been squeezing it to death.
“How long has this been going on?” I asked, needing to know, and she’d opened the door to getting all the dark flushed out early.
“The first year he was so good to me, too good to be true,” she said. “And two days after our one year anniversary, I found out too good to be true was exactly that. I remember each beating, each fit of rage, most ignited because I’d been talking to another guy, some just because he didn’t like what I was wearing or a certain look I gave him. After awhile, he didn’t need an excuse. This past year I expected the backside of his hand just as readily as a hug.”
It was like putting an open flame to my flesh, but I had to keep going. I had to know everything because I had to know all of her. “Why didn’t you just leave him?”
Her head swayed side to side. “For a bunch of reasons that seem really trivial now that he’s finally out of my life,” she said. “Ty was all I knew, the only guy I’d ever dated, ever loved, ever imagined my life with. I clung to the hope that he’d change back into the man he was the first year we were together. I believed so little in myself that no one else would ever want me, and I was messed up enough in the head to believe that anyone was better than no one.” She paused, taking in a few breaths. I’d been massaging the same area of her head for I don’t know how long.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I whispered, because that’s all I was capable of. I felt as broken on the inside as she was on the outside.
“I was ashamed. And embarrassed,” she answered.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You would have been the last person I would have told,” she said, and before I could launch into a
why the heck not?
, she cut me off. “Because when you looked at me, you saw this person I’d always wanted to become. You saw the me I would have become if I hadn’t let others and myself screw up my life.” She sighed, leaning into me. “I loved the way you looked at me, and I had this fear that if I told you I was one of those women who found themselves trapped in an abusive relationship, you’d never look at me the same way again. You’d never even look at me again.” Her voice, for the first time since entering the shower, sounded sad.
Coming around in front of her, I tilted her chin up, waiting for her eyes to find mine. They finally did.
“Am I looking at you any differently right now?”
She studied me, all the way into the dark and cobwebbed places of my soul, and then she smiled. A fresh bead of blood broke through the split on her lower lip. “No.”
“That’s right,” I said, polishing the blood away from her lip. “And to save you the suspense, there’s nothing you can reveal to me about your past or do in your future that will change the way I look at you. I flippin’ worship you, Emma Scarlett. And that’s never, ever, in a million billion years going to change. Promise,” I added, because this, too, was a promise I could keep with unfailing certainty.
The thing about the kind of love I had for Emma was that it was as unequivocal as it was permanent. That’s the way love, in its pure, undiluted form was—it accepted a person’s bad with their good, their failures with their successes, their past with a boyfriend that beat the shit out of them with their future with a man who would love the shit out of them.
“I know that now,” she said, pressing her lips into mine. “Sorry I didn’t realize it sooner.”
I wanted to kiss her again, so damn badly I was tempted to turn the shower as cold as it would go, so I thought of something else that might work instead. “Your brothers never suspected anything?”
It worked. The mere mention of Emma’s four brothers extinguished the fires.
“Of course not,” she said. “If they did, do you think they would have hesitated to take that baseball bat to him sooner?” We both knew the answer to that. “No, Ty was careful. He made sure the bruises formed in spots that were easy to cover, and he never raised a hand to me when anyone was around. But lately, he started getting sloppy, less careful.”
How many of those less “thoughtfully” placed bruises had I witnessed this month and taken her word that vicious volleyballs were to blame? I was a fool.
“Because of me,” I provided, stepping behind her and rinsing her hair for the third time. The water was almost running clear.
She didn’t provide an answer to that; she didn’t need to. We both knew the truth.
“God, Emma. I’m sorry,” I said, my arms going limp at my sides. “If I’d have known this was going on, I wouldn’t have been my persistent self and made things worse for you.” I had to lean into the tile wall for support.
“And then I would have killed him,” I added.
She chuckled a nervous little one. I didn’t.
“You want to hear the last point in the best day of my life outline?” she asked, turning to face me, the water beating in the space separating us.
She waited for an answer, but I couldn’t come up with one. I didn’t want to hear any more as much as I did.
Refusing to wait any longer, she touched her forehead to mine. I could feel the heat of the gash above her eyebrow against my skin.
“You,” she said.
My head felt heavy against hers. I did not deserve to be a proof in her reasoning for a best day.
“Yes,” she argued with my silent response. “You are everything I always wanted, but never believed I deserved. I still didn’t believe it up to a few hours ago, but I suppose you could say you made me see the light.”
I was still wordless, it was happening a lot lately, so I wrapped my arms around her battered, bruised, perfect body and gripped her to me like I could suck all the pain out of her.
“For someone like you, who could have their pick of any woman on the seven continents, to pick me . . .”—her chest heaved heavy against mine—“well, that must mean I’m something special, right? Even if I don’t see it quite yet.”
I saw the beauty then. I was able to look past the pain framing the moment and get to the core of the moment. I wouldn’t forget tonight for several reasons, but the one that would shine above the others was this one right here. The woman I loved resting in my arms, acknowledging she was more than what she’d always believed she was.
“You’re the most something special I’ve ever come across,” I said into her hair, clutching her tighter. If I never let her go, I could always keep her safe. That was the only thing I wanted to do right then.
Never let her go. Protect her. And love her above all.
“Hey, guys.” A trio of knocks thumped outside the bathroom door. Julia sounded just as frazzled as before. “My dad’s here now. No rush, though.”
“We’ll be right there,” Emma answered against my shoulder, not moving an inch.
I pressed a kiss into the bruise exploding over her forehead. “Time to get you to a doc,” I said, shutting off the water and reaching for the bundle of towels piled on the bench. I bundled Emma’s hair into a leaning tower beehive and cinched the other towel around the rest of her before lifting her into my arms.
“I’m good to walk now,” she said, looping an arm around my neck. “That shower and the pills made me a new woman.”
“I know,” I answered, unlocking the door and stepping through it. “But I’m not ready to let you go.”
“Good enough reason for me.”
She made a pillow of my chest as I sloshed down the hall, my hair, suit, and the rest of me so drenched I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be dry again. It was one of the proudest walks I’d made.
The door was waiting open for us, and inside I found a silvering man the polar opposite to Julia. He wasn’t a Dr. Jekyll at all, but like the small town docs that used to make middle of the night home visits when I was growing up in the South. He even had the old school black leather bag William and Joseph still carried around with them.
“My god,” he said like a curse when his eyes floated to Emma. “What happened to you, child?”
“My ex,” she replied as I situated her on her bed.
His hands glided down her arms, drawing an imaginary line between the bruises. Then he looked at her face and his face twisted. “Did he come at you with a hammer?” he asked, swearing under his breath. There was the first indication he and Julia shared the same DNA.
“You should have gone to the emergency room right away, Emma,” he said, scolding her in that non-threatening, affectionate way a father does. “And I’m presuming you’ve called the authorities to get the monster behind bars?”
Doc Grey and I were going to get along just fine.
“Not yet,” Emma answered, focusing on the ceiling.
“Why, pardon my French, the hell not?” He was already reaching for the phone in his pocket, about to do what Emma couldn’t right now, and I wouldn’t because she’d begged me not to.
“I will,” she said, closing her eyes. “I promise I will, just not quite yet.”
“Not quite yet?” Doc Grey repeated, his face formed in disbelief. “Emma, your body was beaten as close to death as a body can be before giving over to it. This isn’t something you wait to report a week later.”
Her head moved against the pillow. “I’ll report it tonight, I swear. I just can’t handle more than one thing at a time right now. Let me get through this,”—her eyes pointed at his opened bag—“and I’ll call them after. I don’t want to go into an interrogation room bleeding and gaping open in spots. I don’t want to be pitied.”
Her eyes fogged over, travelling back in time to a certain night when she’d lost both her parents in different ways. “Fix me up, patch what needs to be patched, so I can go in there with my head held high.”
“Child,” Doctor Grey said, patting her hand, “you came through that door with your head high.” He didn’t push calling the men in blue right then after that, he just began riffling through his bag in silence.
“Julia, my dear?” Doctor Grey said into his bag. “I think you are in serious need of some fresh air.”
That, and a new pair of nails, judging from where she’d gnawed them down to. Poor Julia, this night had really taken it out of her. The hollows beneath her eyes were blacker than usual and her eyes scampered around more neurotically than normal. She was doing justice to her goth heritage right now.
“Young man,” he said, glancing at me once.
“Hayward,” I provided, extending my hand. “Patrick Hayward.”
Doctor Grey set a roll of bandages on Emma’s bed to shake my hand. “Am I to assume you are the new man in Emma’s life who would never so much as raise your voice to her?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered.
Putting two fingers to Emma’s pulse, he nodded once. “You don’t need to be here for this,” he said, his fingers moving just outside the largest gash gaping over Emma’s cheekbone. “Would you mind escorting my daughter outside and watching after her? It seems Stanford is not the safe haven I was foolish enough to think it was.”
That was an impossible question to answer without offending someone. Why would I want to leave with Julia when Emma was here? Wherever Emma’s
here
was was where I belonged.
“Go ahead,” Emma said, interrupting my thoughts. “You can grab some dry clothes out of Austin and Dallas’s room on the first floor on your way out.” She wove her fingers through mine then, squeezing them, seeing I was not in the mood to go anywhere. “I’m in good hands. Trust me.”
And there were those words. I did trust her, but I didn’t want to if it meant leaving her. Trust was a complicated thing that could really screw with your head. In the end, though, I decided to follow through on trusting her.
“All right,” I relented, looking at the doc. “Call me if you need anything. Anything. And call me the instant you’re done if we’re not back before.”
“It’s a few stitches and a handful of bandages, son,” Doctor Grey said, meaning to assure me, but it did the opposite. “It’s not open heart surgery.”