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~Dixon~
I DROPPED MY HANDS to my side, no longer holding onto Cora’s tempting body. But Cora still traced that damn scar. The tingling touch was just as electrifying as it always was, but it left me uncomfortable.
And not for some unknown reason. I knew damn well why I was pulling back. Not just physically but from that emotional connection, that passionate response to being with Cora. It was always lurking there, ready to jump out and fuck up my life. As if it hadn’t done a good enough job when I was a kid.
“Dixon?” Cora whispered.
Her soft tone was full of questions. Questions I’d spent my life avoiding.
“Dixon...you don’t have to tell me. But, you know, I can tell it’s eating you up. I know. I had the same look in my eye after my mother...was killed. I mean, she was in a coma for a long time after the assault. There wasn’t anything we could do. The nurses couldn’t do anything. The doctors couldn’t do anything. Everyone was helpless. And when all you have is helpless, sometimes it turns into anger. Or fear.” She moved herself off me and sat on the edge of the bed.
Cora looked down for a moment, and then her eyes focused on me again. “For about a month after my mother was attacked, I couldn’t sleep by myself. I was afraid all the time, afraid if I was alone that someone would break in and hurt me. I stayed with Wendy, and the only reason I got through that was because she’d sit with me every night, until two or three in the morning, when I couldn’t fight the sleeping pills anymore and I’d finally sleep. She’d let me talk—gibberish, mostly, I think—and cry and scream and yell until I couldn’t anymore.”
She held my hand, and the heat of her touch warmed me, took some of the chill off my heart. When she stroked my hand with her thumb, the little pinpricks of electricity popped.
“I’m glad she was there to help you. I can’t imag—” I took a deep breath. “Actually, I don’t have to imagine what you went through. I know it, too. My mother didn’t just get sick and die. No. It was much, much worse than that.”
Cora inched closer to me, and the silky skin of her leg brushed mine. The gesture spoke of support, care...things I didn’t have any idea how to react to.
“Do you want to tell me?”
I only had one answer to her question: yes. I wanted to tell her. But if I did, it would change everything. I’d be opening myself up, and that was something I never did. Very few got close—Ryan, for example. The biggest exception was Jake, and that was because he was with me and knew it all. Hell, it was worse for him. In the grand scheme of things, I got off easy in comparison.
“Do you really want to know? It’s not...a happy fairy tale. It’s not fun. It’s mean, and cruel, and most important, it’s in the past. It doesn’t have anything to do with you and me.” I closed my eyes, not ready to see compassion—or worse, pity—in her beautiful green eyes.
“I want to know all about you, Dixon.” Cora touched my cheek, and her breath warmed my face when she leaned over. “Not just the good bits, but the terrible, dark, bad, no good stuff that you’ve been through, too. All of it made you who you are right now, and that’s a pretty incredible guy.”
She brushed her lips against mine, and that spark made my heart leap in response. Before I knew it, my hands were tangled in her silky hair, pulling her closer to me as I claimed her mouth. Damn, this woman knew how to make me feel secure and strong at the same time.
“I think you’re pretty incredible too, Cora. And if you want to hear the terrible parts...”
She nodded.
“Okay.” I sat up in the bed, rearranged some pillows, and pulled back the blankets to invite her in. “Snuggle up, buttercup. It’s going to be a long, sad tale.”
Cora snuggled up to my chest, hands on my abs and her torso tucked under my arm. Her fingers roamed over my chest in a slow-moving motion that settled my nerves.
“So, you already know that my mom raised me herself until I was about ten. That’s when she met Jonah, Jake’s dad. I never knew my real dad, and Mom never said much about him. But she fell in love with Jonah and married him a few years after they started dating. While they were dating, everything was fine. Jonah treated me good, and he encouraged Jake to hang out with me...act like a big brother. We had family time with the four of us—camping, bowling, hiking, playing board games.
“After they got married, things started to...change. I was too involved in my own life—I mean, I was a teenager—but sometimes I’d find broken things in the garbage when it was my turn to take it out. Like glasses or picture frames. And my mom started to ‘trip’ over things...at least, that’s what she’d say if someone asked about a bruise or a cut. I never saw Jonah raise a hand to her, but it became clear even to me that something was going on.
“Then, one day, Jake and I came home from school. Mom was on the couch. She’d been crying, we could tell. She told us she had cancer. Mom tried to soften the news, but the doctors said the outlook wasn’t good.” My wooden words covered my fifteen-year-old self’s confusion and pain.
Soft hands clasped around mine, grounding me to the moment.
I cleared my throat. “Well, anyway, after that, Jonah’s behavior was more...erratic. Sometimes he’d be all loving with her, but I saw him hit her when he’d be frustrated over something. Small things, like helping her dress. She still tried to hide it, but her body was getting weaker and weaker. She didn’t have the strength to lie like she used to.” I stopped, not sure I wanted to go further. There was still more, but I wasn’t sure how to say the words.
“I’m so sorry, Dixon. I remember you said things changed after you and your mom moved in with Jonah and Jake. No kid should see their parent hurt like that, but when she’s suffering from cancer...” Cora placed a soft kiss on my arm and snuggled back in. “I can’t imagine.”
“Well, it wasn’t long before his frustrations spilled out to Jake and me. Before Jonah met my mom, he’d been ‘frustrated’ with Jake, too. He never told me those first years, but after Mom’s diagnosis and Jonah’s temper flaring up, Jake promised he’d keep his father away from me as much as he could. And he did. He’d always step between us whenever Jonah raised his fist at me. Got a few nasty punches and black eyes from his own dad.” I sucked in a deep breath, still amazed at how Jake had stood up for me, how he’d put himself between his own father and a kid he was no real brother with. God knew what would have happened if he wasn’t there. The few times Jonah cornered me by myself were difficult to think about.
The times Jake took the pain were sometimes harder to deal with. Because I felt like a coward for hiding behind him. He was older than me, but it was his own father hurting him. But he kept on standing there in front of his father, protecting me...and my mother, when he could.
“After my mother died, I was scared...I didn’t know whether Jonah was going to kick me out or send me off to foster care, or what. And even if I stayed there, I was sure he was gonna make every day miserable. The only person who cared about me was Jake. But the first year or so after her death was...tolerable. His frustrations must have settled down when she was gone, even if I was a reminder of her.
“But something happened. I have no real idea what. He started drinking...Jake said he’d been a drinker before he met my mom...and the beatings started up again. Jake was getting ready to leave the house. He was almost twenty and was ready to leave his father behind. But he didn’t want to leave me alone with him. So he stuck it out, just to keep an eye out for me.
“One night, Jonah started yelling at me about my mother. Said she betrayed him. Had treated him like a fool. He came at me with a knife.” I pointed at my left shoulder. “I’m not sure what he was aiming at, but that’s where he got me. I probably needed stitches, but I didn’t want to go to the hospital. Didn’t want people asking questions. Jake bandaged me up as best he could when he got home and saw it. Jake had enough at that point. He packed up his stuff, packed up my stuff. Then he told me we were getting out of there for good.”
Cora looked up at me. “Sounds like Jake came to his senses and got you two out of there. Where did you end up going?”
“Not far, really. We spend that first night in some crappy no-name motel, but the next day, Jake was out looking for apartments. I was still in school, so he didn’t want to leave town...just get me out of that house and away from his dad. He figured he was already working and could support both of us with a small one-bedroom apartment. He’d been saving up, so that was good. I got to stay in school, and he kept his job, and we both stayed as far from Jonah as we could. He never seemed to care that we were gone, although once in a while he’d call Jake when he was drunk and threaten to beat him up for something or other. His drunken ramblings never made much sense to me.”
If I stopped here, it’d be enough for Cora to go through in her mind. After all, the death of a mother and having an abusive stepdad was bad enough. Who needed to pile more on the fire? Apparently, I did. In for a penny, in for a pound, right? Getting all this putrid crap out of my system was freeing, clearing out the nooks and crannies in my busted-up soul. All that new space was filling up with the feeling of Cora in my arms, the scent of her flooding over and calming my soul.
“That...that wasn’t the worst thing.”
Cora stopped her caresses. “Not the worst thing? There’s more? Oh, Dixon.” Her breath whooshed over my chest.
“Yeah, there’s more. I had to go back to Jonah’s for some paperwork I needed to apply for a job. I needed my Social Security card, and it was with some things of my mother’s. When we first left, it wasn’t high on the priority list. But I eventually needed it, and I knew she’d kept it in her nightstand. So I went back there during the day when Jonah’d be working.
“I found it easy enough, right where it was supposed to be. But I also found a journal...my mother’s journal. I probably shouldn’t have, but I read it. I wanted to see her handwriting...imagine her voice as I read her words. Now...now I almost wish I’d never seen it, because what she wrote, I did hear in my head in her voice.” My voice cracked as my heart sped up at the mere memory.
“She wrote about how she was feeling, how the cancer was stealing her away from her boys. She’d loved Jake like her own, always called us ‘her boys’ when she introduced us to people.” I smiled, thinking about how proud she was of both of us. “But there were things she wrote about Jonah that weren’t so nice. I found out how much he’d done to her, and for how long. It broke my heart to realize how much she’d protected me from...” I got caught up in the memory of those words, and hot tears threatened to spill. Gravity won, and several tears dripped down my cheek.
I sniffed, trying to keep going without stopping now. This would be the hardest part. The part I never talked about. “Anyway, that wasn’t the only thing she put in that journal. She—she talked about how Jonah seemed to change over their marriage, not just with being abusive but...how secretive he’d be about things. He’d hide things in this little spot in the attic. She caught him once up there, looking at some necklace. It wasn’t hers, and he told her it wasn’t any of her business and not to tell anyone about it. Right after that, she seemed to go downhill real quick, and there weren’t many more entries in the journal.
“But it was the last one that freaked me out. She wrote that she’d confronted him about the necklace after she went up there again. Not only was there that one necklace, but several of them. He tried to brush it off, telling her she was making things up and her medicine had her all confused. But she wrote that one necklace matched one that a friend of hers had...a friend who had gone missing. She was afraid that Jonah had done something to her.
“Once I read that, I hauled ass out of there. I took my Social Security card, and the journal, and hightailed it back to Jake’s. By the time he got home from work, I’d worked myself into a frenzy. And once he saw the journal, Jake was right there with me. There’d been a string of missing women—not just one of my mom’s friends, but like half a dozen women the police couldn’t account for. Both me and Jake were convinced Jonah had something to do with it, and the journal was, well, not proof...but a damn good start.
“We took it down to the police, and, well, it turned out my mother had been right. Jake and I were right. Jonah was brought in for questioning, and ended up confessing to kidnapping and killing those women. He’d stashed his little ‘mementos’ in a box in the attic, and a few days after my mom found him with them...” I took what felt like my last breath. “He confessed that he killed her, too. It wasn’t enough that she was already dying...he snuffed out any chance she had to pass peacefully, with me and Jake by her side.”
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AFTER TELLING CORA about my childhood and the abuse we’d all suffered under Jonah, I should have felt like hell. Reliving that shit never felt good. Even with a couple of Jack and Cokes in hand. But all I had was lightness. Lightness of soul. Lightness of heart.
Or maybe it was more that by releasing all that pent-up sorrow and fear, I had room for something better. Something like Cora.
“I...I don’t know what to say.” Cora bit her lip, staring deep into my face. “To say that what you went through was awful just seems so...inadequate. So small in comparison to what it really must have been like for you.” She lifted her hand to rest on my jaw. “But I know your mother must have been proud that you and Jake did the right thing by turning that journal over to the police. It would have been so much worse if he’d been able to keep on hurting people.”
“I guess. But still, sometimes I feel guilty that I turned him in. Or that I didn’t find that journal earlier. Maybe there’d be a family or two who wouldn’t have had to go through all that pain if he’d been in jail earlier. If I’d thought to take my Social Security card the night we left, I might have taken that journal then, too. Who knows?” I shrugged, but did my best to keep Cora tight against me.
“But you might not have been ready to look at your mother’s journal right then, anyway. Maybe you would have put it away and not looked at it for a long time. So when you did read it, you might have saved countless women and their families by going to the police right then.” Cora gave me a quick kiss. “There’s no reason to beat yourself up on what-ifs. You’ll drive yourself up a wall like that.” Her fingers intertwined with mine.
That contact, that connection, was like a long-lost memory, fighting its way to be remembered. Fighting to be front and center. It’d been the thing I’d lost when my mother died, when she was ripped from my life. But here it was again: different, but the same. Security. Acceptance. Peace.
And this amazing woman in front of me was working a miracle, bringing my heart back to life, along with ideas of a future...one where I could be happy and loved.
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THE NEXT MORNING, CORA grabbed her laptop out of the purple carrying case.
“Damn. It looks like you could pack an entire office in that thing.” It was professional, but huge.
“Yeah, pretty much.” She pulled out a power cord and a mouse. “But I’ve got a larger laptop, with a big screen, so I need this size bag.” She finished getting set up and powered up the computer. “So, did you have any ideas on what you want to showcase to sell? Did you think of a business name? I assume you have a bank account that we can link up to your online store, right? Do you have any social media sites already where you can start posting?” Cora looked at me.
Each question hit me like a hammer. I hadn’t thought of any of that. Shit. Maybe this was going to be more difficult than I thought. I must have had the look of the Roadrunner after he’d just figured out he’d run out of road and was about to plummet off the cliff.
Cora reached out, caressing my hand. “Nobody ever really thinks about that at first. Don’t freak out.” She patted my hand. “So let’s concentrate on one thing at a time. Do you have any projects we can take pictures of and put up online?”
Immediately, I thought of the vanity table. It was complete; I just hadn’t found the right time to show it to Cora, much less figure out how to give it to her. “Well...yes, I do have one completed project. It’s down at the warehouse...Ryan’s parents are letting me use the space there. I guess we could go down and take some pictures. Would that work?” I shifted in my chair and pulled at my shirt collar.
“That would be great. Let’s work through some more details, and then we can head out.”
Cora’s mega-watt smile settled my nerves.
“Next. Let’s see...how about social media? You post anywhere?”
I shrugged. “Not a big social guy. I’ve got a few accounts.”
She typed a note on her computer. “Okay. You’ll have to get in the habit of posting regularly, but you should use whatever site you like best. You should focus on photos and descriptions of your projects, maybe some ‘works in progress’ posts...that kind of thing.” She paused. “Do you think you want to get all official with a company name, or do you just want to sell under your personal profiles?”
I definitely hadn’t come up with a company name. “Just under my name, I guess. I’m not great with words or coming up with clever stuff like that, so let’s skip that.” I swallowed hard. “Not off to a great start, huh?”
“Nonsense. This is your business, so you get to make your own rules, do what you want. Nobody gets to dictate what works for you. Plenty of small businesses start off pretty informally and do just fine.” Cora smiled reassuringly.
“Let’s go take some shots of that project, and then we can get it up online and start putting your name out there.” Cora shut down her computer and closed it. “And once we start doing that, like I said, you need to keep interest up by posting often. Make sure you take tons of photos while you are working so you’ll have in-progress shots to share with your fans.” She stood and pulled me up with her. “And yes, I am sure you’ll have fans.” She kissed me, lingering as the kiss heated. “You’ve already got one in me.”
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I PULLED UP TO THE warehouse. My palms had started to sweat on the drive over. As I put the truck in park, I took a deep breath through my nose. “So, this first project...well, I had a specific idea in mind. I started thinking about it a day or so after we first met at Jake’s.”
Cora smiled. “Really? I mean, I figured that our trip to the Trunk and you picking up those metal legs was part of a plan, but I didn’t realize you’d just thought of it that recently.” She tilted her head to the side, appraising me. “Wait...do you mean that I was part of what put this idea in your head?” She smiled even wider at the thought.
“Well, yeah. In fact, it’s not just inspired by you...it’s for you.” I looked her straight in the eyes, looking for her reaction.
She leaned over and kissed me, hard. Our tongues met and their dance had me almost forgetting about getting out of the truck. I’d be a happy camper to stay there, wrapped in Cora’s web, for as long as she’d let me.
She pulled back. “Well, I can’t wait to see it.” Cora got out of the truck and was by the warehouse door practically before I had my hand on the door handle.
Her enthusiasm swiped away any uncertainty that lurked in the back of my mind. “All right then, let me show it to you,” I said as I climbed out of my seat and found the keys for the warehouse door. “Just remember—this is my first project. I’ve got a few more ideas percolating, especially after our trip to the Trunk. I’ve got that other set of legs that I need to use...just need to find the right table top—”
“Oooh...a table. That means I need a chair for it, right?” She laughed at my expression. “I probably have a chair already, don’t worry.”
“Actually, I’ve got plans for a chair, too. So don’t go thinking I was going to give you an incomplete present.” I reached for her hand as we walked toward the back of the warehouse, where I had the vanity table set up, just waiting for the right moment to show it to Cora.
Cora slowed her stride. “Oh my. Dixon...” She turned to me. “It’s beautiful! I love it.” She leaned in to give me a kiss. “The black is so deep...and there’s green sparkles in there, too...” She bent over the table, checking out the detail work. “And those legs...it looks so awesome all together.” She turned back to me. “You really have a talent here, Dixon. Everyone is going to be so jealous when I show them the picture of this vanity...I hope you are ready to make some more projects.”
I watched Cora’s expressions, and her tone matched her excitement. I put a finger in my belt loop and rocked back on my heels. “I’m glad you like it. I was a little worried that maybe it wouldn’t be your style, or that maybe you just wouldn’t like it. And like I said, I’ve got a line on a chair that I think will work with it.” I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and scrolled to find the email with the picture of the chair from Jefferson Furniture. “What do you think?”
She came closer, and her clean spring scent filled my head. Damn, I just could not get enough of that aroma.
“That looks perfect. I see how it fits in just right with the lines of the table legs—a complementary contrast.” She held onto my arm, leaning in for another kiss.
One I was ready for. Cora had my body revving with excitement and anticipation. It wasn’t only the way she responded to my touch; it was the way she lit up when we talked, the way she wanted me to succeed...and believed I could.
My chest puffed with pride...and hope. The act of creating something new from discarded, what some would consider worthless, scraps—and the way Cora appreciated it—filled me with the courage to do the same in my life. I’d take the pieces of my past, and forge them into a new life...one where I was worth something...worth Cora’s love.