Chapter Seventeen

Rio

What the fuck had I just agreed to? I looked over at the kid. He was supposed to be watching the movie, but his gaze locked with mine. He knew he’d been caught listening, and his eyes went wide before he swung his attention back to the television.

How many times had people come knocking on our trailer door, demanding money from my mother that she didn’t have? How many times had I hidden in my room, under my bed, in my closet, while she paid them back with sex acts that I could hear? How many times had she left with them and not come home for days? How many fucking times had Tory done this to her son?

I turned my attention back to Bryn. “I’ll stay just to be sure no one comes tonight. Then, tomorrow, I will handle things. I know who she was tied up with, and most of them were arrested. They won’t stay locked up forever, but when they are free, Tory should be, too, and she can clean up her mess.”

Bryn massaged her temples, then sighed before finally looking at me. “Whatever n-n-needs to be done to-to-to keep Cullen s-safe,” she said.

She hadn’t said anything about herself. She hadn’t said us . Just Cullen. Henley was right about one thing; I seriously doubted Bryn was using drugs too. She didn’t act like someone using.

“That’s settled then,” Henley said. “I will call tomorrow and see what I can do to help out. Just let me know when you go back to work.” She turned and walked to the door then.

“I’m walking you to the car,” I said. There was no way I was letting her walk out there alone, coming from this apartment.

She didn’t argue, and I was relieved. Cullen was still listening to us. The tilt of his head said as much. The less he knew about the world his mother lived in, the better his life would be. I didn’t know how much Bryn had managed to shelter him from, but from what I could tell, she had done everything but take him away from his mother. Which, in my opinion, was what she should have done a long time ago.

“Lock the door behind me. I’ll knock when I’m back,” I told Bryn, not looking back at her.

The walk out to the car and the few moments away from her would give me time to think. Being in there and watching her had my head messed up. My concern was for the boy. Bryn could take care of herself. She had been doing so for a long time.

When we were far enough away from the apartment, Henley looked back at me. “She’s not what you think she is. She might have lived some awful life, growing up, that you think I wouldn’t understand, but it made her strong. She’s tough. She’s resilient. She doesn’t fall apart when things get bad. She does what she has to for those she loves. She is protective and nurturing to Cullen. He is well taken care of. Whatever you think her life did to her, you’re wrong. That woman is not a drug user. I just hope you see it before you do too much damage to undo it.”

Sighing, I looked down at her. “What damage am I doing? I’m staying, aren’t I? Keeping them safe,” I reminded her.

We reached the car, and Henley turned to me. She pointed a finger at my chest and glared up at me. “The kind of damage that ruins any chance you might have at getting to know her again. She’s under your skin, and I think she has been since you were kids. You can’t shake it, and you ignore it. But I see the way you look at her. Under all that fake crap, there is something there, and you hate it. Well, you’re gonna hate it more if you lose it.”

Henley had no idea what she was talking about. I didn’t trust Bryn, but I wasn’t going to tell my sister I suspected she had tracked me down and was probably desperate.

“Text me when you’re back at the house,” I told her. “So I know you made it safely.”

She smiled and climbed inside the car. I waited until she pulled out of the parking lot to turn and head back to the apartment.

Henley was wrong. There was a past with Bryn and me. When I looked at her, memories of the girl she had been came back, and I couldn’t help that. It was hard to keep this Bryn and the girl she had once been separate. We had just been kids, but Bryn had been special.

Henley was reading things into the memories that haunted me and nothing more. Well, except the attraction, but I was a man, and Bryn was impossible to overlook. Her face, hair, body, the way her top lip was slightly bigger than her bottom, smooth and tan skin that appeared too perfect. Yeah, I fucking looked at her, but it was lust that Henley saw in my gaze. Nothing more.

I knocked on the door and noticed the curtain covering the window move. I was glad she was being careful. For the kid’s sake at least. From the way things looked, Bryn was all he had in this world. He clung to her as if he understood that. Where the fuck was his dad?

Bryn opened the door, paused, and studied me a moment. I thought perhaps she was going to tell me she didn’t need me to stay now that Henley wasn’t here to demand it. If that had been on her mind, she pushed it aside and moved back so that I could come in.

I was glad she’d made it easy because her telling me to leave wouldn’t have done any good. We would have just ended up fighting, and I would have won.

She glanced back at the sofa, and I followed her gaze. Cullen had fallen asleep and was now slumped over.

“I need to get him in bed. The kitchen is right through there. Make yourself at home,” she said without once stuttering, then walked over to the sofa. She moved the blanket off Cullen, then went to pick him up.

“Do you want me to do that?” I asked her.

She shook her head and scooped him into her arms, then headed for the hallway. I waited until they disappeared into a bedroom before heading toward the kitchen. I noticed the chocolate chip cookies that sat on a cake plate by the stove. I wondered if that was something Bryn had made with Cullen.

There were drawings and artwork covering the front of the fridge door. The drawings all had the sky, sun, grass, and stick people. All but one of them only had two people in them. The drawing that was on the very top had three. It was clear that it was Cullen, Bryn, and Tory. A much smaller figure stood between two others, and they were all holding hands.

I looked down at the next drawing and studied it. The much shorter figure was holding an ice cream cone in his hand. The taller one was smiling beside him. The brown hair told me who it was, and as I studied the other drawings, the taller figure was always the same. Bryn. Never his mother, who he would have given blonde hair. Although both sisters were blondes, Bryn’s was a darker blonde, almost a golden brown. Tory was a paler blonde.

“I have to rotate the artwork every other week. Cullen loves to draw, and there isn’t enough room on the fridge for all of it. I started putting the ones I take down in a scrapbook for memories. Years from now, we can go back and look at how his drawing evolved and changed through the pages.”

I glanced back at Bryn, who wasn’t looking at me, but at Cullen’s art, smiling.

“That sounds like a lot of work,” I replied. Unable to admit I was impressed with her dedication to making sure Cullen had memories from his childhood. Neither she nor I had that, and neither of us wanted to remember that time either.

She shrugged, then walked past me toward the sink. “Not really. He takes the time to create them. I can take the time to display them and keep them.”

I stood, watching her as she filled a glass with water. It was things like this that didn’t fit into the Bryn I knew now. The crazy one who’d beaten the hell out of my truck. The one who served drinks, topless.

She took a drink, her gaze now locked on me. “You know, Rio, the image in your head you have of me is wrong. I think deep down, you already know that,” she said without stammering over her words once.

She hadn’t stuttered since I’d walked back in the apartment. Her control of it was impressive. It wasn’t something I had witnessed until now.

She continued to study me, and I wasn’t going to defend myself by pointing out why I had the image in my head of her that I did. This was her apartment, and I was here because I wanted the kid to be safe. Tomorrow, I would leave and handle things to make sure there wouldn’t be any more of these nights.

“When did your stutter begin to fade?” I asked her, changing the subject.

“It didn’t fade. I learned some techniques to help control it,” she replied, taking another drink of water.

“I think this is the first time I’ve heard you speak without one at all,” I said.

She shrugged. “That’s because you make it hard for me, and then speaking becomes difficult.”

“How?” I asked her.

She raised an eyebrow and set her glass down on the counter. “By being a complete ass,” she replied, then gave me a smile that didn’t meet her eyes before walking past me and leaving the kitchen.

I listened to her footsteps as she walked away and back down the hallway. There had been no response to that anyway. I was glad she had left. Talking about things with her would lead nowhere good. We just had to get through tonight.

Opening the fridge, I found a small bottle of apple juice and took it.

“First bedroom on the right is yours for the night. If you need a shower, the bathroom is the very next door down. Towels are under the sink,” Bryn told me, and I turned to see her standing in the doorway again. “Eat some of those cookies. Cullen wanted to make them, and we will never eat them all,” she added. Then, once again, she walked away, leaving me there, alone in her kitchen.