Rev It Up (35 page)

Girl
power!

“Come in where?” Rock demanded, jumping from the chair. “Here?”

“Yes!” She excitedly hopped from one foot to the other. “He’s staying here. Right here in this hotel!”

***

“Your phone is out of batteries now too, damnit
,
” Michelle cursed from the passenger seat of her Hyundai Elantra, clicking off Jake’s iPhone. She winced and glanced into the back seat to make sure her son hadn’t heard that little slip at the end.

The last few days had seen her vocabulary deteriorate considerably.

Thankfully, Franklin had his headphones on, watching the movie playing on his iPad, his soft cheeks absent their usual rosy glow and his little eyes smudged by dark bruises.

We’ll be home soon,
she silently promised him, reaching back to pat his knee.

He smiled at her so sweetly, lifting the sleeve on his T-shirt to proudly display—for the twentieth time—the press-on tattoo Jake had given him, and her poor, battered heart melted all over the place.

She winked and pointed at the tattoo, giving him a thumbs up like she’d done twenty times before, and he giggled before returning his attention to the movie. His pale face wrinkled when they inched over a speed bump in Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s underground parking garage, causing her to glance at her watch.

It was almost time for another dose of pain medication.

“I’m sure there’s a good reason why she isn’t here,” Jake said from the driver’s seat, pocketing the change the parking attendant handed him before pulling past the gate and taking the ramp up to street level. There was still a cloud of tension hanging between them, but after their come-to-Jesus talk he was no longer giving her the silent treatment.

Which was a good thing.

She had enough to worry about without his whole cold-shoulder act adding to it. And for the first time in a really long time, she began to believe there might be hope for the two of them.

Oh, not that she thought there was any room for a relationship. Because Jake would never forgive her…

Heck, after seeing the look on his face out when she first told him what she’d done, the shock that’d instantly morphed into rage that’d quickly slid into a sickening kind of anguish, she had a hard time forgiving herself for the pain she’d caused him.

But even if there wasn’t room for a relationship, maybe there was room for an understanding.

She would continue to hope so. For her son’s sake.

Jake flicked on the blinker, and they exited onto the packed city streets. A line of yellow taxis waited by the hospital’s main doors, and The Corner Bakery advertised their daily panini special on a chalkboard easel in the middle of the sidewalk—which reminded her that she hadn’t eaten. Jake had come back earlier in the afternoon with a bag of hamburgers after dropping off his motorcycle at her house and picking up her car, but she’d been too busy listening to the nurse and jotting down notes about medication schedules, maintaining stitches, and food restrictions to eat anything.

Now she was starving. And worried.

Worried about Franklin. Worried about Lisa and her brother and…Jake…

“She probably just broke her phone or dropped it in the toilet or something,” he assured her, still talking about the nanny. “I bet when you get home, charge your phone and check your email, you’ll find she sent you something explaining her absence.”

That made sense. Lisa did have a bad habit of going through cell phones. She was always leaving them on the El-train or forgetting them in class…

“Maybe you’re right,” she said, although she couldn’t shake the niggle of unease that teased at the back of her brain. Of course, maybe that was just light-headedness brought on by having gone nearly twenty-four hours without food.

Digging in her purse, she pulled out her emergency granola bar and peeled off the wrapper, eating half the thing in one bite.

“Mmm,” she murmured. Never had nuts, fruit, and rolled oats tasted so good. “I’d offer you some,” she said around the mouthful, “but I’m afraid I might eat your hand should you reach for it.”

He smiled, his green eyes flashing, his dimples deepening in his shadowed cheeks. The expression was so shocking and unexpected given the events of the last day, the granola turned to dust when she tried to swallow it.

Finally managing to choke it down, she decided now was her chance to ask him his intentions.

“What are you going to do, Jake?” The words tumbled from her lips.

“About what?” He turned to frown at her.

“About Franklin.” She held her breath.

He glanced into the rearview mirror. “He can’t hear us?”

“Not with those earphones on. And he won’t take them off for an instant while
Tangled
is playing. He loves the horse.”

He nodded, remaining quiet for too long, then, “I want joint custody,” he blurted.

She nearly threw up.

“But how…but where…I mean…” There were so many questions, and she had so many objections, she didn’t know where to begin. So she just stopped and swallowed the last bits of granola in the hopes that it might actually stay down.

Joint custody?

But then she’d only get to see her son three or four days a week! Just think of all the things she’d miss…

Kinda
like
the
things
Jake
has
missed
over
the
past
three
years?
a little voice whispered.

Oh, dear Lord.

“Boss has offered me a job,” he said, oblivious to the fact that she might be having a nervous breakdown in the passenger seat. “So I’ll be living here in Chicago. And I know how you are about Franklin’s schedule not getting interrupted, but kids are more resilient than you think. I don’t see why us splitting time with him should be a problem.”

And just as quickly as the panic had seized her, it slid away, leaving her with a feeling of numbness. Helpless numbness.

“You know,” she murmured after a while, staring out the window even though she was blind to the traffic whizzing by, “my brother thinks I stick to a routine with Franklin because of our father leaving. He thinks it’s a control issue brought on by a childlike need to ensure nothing bad ever happens to me again. But that’s not true.”

“No?” Jake asked as he inched onto the highway running between the city and Lake Michigan.

“No,” she shook her head, absently watching a dog owner chunk a stick into the water at the edge of Oak Street Beach. A black Labrador retriever raced into the choppy waves after it, and for a moment she wondered how the world kept on turning, how everything kept on moving, when her entire life was spinning out of control.

Joint custody…

“Dad was a douchebag of epic proportions; there’s no question of that,” she admitted distractedly, her mind only half on the conversation. The other half was busy silently screaming. “But Mom was just as bad. Maybe worse. Because even though she stuck around, she was no kind of mother. After my dad left, she decided the best way to bury her sorrow was in a daily bottle of Stoli.”

“Christ,” Jake spat, and she could feel him glance over at her, feel his sympathetic gaze heating her face and somehow that made everything worse. She didn’t want his sympathy. She wanted his understanding. She wanted her
son
. She wanted…so many things that could never be…

“I learned to live in fear of the unexpected. Like the day I came home from school to find the man from next door tearing away my mother’s clothes as she lay passed-out on the living room sofa. I don’t remember much about what happened after I flew at him, mainly because he hit me hard enough to knock me senseless, but sometimes, late at night when I’m just drifting to sleep, I have these brief flashbacks of Frank barreling through the open front door and tackling our neighbor to the ground.”

“Good for Boss.”

“Yeah,” she nodded, remembering very clearly the fury that’d contorted her brother’s young face when he flew through the door. Killing rage. That’s how most people would describe it. “At fifteen, he was already bigger than most full-grown men, and though my recollection of the exact chain of events is sketchy at best,” she absently drew a broken heart in the condensation that’d formed from her breath on the passenger side window, “I
do
remember three things. The neighbor ended up in the hospital. Frank installed triple locks on our front door. And I was never allowed to walk home alone again.”

They drove in silence then, both lost in their own thoughts as the white-capped waves of Lake Michigan rolled onto the beach to their right and the twinkling lights of the skyscrapers cut through the coming dusk to their left. Then Franklin giggled in the backseat—undoubtedly it was a scene with the horse—and Michelle was dragged back into the moment.

“I swore that day, I swore then and there,” she breathed, reliving the fear and uncertainty of that instant when she walked through the front door to see what was being done to her mother, “that if I ever had kids they’d
never
have to live through the kind of childhood I had to live through, an unstable environment created by a drunken mother and exacerbated by an absent father.”

“Shell—”

“Anyway,” she cut him off, still staring out the window, “
that’s
why I’m such a stickler for Franklin’s schedule. Because I never had one as a child. When I walked through my door each day after school, I never knew what I might find.”

“I’m so sorry that happened to you,” he said, and there was genuine regret in his voice.

“I’m sorry it happened to me, too,” she admitted with a shrug. “Maybe if it hadn’t, I would’ve done things differently. Maybe I would have been braver, not so hell bent on trying to create that perfect family…”

He grabbed her hand, his palm warm against her cold fingers. “Why didn’t you tell me about Franklin after Preacher died? After there was no hope of creating that perfect family? That’s the part I just can’t get past, Shell. You had
four
years.”

“I
tried
, Jake,” she choked on a sob, refusing to look at him when there were tears standing in her eyes. “I was going to tell you after the funeral, out of respect for Steven, but you left early. And then, when I went to find you, I discovered you’d already transferred to Alpha Platoon, caught a transport OCONUS. You were gone for two years, Jake. For two years nobody knew where you were, so how was I supposed to tell you?”

She turned to him then, her eyes beseeching him to understand.

“But I came back—” he began, and she interrupted him.

“And I sent you a letter begging you to come here.”

He rolled in his lips, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “The letter said nothing about my having a son, Shell.”

“Yeah,” she swallowed, once more facing the window. “I suppose that was a test of sorts. If you’d come, if you’d shown a modicum of interest, I’d planned to tell you.”

“You know why I stayed away,” he growled.

“Yes,” she sighed. “I know now why you stayed away.”

Again they fell into silence, only this time the strain of it was a palpable thing. It stretched between them like the string of a kite caught in the wind, threatening to snap at any moment.

Finally, after several excruciating seconds, Jake ventured quietly, “And after I came here, after I’d explained everything, why didn’t you tell me then?”

She swung to face him, her jaw slung open.

He really didn’t get it, did he?

“Because you’d already proven yourself true to form!” She tossed her hands in the air.

“I’m
nothing
like your father,” he snarled. “And I’m getting real sick and tired of the comparison. I. Am.
Nothing
. Like him.”

And for the first time since his arrival, seeing the adamancy and sincerity on his face, she began to wonder if maybe he was right. If maybe
she
was the one who’d been wrong all along. If maybe her own childhood had blinded her, making her jump to conclusions about men and—

Oh God. The thought was too horrific to bear. Because that would mean she’d wronged him, robbed him of the child he would have protected and cherished and loved and—

Remorse and regret settled heavily in her stomach, making the granola she’d eaten turn to burning acid that scorched her throat.

“I’m sorry, Jake,” she finally whispered. And that didn’t even begin to cover her nearly paralyzing sorrow over the way things had happened, over her role in the way things had happened.