What Lies Beneath (Count on Me Series #7) (12 page)

I’m where I wanna be.

Right where I belong.

“Soon.”

Awakening from my haze at the feel of my body being shaken, my eyes pop open and they’re met with the sky blue warmth I’d just been so lost in.

“There you are.” She says, wrapping her arms around me and squeezing me tight before shifting and curling herself around my now suddenly wide awake body.

“What happened?”

“You were dreaming. Calling out to me, actually. Repeating the same word over and over. I’m not sure how long you were doing it, but when I finally woke up and heard you, I tried everything to get you to wake up.”

The dream. The reason I’m laying here in bed with the blankets kicked completely off, sweat seeping from every pore, and why her eyes look so damn worried staring back at me.

That wasn’t a dream for fuck sakes. That was the beginning of a nightmare, and one that despite the fact that I am going to tell her what it was about, I’d rather not dive back into.

Yesterday was so perfect. Kissing her in the rain, Tristan snickering behind us when I finally did it and then drenching us in water. Then after bringing him home, taking her back to the house and standing in the middle of our room, watching her as the rain made her skin glisten the same damn way it did when we were nine and I was overtaken by a need to experience her like this.

Love her after the rain touched her.

Lost myself in her.

Telling her what I was dreaming about will take the beauty of yesterday and twist it, the same way I did the night we talked about Sammy and everything else came spilling out.

“I was dreaming about the day my mom left.” I blurt, and she reacts by burrowing herself even deeper into my arms.

“Soon.” She whispers, and her earlier words about me repeating that word come back.

“It’s what I mouthed to you when my mom first brought us over. Your mom wouldn’t let me go to you, and seeing you crying at the top of the stairs made me sick. So I did the only thing I could.”

“You told me soon because you wanted me to know you’d get to me.”

“Yeah.” I admit and that’s when her lips find my chest and she’s brushing them gently over where my heart rests. The part that she owns.

“You held my hand that day. You never let it go and back then, after she took off and Dean told me she was gone, I held it against you. I thought you were holding my hand so tight because you knew she left me. I hated you for it. When you held my hand it was supposed to mean good things. Not the worst thing.”

“I never knew, Kayden. All I was sure of was that I wanted to hold your hand.”

Shifting in the bed, I take her chin in my hand and lift it up to where our eyes can meet and running a finger over her lips, I lean in and kiss her, while at the same time, slipping my hand down and finding hers. Locking our fingers together the way she did then.

And just like then, she gives me everything I need the second we’re joined. Reminding me not of my mother leaving and the impact the event had on me all those years ago, but of the realization that nine year old me had before it even happened.

She’s my happy place.

“Promise me something?” I ask, my lips so close to her skin I swear I can actually see the words forming on the peach of her flesh.

“Anything.”

“Whatever you read next. Whatever we read in the journal from back then, promise me you’ll never let go.” Slipping my hand out of hers, but not pulling away, I lift it in the air between us and place them together palms facing each other. “Take my hand and promise that you’ll never let it go again.”

Lowering her fingers down into the spaces in mine, the ones that I swear with the way they perfectly align, were made for her and her alone, she gives me her answer in the only way she can.

Tightening the lock our fingers have to one another, she nods slowly as she brings her lips to mine. Her action less about a kiss and more about fulfilling my need for skin to skin connection.

And just like I heard her love for me loud and clear three years ago, I hear it again now.

Straight in my heart.

Chapter Thirteen

November 10, 2006

Something’s not right.

We’ve been at the Reagan’s most of the day. Mom’s been gone for hours, it’s nighttime now and even though she swore she’d be back for us, we’re still here.

I keep asking Grace when my mom is coming back, but she doesn’t say anything. She just sniffles and turns away.

Maybe she’s just getting sick or something.

I just wish someone would tell me where Mom is. Why she left earlier and hasn’t called to check in or come back and got us the way she promised before she hugged me and walked out the door.

Or at least explain why Dean won’t stop staring out the window across the street at our house.

He was there when Grace finally let me go to Belle and there when I came downstairs with her a few hours later. He stood there while we all had dinner and he’s still there now.

A few times when she leaves the room to go check on him, I can hear them talking and I swear once I even heard sniffling coming from him too. Since he never gets sick, even when I wish he would so I wouldn’t have to deal with him, I know it’s gotta be something else causing it.

Something is wrong.

My mom is gone and I’m here surrounded by people that aren’t her.

I’m alone.

The first time I got up the nerve to ask Dean, he grunted at me and then went back to looking out the window. And the last? He grunted and swore at me under his breath before stomping off to the kitchen. I heard slamming of cupboards and then the shake of the fridge and then he was there again, drink in hand, at the window.

Why won’t anyone tell me anything?

I asked Belle and she cried. A lot. I couldn’t calm her down. She was rocking back and forth and I had to put my hands up to block her head from hitting my chest. She hits really hard when she’s like that.

I don’t even know why she’s doing it. We were fine for a long time. I even got her to smile, kind of. I like when she smiles, but just like mom is gone it seems like her smiles are too.

When Belle cries, my stomach hurts and all I want to do is cry too, so when she did it and wouldn’t stop, I lowered my hands away, let her bang against me even though it stung and I cried too.

If anyone wonders what happened, I’ll just say Belle hurt me since crying is for pussies according to Dean. But it wasn’t Belle.

I can take what she gives me, especially if it helps her.

What I can’t take is not knowing.

How lost I feel.

How alone.

My brother is here and I still feel like I’m in a room full of aliens or something. I’ve been abducted and no one speaks my language.

Mom…where the hell are you? When can we go home? I like Belle’s bed, but I miss mine. I miss you reading me a story. I miss our jokes when no one else is around to hear. I know what you said about me and Dean, but I don’t believe you meant it. You were just so sad. It’s just sad words.

Please just come home so we can forget you even said them.

I miss you.

It’s happening again. Freaking waterworks. I know what Dean said about them and how guys just aren’t supposed to let it happen. I also remember the threat that if he saw me doing it, he’d beat them out of me. Right now I don’t care about any of that because it feels okay.

It makes the pain stop.

I don’t have to rub my skin until it bleeds to try and stop the ache that’s there when I cry. It just settles itself.

Please, Mom. Come back.

I wanna go home.

“Belle…” I plead quietly, closing my eyes tight and rubbing the ache in the center of my chest. “I—I can’t.”

Feeling the weight lift from the center of my lap, I follow her as she moves the book away completely, laying it to rest on the opposite side before resting her head against mine.

There’s not a lot here about my mom. I know this. I also know why that is.

It’s because I didn’t believe it.

Couldn’t believe it at first.

Then, when it sunk in, I couldn’t confront it. I couldn’t admit that she walked out on us without so much as a glance back to make sure we were okay. I couldn’t deal with the fact that all of the shit she’d told me over the years was actually true and we’d let her down.

We were so bad she couldn’t stand to be our mother anymore.

I couldn’t deal with any of it, and with the way I just want to rub my skin raw in an attempt to rid myself of that same fucking ache I felt then, before Grace and Dean even sat me down and told me what was really going on, I still can’t.

“Thank you.” I somehow manage to choke out after sitting in what feels like silence for hours but couldn’t have been more than a minute or two. My mind flooded with every single thing I thought and felt from that day and the first few after it as reality had the chance to settle in.

Or with what happened the day Grace let us head back home, had beat into me.

“Why are you thanking me?”

“I know you didn’t have any control over the way you were reacting the day she left. That it had nothing to do with her leaving or Dean being there, but baby, you crying and wanting to hit something…hit me, it helped.”

I don’t even have to meet her eyes to know she won’t believe me. Seeing her meltdowns as something bad and not the saving grace they were that day. I guess, when you live with them as long as Belle has, it isn’t a good thing, but for me, that day especially, it definitely was.

She opened the door and let me feel without consequence.

“You’re welcome.” She says with a gentle squeeze, burying her face into my shoulder and breathing in and out evenly. “The truth is, I just thought I made things worse.”

“Never. Even when I was being a complete prick, it wasn’t your fault. None of it was. Even if at the time I really wished it could have been.”

For a while after my mom took off, things stayed pretty much the same way as they were before. I was over at their house as much as possible when I wasn’t being forced to go to school every day. I still looked forward to being there and hated leaving at night in order to go home to Dean and his ranting.

His excessive drinking and nights full of hatred and loathing.

The blame being tossed at Belle’s feet happened a year later.

“Kayden, can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“I know you probably don’t want to get into it, but a couple of days after Mom sent you home, you came back over after school with a bunch of cuts on your face. Mom used to tell me that you were fighting at school, acting out because you were trying to deal with your mom leaving, but I didn’t believe her. I still don’t.”

She didn’t believe it because she knew me better than anyone.

Sure, I became really aggressive after she split, but after all the crap at home, I’d learned how to fight and it wasn’t often I had marks to show for it.

Unless the marks
came
from home.

“It was Dean. It was always him, Belle.”

“How bad was it?” she murmurs softly, her attempt to not push me evident, but unnecessary given the road I’m already on.

“No worse than the stuff that was going on before.”

“Was it like the day I found you on the floor?”

My head starts moving of its own volition. Nothing was quite as bad as what Belle walked in on senior year.

That was the end result, not the beginning.

“The first night we went home, things seemed okay. I was in my room alone, Dean was out in the living room drinking. With him, that was pretty standard though. It only turned nasty after he started inviting people over. He wanted to put on a show at that point and ended up using me to do it.”

“How?”

“Called me out of the room saying he wanted to run through drills with me. Combat techniques. He wanted to be sure that I didn’t turn into a pussy like our mother.”

“Kay…”

“I know, Belle. But if I don’t get it out now, I never will. You knew the gist of what was going on here. What you could see after the fact anyway. Maybe it’s time I dealt with what got me there.”

“Okay…” she answers, the word trepid and unsure. The way they should be. No one should ever have to deal with this kind of nightmare. Least of all her.

“I blocked the first few attempts. He couldn’t get a hit off and when he attempted to take me off my feet, that wasn’t working either. But considering how easily he’d been able to do it before, I knew it was booze causing his delay. I just didn’t expect the adrenaline rush I ended up having the more we went at it. How into it I got. Soon we were sparring, and even though they weren’t all that hard, I got a few good hits in. Made his drunk ass stumble. But I got cocky showing off for his buddies, and when I turned my attention away it all changed.”

“Changed how?”

It’s weird how things that happened years before, ones that you haven’t even really thought about in forever, are always just there. They never really go away. They only seem to gain more color and vibrancy when you’re forced to remember them.

“He didn’t hold back. He was pissed drunk, but vile. I think that was the night I finally learned the truth.”

“What truth?”

“How he really felt about me.”

*****

Rubbing at my jaw, now stinging from the impact of Dean’s fist as it sideswiped my face, I steel myself for what comes next and ready my body for his next move.

“Come on, pretty boy. Stop tearing up and show me what you got!”