Yours to Savor (46 page)

Sandra lay beside Brandon, tucked beneath the sheets of the king-size bed, basking in the tender serenity of the moment after their lovemaking. Brandon had brought her to Clarisse’s beach house once he’d helped clean up
Cassie’s Blend
. As soon as they walked in it was another mad rush to the bedroom. But when Brandon had undressed her this time, he’d been sweet and gentle, and made love to her slowly. It was completely unlike the raw intensity of sex in the coffee shop.

Sandra sighed, and moved her head to his chest as her breathing returned to normal. Through the sliding glass door, she could see the glittering stars reflect off the dark sea. Brandon ran his fingers through her hair, tightening his grip at the back of her scalp before loosening it again to rake down through the strands.

“When is Clarisse coming back?” Sandra wondered aloud.

“Hmm?” Brandon tilted his head to look down at her. “She’s in Seattle for a few more days. She took my place there so I could spend more time with you.”

Sandra smiled, shifting her arm so it lay over his abdomen. “I hope I’m not distracting you from work.”

“You are,” Brandon admitted. “But it’s the best kind of distraction.”

Sandra sat up, looked over at him. “If you need to be there—”

“Clarisse can handle everything just fine. Besides, I always have my phone on me.”

“
Both
of them?” Sandra laughed.

“Yes. And my laptop has a great camera. I don’t need anything else to have a presence at our meetings.” Brandon winked. “Telecommunication is a powerful tool.”

“Okay,” Sandra agreed, content. She lay back down on his chest. “I just don’t want you to be held back by me.”

“Babe, I’ll never be held back by you. And you shouldn’t let anything hold you back, either. You remember what I told you today?”

“That a sheltered existence is no way to live?”

Brandon smiled. “Exactly. I want you to take that to heart. I really mean it. You came to Ocean Shores to escape from your past. I get that. But it’s not the past I want you to live for. It’s the present. The future.” He picked up her small hand in his, and matched their palms together. “The future…” he repeated, “…with me.”

Sandra felt a warm feeling bubble up inside her on hearing those words. “How is it you can be so perfect, Brandon?”

He smiled, but shook his head. “I’m not. Far from it. But with you beside me, I know I’m getting a little better every day.” He brought her hand to his mouth, and brushed her knuckles with his lips. “You told me about your sister, and your nightmares. Do those still bother you?”

“No,” Sandra said. “Not since I met you.”

She felt Brandon exhale against her head. “I’m glad.”

“They’ve never been gone for so long before.” Sandra pushed herself up and swung her leg over his body, settling down on his chest to look him straight in the eye. “I still don’t know what you did to me, Brandon Galliani, but I hope it never lets up.”

“As do I.” Brandon closed their hands together and tangled his fingers with hers. “Tell me, Sandra, when your nightmares come… what do you see? What do you remember?”

Sandra frowned. She didn’t want to ruin the moment by bringing up
that
heavy topic… but Brandon had told her she should feel free around him. This could be a first step. And Brandon still hadn’t told her about Chicago. Sandra needed his trust for that—the type of trust that didn’t just sprout up overnight. But, maybe, if she told him her story, he would finally be ready to reveal that part of his life to her.

“Not a lot,” she admitted after a long pause. “Most of the details are just a blur. When I have the nightmare, it’s my emotions that stand out. But I do remember following my sister to the house. I remember being scared inside, feeling terrified by all the strange people. But even through that, I remember having this… I don’t know, this
determination
… to see my sister home. I remember seeing the flash of her yellow heels. I remember pounding on the door to get her out. And of course, I remember the explosion. The flames, the heat, the overwhelming sense of loss and dread compounded by my utter failure.”

“You said before somebody pulled you out of the house after the first explosion?” Brandon asked. “What about him? What about the man who saved you? Do you remember anything about him?”

“Yes,” Sandra nodded. “I do. But I try to avoid thinking about him when I can. I never found out who he was. Even though I
know
I should be thankful to him, every time I think back… I think that maybe, if I had just had a little bit more time, maybe I could have changed things, you know, saved my sister, somehow, if only that man hadn’t…” Sandra recognized the swell of sadness growing inside her, and shook her head, determined to fight it off. “No. You were right. I can’t live in the past. It doesn’t matter what I could or couldn’t have done. It doesn’t matter what he did. What matters is what I have here.” She forced herself to smile, stifling the melancholy feelings. “What I have with you.”

“But if you
did
find out who he was,” Brandon pressed, “if you saw a newspaper article from back then and saw him in it, or somehow met him in your life… what you would say to him?”

“What would I say?” Sandra echoed. This conversation was getting heavy, fast. “I don’t know what I would say.
Thank you
, maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe I still have that bit of hatred for him. I know it’s irrational, but sometimes our feelings can’t be helped.” She frowned down at Brandon. “Why? You knew about the fire when I told you about it on
VEGA
. Do you know something else?”

Brandon hesitated, so briefly that Sandra thought she might have imagined it, but then shook his head. “No. No, I don’t.”

“How come
you
remember it, though?”

Brandon shrugged. “I told you before: anybody who lived in Chicago would. You were probably too young to pay attention to the news, but it was the biggest news story for weeks. There was a huge police investigation after. The city councilors were appalled that a meth lab could be housed in such a comfortable, upscale neighborhood. They blamed the cops for negligence. People died in the fire—your sister included—and there was a public uproar about law enforcement incompetence. It was a big thing, back then.”

Sandra nodded. “Okay. But what about
you
, Brandon? What happened to
you
in Chicago?” She felt him stiffen under her. She slid off, but pressed on otherwise. “You told me I should feel free around you. Well, I’ve wanted to ask you about Chicago for a long time. You promised once you wouldn’t lie to me, on our date at the Space Needle. And I can understand if you’re not comfortable enough to talk about Chicago, but I’ve basically told you everything about me. And to me, your past is still shrouded in darkness. I don’t know anything about your family. You haven’t told me
anything
.”

Brandon sighed. “There’s not much to tell.” His eyes were withdrawn. Their gazes met. But, he was somewhere else, far away and distant. “But you’re right. I did promise you those things. What do you want to know?”

Sandra felt a little twinge of regret about pressing him on the subject. Maybe it was still too early. But, just like he wanted her to be comfortable around him, she wanted Brandon to be comfortable around
her
, too. So, she curled into his body, pressing her soft curves against his hard planes, and said in her gentlest voice, “I just want to know about
you
, Brandon.”

He smiled, but the expression did not touch his eyes. “I was the oldest of the clan.”

“You have brothers?” she probed softly. “Sisters?”

“Four brothers, three sisters,” Brandon said stiffly. “I loved them very much.”

“Oh.” It was a soft murmur. The way he said that, said lov
ed
instead of love, made it sound like some great tragedy had befallen his family. Clarisse had alluded to that… but Sandra had to know the truth from Brandon, so she took a chance. “Did something happen to them?”

“Last I saw them, they were all alive and well.” He took a deep breath, closed his eyes. And when he opened them, that distant look was gone. There was life in his eyes again. Sandra knew he was back with her. “Sandra, I’ve never told anybody this. Not even Clarisse knows the whole truth. But you’ve trusted me with your past. I want to do the same with mine.”

“Absolutely. There’s nothing you need to hide from me.”

He took another breath, and when he exhaled, the words came out of him like a flood. “Everyone in my family was very close. We didn’t have much money growing up, but we had two loving parents. There were eight of us kids, so you can imagine how overwhelming things must have been for my parents. My father was a cop, my mother a barmaid-turned-optician, of all things. We moved to America when I was three, just before my brother was born.

“My parents barely made enough money to scrape by. I didn’t realize how close we were to poverty until I became a teenager. It was just the way my parents raised us; they made sure we never felt pinched for money. But I can’t imagine the sacrifices they must have made, just to feed us all.

“Anyway, I had a happy childhood. I was best friends with all my brothers and sisters. But even though my closest sibling was only three years younger, I remember thinking back then that we were a world apart. I always tried to help my parents deal with all of us, always tried to be the responsible one. I took care of my sisters and brothers when I could, offloading chores from my mother, helping with scraped knees, sticking up for them in schoolyard fights, that sort of thing. But everything changed when I was fifteen.”

“What happened?”

“It was in the middle of summer, but a cold, wet storm had been raging outside for weeks. Rain, dark clouds, and wind were the norm for most days. It was like nothing you would ever expect in the summer. I’ve never seen anything like it since. You must have been, what, six, seven, when it happened? I don’t know if you remember it…”

“No,” Sandra shook her head. “I must have been too young.”

“Well, you can imagine, having eight kids cooped up in a tiny house for weeks on end, with no school or summer camps to distract any of us, made for high tensions. There were more fights that summer than at any point I could remember before.

“To make it worse, my father had started working overtime to scrape together some more money. We were growing up, getting bigger, which meant we needed more food, more clothes, more household supplies, more
everything
. That was the first time, I think, that I realized just how stretched my parents were for money.”

Brandon took another breath. “I remember that summer night like it was yesterday. My dad was out working. There was a thunderstorm outside, and it was dark. Just before dinner, somebody broke my sister Ashley’s hairbrush, her only one. I don’t know if it was by accident, or on purpose, or as payback for something she did. But I remember my mother playing peacemaker when a crash of thunder shook the house. That was when the phone rang.”

Brandon pushed away from Sandra, and sat straight up. “I heard it first. I went to pick it up.” He motioned with one hand, re-enacting that moment, bringing an invisible phone to his ear. “There was a stern voice on the line. He asked for my mother. I walked over to her while she struggled to solve things between my siblings. I gave the phone to her—” he extended his hand in front of him, “—and I don’t know what the man said, but such a look of terror came over my mother’s face that Ashley started to cry. Without a word, my mother turned around, put on her jacket, and walked out the door.”

Brandon looked strained but he continued.

“None of us had any idea what was going on. But the storm outside fit the moment perfectly. My mother’s reaction to the phone call stopped all the squabbling. We all sensed something was terribly wrong.”

Sandra waited for Brandon to continue. “She was gone for hours and hours and hours. Some of the younger kids fell asleep, while the rest of us waited in the living room, trying to stay awake for our mother to return. Time stretched by. We waited, and waited, and waited. We didn’t hear a word from our mother or father.”

“What happened next?” Sandra asked.

“Finally, my mother burst through the door. Her jacket was gone. Her shirt was soaked with rain, and she was sobbing.” Brandon’s voice became strained. “I ran to her. I was first.” He tightened his grip on Sandra’s arm until he was hurting her. She didn’t say anything. “I asked my mother what was wrong. She didn’t answer. She fell into me and just cried and cried and cried. My youngest sister Kelsey—she was three—was asleep when my mother came home. She must have heard her voice, because she woke up, and walked out of her room with groggy eyes. She walked to our mother, tugged on her sleeve. She asked, in the most innocent of voices, ‘When is daddy coming home?’”

Brandon fell silent. Sandra didn’t push him. She waited for him to continue the story.

“My mother looked at her,” Brandon exhaled finally, “and did not say anything for a long time. And right there, right at that moment, something came together in my mind, and I
knew
. This…
dread
came over me. The constant beat of rain against the windows was the only thing that broke the silence. My mother bent down, took my sister by the shoulders, and whispered, as gently as she could, that daddy wouldn’t ever be coming home again.”