Page 47 of His to Seduce
Chapter 15
Camden
When you grow up in a life where you scavenge for change when payday is still too many days away and you desperately need a gallon of milk, luxuries are unheard of. I grew up not knowing the taste of cake until I was ten and invited to Suzanne’s birthday party. My first party, my first slice of chocolate cake with a hot-pink buttercream frosting, and polka-dotted paper birthday hats we’d been too old to think were still cool but young enough to pretend.
It was the best party I’d ever seen.
As delicious as that cake was, though, to me, nothing ever beat the taste of my mom’s homemade chocolate chip cookies. I could practically taste them as I pulled my car into her tiny dirt driveway.
The nightmare still close to the front of my mind, I stared at the spot where I’d screamed. Tremors started in my fingertips and spread up my arms. As much as I’d admired my mom and loved the way she’d fought for me afterward, I’d despised the fact that we hadn’t been able to move. Every time I came home, which wasn’t often since I’d gone to college and didn’t have to be there, the memories flickered far more brightly.
I hated it.
Swallowing down the taste of bile in my throat, feeling it down deep in my gut, I turned off my car engine and pulled out the keys. Next to our trailer, Johnny Jacobs was long gone. The man who had helped save me that day had died a few years ago. He’d never kicked his alcohol addiction, but next to my mom, he’d always be my hero. He’d seen a scared-out-of-her-mind, shrieking and bleeding kid and had barreled into our trailer, somehow knowing exactly what had been going on.
I never saw Evan again, but based on the thumps and grunts and shouts coming from inside my trailer, and the way Johnny’s knuckles had been bloodied when he’d walked out, stumbling from exertion and drunkenness, I knew he’d beaten the shit out of Evan.
He didn’t say a word to me. He stood close to me, but not too close, and stayed between me and my trailer where Evan still lay, until cops and then my mom had arrived.
Movement caught my attention in my peripheral vision, and I swiped my eyes toward it.
My mom stood on the tiny front porch, stairs crooked from age and wear and lack of upkeep, staring at me.
Her chin wobbled, as if she knew what I was remembering, and her hands tightened around the railing.
Seeing her get emotional made me move and I scrambled out of my car, hurrying to her.
“What’s going on?” she asked, light green eyes just like mine looking me over quickly, scanning me like she’d done that day. “What happened?”
I lost what little hold I had on my emotions and threw my arms around her, shoulders shaking. “I just needed my mom and cookies.”
She sniffed through sudden tears and held me tight, laughing softly despite the heaviness I knew she felt seeping from me.
“You’re in luck.” She pulled back and tenderly wiped tears from my cheeks I didn’t realize were falling. “I just made a fresh batch.”
Of course she did. It was Sunday night and the only night she never worked. Because it was our night for cookies and hot dogs, a step up from bologna sandwiches, and even once I’d moved out, she still did the same thing.
She let me stay silent while I followed her into the house, but I knew she flinched when I cringed at the living room floor. Hurrying to the kitchen, she piled cookies onto a plate and slid them in front of me at the small kitchen counter. It was still a sickly green color straight out of the seventies, and cracked and chipped at the edges. I dropped my purse on the counter next to them and slid onto a stool.
We didn’t speak while she puttered around, filling glasses of milk, moving skittishly.
I watched every one of her movements, afraid to lose my connection to her.
Years and hard work had aged her too quickly and even though she had me when she was seventeen, with her graying hair, deep wrinkles, and lack of meat on her bones, she looked much older than her forty-five years.
I ate three cookies before she pulled a stool to the other side of the counter and took a bite of her own cookie.
“So,” she asked, nonchalant as possible. “Want to talk about it?”
I picked at the cookie I was eating and shoved a tiny piece into my mouth. It wasn’t up for debate. I needed her wisdom and her kindness and to know that she hadn’t been hiding anything from me all these months.
“I met this guy,” I started. Her green eyes lit, and her lips tipped up.
“And?”
I thought of David and his smiles and his touches and his laughter and the way he’d pulled me back from the ledge when he knew I was terrified, but how he’d pushed me to snorkel with him. I thought of the way I felt next to him in bed, telling him about my childhood. Then I thought about the pier and the collapsed man, and David’s cold look when I figured out he’d been lying to me flashed last but brightest.
I scowled. “And he’s a liar, like every other man.”
