I gave her butt a squeeze. “They’re officially a family heirloom. Now, get in the car.”
The drive had started easy, but as we drew closer and closer to my hometown, my chest filled like a balloon with dread. As if she sensed it, Helen laid her hand on my leg, stroking up and down every once in a while, but mostly leaving it in place. And that was something. That was a lot. We grew up the same. There was no one there to offer us comfort when we needed it. But here she was, offering it to me as easy as breathing.
I put my hand on top of hers when I didn’t need it on the wheel. She never tried to take it back once I made it obvious I wanted and needed it there.
When I’d decided to bring her here, I didn’t have a plan in place. Not where to take her first, or how to explain myself when I’d spent years hiding and denying the truth. But once I passed the city limits, I knew where I wanted to go first.
Helen stiffened and tried to take her hand back when I parked in the lot of a strip club that had never once seen better days. All its days had resembled the pits of hell.
“Why are we here, Theo? What…?”
“This is where my mom worked when Andrew Whitlock walked in, bought a private lap dance, paid her a little extra, and knocked her up with me.”
Helen yanked her hand away and hugged herself with her arms. “Wha—? How could you have not told me this?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t been back to this city since my father took me out of here when I was sixteen. Even before that, I tried not to think about my mom.” I stared at the gritty, run-down stucco building that housed a den of iniquity. It wasn’t anything like Savage Beauties, but every time I picked up Helen there, this was what I saw.
“So, am I like your mom? Is that what you’re saying?”
Startled, I twisted to face her. “Fuck no, I don’t think that. I’m showing you this hellhole to explain my hang ups about your job and why I reacted the way I did. It wasn’t you. It’s never been because of you.”
“I should have told you,” she interjected, “about the times I stripped. I should have told you, but I didn’t want you looking at me the way you did when you found out. And I knew you would.”
My exhale was heavy. I studied her folded arms, wanting the closeness we had on the drive here back.
“Not for the reasons you thought, but yeah, I did exactly what you feared.”
I looked out the windshield again. Something inside me popped, like a rusty lock springing open, and I wanted to tell her everything.
“She was sick. My pops—her dad—told me she had never been mentally well. This place, the things she had to do while she worked here…it only got worse. When I was little, before Pops knew I existed, she’d bring me to work with her. Some of my first memories are of hiding in the dressing room and sleeping in piles of clothes. I can still feel the sequins digging into my skin.” I scoffed, rubbing my arm at the phantom fabric digging into my flesh. “I have no doubt I saw things a little kid should never see, but I thank all that is holy my mind chose to protect me from those memories. The things I do remember are bad enough.”
I pounded my fist on the steering wheel. My chest was tight, throat clogged. I thought I’d come here, show Helen around, open up to her, and not feel it. But it was all hitting me. Every scary night. The sounds, the smells, the desperation for my mom to be safe and happy when she never, ever was. I’d pushed it down and pushed it down, but it was always there. And sitting here with my girl, the one who’d broke the dam with a bat in her hand, a smile on her ruby lips, I was feeling it all.
Helen brushed her fingers through the hair at my nape and murmured my name, but she didn’t try to interrupt. She let me give her what I needed to.
“I should hate her. I do hate her. But she was my mom, you know?” I had to stop, suck in a breath, push out the long forgotten rush of pain that came along with having Shannon O’Reilly as a mother. “She was my mom, and she was sick, and she never had a fucking chance. My pops did what he could when she was younger, but he didn’t know jack about mental health, and she was good at masking. And then it was just too late. Too much bad had happened. This place, the despair in the walls, she soaked it up. It broke her body, then her fragile mind. She contracted hep C somewhere along the line. Probably a slew of other things too, I don’t know. It’s a blur because I was a kid. Ten years old, and I was helping my mom out of bed because she was too out of it to do it herself.”
“Theo…” Helen pushed to her knees on her seat and leaned across the console to shove her face in my throat and wrap me in her arms. “I hear you.”
Letting go of the wheel, I held the warm, solid, powerful girl in my arms who would never end up like my mom, who gave up fighting long before her fragmented mind and illness claimed her. Helen would come out of that world clean, not because of anything I did or didn’t do, but because she was a warrior. She would fight until the end.
Fisting the back of her hair, I brought my mouth to her ear, and whispered fiercely, “You’re not like that.”
Her lips moved against my throat. “I know I’m not. I know, Theodore. You don’t know how relieved I am that you know too.”
“I was protecting myself.” I flung my hand out in the direction of the club. “From sliding back into this. It doesn’t make sense, right? But logic doesn’t touch the fear leftover from when I was that little kid hiding in the dressing room. That’s on me. All that’s my baggage.”
She dragged her mouth along the taut tendons in my neck. “I promise you, I understand now. I get it completely.”
“I was an idiot to think I didn’t still carry that.”
She pressed a soft kiss to the corner of my jaw. “Wishful thinking. I understand that too.”
The door of the club opened, and a couple guys in suits that stretched across their massive frames strode out. They pointed to my car, and I hadn’t gotten so soft, I didn’t recognize the potential for trouble when I saw it. I pushed Helen back to her seat and tore out of the parking lot before they could get close to us.
“They didn’t look like upstanding gentlemen,” Helen said.
“Nope. Not if they work at a place like that.”
I drove to another part of town that was even worse. I used to think the cracks in the sidewalks and road were places where the fire from hell had broken through. That wasn’t whimsy either. People who lived here didn’t go outside after dark unless they were gang affiliated and packing. Daytime was iffy at best too. And if truth was to be told, being inside was only halfway safer.
I pointed to the gutted, blackened remains of a building. “That was my pops’s garage before the bank reclaimed it. He’d owned it since he was in his twenties, but never really got his head above water in all that time. Probably because he was terrible at business, but also because he had break-ins at least once a year and had to replace half his tools each time.”