“Where was your mother?” he asked in that creepy, calm tone.
I wasn’t sure what it was about all these memories I’d shoved aside for so long suddenly coming back that made me feel like a raw, open wound. I couldn’t control the long breath I let out. “I think she was dating someone back then. It might have been my little brother’s dad. I don’t remember that well. He was in and out of our lives for a few years. All I know for sure was that she wasn’t at home then.” Sometimes she’d disappear for a few days at a time, but that was my burden to bear.
“Who let you out?”
“They did.” They unlocked the door and made fun of me for being a baby and peeing on myself. It had taken me an hour to get myself to crawl out of there.
“What happened after that?” He was still talking in that effortless, patient voice that screamed ‘wrong’ at the top of its lungs.
Shame and anger made me shake. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“No.”
“Did you tell your mom?”
“Of course I told my mom. It was her closet they put me in. I’d peed in there. She had to get the carpet replaced because it smelled so bad.” I’d smelled so bad. My hands had been so messed up from banging on the door, and my voice so hoarse from screaming at them to let me out… or to at least turn on the closet light… or if they couldn’t turn on the closet light to turn on the bedroom light… to no avail. I never knew for sure what they’d done in those two days I was in there, and frankly, I didn’t care at all.
I didn’t. Because kids that young shouldn’t have been left alone to begin with.
His chest started puffing against my back as if his breathing was difficult. “She did nothing to your sisters?”
I wanted to crawl into myself. The tone he was using raked at my nerves, pulling the sides of the stab wound called my childhood wide open for inspection. It made me feel small. “No. She yelled at them, but that was it. I mean, she stayed home for a month or two afterward” —that was one of the times I remembered her being mostly sober— “and I slept with her every night. After that, I moved my things and shared a room with my little brother.” I’d started locking the bedroom door after that as well.
The fingertips on my knees kneaded for a second, but I bet my life it was a subconscious gesture, mostly because his labored breathing hadn’t gone anywhere.
“I have to sleep with a light on,” I admitted to him, feeling his chest huff behind me. Dumb, dumb, dumb. “I don’t know why I just told you that. Don’t make fun of me.”
There was a pause. A hesitation before, “I won’t,” he promised effortlessly. “I wondered why you had so many at your apartment and in your room.”
I knew he’d noticed. “Please don’t tell Zac. I wouldn’t hold it passed him to hide under the bed when I’m sleeping to try and scare the crap out of me.”
“I won’t.” His palms shaped my knees. The insides of his arms seemed to frame my shoulders and arms. His breathing was low but not so steady against my ear. “It isn’t stupid that you’re scared. You shouldn’t be embarrassed. It’s everyone else who should be ashamed of themselves.”
The only way I managed to answer was with a nod that I wasn’t sure he knew of or not. Another rattling breath made its way out of my chest like a gust and I touched a patch of skin somewhere around his knee as I kept my eyes closed. “Thank you for helping me calm down, big guy. I haven’t lost it like that in forever.”
“Don’t worry about it,” was all he muttered in return.
I kept my hand on his leg, my fingertips against the coarse dark hairs that covered his legs. My breathing sounded too loud, my heart was still beating a little weird, while Aiden’s was soft and barely audible. I focused on the in and the out of my lungs.
The other woman in the elevator mumbled, “This sucks.”
It did. It really did.
The silence ate up the minutes, and I let my back loosen, the top of it touching Aiden’s pectorals. The insides of his upper arms cradled me. His breathing was so even it made me sleepy.
The elevator gave a jerk that had me opening my eyes in reaction as the lighting flickered twice and stayed on. The woman on the other side squealed, but I couldn’t even be remotely scared. I only cared about the lighting.
And it was right then, not being plunged in the dark, that I finally witnessed with my own two eyes the sight of me sitting on Aiden. Two long, muscular legs circled me, so long that the knees jutted out way passed where mine ended. Two heavily muscled triceps popped on either side of my arms, playing my bodyguards. But it was the big hands on me, the wrists propped up so effortlessly on my thighs, that made something in me react.
He was hugging me. For all intents and purposes, Aiden was hugging me. Surrounding me.
Tilting my head back, I swallowed that thing making its way from my stomach to my throat, and prepared a nervous, slightly shy smile over my shoulder. Except when my gaze landed on Aiden’s face, it was so serious… so damn serious. It wiped the expression right off my mouth.
The elevator gave another jerk and almost immediately, the phone on the wall began ringing.
With a light tap to my knee, Aiden picked me up and moved me off to the side, as if my weight was nothing to him—and it definitely wasn’t nothing. He got to his feet and reached toward the wall, picking the phone off the cradle. His gaze drifted over me in the process, those ultra-sober features making me feel like I’d done something wrong all of a sudden. “Yes… It’s about time… Yes.” Just like that, he hung up, probably in the middle of the conversation. “It’ll be about fifteen minutes.”
Drawing my legs up to my chest, I wrapped my arms around them and nodded at his comment. He didn’t sit back down; instead, Aiden leaned against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. One ankle went over the other.
Not ten minutes later, a loud noise pierced through the elevator, and the next thing I knew, it began its ascent again. When the doors finally opened, two building employees were standing there, asking if we were fine, but Aiden walked right passed them as if they weren’t there.
“Are you okay?” one of the employees asked.
Was I okay? I hadn’t been, but I wasn’t going to say anything. Mostly, I was a little bit embarrassed I’d freaked out and uncertain what the hell the look on Aiden’s face had been about when the lights had come back on.
“Are you coming?” the big guy asked from where he was waiting.
There was the man I knew. “Hold your horses, sunshine. I’m coming.”
His lips moved in a way that told me he wasn’t particularly fond of ‘sunshine,’ but most importantly, he knew I didn’t care that he hated it. “Let’s go. He’s paid by the hour and we’re already late.”
It didn’t take long to find what we were looking for. A hardwood-framed glass door with etchings on the front and a plaque on the wall right next to it, deemed that this was the lawyer’s office.
Sleek, beautiful, hardwood furniture in warm shades of brown and green welcomed us. It hit me again right then that I looked like a fifteen-year-old hoochie mama in a giant-sized sweater that made it seem as if I didn’t have any clothes on underneath. Aiden didn’t look much better; his T-shirt was clingy, he had on long, black shorts that went past his knees, and he was in running shoes. The difference was, he didn’t give a single crap what he looked like.
Directly in front of the doors, an older woman behind a desk smiled over at us. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“Yes. We had an appointment with Jackson. I’m the one who called to say I was running late,” Aiden explained.
That changed everything. “Oh, Mr. Graves. Right. One moment please. The lighting issue pushed his meeting late.”
The lighting issue. Aiden and I looked at each other.