Easy Little Lick (Copperline #3) Page 15

  “I can get one of the guys to take me to it in the morning.” I glanced at her again. She didn’t move. It was almost like I hadn’t even spoken. “So, your place?”

  “I can’t…”

  “You say that a lot,” I noted.

  “I really can’t. I can’t go back to my apartment, Cody,” she whispered.

  “Why, Ils?”

  She looked out the window into the darkness for moment, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. Finally she spoke again.

  “Just go back to the Copperline.”

  No fuckin’ way was I going to do that.

  The way she’d gone apeshit out behind the bar. Watching her give the sitter her entire night’s worth of tips. This whole situation, all the unknown, was ripping me to pieces. I needed some answers. I looked at her long and hard, then started the car up and turned back on the road towards the Copperline… but also towards Ophir.

  “You’re coming home with me,” I stated after we’d driven a couple miles in silence.

  “Cody—”

  “You’re coming home with me, and you are going to tell me what the fuck is going on.”

  “I can’t do that. I need to go.”

  “Where? Because you’re not going home, so where are you going?” She didn’t answer, but only turned her face away again. “Why are you leaving in the middle of the night? Was that fucker on the phone really your husband? Are you really married?”

  She looked over at me, her eyes luminous with unshed tears that reflected in the dashboard lights.

  “Yes.”

  One little word. It answered my question, but it was not good enough.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  She turned back to face the passenger window.

  “You’re coming home with me.”

  “Cody, I can’t.”

  “You are.”

  “Why?” she asked. “You should hate me for keeping something like this from you. I’m married, Cody. Married. Why would you even want me anywhere near you now?”

  I looked ahead of me down the stretch of road illuminated by the headlights. It was actually a good question. She was right. I shouldn’t give a fuck. I should take the fact that she lied to me, tell her to fuck off, and put it all behind me.

  Ultimately, though, even considering that I really felt pretty damn fucked over, she was in some sort of trouble. I knew she needed someone. She needed some kind of help. Her reaction to being caught in a lie wasn’t guilt or regret.

  The expression on her face when I’d confronted her was pure fear.

  I was bullheaded, and that old constant need to protect those around me took over, even as disillusioned by her as I suddenly was. I knew what it was like to live with the guilt of not acting, and it killed me to think of something happening to her and Max.

  There wasn’t any choice really. I was going to help her… whether either of us liked it or not.

  “You need me,” I finally said.

  “I don’t want to involve you,” she explained quietly.

  I looked over at her, her face barely visible in the dashboard lights.

  “Little late for that, don’t you think?”

  “Don’t, Cody, please,” she whispered, and I could hear something breaking in her voice. God only knew what the outcome of this would be, but the fear she exuded…

  We neared the Copperline, and I felt her tensing up the closer we got. Right up until we blew right past the bar. I didn’t even slow down.

  “Cody, you missed the turn.”

  “I didn’t miss shit.” I looked over at her, glaring at her, daring her to say anything else. “You’re coming with me to Ophir, and we’re gonna have a talk.”

  The house was still dark when we got there. As Ilsa grabbed the diaper bag, I unbuckled Max from his car seat and carried him upstairs, choosing to put him in the spare room that had been Denny’s when he lived there. There wasn’t much in the room, but there was an extra bed. I flicked on the closet light to spread the dim glow across the room while Ilsa tucked his blanket around him.

  Married… she was fucking married.

  I clenched my jaw and shook my head.

  What had I done?

  What the actual fuck?

  I slept with a married woman… that’s what.

  Slowly she turned and looked up at me. I had so much going through my head all at once that it was hard to even look at her.

  But it was time for honesty. I needed to know everything.

  I started for the door, turned back to her, and curled my finger, silently telling her to follow. As she stepped out into the hallway, I grabbed her arm and pulled her into my room, closing the door behind me.

  My brain tried to process the situation, but completely failed. Now that her fear was under control, my anger was starting to seep back in. “You do tend to keep things to yourself a little, don’t you?”

  She swallowed, sat on my bed, and looked down at her hands. “I should have told you.”

  “It would have been good to have a heads up, especially before you slept with me.” She grimaced and looked off to the side. Her panic was beginning to give way to shame. “Even if not the first time, maybe the second… or third. Sometime in the past couple weeks, anyway. Might have been a good thing to share.”

  “It’s complicated. I don’t even know where to start.”

  I leaned back against the door and crossed my arms over my chest. “Try the beginning.”

  “I got bombed on my twenty-first birthday,” she began. “I had started seeing Simon not long before, and finally gave it up that night. We were just messing around. It was definitely not serious. A few weeks later, though, I found out I was pregnant. I was in college, but I still lived at home. My parents were very puritanical, so they were absolutely horrified. They essentially threw a Bible at me, said I was going to hell if I didn’t make it right in the eyes of God. It was far from a love match, but I thought we could maybe make it work.”

  “So you married him.” I tried like fuck to keep the pained frustration out of my voice, but it was there. Swirling around in my chest and aimed at so many people… her… him… myself.

  “My dad leaned on his family pretty hard. My parents were so ashamed of me.” This whole time, she’d been looking down at her hands, but then she lifted her eyes to look at me. The luminous hazel depths looked so hollow and lonely that my throat ached. “They wanted me gone… out of their house. We hadn’t exactly been close before then, but that was it. They were done with me.”

  As though she didn’t have the strength to hold my gaze, she curled back into herself a little and focused on a spot in the carpet. I suddenly found my anger directed at a new target, thinking her folks sounded like fucking assholes.

  “My parents quit paying for my school, forcing me to drop out. They felt I was my husband’s responsibility at that point anyway, and he was going to be a lawyer, so there was no reason for me to continue. What did I need a degree for? My lot in life was cast. I was going to be a society wife. I would keep a nice, clean home, learn to cook gourmet meals, and support him in his career. That’s what a good little wife does, right?”

  I didn’t really have an answer for her. That’s not what I’d expect of her if she was my wife. I’d want her to laugh, to do what she enjoyed. I’d just want to love her.

  “Things were a little uncomfortable,” she went on, “but not… horrible. I tried to make the best of it by being what he wanted. I’d always been a people pleaser, and so I tried to do that for him. He liked me to be available for him and would get upset if I’d made plans with my friends or something. After a while, I didn’t really want to rock the boat, so I withdrew a bit. If I didn’t talk to my friends, I wouldn’t have to explain why I couldn’t do things with them.”

  A sad smile crossed over her face. “And then Max was born. For the first time in a long time, there was something to really, truly be happy
about… something to live for, to make me smile. It wasn’t a fairytale, but it was working.”

  She took another bracing breath and continued.

  “Simon graduated and got hired on at a law firm in Indianapolis. It was so far away from everyone and everything I knew. I didn’t have a lot of friends left really, by that point, but there were a couple I’d been close to since I was a kid. Leaving them was… difficult. But I had my baby. I just focused on Max as much as I could. He was everything in my world.”

  Her brow knit tightly and she bit her lip with a troubling expression, but she still wouldn’t look up at me.

  “Simon’s job was pretty stressful, but he was hoping to make partner, so he did a lot of socializing outside of work. He’d go out with the others and often wouldn’t come home until late. I kept the home fire burning and took care of Max.”

  She shook her head with a far-away look in her eyes.

  “I knew nothing about his life at work or what he was doing. He’d sometimes let me know if he was going to be home late, but it got to the point where I was more surprised if he was going to be home at a reasonable time. When he touched me, it was hollow. A way to slake his lust, like I wasn’t even a person to him.”

  The sick, twisted feeling in my gut tightened, and I felt bile rise in my throat. I instantly became pissed at the thought of him touching her… using her.

  “After a few months, it started to kind of turn… bad. He started coming home in these really dark moods. Angry and bitter. He became very volatile. He would say really cold and cruel things to me and fly off the handle if I didn’t react how he wanted. It was so strange, like the flip of a switch. I started wondering if he was maybe… taking something or going crazy from the stress… I didn’t know what to think. His behavior just became so erratic. I never knew which Simon I’d be dealing with. None of them were Prince Charming, but some… some were better than others.”

  “And then, he really freaked out on me one day. I’d washed a jacket of his, and, when he found out, he just exploded. He slapped me, really hard across the face. I didn’t even know what I’d done wrong.”

  “He had something in the pocket,” I murmured, “didn’t he.”

  Ilsa nodded slowly. “The funny thing was, I had checked the pockets, but there was one that was hidden. He had some coke stashed there.” She took a deep breath and looked across the room, out the window. “Apparently, one of his work friends had gotten him into it, something to help keep them going during long, busy days. Something to give him a little extra confidence in court.”

  “I was shocked, so shocked that it didn’t even really phase me that he’d actually hit me. Instead I focused on what he was doing to himself. I didn’t know how to deal with it, how to make him stop. The thing was, once it was out in the open, it was like he didn’t even try to hide it anymore. He started doing it even more and was very blatant and antagonistic about it all. He became even more moody and harsh. I was bending over backwards trying to keep things on an even keel, to keep him from lashing out, but he was very hard to please.”

  She smiled wistfully. “Max was such a good baby. He was quiet and healthy. He hardly fussed at all, even when he was teething. When he was about six months old, though, he got a really bad ear infection and he cried a lot. Simon didn’t like that. He’d yell at me to shut Max up. He said the sound was more than he could take. Sometimes he’d leave, but sometimes… sometimes he’d just look at Max like he hated him… so cold.” Her gaze flicked up to me for a second, to see me watching her intently, then back down. “It scared me, so even after Max got better, I tried to keep him as quiet as possible when Simon was home. That’s probably why he’s a little delayed now. I wouldn’t let him babble on like a baby should. I was scared to.”

  “I knew that it was only going to get worse, and the way he’d started acting towards Max… it scared me. I just didn’t know what to do. I tried talking to him, sort of feeling him out and suggesting that maybe it wasn’t going to work.”

  “And?”

  “He didn’t take it very well. That was… that was a bad one.”

  “A bad one?” I asked with a sick feeling in my gut.

  “He didn’t hold back much,” she whispered. “I barely remember anything after the first few seconds.” As a shiver coursed through her, it occurred to me that I never wanted to kick someone’s ass so much in all my life.

  “And then?” I prompted.

  “He went out. I called my mother, begging for help, but she said I had made my bed and that I needed to lie in it.”

  “Jesus, he was beating you up, and you mother basically told you tough shit?”

  Ilsa nodded. “Then she called him and told him what I’d done. He put a bunch of parental controls on my phone so he could keep really close track of who I called. Any texts I sent or received went to him also. He did the same with the computer, making it so he knew everything I did, every website I looked at or email I sent. He slowly closed me off from the rest of the world until I’d lost all contact with my friends from back home.”

  As she spoke, her voice became more and more impassive, quiet and small, as if she was afraid of him even now. My protective instincts warred with my frustration at this situation. And in the middle of it all sat the helpless feeling that I was way more invested in her than she was in me.

  That I always had been.

  But I was starting to see why. All those times she’d told me she couldn’t or she shouldn’t… and I’d blown her off, thinking she was just shy or scared of getting attached. The loathing for my own failure to see the warning signs made bile rise in my throat. She glanced up at me, registering my clenched jaw, and she shied back a little more.

  “After that,” she said, “things got worse yet. The strain that was already there intensified. The longer it dragged out, the more awkward things felt. The more awkward things felt, the more irritated he became with me. The more irritated he became… the more he would hurt me.”

  Her voice lowered to a whisper.

  “He generally kept some control and avoided places people would see, but one night he actually punched me… hard. Right in the face. I panicked and ran to get Max and leave. He grabbed me by the throat until I saw spots, and then he wrenched Max from my arms. Max was screaming, he was so scared. And Simon just held him out of my reach while he smacked my head into the floor. He said he’d beat it into me… I could go, but I couldn’t take Max. With his connections and my lack of them, there was nobody who would fight on my side.”

  As she continued to talk, I sat there speechless, my mind trying to process the horror her life had been. I remembered the fights my neighbors had, how it all had culminated in a deadly blow.

  Jesus… that could have been her.

  Those screams that haunted me some nights, the sounds of my neighbors fighting and the violent end, began to float through my mind. Only now, I was picturing Ilsa… small and frightened. And Max crying while his mother was beaten. My gut lurched as I remembered watching the paramedics wheeling out my neighbor’s body.

  “It scared me enough to make me stay,” she whispered, “but I was always looking for some chance to get out of there. I felt so trapped, though. I didn’t have anything of my own, nobody I could trust.”

  “You’re lucky he didn’t kill you,” I breathed.

  She gave me a grim shrug. “I knew I had to get out of there before he did, I just didn’t know how.”

  “What did you do? How did you leave?”

  “Like an answer to a prayer, one day in the mail, there was a credit card application in my name. I hid it in my purse, and then a couple days later, I called from a pay phone, and it was approved. A week later, I had a credit card he didn’t know about. It terrified me thinking he might catch me, but that little card gave me… hope.”

  A small tremble coursed through her, as though the fear she’d felt still echoed in her bones.

  “Then,” she said, “when I took Max for a checkup, I saw a br
ochure in the clinic waiting room for a women’s shelter. I drove there with Max directly after his appointment. I begged them to take me, but they didn’t have any beds available. However, they helped me with some paperwork to file for protection from abuse, then checked us into a cheap hotel to keep us safe until the hearing the next day. I was so hopeful… I didn’t sleep at all.”

  “I took Max to a drop in child care place in the morning and went to the hearing, but it was a disaster. He had a buddy from his firm to act as his lawyer. I had no legal representation,” she raised a brow, giving me a knowing look, “and he knew the judge. They played golf together almost every weekend. My case was thrown out for lack of evidence of abuse. I’d never gone to the hospital, so there were no records. He’d never touched me in front of others, so there were no witnesses.” She took a deep breath that hitched halfway through. “I was so ashamed of how things had ended up that I hadn’t told anyone but my mother, and her and my dad signed a statement saying I had an overactive imagination. They said I was always painting myself as the victim.”

  It all seemed so surreal. If I hadn’t known an abusive situation, if I hadn’t seen and heard how bad it could all end up, I might not have believed her. It was all that fucked up.

  “When I left the hearing, I had no protection, and I was terrified. There was no way to keep him away from me. I had no money, just one credit card that he didn’t know about. I didn’t know where I was going to go or what I was going to do. I went to the drop-in center to get Max and headed right out of town. I just drove, randomly following the next road and the road after that until I wound up in Butte. It just… felt like it was a place I could maybe go unnoticed. I saw an ad in the paper for the waitressing job at the Copperline and found a cheap apartment.”

  Her eyes had been watery off and on throughout her story, but when she looked up at me, they were full of tears and fear.

  “But tonight he called you. He knows where I work. He knows… about you,” she whispered. “I have to go.”

  “So you’re just going to run again? Where are you going to go this time? I don’t know what kind of credit limit you’ve got, but eventually your credit line is going to run out.”