Between the Sheets (32 page)

Her nasal passages burned and she wiped her hand under her nose, tucked her knees up to her chest, feeling
the sting between her legs from Ty. From them together. “And it felt so good for a while to have all that power.”

“I’m sure,” Ty said. “I used to dream of having some kind of power over my parents. When they would fight, I used to wish I mattered enough to make them stop. But I never did. No matter how good I was or how bad, it didn’t matter. They were locked up in their own hell and I was never a part of it.”

“I’m so sorry,” she told him. Her measly spirit eased open, grateful for the chance to be kind. To offer him a share of the comfort he offered her. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that. And I’m so glad you had your pop and Nana to show you that there was another way to live. I’m glad you’re that person for Casey. You’re doing so well with him.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” She glanced away from the gleam of his smile. “Did your mom do that for you? Show you another way to live?”

“She loved me. Really loved me. And she tried to be a buffer, to teach me how to be useful, that no matter what he said I had tremendous worth. She just never seemed to be able to believe that about herself.”

“Did she ever try to leave?”

“I think there was a time when if it hadn’t been for me she would have left. But after that night when I was seven … she didn’t stand a chance.”

“What are you talking about?”

Oh, this was her darkest shame. Something she’d never told anyone. Never had the courage to share. “The angrier I got at my father, the more I hated him, the more he turned on my mom. She was like this open nerve for him. Everything he did made her jump and when I wouldn’t react to him the way he wanted, he just …” She remembered all of it with a knife-sharp clarity—all of the terribleness her father would smear all over Mom, because Shelby was impervious.

“Hit her?”

She shrugged. What were a few slaps, really, compared to the rest of it? “The worst was the way he would just grind her into dust. Make her feel like nothing. He’d pile on abuse after abuse, looking me right in the eye, wanting me to know that this was my fault. I’d gotten asked to Homecoming by a friend of mine and Mom and I bought this dress, this beautiful blue sequined, ruffled dress, and I knew I was beautiful in it. And Dad tried to hurt me. He called me horrible names, said things no father should say to his daughter, but I just stared at him. Dry-eyed and hateful. And I thought, ‘I win!’ But then he turned to Mom and told her he was embarrassed to have his congregation see him married to such an old woman. A woman who didn’t take care of herself. Who dressed like a man and did a man’s job. He just … 
crushed
her, right in front of me. And all her internal light, it just vanished.”

In a heartbeat he was beside her, his hands at her back, and she flinched away from his touch. “Shelby, it wasn’t your fault.”

She laughed at him, because what a stupid thing to say. What a hope-riddled, naive thing to say. “Don’t laugh,” he demanded. “Don’t brush me off, Shelby. He was a sick man and your mom—”

“Was a victim, probably before she met him, but it doesn’t change anything, Ty. It doesn’t change that I let it happen, that I grew up knowing what he would do if I didn’t bend, just a little, just enough to keep her safe, and I still didn’t do it. Tell me who was worse. Him? That sick man, or me?”

Tired of this conversation, the weight on her shoulders shifted enough that she stood. “My dad told me I was unlovable, that I was cold and unnatural. And that no one—
no one
—would want me. Not really. And maybe he was right, or maybe he just made me so scared that
I would never try to test that. Never find someone who would fight through the distance I put around myself. But what he really taught me was that I’m not capable of loving anyone.”

“That’s not true.” He stood up, too, and she stepped away, out of the reach of his heat. His hands. She wanted no part of him touching her. Couldn’t bear it. “Look at the Art Barn, and what you’re doing for your mom. You can’t tell me that’s not love.”

“If I loved her … loved her like you’re supposed to love someone, I would have stopped letting my father abuse her. I would have stopped creating reasons for him to hurt her. I would have found one way to get us out of this house instead of finding a thousand ways to infuriate him.”

“You were a kid—”

“You’re only seeing what you want to see, Ty.” Braving the warmth of him, the ruining pleasure of his touch, she stepped right up to him, close enough that his beautiful face was all she saw and her face was all he saw. “I will still fuck you, Ty. You and only you. And I’ll help you forget the things you want to forget as long as you keep doing the same for me, but I’m warning you, don’t love me,” she told him. “Because I will never love you back.”

She left him there, in the gloom of her Art Barn, where his touch more times than she could count now had calibrated her, made her able to live in her own skin again. In this world that she’d made.

She left him there alone, because in the end, that was better for him than being with her.

“Bullshit.”

She dropped the door handle and turned. “What?”

Slowly, he straightened his clothes, shaking out his pants before buttoning them up, strapping on his belt. “I call bullshit.”

Was this a joke? His attempt at being funny?

“Everything you just told me, it’s awful. Honest to God, Shelby, if your father was alive I’d find him and—” He stopped, but there was no question what he’d do. The thwarted violence rolled off of him and it made her both nervous and delighted.

The man was long dead, the wounds he’d inflicted scabbed over, but never had anyone sought justice for what her father had done.

It’s because you never told anyone. Those well-meaning teachers, the social workers and friends’ parents. You never let anyone in
. She knew that was true, but there was more to Ty’s anger, more to his coiled muscles and hard jaw, and she didn’t want to fully address it.

He’s falling for you
, a voice whispered in her head. A young-and-terrified-and-hopeful-all-at-once voice that almost never had the nerve to speak up.

But she shut that voice out, because if it was true, if he was really falling for her, she would have to end it. No more anger sex in the barn, no more recalibrating touches, no more of the way he watched her—seeing something in her that wasn’t there, but seemed like it would be nice if it were.

“But it’s still bullshit.”

“That’s not funny, Ty.”

“I know. After my pop died, I ran for years. Picked up and moved every single time things got hard. Or boring. I bailed on everyone and everything for almost seven years. I thought that’s who I was, and despite everything my grandparents showed me I decided to live the way my parents did. Rootless, no ties, not needing anyone and not letting anyone need me. And then Nana got sick and Casey showed up—” He cleared his throat, his emotions sitting so close to the surface of his face she could see them. She clasped her fingers together so
she didn’t touch him. So she didn’t reach out and try to ease some of his pain. It was exhausting feeling so much for this man. The sympathy and the grief and the affection and the anger—she was not made to hold so much. She was brittle and small; she did not expand.

She only broke.

“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with two people twice in the same week, but you can make a choice now, Shelby. You’re not that girl anymore. You’ve locked yourself up in that house thinking you’re repaying a debt you owe your mom, but you don’t have to live in suspended animation.”

“I haven’t locked myself up.”

He shot her a cut-the-crap look.

“It’s not that easy,” she said, knowing he was right but so was she, and nothing was as simple as just making a choice.

“I know. It’s really fucking hard. But my son walked across state lines to go looking for a new life, a new way of being. He shed all the garbage Vanessa piled on him and tried to get something better. You can do the same thing.”

She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t speak for all her shocked outrage that he would try to marginalize this.

Ty glanced over his shoulder at the couches, as if what they’d done there were still visible. Their bodies, see-through and ghostly, still locked together. “I want something better, too. I deserve something better.”

When he looked back at her, she took a step away, nearly put a hand to her throat. The intensity and grief on his face, the resolve directed toward her, was something she’d never seen from him. Never seen from anyone.

“I’m no one’s dirty secret. And I won’t be yours anymore.”

“You’re not a dirty secret.” She was lying, they both knew it, and his hands scraped his hair from his face,
tucking it behind his ears. She couldn’t look at those hands without wanting them on her. Without remembering and imagining and wanting.

But that was all she could give him. And she wanted it to be private. Secret. Not because she was ashamed of him, or thought less of him, but because her entire life she had kept the things she wanted very small and very secret—so her father could not touch them.

Hot shame flooded her.

“Then let me take you out to dinner.”

“When?” She laughed, because her schedule was tied to this house and everything going on inside of it and there hadn’t been time to even shower lately.

“Tomorrow. Next week. Whenever you can do it.”

The words weren’t even completely out of his mouth and she was shaking her head, denying him. Denying the idea.

“You’ve got time to have sex with me in the Art Barn, but not to have dinner?”

She was frozen in silence.

“I know you’ve got a lot on your plate, Shelby. And I’m not going to push, but I want to help. More than fucking you until you can live in your skin again. I want more. And I’m willing to wait, to be here when you’re ready.”

I’ll never be ready,
she thought.
I will never be able to give you what you want. I am not made for that
.

If she said that, he wouldn’t hear her, would try to find some way to change the way she saw herself, as if perception were the only problem.

“Ty, I’m a mess. My life is a mess, this … you can’t want any part of this.”

“Your life is a mess?” He sat back. “Have we met? I’m Ty, I just found out I had an eleven-year-old son five months ago.”

She didn’t laugh. If she laughed she was afraid she
would cry. Ty stepped closer, a sweet smile on his face. “I like your mess, Shelby. I like
you
. You’ve helped me so much, and I just want to return the favor. But with my clothes on.” He ducked his head to look into her eyes and she looked right back, forced herself to meet those smiling blue depths.

“You want something I don’t have to give,” she told him, her voice burning through her chest.

“I think you do.”

“Why?”

“Faith, baby,” he breathed over her lips. “I have faith.”

He touched her cheek as he walked by, a glancing touch more suggestion than reality. “I have to get back to Casey,” he said. “You have my number. The offer for dinner stands—any day, any time.” And then he was gone.

And the barn was cold and empty. A giant shell she rattled around in.

He’d been trying to give her hope, and she appreciated that, but all he’d done was prove her point.

If this was about faith, then it was over before it even started.

Faith had been beaten out of her years ago.

Chapter 22

It took nearly two weeks for Ty’s hope to be extinguished. Two weeks of really believing that Shelby was going to call. That underneath the fear and the guilt she was capable of seeing what was right in front of her.

Namely him, with his heart in his hand.

But after two weeks without word, two weeks without seeing her at church, two weeks of unreturned texts and messages, even he was able to see the writing on the wall.

He’d taken a gamble and lost.

And it fucking hurt.

And he was pissed.

And sad. Sad for her that she was so locked down behind the walls she’d created as a kid.

And sad for himself that she didn’t think he was worth breaking down those walls.

All day, every day he walked around as if there were something lodged in his chest that he couldn’t get rid of. He worked hard, tearing out the ceiling in the kitchen at the old mansion in the center of town called The Big House, and then he went to town on the floor with a sledgehammer, working until sweat soaked through his shirt and jeans.

He tried distraction, but Casey didn’t want to go fishing after school; instead he wanted to hang out with the friends he’d made at school and at the Art Barn.
Ty was glad down to his bones that Casey had found some friends, but the empty house made his loneliness worse.

Thank God for Otto Turner and his shed full of bikes. Or as Ty was calling it, Otto Turner’s Shed of Wonder.

He’d been going there every day after work and picking up a few more parts. A few more bikes.

Otto had a serious thing for old BMW bikes. And there was a nearly intact R52. A 1921 Victoria that used the BMW engine—that’s the one Otto wanted refurbished, which would be the oldest bike Ty had ever rebuilt and a total pleasure to work on.

There was a military 16h Norton. A few Hondas in pieces. An old Ducati café racer that nearly made him weep. A sweet little SL70 that with a little work could be auctioned off at that Okra Festival thing that Sean had been talking about the other day. Maybe he could donate the money to the elementary school and they could get an art therapist on staff or something.

Ty had left most of the intact bikes at Otto’s, instead moving some of the parts Otto had collected over the years. Including some rare BMW clutches that Ty had told Otto he would sell on his behalf.

In the back of that shed there were also a few bicycles—including an older Trek mountain bike Ty thought would fit Casey. Ty could clean it up for his birthday, with new tires. New paint. Casey would love it.

But not even this was enough to cheer him up.