Battered Not Broken (29 page)

Melissa flashed Ally a sad little frown as she unrolled her napkin, freeing the silverware within. “Sorry, Ally. This whole thing with Manny sucks. What happened six years ago wasn’t fair, and neither is what he’s putting you through now.”

Ally mirrored her friend’s motions, unwrapping her own silverware. The scent of waffles, cream and strawberries resting on the table in front of her rose to fill her nostrils. The normally appealing aroma seemed different than usual – more sickly-sweet than anything, a saccharine smell that did nothing to stir her appetite. “On top of everything, I think I have to tell Ryan what happened. I’m dreading that even more than I’m dreading seeing Manny again.”

Melissa paused midway through cutting the first bite of her waffles free. “Why do you have to tell Ryan?”

“He walked in on my argument with Manny last night. He’d just dropped me off after our date and heard arguing inside. He came in to make sure everything was all right, and I’m not sure how much he heard.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to tell him everything if you don’t feel comfortable talking about it. You guys have only been going out for what, like a week and a half?”

Ally gnawed the inside of her lower lip. When Melissa said it like that, she made it sound so simple. But she didn’t know all the details of her and Ryan’s time together – she didn’t know the secrets of his Ally had stumbled into and discovered by accident. “I think it would be weird not to say anything after what he walked in on, don’t you?”

“I think it’s up to you,” Melissa said, gesturing with her fork. “If you think your relationship is heading somewhere serious, go ahead and tell him. If not, why put yourself through that?”

Again, she made it sound so simple. Maybe it was.

Chapter 16

Ally had called Ryan that morning like she’d promised to. When he’d asked her if she wanted to see him that day, she’d told him about her standing brunch date with Melissa and promised to call him afterward. She hadn’t been sure at the time why she’d begged off committing to anything until then, but by the time she’d arrived home from Annalisa’s, it had made sense.

She’d wanted Melissa’s input. Sometimes it helped to have another perspective on a situation – to hear someone who wasn’t directly touched by her problems tell her that her reactions weren’t completely off the wall. And Melissa had agreed that she should tell Ryan about the ugly past Manny had dug up – if she felt comfortable, and if she thought they were heading somewhere serious.

The idea of dumping an explanation of her past on Ryan made her feel anything but comfortable. On the other hand, the idea of keeping the facts to herself like some kind of secret he’d been granted an accidental glimpse of made her feel even more uneasy. After all, he’d already heard part of it from Manny. She might as well fill him in on the rest of the story instead of leaving him to wonder or draw his own conclusions.

As far as she knew, she was the only person in the city – besides his doctor – who knew about his TBI, about the explosion he’d been caught in and the way it still affected him. The fact that no one else knew made it feel like he’d trusted her with a secret. Of course, she’d stumbled into the knowledge that night when he’d gotten sick and she’d driven him home. Sort of like he’d stumbled in on her argument with Manny the night before.

Yes, she’d tell him. Because Manny and the problems he caused weren’t just going to go away, and neither was the past. She was sharing a bed and even a drawer with Ryan. Maybe that didn’t mean ‘serious’ to some people, but it went seriously beyond any intimacy she’d ever shared with any other man. If she could do those things, she could let him in on what was going on.

Her palms sweated when she dialed his number on her cell phone.

He picked up on the second ring and asked her how her brunch had gone.

She told him it had gone well. By the end of the conversation, she’d promised to choose a movie from her collection for them to watch at his place. She knew they wouldn’t bother, but if felt good to pretend, if only briefly, that she was going over there to do something other than dump her secrets in his lap.

When he arrived she walked out to the curb with a movie in hand. She hadn’t put much thought into choosing it.

“Do you want to drive?” he asked her when she opened the passenger-side door and prepared to climb in.

“Are you feeling okay?” Her heart sank a little at the thought of him slipping into another pain-filled day.

“I’m fine. I just thought you might want the practice. For your license?”

“Oh. Right. Yeah, I’ll drive.”

It felt good to slip into the driver’s seat. Mostly because it meant she’d have to devote her concentration purely to the task at hand. The only thing she and Ryan would discuss during the drive would be directions.

She made it to his apartment building without incident. Pulling into an empty space and putting the car into park made her heart speed instead of slow, for once.

Once inside his apartment, she took off her shoes and jacket, draping the latter over the back of a kitchen chair.

“Want something to drink?” He opened the refrigerator and bent down to peer inside.

“Yeah. Whatever you have will be fine.”

He poured her a glass of orange juice. “Guess I need to go grocery shopping,” he said, frowning down at the carton. “I’ve got breakfast stuff, but not much else.”

“I like orange juice. It’s fine.” She took the glass and sank down onto one of the chairs at the small kitchen table as he poured one for himself.

“Yeah, well, I hoped you would.” He leaned against the island and lifted his glass halfway to his mouth. “I stocked up on lots of breakfast stuff after we made plans for you to spend the night last Friday.”

“Really?” Despite her nervousness, her lips curled into a small, involuntary smile. The notion of him preparing for her night at his place was undeniably pleasing. “That was sweet of you.”

“It was a strategic move. Breakfast is pretty much the only meal I know how to cook, so I thought I’d try to impress you before you discovered that.”

She took a long drink of her orange juice, letting the sweet-tart taste flood her mouth as her thoughts drifted once more to the previous night. “Yesterday,” she said, “when you walked in on my argument with my brother…”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he admitted. “Are you sure you’re all right? You said you were estranged from him.”

“I was. Me and my mother – we were, until just recently. He’s started coming around again for the first time in several years. Uninvited.”

“And unwelcome, right?”

She nodded. “He belongs to a local gang my uncle Carlos runs – Casa de Ladrillos. It’s not very big, and you’ve probably never heard of it. They sell drugs in their own neighborhood, mostly. My brother Manny is second in command – completely under Carlos’ thumb. We don’t want him around because of that.”

“And he’s respected that until now?”

“Yes. Carlos lured him into the gang after my father went to prison. When my mother told my father during a visit, he was furious. He told us to tell Manny that as long as he associated with Carlos, under no circumstances was he allowed inside our home, and we did. As far as our father was concerned, Manny stopped being a member of our family the day he joined Casa de Ladrillos.”

“What does he want?”

Ally shrugged. “For us to come to his wedding this summer. And act like we’re still family, apparently. I think he feels like we’re disrespecting him by ignoring him, and that I owe him.”

Ryan’s brows drew together as he set his glass down on the counter. “For what?”

Ally ignored the fact that her stomach was a tight bundle of knots. If the current conversation had taken place an hour sooner, she probably would’ve thrown up her waffles. “My father went to prison for attacking and seriously injuring someone. I think he would’ve killed the man, if the police hadn’t arrived and stopped him.”

Ryan’s expression didn’t change as he listened.

“My father isn’t normally violent. He did it because the man had raped me.”

His expression did change then, darkening. Even his eyes seemed to change color. Maybe it was because of the shadow his knit brows cast over them, but they were a shade of blue that reminded her of the Inner Harbor’s dark, deep water that had frightened her as a child.

“The man who did it was a drug addict, from a different part of the city. He’d come to our area to buy drugs.”

“How long ago was this?” The dangerous look in Ryan’s eyes told her he was probably thinking the same way her father had been at the time.

Fortunately, there was no exacting vengeance against a dead man.

“Almost six years ago. I was in my last year of highschool then, and one of my friends had talked me into joining the drama club. I stayed late that day for practice and it was almost dark when I was walking home. He … accosted me along the way.”

The synapses in her brain sparked with memories. It was strange – some details had been dulled so severely by time that she’d practically forgotten them, while others stood out crystal clear.

The initial spike of panic when the man had grabbed her as she’d passed in front of a house with an open front door, the smell of his unwashed body and the way he’d laughed when she’d tried to wrench herself free from his grip and had ended up spraining her wrist instead – those were the details she remembered most vividly. That and the coppery taste of blood that had flooded her tongue when he’d pushed her down and pressed his palm over her mouth, silencing her with such force that the insides of her lips had bled against her teeth.

When it had happened, she’d hardly been able to comprehend the reality that one moment she’d been walking on the sidewalk and the next she’d been inside the house, the aged wooden kitchen floor pressing hard against her back while the stranger had crushed her with his body.

His fingertips and the heel of his palm had dented her cheeks, bruising them. And the floorboards had left their marks on her back. Even years later, she didn’t quite remember how he’d wrestled her inside, and it still didn’t seem wholly real that she’d gone from her routine walk to hell in the blink of an eye.

“And you didn’t know the guy?”

“I’d noticed him a few times before when walking home from school. I guess he planned it, or at least thought about it before then. But I’d never thought that anything like that would happen.”

“Your father did the right thing,” Ryan said, a harder edge to his voice than she’d ever heard before. He hadn’t changed positions, but he gripped the edge of the counter hard with one hand, his knuckles white. His jaw seemed stronger than usual and a fat tendon stood out beneath it, running the length of his neck like a steel cord.

“He was outraged.” Actually, outraged didn’t even begin to cover it. Her father had been more furious than Ally had ever seen him – more furious than Ally had ever seen anyone. It had scared her, at the time, especially since he was usually a soft-spoken man. And those fears had turned out to be justified. His reaction to her ordeal had cost him his freedom for several years.

“I can imagine.” Ryan was still frowning, his voice as hard as steel.

“He spent the next two days hunting the guy down. He found him on the second day, near where he’d attacked me. He started beating him in the street, and someone called the police.” It had been shitty luck that an officer had happened to only be a few blocks away in his cruiser at the time.

“And he’s been in prison all these years for that? How badly did he hurt the guy?”