CHERISH (72 page)

Jeremy manages to get his feet under him, but he quickly backs against the wall, one hand against the river of red coming from his nose.

“
Beck
.” I’m pleading as I try to push him back, but he is cemented in place. How did so much happen in the last sixty seconds? I can’t get my lungs to agree to take a breath. The only thing I can think of is Jordan.

“I didn’t want to tell you.” Jeremy’s eyes are blinking far too fast when he looks to be sure that Beckett isn’t closing in on him against the wall. “
He
was friends with
Steven Holder
and
Brian Jennings
. He knew what was going to happen that night. He could have stopped it. He
knew
.”

Jeremy is pointing at Beckett. Beckett growls at him, and Jeremy’s finger goes limp.

“We’re leaving.” Beckett leaves no room for rebuttal as his hand circles my arm.

“Looks like the show’s over.” Bruce’s sing-song voice is aimed at Jeremy. “No happily ever afters for you today. Sorry.”

I shoot him a glare that tells him he’s not helping.

“I’m not leaving.
Stop.
” I shake my head, trying to get a grip on what is happening.
“Everyone just
stop
.” My voice cracks as I shake my arm, but Beckett’s hand is a vice.

“
Tell
her. Tell her you were there.” Jeremy focuses on Beckett, then back to me. “Bet he hasn’t shared
that
little war story with you. He could have stopped them. He didn’t.” Jeremy spits the words toward me while he holds the corner of a pillow from my bed onto his nose.

“He also let his own mother die.” Jeremy lets that grenade fly oblivious of his own mortality.

Beckett releases my arm, and he launches like a cannon ball at Jeremy.

Jeremy jerks the pillow to cover his face, and there is a sound like someone trying to bathe a cat that comes from him. Jeremy crumples to the floor in a ball; his polyfoam filled shield over his head.

It doesn’t stop the barrage of fists that fire from Beckett into any part of Jeremy he can find.

Now, the man that made love to me an hour ago is about to kill the man that just asked me to marry him with his bare hands.

I don’t know what is happening. I’m completely frozen until finally I manage to wedge myself between Beckett and Jeremy, one hand darting between them as Beckett pulls back, looking like a paid assassin.

“
Oh my god
.” Jeremy is crying. At least he’s making noise because I was sure he would be dead.

I manage to get my hands on Beckett’s biceps. Every inch of him is vibrating as I push with all my might to get him back toward the door.

“You two better go in the living room.” Bruce’s calm voice cuts through the tension. “Let me comfort the fallen.” He works his way calmly through the chaos like the two men had only been having a tiff over losing a hand of cards.

This is too much to absorb. I’m like a soaking sponge, dripping with questions, but I’m not sure I want the answers.

“Come on.” Beckett’s arm settles around my shoulders, and I half-stumble out the door of my bedroom in front of him.

Jordan. I just lost my brother.

Unless I find the strength to push Beckett out the door and crawl back in there and let Jeremy put that ring on my finger.

If there was a slim possibility for me to win the battle with the court before, it is completely gone without Jeremy.

And the other $4112 I need to come up with for the lawyer. Even if Beckett gives me that money, Jeremy can still kill it all.

And yet, I’m not pushing. I’m not even looking at the door. I turn around and I’m looking at Beckett's eyes, and I feel myself let out a sigh of defeat.

“We have a lot to fucking talk about.” Beckett’s stare is controlled, but I can see what’s behind those eyes.

Jeremy’s words echo in my head. Those names I try to never think about are alive again—taunting me.

Steven Holder.

Brian Jennings.

There is a kind of pain reserved for the worst of our memories, and I can feel the flames of it rising up around my feet.

Steven Holder was my first crush. He lived in another foster home with me the year before, and I fell for him hard. He flirted with me, made me feel pretty. Then when I moved on to the next house, he started coming around. Before I knew it, I’d believed his line of bullshit that he loved me. He wanted in my pants, and I refused. So, the next night, him and Brian Jennings showed up and took what I wouldn’t give.

So, what is it that Beckett knew? Jeremy said he knew what was going to happen and something about him being there. I need to know what it means.

It’s enough I have to hear those names again. But, it’s life altering to hear them uttered in the same sentence with “Beckett.”

“What did he mean about you and—” I don’t. I can’t say their names. “
Them
.
Those
boys.”

What I want to see right now is a look of complete confusion. A look that tells me the desperate words of a desperate man have zero truth in them.

That is not what I see.

“
Promise
.” Beckett lets out a breath, and his eyes fall from mine, and I hate everything about his reaction. His sigh is the sound of someone thinking about how to respond to something they don’t want to.

“Was he right? Did you know them? Were you there?”

“No. I wasn’t exactly there.” He pauses and looks up at the ceiling before bringing his eyes back to me. I want him to stop talking. But he doesn’t.

“I overheard. They weren’t my friends, but I knew them. I’d lived with them at another house once. I knew they were bad guys.”

Nothing is the same. Even the way it feels to breathe is different.

“But, did you know . . . the other thing? What they planned?” I feel like I’m going to throw up.

He’s silent. Then his hands are on my face, but I don’t feel anything anymore.

“Babe . . .”

“Don’t call me that!” I smack and twist like a demon, trying to get his touch off of me.

A noise comes out of me, and I’m not even sure what it is. There are tears flooding my cheeks, but I am also kicking and wailing, wishing he would disappear.

I can’t decide what hurts more.

The past or the present.

I’m sitting back on my bed. My limbs don’t feel like they are attached to me. Jeremy is talking, but I’m holding my head in my hands, trying not to absorb the meaning of his words.

I’m not sure who I hate more right now.

Jeremy is half-smiling as he lays out more information that I don’t want to know about Beckett.

He grabs the little, white box off the floor and stuffs the diamond solitaire back inside and shoves it in his pocket like he’s an angry kid on the playground, taking his ball and going home. I follow him out into the living room.

“I’ve done everything I can for you. I don’t even know if I want to marry you anymore. You have a lot of thinking to do, Promise. I’m beginning to believe Jordan is better off with them.”

Those are the words he knew would hurt me the most, and they did.

Bruce has Beckett corralled on the balcony in an attempt to give Jeremy a chance to get out of the apartment alive. Jeremy agreed to leave without calling the cops on the condition that he could tell me what he needed to tell me before getting out the door.

Beckett refused at first. He even got his phone out and handed it to Jeremy with 911 already dialed, daring him to make the call. With Bruce’s magic smile and my pathetic pleas, Beckett gave Jeremy one last death stare and stomped out with Bruce pushing from behind.

Now, Jeremy’s gone. He told me things I don’t want to know. Things that can’t be true. I’m not sure how I’m still standing—how I’m still alive—because I hurt down inside the marrow of my bones. I can
feel
my bone marrow, and it’s not good.

I see Beckett's silhouette pacing on the balcony through the tightly closed vertical blinds. Bruce’s muffled voice rambles on, trying to keep Beckett from breaking through the glass and bashing Jeremy’s head until gray matter drips out his ears.

I take a long moment and stare at the movement behind the glass. Then, instead of opening the door and joining Beckett and Bruce, I grab my backpack and head out the apartment door and down the hall in the opposite direction from Jeremy.

Beckett

After twenty minutes, I’m not waiting anymore. Bruce is on his fifth pretzel stick when I slide open the glass door separating the balcony from the living room of the apartment.

It’s quiet.

I should have never agreed to let her talk to him alone. Fuck.

In ten steps, I’m in her bedroom. Nothing.

Bathroom. Kitchen. Nothing.

She’s fucking gone.

As if the last hour wasn’t fucked up enough, now she’s decided to go solo?

She’s in no condition for this shit. On top of that, I have no idea what other venom Jeremy spewed on her about me or who knows what else while I paced a damn groove in the cement floor of the balcony.

I knew I should have beat that pathetic fuck into a weeping heap and just let it all be done. Now, I don’t know where she is, and that’s all that really fucking matters to me.

Jeremy should know better than to raise the bounty on his ass. I saw the look in his eye. He’s a piece of shit. Always has been.

If I had my way, I would have gone to my grave without her knowing I was there the night Steven and Brian fucking took everything from her. I hate myself for wanting to keep it from her. Secrets are cancer, but there was no fucking benefit for her to know.

Hell, I didn’t even know myself for sure for a couple weeks after what had really happened, and by then, it was too late to go back and change things.

I could have stopped it. I could have saved her.

I’ve carried that shit storm of guilt with me all these years, and now it’s going to blow up the one thing I’ve always wanted. Steven and Brian were both convicted as juvenile offenders, and spend a year or some minor shit paying their debt. They pled down to assault, brought into question whether or not is was consensual. Bull. Shit. She was fucking twelve, and they were seventeen. It’s ten tons of suck for her because a year at the juvenile farm is nothing compared to the life of memories she has to carry.

I’m sure Jeremy filled her head with more bullshit about me. Even what he said in the bedroom was shit. I
hadn’t
known it was going to be her. I had known those guys were planning to take some girl. I hadn’t known when, and I hadn’t even been sure they weren’t just talking shit.

But, that night when I saw them in the alley heading through the back gate of the house where I knew Promise stayed, I was pretty fucking sure what was going on—what was going to happen.

And, I chose not to stop it. I didn’t do what I should have done, and she paid with a part of herself that cannot be restored. She was fucking thirteen. That is a debt I will never be able to repay.

With her not scheduled to work at Windfield again until Tuesday, she’s in the wind now, and I have no idea where she’ll land. All I know is that Tuesday is way too fucking long to wait to set things back to right.

It’s Friday, and I take the next twelve hours to scour the streets without a break. I even stop in at that shithole where she’s been dancing and light into some scumbag named Tito when he gives me lip for asking where she is. She’s like dust, no one has seen her, and I’m losing my damn mind.

By Saturday night, I’m completely undone. I’ve got Bruce on my side, but no matter how many damn times I check in with him, he still hasn’t heard from her.

I’ve been stalking Jeremy’s place. I've driven by so many times; I’ve got it memorized. He wasn’t hard to find. I asked Louis to get me his address, and he did it without hesitation.

I’ve watched that piece of human garbage come and go on his regular schedule, fighting the urge to lie in wait under his bed for when he goes to sleep. Ready to become his own personal nightmare. But instead, I watch . . . he comes and goes. No sign of her. If she was there, I would feel it.

With every beat of my heart, I want to demolish Jeremy. To end him. The only thing keeping my hands from snapping his neck is the forty-to-life it would put between me and Promise.