"Noah," she murmured a couple of minutes later, "I watched that episode of Blue Force again."
Nausea swamped him, along with a wave of black rage. His fingers threatened to tighten to crushing pressure. "Why?" The single word came out as harsh as broken stone.
A quiet glance that was more of an answer than any words she could've spoken. She'd looked because she loved him and she was trying to find a way to help him.
"What did you figure out?" he asked, every muscle in his body so rigid he felt as if he was made of thousands of pieces of steel wire.
"Were you kidnapped as a child?"
He laughed, and it was a broken sound. "That would've been simpler." Tugging Kit against him, he thrust the fingers of his hand into her hair and cupped the back of her head as he pressed his cheek to her temple.
He could feel the tremors running through his body, couldn't make them stop, the past he'd spent a lifetime trying to bury suddenly shoving at his mind. He'd never, never wanted Kit to know, but she was starting to suspect. Whatever she'd imagined, it couldn't be as bad as the truth, but he realized at that instant that he couldn't live with having her guessing, having her hurting for him as she imagined scenario after scenario.
He didn't know if this was better. It made him feel sick to even think about.
She ran her hands down his back. "Noah, I'm sorry." Her breath against his neck. "It's all right. We don't have to talk about it right now."
He couldn't stop the damn shaking, and he couldn't let go of her. It felt as if he'd throw up, but his body was ice-cold at the same time. When he tried to speak, nothing came out. He was that child again, that small six-year-old boy who couldn't escape from under the suffocating body of the man who was hurting him.
Shaking so hard now that he felt as if he'd break apart, he turned his nose into Kit's hair, breathing her scent in an effort to forget the acrid, sweaty, ugly scent of that bed, that room, that man.
"Noah." Kit's voice, a little thready but resolute. "Noah, it's Kit, and we're standing in my garden after having a really big fight." She stroked his back again. "Your face looks like you ran into a brick wall. Three times."
He wanted to laugh, couldn't manage it.
"Does it hurt here?" She petted his back gently. "I didn't even ask if you guys kicked each other around."
"No," he managed to rasp out. "Fists only."
"Glad to see you two have standards." Her voice steadied with his response, as if she'd just needed to hear him. "The real question is whether you rolled around in the mud after you destroyed your garden."
Her hair was soft against his chin, her body slender and yet curvy in all the right places. He could smell that fruity shampoo she liked, the one he'd used once and felt as if he'd been emasculated. On her, it was perfect. And her skin, it had its own Kit scent. She was the most beautiful woman he'd ever met, and it had nothing to do with her face.
I love you.
I love you, but I won't be an emotional punching bag.
He knew at that instant that he hadn't just hurt her. He'd come very close to abuse of the kind that left no bruises but hurt just as bad. "I'm sorry," he said again, the tremors still rocking his frame. "Forgive me."
"It's okay, Noah."
No, it wasn't okay, and he knew she wasn't fine with it, but right now she was so worried about him that she was giving him a pass.
"Fuck!" Wrenching away from her, he strode into the garden.
He half expected her to follow, but she didn't. Instead, she let him walk into the darkness and when he came back ten minutes later, having conquered the shaking but with his body covered in a cold sweat, she was waiting for him on a picnic blanket she'd laid out on the mossy grass, her head on a pillow as she looked up at the stars.
Coming down beside her, he laid his head on the pillow she'd placed next to her own. It was automatic to stretch out his arm so she could use that as her pillow instead. He had a stupid fucking romantic dream of waking up one day with his arm all numb because she'd slept on it through the night. Yeah, he was screwed.
She accepted his silent offer while, above them, the sky glittered bright. "That's part of why I love this place," Kit said to him. "It's far enough away from the lights that you can actually see the stars."
Noah had spent more than one night awake staring up at the night sky. "You know that group of stars?" He gestured up. "That's called Pegasus."
"How do you know that?"
He shrugged. "I was up late and bored one night, so I started looking stuff up online and kind of got into it." For a while, he'd thought about buying a telescope, but he didn't want to take away the magic by making the stars too real; he'd rather just look at them as sparkling pieces of light, clean and untainted.
They lay there in silence for a long time, and the claw was back around his heart when he found the courage to speak. "It happened when I was six years old."
The shaking threatened to start again.
Nails digging into the palm of the hand he had by his side, he clenched his jaw and breathed short and shallow in an effort to fight it. "My father had this friend." Noah tried to say the name, but all that came up was choking bile.
He swallowed it down, kept going, aware that he was destroying his future with Kit--what woman would want a man who'd had that done to him? He'd been made less than a man before he even had the chance to grow up.
"My family and the friend's family used to spend summers together in houses side by side on Cape Cod." Noah's chest was so painful now that it was as if his rib cage were crushing his internal organs. "He had a son around my age, so my parents thought it was the perfect arrangement. Emily was only a few weeks old, and she stayed with the nanny, and the other boy and I were sent off to play while the adults socialized."
Kit curled her fingers around the hand he had beside her head.
He held on tight, knowing he'd soon enough have to let her go forever. "Only it wasn't always like that. Sometimes my dad wanted to work and my mom wanted to go out for a coffee with the other boy's mom. So my father's friend would volunteer to watch us boys." His breath was a wheeze now.
Oh, don't coop the kids up with the nanny. She can't keep up with two growing boys anyway. I'll make sure they stay busy and out of trouble.
Noah could still hear that voice in his head, so jovial and friendly. He'd trusted that man because his father had trusted him. The man was a dad too. Dads were to be trusted.
"He hurt you and his son," Kit said softly. "You don't have to give me details, Noah. I can imagine."
It was an out, and one he should've grabbed on to, but if this was the last night he was to spend with Kit, then why not give her the whole ugly truth? She deserved it after all the crap he'd put her through. "He never touched his own son. Only me."
Noah forced himself to breathe. "He'd send his son to play in the backyard and then he'd..." The memories threatened to drown Noah in suffocating blackness. Staring up at the brightest star in the sky, he got the rest of it out before he could no longer speak. "He did pretty much everything you can do to a small boy with no defenses."
He heard a wet sound, realized Kit was crying again.
Curling his arm inward, he held her against him. Again, he'd made her cry and it wasn't over. Somehow he could still speak, and the words, they came out one by one, each a razor blade slicing his vocal cords. "Afterward, he warned me that if I ever told, he'd cut my parents' throats in the middle of the night and do the same things to Emily that he'd done to me. He said that even if my parents survived, they'd send me away for bringing the monster to their door."
"That fucking bastard." Kit's hand was a fist on his chest, her voice thick and harsh.
He crushed her closer, the tremors in his body having turned stiff until his muscles and bones felt like those of an eighty-year-old man. "I was only six, and he showed me the knife he'd use to cut my parents' throats. So I didn't tell."
To this day, Noah didn't know if he'd have been believed if he had
told. "That summer, he did it again and again and again." Noah's father had brought a lot of work with him, and Noah's mother had so many friends to see after having been on bed rest for most of her pregnancy; they'd thought nothing of leaving Noah with the man who was thought to be a friend. And the man's wife had thought him a great guy for offering to babysit so she could accompany Noah's mom on her visits.
"Even after we returned home," Noah continued before he couldn't, "I didn't tell anyone. He'd convinced me that he was a real monster, that he could get to my family no matter where we lived." Huddled and shivering under his blankets, he'd barely slept as he waited for evil to crawl through the window. "It was only when my parents started making plans to spend the next summer with the same family that I broke. I had a screaming tantrum, saying I didn't want to go."
"What happened?"
"Time out." He smiled grimly. "My father told me I was too old for such theatrics and left me alone in my room to think it over. What I did instead was go into his study and use the key hidden under his lamp to unlock the drawer in which he kept his gun."
Kit's gasp was loud.
"I knew how to use it." How to load the bullets if it was empty, how to release the safety, how to brace himself for the recoil. "My father'd taught me--we're all 'real men' in the St. John family. Guns and hunting and women." His father had always had a woman on the side, all part of the proud St. John tradition.
Bitterness in his mouth, Noah fisted his hand in Kit's hair. "My father walked into my room an hour after he'd left to find me pointing the gun at the window."
Kit went as if to rise up, but he couldn't bear to see the disgust on her face, so he used his grip in her hair to keep her down. Not resisting, she stayed.
"To his credit, he didn't yell. Instead, he asked me why I had the gun. I told him it was to shoot the monster so he couldn't hurt us." Noah could still see his father's face as Noah finally told him about how the monster liked to do "bad things" to Noah: a mix of shock, pain, disgust... and shame.
Noah sometimes liked to imagine the latter two had been directed inward or at the man who'd done the crime, but Robert St. John's later actions had made it clear the disgust and shame had been directed solely at Noah. "To cut a long story short, my father told me we wouldn't be going to the Cape, I gave him the gun, and two weeks later, after a discreet medical examination to make sure there was no permanent physical damage, I was shipped off to boarding school."
This time when Kit jerked up her head, he couldn't keep her down. Turning his face away, he stared out into the garden.
"What about counseling?" she said, horror in her tone. "Did they even talk to you about--"
"No." After the medical exam, no one in his family had ever again discussed the events of the summer of his sixth year. "My mother couldn't even bear going with me to the doctor, and my father... he looked at me and was ashamed of me because I'd allowed it to happen."
"You were just a child!" Open rage in Kit's voice as she sat up beside him, her knees brushing his side. "They didn't report the man, did they?"
"No. I spent my first year at boarding school having nightmares about him hunting me down." It was after a screaming nightmare that Fox had tried to comfort him and he'd spilled the whole truth. His best friend had responded by putting a chair under the doorknob so no one could get into their room, and together they'd rigged up a noisemaker across the window.
"Tell me they didn't just let that monster walk free," Kit pleaded.
"On my eighth birthday, my father gave me a cutting from a newspaper. It was the man's obituary." Putting one arm under his head, he chanced looking up at the stars again, Kit in his peripheral vision. "It wasn't until I was older that I searched online and discovered the man had been found in his study at home, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound."
"Suicide. He did the world a favor."
Noah wanted to laugh. "He did nothing. My father used to defend small-time mobsters, did you know that? The kind of men who'd do him a solid, no questions asked."
"You think he had the bastard killed?"
"I know he did." Noah was certain Robert St. John had done it because that man had dared shame the family name, not because he'd hurt Robert's son. "When I turned eighteen, after a big-ass party my mother threw because that's what she does, my father found me fucking some random debutante. Later that night, he slapped me on the back and said, 'Good to know that asswipe didn't ruin you, boy. I hear the pussy begged for his life.'"
Chapter 33
If Noah's parents had been in front of Kit right then, she'd have slapped them both sideways. They'd sent away a traumatized, scared boy without offering him any help. What must he have thought when he was shoved out of the family home? When he was abandoned?
Just like the monster had predicted.
"It wasn't your fault," she said softly, conscious those beautiful gray eyes hadn't met hers since he began speaking. "You know that, don't you?"
"That night? The one of my eighteenth birthday party?" Noah said instead of answering. "It was the first time in eleven years my father asked me if I'd like to go on a hunting trip with him and the rest of the males in the extended family. Every other boy had been going since he could hold a weapon."
Kit had never hated anyone as much as she hated Robert St. John right then. "That makes him an asshole. It doesn't make any of what happened your fault."
He still wouldn't look at her, but he moved one hand to touch her lower back, the contact hesitant. "I don't like sex," he said, the words blunt and hard. "I fuck women because it makes me feel like a man, and for a short time afterward, I can forget that I had my manhood taken from me."
Kit didn't know how to deal with this--Noah's pain wasn't something that could be fixed with kisses and hugs or love. This was a down-to-the-soul wound, one that was still bleeding. But she knew one thing, and that was that she loved Noah. "Bullshit."
His eyes finally flicked to her, the dark gray unreadable. "You never say bullshit."
"I'm saying it now." She held his gaze. "You're one hell of a man--that bastard hurt you, but he did not make you any less a man."
Jaw tight, he broke the eye contact. "Yeah, okay."
Gripping his jaw, she made him face her. "What if it was me?" she asked him. "What if it had been a child Kit in that room instead of you? Would you consider me any less a woman?"
"No, of course not." His fingers dug into the flesh of her hip. "But I'm a man, Kit. I was brought up to be the man of the fucking house. To take care of the people who were my own and to gut anyone who dared hurt any of them, and I couldn't even protect myself."
"Noah, you were six years old." Kit was speaking, but she knew her words were hitting a stone wall of rage and self-recrimination and indoctrination. "Girl or boy, no six-year-old can protect themselves against an adult. The hurt is the same, regardless of the gender, and deserving of the same care."
That held true no matter the age of the abused, but right now, she had to focus on the fact Noah had been a child--she might actually stand a chance of getting through to him if she made him consciously think about the fact he was pitting a small boy against a full-grown adult.
Her attempt didn't work.
"I should've shot him," Noah said. "That's what my Dad said the day he found me with the gun. After I told him, he said I should've shot the bastard."
"I want to shoot your father right now," Kit ground out. "Jesus Christ, that man has no business being a father." Her parents might be feckless and self-involved, but the one time she'd had a bully come after her in school, they'd marched in and torn the principal a new one, then confronted the bully's parents. "Where was your mother in all this?"
"Shopping, tanning, taking Emily for walks in her stroller, anything to get away from the reality of a defiled child." A vicious smile on his face. "She can't look at me, did you notice?"
She had. Now that she knew why, she wanted to pound Noah's mother into dust, just crush her out of existence. "That's on
her." Kit's voice shook with sheer fury. "It's the job of a parent to be there for their child, to kiss the hurts and fight the monsters. It sucks that yours failed at that." She reached out to brush back his hair.
When he grew stiff, she nearly withdrew, but gut instinct forced her to keep going, keep running her fingers through the golden strands. If he wanted her to stop, he'd pull away.
He didn't.
Inch by inch, second by second, his muscles eased until she braced her back against a tree, stretched out her legs, and coaxed him to put his head in her lap so she could continue to play with his hair. "Have you ever spoken to anyone about this?"
"Fox knows."
"No, I mean a counselor, or--"
"No. And that's not going to change."
"Noah--"
"No." He closed his eyes, one knee drawn up on the picnic blanket and shoulder muscles bunched again. "I'm not going to spill my guts to some shrink. Not now, not ever. It'll end up on the front page of a tabloid the next day."
That tone was one she'd rarely heard from him, but it always meant a hard, bright line beyond which he would not negotiate.
The worst thing was that she couldn't even argue with him. She was sure there were trustworthy psychologists and counselors out there, but they kept records and those records went into computer systems or into filing cabinets, and Noah was a high-profile man. All it would take was a single nosy receptionist or file clerk who couldn't keep the news to himself or herself, and it would end up in the tabloids, front and center.
Oh, the articles would be cloyingly sweet, giving lip service to Noah's courage and strength, but all the while, they'd be ripping him to shreds by bringing up the most horrific time of his life over and over and over again. He wouldn't be able to escape the knowledge in people's eyes, and knowing Noah as she did and having just heard what he believed about masculinity and strength, she knew that would destroy him.
What she didn't know was if he'd walk away from her too, now that she knew.
For this moment, he lay there quietly as she stroked her fingers through his hair, his eyes closed. She didn't know when she realized the rhythm of his breathing had changed.
He was asleep.
Eyes wide, she almost halted in her soothing strokes, caught herself before she could interrupt the rhythm. If Noah was finally sleeping, especially after what he'd just told her, she wasn't about to wreck it.