Pop’s voice cut off when I leaned against the bathroom door, and it banged open. I’d thought it was closed when I leaned against it, and after the loud noise, I scrambled inside before they could see me. I didn’t know what was going on with Pop, but that was the second time I’d heard him trying to talk Dragon out of getting the DNA testing done. I decided I’d think about it later as I spun around and locked the door. It wouldn’t keep Dragon out if he really wanted in, but I doubted he would come barging in anyway. If his absence in bed that morning was any indication, he was as leery of me as I was of him.
I took a longer shower than I had planned on, taking the time to shave my legs and carefully wash my face before I got out. Long showers were a luxury that I hadn’t had in four years, and it was kind of nice to take my time. I eventually stopped dawdling, knowing that if I took any longer I’d look like a coward. I climbed out of the shower and got dressed in a summer dress that I’d found in the boxes Vera brought over. It was a little tight across the chest, but I thought it looked okay anyway. It was loose and flowing, perfect for a hot summer day. I also liked the irony of dressing up a little when my face looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. The swelling on my cheekbone hadn’t gone down much, but I was pretty sure the brunt of the trauma was when I’d hit the wall. Dragon’s slap had just added the little bit of extra it took to make me look like a monster. I didn’t even try to cover it up with makeup; nothing was going to help.
When I got to the kitchen a few minutes later, I took a deep breath and tried not to look at Dragon sitting on the couch, alone, with his elbows resting on his knees. He looked how I felt, uneasy. I got my cup of coffee and turned around, leaning against the counter, to catch my breath. I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t know what to do in this situation.
When I was with Tony, the beatings were nothing like this. He liked to hit me. There was no purpose, no anger in it. He got off on it. The next day would be business as usual, and he would expect me to act like nothing happened. With Dragon, he’d hit me once. He hadn’t beaten me. He’d been angry and devastated, and the underlying reason was still stretched between us like a foul-smelling moat that I didn’t know how to cross.
He didn’t say a word to me. He just sat there, looking at the floor, like he had all day to do so. The tension in the air finally caused me to take a few steps in his direction, and when I did, his head snapped up. All at once, I saw everything he was feeling. He wasn’t angry anymore. There was no censure in his gaze, no fury in the lines of his face. The pain I saw was enough for me to take a ragged breath and another step forward, but it was the guilt in his eyes that led me to sit next to him on the couch.
When I got there, he turned toward me, and I flinched as he raised a hand to my swollen face.
“God, baby. I’m so sorry,” he whispered, and I knew that he was.
I knew he was sorry, but whether that mattered or not remained to be seen.
“I know,” I told him quietly, but I couldn’t tell him he was forgiven. I couldn’t tell him it was okay, and I was fine. I wasn’t fine.
“I don’t know what the fuck I was doing. Fuck. Fuck!” He searched my body as if looking for any more bruises, and I knew the exact moment he noticed the ones on my arms. “Shit, look at your arms, baby.” He rubbed them gently with his fingertips as if to finger paint them away.
“Those will be gone by tomorrow,” I told him, and they would. I bruised easily. I always had. “I’m like a peach. I bruise easy. Those ones aren’t the problem.”
“I know,” he told me as he wiped his hand down his face. “God, I was fuckin’ dyin’ when you told me about him. I was so fuckin’ angry with you. I thought, maybe there was an accident or somethin’, you know? Like maybe something happened to him. That’s why I waited, why I let you sleep. I thought we’d just talk about it. I knew it had to have been fuckin’ bad for you. I knew. But fuck, when you said you knew he was dyin’, and you never fuckin’ told me.” He shook his head and cleared his throat. “Fuck, Brenna. I never got to hold my son.”
He looked at the floor again, not touching me, not moving, and for a while, I just sat there, staring at him.
“I’m sorry.” I was so sorry that I hadn’t had a chance to tell him, to soften the blow as much as I could.
“What are you sorry for, Brenna? I hit you in your goddamn face for Christ’s sake!”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I’m sorry you didn’t get a chance to hold him. I thought I was doing the right thing.”
“You don’t need to be sorry. I told you before that all that shit was over. I told you that you were fuckin’ safe here. That nobody would lay a hand on you as long as you were with me. Fuck. I blew that all to shit, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, I guess you did.”
I could feel a lump in my throat growing as I watched him berate himself. Did I want him to be sorry? Hell yes, I did. But I didn’t want him to take all the blame for the clusterfuck that was our lives. I’d done my part, and my part was a doozy.
He must have heard something in my voice because when I finished speaking, he put his arms around me and gently pulled me into his lap. The action was enough to put my overused tear ducts to work again, and I could feel my cheeks getting wet as he buried his face in my throat.
“I’m so sorry, baby. Fuck. I’m so sorry. I won’t hit you again. Ever. Fuck me. I can’t believe I fuckin’ hit you,” he repeated again and again into my throat, kissing me between words.
I didn’t know who moved first, but our lips met, and everything from there was a frenzy of movement. I slid my leg around, so I was straddling his hips, and his hands slid underneath my dress, pulling at my underwear until the strings holding the sides snapped and he pulled them away. I was equally as impatient, digging my fingers into his belly, as I tried to get his jeans unbuttoned. When we were both finally naked from the waist down, I lifted up with my legs and brought him inside me in one move that had us both groaning. We weren’t making love. It wasn’t sweet or soft. We were fucking, hard. Every movement was rough and needy, and for once, Dragon wasn’t talking me through it. We just needed to be as close as we possibly could before the world came tumbling around us again. I was headed for climax, my body stiffening with impending release, when he grasped my hips and slowed me down.
“What are you doing?” I griped as I tried to move against his hands.
“Baby, look at me?” he asked, but I shook my head as I pulled at his hands.
I couldn’t do this right now. I just needed him to fuck me. I couldn’t deal with anything more. My face was finally dry, my emotions in check. I just needed him to fuck me.
The first time was a question, but the next time was a demand. “Baby. Look. At. Me.”
I tried to shake my head again, but he ran his fingers up the uninjured side of my face and lightly tangled his fingers in the hair behind my ear, and I finally met his eyes.
“I am so goddamn sorry, Brenna. I’m sorry I lost it.”
“Okay,” I told him and tried to move my hips again, but he was holding me still.
“I’m sorry that I hit you. But I’m more sorry that I didn’t come for you.”
My breath whooshed out of me at those words.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to hold him, and I’m sorry I didn’t get to hold you, that I didn’t get to take care of you when you needed me. And I’m so goddamn sorry that you told me our son was dead, and I fuckin’ scared you and hit you, and I didn’t hold you tight and love you. I’m sorry.”
It was more than I could take. I leaned forward and rested my head against his neck below his ear and cried as he rubbed my back in slow circles, our bodies still connected. I finally lifted my head and nodded at him, wiping my nose on my dress, as I pulled it off.
“Okay,” I told him. And I was.
The last couple of days were a hell that I would never want to go through again. It was agony, all of it. But I loved him, and I needed him, and I didn’t want to be without him ever again
. So, I would work through it; we would work through it.
As soon as my dress was off, he reached back and unsnapped my bra.
“Not supposed to wear a bra with that hippie dress,” he told me, rubbing the lines on my breasts from the seams of my bra.
“I don’t ever go without a bra. The girls are too big.”
“Good, nobody needs to be starin’ at your tits. You’re home with me and Trix though, you go without,” he grumbled as he took one of my nipples into his mouth.
He let it pop out with a small smack of his lips and then looked up at my face where I sat, unmoving.
“Not ten minutes ago, you were fucking me like you couldn’t get enough, and now, you just sit, not movin’. You need me to talk to you, baby?” he asked with a tender smile.
I hadn’t realized that I was frozen above him until he’d pointed it out. It was true. I had stopped. Normally, I needed that little bit of dominance from him. The little bit of direction helped me feel comfortable and safe. In our mad dash to be connected earlier, I hadn’t thought about it, but once the frenzy was over, I was still, too still. I felt my face burn with embarrassment.
“That’s okay, baby. I’ll give you what you need,” he told me before he took my nipple between his teeth.
He squeezed my ass in his hands, and I knew that he wanted to slap it, but with the day before looming above our heads, he was afraid to.
“Ride me, baby,” he growled at me, squeezing again.
When I didn’t move, he raised his head from my breasts to look me in the eye. I just looked at him, too afraid to say what I needed. I didn’t want this hanging over us, even in bed. I wanted him uninhibited, so I felt free to be uninhibited with him. I needed him to get past it.
So, I just waited, challenging him with my eyes, for him to do what we both needed. I knew the moment when he understood because his eyebrows raised and a small smirk lifted the side of his mouth.
“Okay, baby. I’ll give it to you.” Then, he slapped my ass once, barely enough to sting, but it was there. “Ride me, Brenna. Now.”
And I did.
We spent the rest of the day, lying in bed, talking. I told him all of the things I’d wanted to before, and he listened quietly while I laughed and cried. It was good for us. We planned on getting Trix the next day, and I really hoped that my face looked good enough to cover with makeup. The swelling went down considerably as the day went on, and Dragon frequently reached up to touch it softly as if reminding himself what a dick he’d been. We only left the bed for food and bathroom trips, preferring to spend our time cocooned together, away from the outside world. If Trix had been there, it would have been perfect.
I knew that it was going to be a process for us to put things behind us, but I was willing to be patient. When I looked at him, I saw everything I wanted. That was enough.
Chapter 24
Brenna
The next few days were a revelation. Trix came home the next day, and although she could tell something had happened, she never said anything. The swelling went down on my face pretty quickly after those first couple of days, and the bruising faded to a putrid yellow color I could cover with makeup. Tony hadn’t ever hit my face hard enough to bruise, but more than once, he’d grabbed it hard enough to leave fingerprints, which meant I was pretty damn good at covering things with a little foundation and some powder.
We slept late in the mornings, no morning sex, but Trix came in with the rising of the sun and snuggled up in bed with us. It was heaven. Dragon was able to take off a week of time that he spent mostly with us. There were a few times that he had to go out on club business, but for the most part, he was home with us all day. I knew my pop had a hand in that, and I was grateful.
We spent time getting to know each other on a level we never had before. Little things that other people took for granted, I relished. Dragon didn’t like any cereal that wasn’t sugary or didn’t have a cartoon character on the box, but he was really health-conscious otherwise. I’d always been pretty careful with what I fed Trix, but he took it to a whole new level, making sure she ate plenty of vegetables and nothing out of a box, except cereal.
I knew he would eventually grow more complacent, but the fact that he worried so much was endearing. He let me lounge in bed in the morning while he got Trix fed, but he was in, slapping my ass to wake me up to get her dressed. He liked metal music and anything to do with an engine that he could work on with his hands.
Spare parts soon came to rest on my kitchen table or by the front door, and I eventually got him a crate to put things in, so they didn’t clutter up my house. He used orange-smelling cleaner to scrub his hands and a little nailbrush to make sure he never came to bed and put his hands in me while they were covered in grease.
We lay out on a blanket in the grass, his hand holding mine or wrapped around my waist for hours, while we watched Trix run through the sprinkler in her underwear. He always made sure both Trix and I were slathered in sunblock every time we left the house.
He was concerned about things that I had never imagined would matter to him. The way he took care of us relieved every concern I had about him in the past. He cared about everything. He tried to protect us without stifling us, and Trix and I blossomed.
One night, when Trix was playing on the floor and Dragon sat polishing some sort of engine something or other, I started flipping through the music on my iPod. He was grunting with every selection, like I was turning it on just to torture him. He never raised his head, but after a while, I started to pick music just to annoy him. Maroon 5, Janet Jackson, anything pop-related that I could find, I played, and every time, he made a noise of disapproval. Finally, I chose one of my favorites, a song I used to sing to Trix as a baby. It wasn’t pop, but it definitely wasn’t heavy metal. When I didn’t hear a noise from him, I raised my head and watched him polishing the engine part.
“Seriously? Nothing to say?” I asked him, my eyebrows rose in surprise.
He never looked up from what he was doing, but he answered me anyway, “Babe. The man’s a poet.”
“You like James Taylor?”
“Just said I did, didn’t I?”
I felt the smile forming on my face as I found the greatest hits on my iPod and set them on shuffle. I’d found our musical common ground. To other people, it may have seemed insignificant, silly even. But we were building a life, starting from the ground up. I loved learning new things about him, finding how we fit. When he looked up and winked at me, my smile widened until I felt my cheeks cramp.
We made our first forays into the outside world, and it didn’t seem as daunting with Dragon by my side. I knew he wouldn’t let anything happen to us. We grocery shopped and went to dinner, and we even went shopping for summer clothes for Trix. Nothing too short or with any thin shoulder straps made it into our basket. He was very particular about what she wore. It seemed a little over the top to me, but if it was important to him, we could wait until Trix was old enough to complain before we discussed it.
Normal things felt like trips to an amusement park. They were all new and exciting. Even settling into a routine was something that I found myself daydreaming about. This was a life I’d never wanted, and now, suddenly, it felt completely right.
If Dragon would have treated me like spun glass those first few weeks, I thought things would have been much harder to move on from. I would have been aware of our fight every moment of every day, like an albatross hanging around my neck. But after that first day, he didn’t bring it up again other than the small kisses he dropped on my cheek daily, even after the bruises had faded. It was a reminder that he hadn’t forgotten; it was a promise. He went back to being the man I’d dreamed about, gruff and blunt and completely enamored with me. He undressed me with his eyes at the dinner table and grabbed my ass as I left a room, and I loved it. I loved him. I wasn’t sure when it started—long before the day he found out about Draco—but it felt so much more real once he knew everything. All our secrets were ou
t in the open, and I reveled in it.
For once in five years, I wasn’t in control, and I loved it. I hadn’t had a panic attack since I got the papers from Tony, and I felt stronger by the day. I knew Dragon and Pop wouldn’t let anything happen to Trix, and it was a heady feeling to not have to worry about every single little thing. I was just living, playing with my girl during the day and playing with my man at night. It was bliss.
Eventually, life changed into a more normal pattern with Dragon leaving in the mornings and sometimes not getting home until Trix and I were in bed. I didn’t like it. Of course, I didn’t. Most nights, I lay awake, waiting for him to get home, my insecurities screaming at me. But he never gave me any reason not to trust him. He’d come home smelling like the clubhouse—smoke and a mix of whiskey and beer. It didn’t matter if he’d left only hours before, the minute he got home, I wanted him. I simmered all day, my body sore, but with an underlying arousal that never went away. We wanted each other with an urgency that never wavered.
The club had a barbeque every few months, and about three weeks after the fight, they had another. It was mid-summer. Everyone was outside in the sunshine, and a band was playing on a platform built every year once the sun came out. It was a tradition to have one of the local bands play, and it’d been the same one since I was a kid. The guys in the band were honorary members of the club although none of them had ever been patched in. They were old and grizzly, and I loved every single one of them. It was like seeing a bunch of uncles for the first time in years, and I proudly showed Trix off while she stood shyly, trying to hide behind my legs.
It was fun to see Dragon in his element, drinking beer with the boys and giving the recruits a hard time. I’d never had the chance to see him interact with the boys before, but I wasn’t surprised by the respect he seemed to have inside the club. It gave me a feeling of family that I hadn’t had in a long time.
I was sitting on Dragon’s knee, my arms wrapped around his shoulders, while he talked to Grease when the band started its first set. I was familiar with all of the songs they sang. Not only were they covers, but they hadn’t changed much over the years. There were newer versions of some of the songs, but for the most part, they stuck to what they considered the classics. It wasn’t until they paused after “Crazy Train” and the lead singer Jimmy started speaking that I paid any attention to what they were doing.