Chapter 19

Van

I don’t think I can do this.

Even as I hold tight to Simone, every moral cell in my body is screaming at me to cut ties and run. She doesn’t deserve this weight I carry around. As she holds me now and I realize that her heart is indeed involved, she sure as fuck doesn’t deserve to fall for someone like me.

“Simone,” I say gently as I bring a hand up to the back of her head. I curl my fingers around her neck and give her a gentle squeeze.

She looks up at me with fierce eyes. “Don’t you even think about telling me I deserve better, or that you don’t have anything to give me. At the very least, you better sure as fuck keep giving me what you’ve been giving me, and if I had my way, you’d talk to me and tell me everything.”

I blink at her, mesmerized by her determination. She continues. “So you have two choices. You either take me back into your bedroom and fuck the hell out of me, and we’ll both push this under the rug. Or you sit your ass on that couch and you tell me all of it. Every last nasty detail, and then you let me keep your secret.”

“I’m not surprised,” I mutter.

“By what?” she asks with her head tilted.

“That you won’t take no for an answer,” I say with a sigh. “You’re relentless.”

“And shiny,” she says with a perky smile.

“And shiny,” I admit with defeat. “Go grab two beers out of the fridge and you’ll hear it all.”

She doesn’t hesitate, releasing her hold on me and trotting into the kitchen. When she comes back, I already have taken a seat on one end of the couch. To my relief, after handing me my beer, she sits on the opposite end. I kick my legs out but turn slightly to face her. She draws her legs up under her and pops the top to her beer.

“How much of that stuff did you read?” I ask her.

“I got the gist of what your father did,” she says quietly. “And that he’s in prison in Virginia and dying.”

I nod, popping my own beer open. I take a long swallow, mostly to wet my throat, which has become dry as dirt. “I was eight when he was tried and convicted. It was in the summer, and my mom made me attend the trial with her. She was convinced he was innocent and wanted to show our support.”

“That’s awful,” she murmurs.

“I agree,” I tell her. “You don’t even want to know the nightmares I had for years after that.”

“Did you…um…ever talk to someone about it?”

“You mean like a psychologist or something?” I ask, and she nods. “Yes. For a few years when I was younger. Again when I hit my teens. It helped.”

“And your mom? Is that Etta Turner?” she asks.

I shake my head, smiling slightly at just the mention of Etta’s name. “She’s my aunt. My mom killed herself three days after my dad was convicted. I came home from school one day and she was just lying in bed…thought she was sleeping. It was a prescription drug overdose.”

“Oh, Van,” Simone says with such heartfelt sympathy it makes my nose sting from the care within her tone.

I wave her off. “I don’t miss her. I’ve come to grips that she was wrong to expose me to that, but honestly, it afforded me a life with Etta.”

“You changed your name,” Simone says with sudden realization. “The letter was addressed to Grant VanBuskirk.”

“Etta had custody of me and we tried to stay in the D.C. area, but I was really struggling. School was just hard, and I was acting out. She got my dad’s parental rights terminated, moved me to California, and we left it all behind.”

“I like Van,” she says, giving me a sweet smile. “It’s a good name. Strong. Like you.”

I appreciate her sweet words, but strong isn’t the word I would ever use to describe me. Coward, maybe, since I shut myself away from the world. Asshole, definitely. A charlatan, probably, for hiding behind a fake name.

I don’t say these things, though, and push on with my story. “Etta gave me a new life and things were better in California. She got me involved in hockey early, and it was a way for me to channel a lot of my anger.”

“She sounds amazing,” Simone says.

I nod, and although I know it will hurt, I have to say it. “The only woman I’ll ever love.”

Gotta give Simone credit, she doesn’t even flinch. She just nods, as if she understands why I’m such a schmuck and is willing to shoulder the burden of my assholery.

“And now your dad is dying?” she asks, pushing me to finish.

“I went to see him a few weeks ago,” I tell her.

“After that first night we were together,” she murmurs, more to herself than to me. “That’s where you went.”

I nod. “I spent maybe five minutes talking to that asshole. He found out who I’d become but promised he’d keep my identity a secret.”

“Do you believe him?” she asks.

“Not one bit,” I mutter. “I just hope he’s too fucking sick to have the energy to do it.”

“Why did you go see him?”

I blink in surprise at this question. “Because…he’s my dad.”

“No, that’s not it.” She doesn’t give me any more, but I can see in her eyes that she doesn’t accept that.

Savvy little brat.

I suck in a breath, and when I let it out, I release the last secret I’ve held from her. “Because I’m afraid I might be like him, and I had to see if I could find out anything from him that would either confirm my suspicions or put my soul at peace.”

Simone scoffs at me. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Maybe to you,” I tell her calmly. “But to me, it’s all I’ve thought about most of my life.”

“But you went to counseling—”

“Yes, I did,” I say, cutting her off. “And I didn’t kill animals when I was younger and the thought of raping a woman disgusts me. I can’t even fathom killing a person. I’ve read articles on sociopathy and psychopathy—or rather antisocial personality disorder and its variations—and fuck…I was going to go to college and study it before I got drafted, but none of that matters, Simone. Just one tiny kernel of fear is enough to keep me awake at night.”

She doesn’t try to dissuade me, but takes another tack. “And did you find out any answers?”

I don’t answer at first, holding her gaze for a moment. So fucking beautiful, and so fucking naïve sometimes.

“He didn’t start killing until he married my mother. He was thirty years old. Two years older than I am now.”

Realization dawns in Simone’s eyes and she immediately starts shaking her head. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Yeah, I know. But it could also mean something.”

“Van…I took some psychology courses in college. From what I remember, you don’t fit the bill at all. I bet your dad was charming, right? Superficially, that’s how sociopaths are, and, baby, you are anything but charming.”

My lips start to curve upward, but she’s not done. “Sociopaths have little to no remorse…no conscience, and Mr. Turner, I’ll say it again, the fact you’re struggling so mightily with this and the fact you’re so weighed down by your father’s sins shows your conscience is completely intact.”

“Other things,” she continues to recite. “Lack of insight. Inability to motivate. Lying. Poor judgment.”

“Lack of ability to love,” I throw out at her. “Impersonal sex. Trivializing intimacy.”

She shakes her head so hard her hair flies. “No. That’s not you. You love Etta. Van…sex is not impersonal between us. You might hold your emotions in reserve, but, baby, I’ve never had a more personal connection to someone the way I do with you when we’re fucking.”

My gaze drops to the floor. I expect she wanted to use something different there, like “making love,” but she knows I’d scoff at that. It’s amazing the uncanny insight she has into me. Simone knows how to handle me, and the only other person in my life who knows how to do that is Etta.

“Van,” Simone murmurs, and I look back to her.

“Can I come over there with you?” she says with a nod of her head to my end of the couch.

I want to say no because I don’t think I can handle her empathy right now, but instead I find my head bobbing up and down.

She leans over and places her beer on the floor. She pushes forward and crawls across the couch to me. In any other scenario, it would be sexy as fuck, but that look in her eyes tells me she’s not coming to me to give me an orgasm.

She’s coming to tell me something so important to her she wants to do it looking straight into my eyes.

When she reaches me, she turns and puts herself in my lap. I rest a hand on her thigh while her arms curve over my shoulders. Her face is inches from mine and I’m staring into her sweet, tender gaze.

“I understand your worries,” she says softly. “But dig deep, Van. I don’t think it’s really why you close yourself off.”

My eyelids drop, closing her from my sight for a moment so I can think. I conjure up my father, as he smirked at me from the other side of the Plexiglas, wanting me to believe we had more in common than not. I try to recall how I truly felt as I pushed up out of the chair and left him behind yelling obscenities.

And I remember…I felt done. The information he provided me didn’t really add to my fears. If anything, my instinct said he was just getting his kicks from trying to inflict pain on someone in the only way his limited, dying body was able to.

Yes, I knew that deep down. I’m in no danger of being like him. The only danger to me is staying in the mold I put myself in.

My eyes open slowly and Simone is filling my vision, waiting patiently.

“Kids can be vicious,” I start by saying, and she tilts her head slightly as she listens. “When I went back to school in the fall after he was convicted, the other kids had already labeled me. ‘Little Arco,’ ‘killer,’ ‘rapist’…those were some of the more popular ones. I was horrified they’d think that about me. I tried to defend myself, but it’s a weak claim that you’re not like your father when you sat every day behind him at trial. My mom wanting to support my dad labeled me as a sympathizer to him, merely because she made me sit beside her.”

“You heard things that no eight-year-old should ever hear,” she murmurs.

“Yeah, I’m not even sure those kids really even know what it all meant,” I tell her. “They were probably listening to their parents discuss it, or saw it on the news, and they found a way to bully me with it. I came home with a new bruise or split lip almost every day from the fights I’d get in just trying to defend my own name. But that wasn’t the worst, because only a handful of kids did that. They were just assholes. The worst was being ignored or shunned because people didn’t know what to say to me. I lost all my friends. No one wanted their kid to play with the boy whose dad was a killer and whose mom committed suicide. Etta tried to have a birthday party for me and not one child showed up. Teachers treated me with kid gloves. I was rarely called on in class because maybe they thought I didn’t want to be in the spotlight. No one asked me how I was feeling outside of Etta, so I didn’t know it was appropriate to be angry. I wasn’t even blaming my parents at that point for my troubles. It was very confusing.”

“And Etta decided to just let you start over again,” Simone says.

“New name, new city, new school,” I say with quiet reflection. “It was supposed to be a fresh start, but I kept hiding. I never shared with one person in my life who I was or what I went through. I think Etta and I got so caught up in running from the notoriety of it that I wasn’t allowed to really confront it.”

“But counseling?”

“Yeah…it was good. Fine. I was able to talk about some things, but maybe it wasn’t enough. Or maybe I didn’t talk about the right things with the right people. What if I’d just confided in a friend, and that friend validated that I was nothing like my father? I was so afraid of being labeled again, it just became easier to stay withdrawn.”

“It lessened your risk of further pain,” she concludes.

I nod, giving her thigh a squeeze. “Yes, I had some fears about the type of person I was, but my lack of connection to people isn’t like Arco’s on a cellular level. It’s from the fallout of what he did.”

Simone smiles at me, bringing her palms to my face. “There you go. What happened to you was a travesty, but you and Etta did the best you could.”

Before I can say anything, she’s putting her lips on mine, the sweetest kiss she’s ever given me, and I feel it from the tip of my head down to my toes.

To my surprise, she deepens the kiss, her fingers going into my hair to pull me to her. I feel instant arousal, the heavy conversation melting away and my need for her becoming my sole focus. I break the kiss by picking her up, turning her in my lap so she straddles me. I can’t help the groan that tears free when she grinds down onto my erection.

“Let’s take this into the bedroom,” she whispers in my ear.