But still, there had not been a day in the last twelve years I didn’t look over my shoulder at least once. That I didn’t wonder if I heard an unfamiliar vehicle roll down our long driveway, if someone new moved into Jackson Hole, someone that had come looking for me.
That a flickering of lights and an image of green aura didn’t make me tense all the way to my asshole.
Twelve years wasn’t enough to erase the past and the demons I’d left behind.
Before I could stop her, Mary-Ellen slid her arm around mine. “I hope you know we would love to have you and your boy come visit when Justin is away next month. Maybe you could come for dinner after church?”
She steered me through the great room with the vaulted ceiling toward the kitchen at the back of the house. I tried to find Justin in the crowd. At 6’6”, his height normally gave him away, but he was off somewhere, no doubt talking about his next skiing trip coming up. Or still dealing with the pushy neighbor. That was more likely.
There he was. He turned and caught my eye. Again, both brows raised almost to his hairline. Our silent question for each other. Was I okay?
I pursed my lips and gave him a single blink. I was okay, and glad he was checking.
“Well, thank you. I’ll think about it.” I said the words with zero intention of ever coming back to Mary-Ellen’s on my own. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her. Or that she wasn’t kind and generous.
More of one of those ‘it’s me not you’ conversations that I just didn’t want to have. I’d seen Mary-Ellen break down once when she talked about her son going away for two years as a missionary for their church. Not only was it uncomfortable to watch, she’d found the nearest woman and clung to her long after I left the scene.
Then there was the whole ‘I know magic exists and you want to act like there is no such thing even though you are abnormal’ conversation that hung between us.
Emotions were not something I understood, except when it came to my boys. That was different. They were the first ones who showed me what real love was and had helped me understand that I could have it in my life despite everything I’d done.
“Lovely, that’s lovely. Maybe we can have the missionaries here, too, if you don’t mind?”
Oh, shit.
I cleared my throat to cover the muttered curse on my tongue before I spoke. “Of course not, but we are quite busy with the horses, you know. It’s a busy time of year.” I tried to get her hand off my arm, carefully, without hurting her. She was having none of it, her long fingers digging in harder. Staking her claim on me. Damn it all.
“Of course.” Her smile never wavered, but her eyes took on an edge.
My own edge pushed to the surface and I locked eyes with her. A staring contest was not something she was going to win with me.
She’d been trying to save me and Justin since she met us. Nicely, of course, plying us with food and friendship, but always there was the undertone of us being heathens. And her being better than us. If she’d known who I really was she’d have probably tried to kill me, rather than feed me.
There was a moment, half a breath, where she held my gaze as I let the emptiness in me well up, the blank space that only my boys and their love made go away.
Inside my head the sound of people was replaced with the white noise that preceded the pop of a silencer, the thud of a well-placed bullet, the drip of blood from a wound, the hiss of a monster dying.
As quickly as that, she blinked and looked away, swallowing hard. “We’d just . . . Bear is such a sweet boy, and he reminds me of my boy gone on his mission—”
I got my arm free with a hard yank. Normally, I try to fit in and all that shit. It was a harder gig than one might think. But I was done playing.
Clearing my throat, I searched the crowd for Justin for a good five seconds again as I softened my tone as much as I could. “Look, Mary-Ellen, I know you mean well, but honestly, we aren’t interested in your church. No matter how sweet Bear is.”
“Of course, of course!” She moved so she was in my line of vision again. But to the left of her in the crowd was a familiar messy head of hair. He came up to my chest, his hair a deep black that held the colors of the rainbow when the sun hit it right. A sweet rush of relief flowed through me at the sight of him.
As if the flickering lights had been an ominous foreboding, like the start of a horror flick, and seeing him was a ray of light dispelling the shadows, and my innate suspicions.
I shook my head at the thoughts running through my mind. Stupid, I was being stupid and paranoid and I didn’t need to be.
I held a hand out to Bear, calling to be heard over the steady thrum of noise. “Bear, come here.” My son would be a lifeline in a sea of bodies that I wanted to get away from so badly, my skin itched. Being a loner was not something I’d been able to change from my past, one of the few things.
Though to be fair, the rest of what I’d changed had been superficial, allowing me to hide in plain sight, as it were.
A man bumped into me, sloshing punch onto my cowboy boots. The smell of his cologne, Old Spice, hit me almost as hard. He didn’t even apologize, just kept on walking through the crowd, the sway in his step making me think he was drunk.
My jaw tightened, but I reined in my anger. It was just punch, after all, and would wash out.
The thing was, none of these people knew how close they walked to death. How close they walked to me.
If they did, they would have either prayed for me, or gone running in the opposite direction.
Bear bobbed and weaved through the last few feet of the crowd between us, oblivious to the tension between me and Mary-Ellen, for which I was grateful. I had shielded him as much as I could from who I really was, from a past that would swallow him whole if I wasn’t vigilant.
The monsters would come for him, if they knew he was mine.
He flashed a smile up at me. “What’s grooving, Mama?”
I tugged him to me, slinging my right arm over his shoulder, leaving my faster hand free at my side. “Drop the second ‘g’ if you want to be cool, little Bear.”
He laughed and gave a half-hearted effort to pull away from me. I bent down to his ear. “I need your help for just a minute. Do you mind?”
He brightened immediately. Help was the magic word for him. He was everything I could have wanted in a son, and then some. How I’d gotten him, after all I’d done . . . that much I would never know.
“Yeah, sure, I’m your guy.” He grinned up at me, dimples showing in the layer of baby fat he still held on his cheeks.
I laughed, and the irritation and need to escape eased a little as he lit up my world, and for a moment the flood of people, the anger, the intense need to run, slid away.
“Oh, that makes me think of Deacon.” Mary-Ellen burst into tears behind us. Deacon was her boy who was still on his mission for another year yet, and I took that as our cue.
Time to go. On the other side of the room, Justin was moving too in our direction.
I grabbed Bear’s hand and hurried us to the front door.
“I need help bringing in the food for the potluck.” I stopped by the door, took my coat off the hanger and slipped it on. Justin reached up and popped a package of cigarette’s out of his shirt pocket. “I need a smoke break.”
Bear tipped his head sideways at me, a single eyebrow arched high. The look was so reminiscent of his grandfather my heart stuttered.