didn’t mean it in a bad way. If there’s anyone who understands what a trigger is, it’s me. I still freak out in storms sometimes. Especially if I’m driving and it catches me unaware. It’s one of the many reasons I don’t like to drive.” She looked up at him, her eyes shining in the starlight. “I would never make fun of anyone who gets emotional because of something that happened to them. I got caught in a storm driving from Papillon back to Austin a couple of years ago. I got so scared I blacked out. I apparently managed to get to the side of the road and park the car, but I swear one minute I was driving in the afternoon and the rain started to fall, and then I heard the thunder crack and I was fifteen and sitting next to my mother watching the lights come at me and feeling my body break.”
He moved closer to her. “It was a car accident?”
She studied him for a moment. “You didn’t ask about why I can’t walk?”
“You can walk.”
She sighed. “Why I can’t walk properly?”
Did she think he was playing around? How often did she have to justify her existence to people who thought the word normal meant anything at all? He’d learned normal was a word humans tossed around to describe something that didn’t exist.
“You walk the way you walk, Noelle. There’s nothing proper or improper about it.” Except the way her ass swayed. That gave him perfectly improper thoughts. “Your walk is a part of you. I didn’t ask why because it doesn’t matter.”
She stared at him for a moment. “I can’t quite believe you’re real. Of course it matters.”
Hutch didn’t see why. “Would my knowing why change my acceptance of you? Would it be different if the reason you walk the way you do came from a congenital defect? If you want to talk about it, I would love to. I would love to know how any incident you want to talk about affects you, but it doesn’t change the fact that there’s nothing wrong or damaged about you.”
“Hutch, I assure you I was damaged,” she said. “I couldn’t walk for a long time. I probably wouldn’t walk today if my stepmom hadn’t come into my life.”
“All right. Then how about I say it’s typical to be damaged. Being human and damaged go hand in hand. I assure you I’m as damaged as a person can be.”
Even in the low light he could see her eyes roll.
“Yes, you look damaged.”
He would love to have the right to put her over his knee for all that sass. “Most of mine is on the inside. My dad was good about not leaving scars. A good punch to the gut can put a kid out of service for a while without a ton of visible damage.”
“I’m sorry,” she sputtered. “It’s just you’re so comfortable talking about it. I still don’t like to.”
“I’ve gone through ten years of weekly therapy. I’ve learned that I can talk about it or I can let it eat me up inside. I ended up on the streets when I was a teen. Oh, there were group homes I could have gone to, but I rather enjoyed finding my own space. I got into a lot of trouble. I ended up meeting a man who I think saved my life. Tennessee Smith. He’s the reason I went into the Army and joined the Agency and eventually landed where I am. Big Tag pretty much chucked my ass into therapy after a particularly long op, and I learned how to talk about my feelings.” He knew there were guys out there who would call him weak, but he knew how strong a base knowledge of his own soul made him.
It should make him strong enough to walk away from her.
“Was it something about your childhood that made you worry about my boss?” Noelle asked.
He sighed and sat back. “There are lots of reasons I’m worried about your boss. I don’t believe in coincidences, not at this level. I could buy that someone tried to get on your laptop and there was an accidental fire in a lab. Tie that together with a DPD detective in your building and someone attacking you and it’s a pattern I haven’t identified yet.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” she pointed out softly.
Yeah, he’d wanted to avoid that. “It was a shitty time of my life. I avoid talking about it