“Sometimes I just wish I could have gotten in a swift kick to his balls, or scratched those lifeless eyes out of his face.”
She laid her head on my shoulder again as I answered, “And that makes you human,” I told her. “I’d like to kill the bastard myself, but he’s locked up, Taylor. He’ll pay the price for what he did for the rest of his fucking life.”
“I’ll be okay, Hudson,” she said in a thoughtful voice. “I’ll be living my life while he rots in prison. Most of the time I’m all right with that. I guess I just haven’t totally resolved everything that happened.”
“It hasn’t even been a month yet,” I said gruffly. “You’ll get there. I never should have mentioned how I felt earlier, Taylor. I fucked up.”
“No,” she said in a stronger tone. “Don’t ever apologize for being honest, Hudson. Please.”
“Bad timing,” I said firmly. “Jesus, you aren’t even recovered yet, Taylor. And then when you tried to tell me you weren’t ready, I didn’t listen.”
“I never said I wasn’t ready,” Taylor replied. “You totally misunderstood.”
Hadn’t she pretty much said she didn’t know how to give me what I wanted? Wasn’t that a good indicator that she’d been completely confused?
“Explain it then,” I insisted gently.
I was sick of dancing around a subject that was eating my guts out.
She’d listened to me….
“First, I want to tell you what all that stuff you read in my dossier was really like,” she said nervously. “You were right when you said all you saw were…just facts.”
I nodded. “I’m here to listen.”
Apparently, she trusted me enough to tell me anything, and I’d have to be satisfied with that. For now.
Taylor
I had things I wanted to say to Hudson, and I wasn’t going to rest until I did.
He’d cut the evening short once we’d gotten inside earlier, going to his office, and leaving me to my own devices.
I’d watched a movie, and then headed to bed. All I’d done was stare at the ceiling by moonlight in his beautiful guest suite until I’d finally conked out and had the worst nightmare I’d ever experienced in my life.
I was calmer, and it was all because of the man holding me right now.
If Hudson hadn’t been so damn determined to get into his office like his ass was on fire earlier, I would have explained exactly why I’d been a little confused.
Burying himself in work was his way of making sure nothing else was said about his whole confession, putting a wall between the two of us until, hopefully, I’d forget about the whole conversation.
That wasn’t going to happen.
He’d just have to listen, and figure out that I was speaking literally earlier, and it wasn’t a hard concept to grasp, but he had to know my history first.
The man had shared enough of his own past for me to realize that he’d never really been a child. We could relate on that part, at least.
I took a deep breath. “I was four when my parents died. Honestly, I don’t really remember them much except for really vague flashes of memory. I grew up in Los Angeles, and my dad worked in a factory there. My mom did some part-time work at a fast food place. We lived in an apartment. Both of them were really young when I was born, and they were still trying to make everything work. It wasn’t the best area of Los Angeles, but it wasn’t the worst, either.”
Hudson’s arm tightened around me as I continued, “I’ve never understood why my father snapped one day when he came home from work, shot my mother, and then turned that same gun on himself.” I took a deep breath. “I’ve always wondered why he didn’t shoot me, too. I didn’t see the incident happen because I was playing in my room, but according to witnesses, I saw it after the fact. Apparently, I was covered in their blood, and begging them both to wake up when I was found and taken by the state.”
It wasn’t all that hard to talk about the death of my parents because I didn’t really remember them, or the homicide-suicide. It was mostly just…facts.
I continued, “My dad’s family could barely take care of themselves, much less a kid who hadn’t started kindergarten yet, and my mother’s family were extremely religious. They wanted nothing to do with me. They cut my mom off completely when she got pregnant before she was eighteen, and worse yet for them,