Heavy Secrets - Elle Aycart Page 0,29
to take you longer to come around.”
“You were pretty pissed, and you didn’t send me any messages afterward. That worried me.”
“I figured this was too serious to send you a Klingon message that you wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh, I do understand them, sweet thing. I downloaded a Klingon dictionary app for it. I’m not fluent by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m getting there.”
Christy stared at him and broke into laughter. He must have been grinning from ear to ear, because his face hurt from it. He was tied to a bed, and he was grinning.
Fuck, he loved this woman.
* * * *
Cole took a deep breath and pulled up the metal shutter. Dust flew all over.
The locker was the smallest he’d ever seen, and yet it was half-empty.
That was all his mother’s life had amounted to.
Man, this was going to be fucking hard.
He glanced around. The stuff in there looked like that unit hadn’t been opened in years. Whatever the fuck he’d expected to find, it wasn’t to be. No answers. No nothing. Just junk.
As he walked in, he realized he was stepping over coins of some sort. Poker chips? He picked one up and his chest tightened. It was an AA month token.
He scanned the floor. There were dozens of one month’s sobriety coins. Several two-month chips. Fuck. It seemed their mother couldn’t keep it together longer than that, and every time she fell off the wagon, she’d tossed the coin here. As some sort of a sick reminder of a life she couldn't have.
Jesus fucking Christ.
He lifted his gaze, trying to get off his mind those tokens and what they meant, and it landed on a pile of old papers with a family album on top of it. He remembered that scrapbook. Helping his mom fill it in on those rare occasions she was having a good day. He’d thought she hadn’t taken anything with her but clothes when she’d bailed out on them, but she had. She had taken all the good moments with her. All the good memories.
He opened the old scrapbook, his hands going over the images and the comments written nearby. Man, he’d almost forgotten how beautiful she’d been, with that contagious smile that had brightened the whole world. She hadn’t had it anymore when he’d gone searching for her at twenty, but there were no shots there of her after she’d left Nate Bowen and her sons. He flipped through the book, and the breath he was taking froze in his throat. The family album didn’t end when she left them. It continued.
There were photos of James, Max, and himself graduating from high school. And in the military, wearing their uniforms. A newspaper clip with his mug shot from when Bowen Construction had gotten that high-profile demolition job a year after he’d come home from the marines. A publicity still from the first movie Max worked in. A wedding picture of James and his first wife.
Fuck. His legs buckled and he all but plopped on a crate nearby.
He’d been right. There were no answers here. Just more questions. His mother was not a monster. It wasn’t that black and white. She was just human. Someone who couldn’t hold it together. Nate Bowen and her sons had been collateral damage.
He didn’t know how long he sat there, but his ass and limbs were numb and frozen from the cold when he felt Christy’s presence.
“Cole, baby?” She caressed his shoulder. “You okay?”
He covered her hand with his and nodded.
“I don’t mean to intrude. I sent you a couple of messages and tried calling. I got worried.”
“Sorry. I left the cell in the car.”
“I’ll wait for you at home,” she said and kissed the top of his head.
As she moved to leave, he grabbed her wrists. She was giving him space, and he appreciated the gesture, but he didn’t need space. Didn’t want it. Not from Christy. “Stay. Please.”
She sat beside him, and for the first time in his life, Cole introduced a girl to his mother.
Chapter Five
“Unbelievable,” Cole muttered, scanning his surroundings. “This place is full of nutcases dressed like aliens and robots and God fucking knows what, and I’m the one who gets stared at.”
“I told you to wear a costume. You would have blended in and not stood out like a sore thumb.”
A costume. Yeah, right. Over his ex-marine dead body.
Christy took something from her pocket and stuck it on the left side of his long-sleeved T-shirt. “There. Now that’s better.”
It was the