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Hesitating on the steps, she looked up at him, not knowing what to say.
Lucas studied the floating clouds beyond her head. After a few seconds ticked by, he said, “This was a mistake. I’ve got to get out of here. I’m not the right person to take care of these kids.”
Addy started to open her mouth to deliver platitudes but snapped it closed. Truth was usually better in these circumstances. “Maybe you’re not cut out for it, but you’re all they have.”
“I need clean air and a clear landscape sitting outside my door. I can’t breathe here.”
Something about the longing in his voice touched her. He felt trapped by the world. She knew a little about being confined to a smaller world.
A full minute ticked by as the sounds of the neighborhood waned and an even smaller world was formed right there on the front porch. A line of black ants squiggled across the top porch step. A spider clung to a web in the camellia bush, and the rocking chair creaked with the slight motion Lucas gave it. Small, closed in. Intimate in a way she hadn’t experienced in a while. Raw emotion pulsed, and she knew it was seldom Lucas admitted defeat, admitted any weakness.
He didn’t look at her, at where she stood slightly to his left, near the line of overgrown bushes that had needed pruning back in the fall. Addy knew at that moment Lucas was mentally picking up the scattered bits of his emotions and trying to tuck them into the strong box of his soul.
Like recognized like.
Something inside her stirred, then stilled. Certainty of what she needed to say settled in her gut.
“I’m sorry about the way I acted earlier. Something happened on Wednesday that shook me up, and I allowed a remnant of that emotion to spill over into today. Wasn’t well done of me.”
He shrugged away her apology. “No problem. You were right. I don’t have any business prying into your life. We’re not friends. We’re just people stuck in this situation. Bottom line.”
Something in the casual dismissal pricked her. She didn’t want to be nothing to him, and that surprised her all over again. She took a deep breath. “I’d like to think we are friends.”
His gaze swept to meet hers. “I guess we are. In a way.”
“I’m about to be vulnerable with you, and that’s not easy for me, but for some reason, you need to know who I am, to understand why I acted the way I did when you pushed me.”
She saw the muscles in his neck move as he swallowed, as his gaze reflected a question. She didn’t understand the desire to tell him about Robbie. Maybe she needed him to know that parts of her were broken and might never be fixed.
“When I was in college, and home for the weekend, a neighbor—a guy I thought I knew—broke into my house, held a knife to my throat, and sexually assaulted me.”
Lucas’s hands tightened on the rocker. “What?”
Acid ate at her stomach. Her hands trembled so she tucked them behind her before meeting Lucas’s stunned gaze. “When I was a senior in high school, I had this need inside me to be rebellious. I had always been a good girl, the quintessential overachiever with a pretty face and a bright future. There was this older guy who lived down the street who caught my eye. He was five years older, cute in a boyish way, rode a Harley, and sometimes hung out at my dad’s garage. He flirted with me, I flirted back, and then one night I snuck out my bedroom window and climbed on his Harley with him.”
Lucas’s eyes narrowed. “You seem so levelheaded. I can’t imagine you sneaking out with an older guy.”
“Of course. I’ve changed. But we all have some wildness inside us. I just chose to be wild with the totally wrong guy.”
Silence sat for a moment.
“Eventually, being a naughty girl got old. I didn’t really like him as much as I liked the feeling of being daring, of having some say-so in my own life. Eventually, I stopped opening that window. But Robbie wouldn’t accept I wasn’t into him. I tried to tell him I had prom coming up and college. I told him we had no future together. He didn’t like it, but he seemed to understand. But then….”
“What did he do?” Lucas’s voice was soft as the day, like sunlight falling on the emerging green of spring.
“At first he said ugly things. Then he showed up at my high school and watched me with my friends. He slashed my tires, wrote me violent letters, and called my cellphone and hung up several times a day. I didn’t tell my parents because I knew they’d be so disappointed. Oh, and because I’d be grounded for life.” She offered him a wry smile.
He didn’t smile back.
She took a deep breath. “It wasn’t constant. He got a girlfriend. I went to college. For a few years, he moved away. Seemed like that ugliness was over. But one day, my senior year of college, I came home and he was in my dad’s garage. I brushed him off. He didn’t like it. Then the stuff started up again. He started calling me, leaving messages through my dad, ones that seemed innocuous, but I knew what he was doing. My daddy used to call me his brown-eyed girl, and Robbie twisted that into being his brown-eyed Susan. He used to pick those flowers for me. He would leave them on my car when I was home. One day I found one on my pillow. Just stuff that scared me.”
“You didn’t tell your parents?”
Addy shook her head. “Sounds stupid, but I felt like I deserved it. I had disobeyed my parents by letting Robbie into my life. He’d been my first, um, you know, sexual experience. I was ashamed, and I just hoped eventually he’d get tired and see that I wasn’t interested and move on. At that time, I didn’t understand what stalking was. How that mindset works.”
“Then one day I came home from school because I had a doctor’s appointment nearby. No one was home, and I didn’t think twice about climbing into the shower. That’s when he broke in. Luckily, my father had left something at the house—a flyer he needed to print for the Rotary Club. Funny how I remember exactly what was on that flyer—a crazy-looking clown advertising their charity circus breakfast. Seems silly to remember the way the clown looked, but I can’t seem to forget anything about that day. The soap I’d used in the shower, the way my favorite jeans lay crumpled on the bathroom floor, the way the blade felt at my throat. I got away, ran into the kitchen, and grabbed a knife. I’d seen too many B movies and thought I could protect myself, but Robbie took it from me. The knife cut me here.” She rolled up her right sleeve to reveal the pink line that ran from midforearm to her bicep. It had faded, but the memories had not. Then she pulled down the collar of her shirt to show him the scar on her shoulder. “And here.”
“Addy.” Lucas leaned forward, hands clutching the broad arm of the chair. He looked as if he might get up, as if he needed to do something. He also looked like she’d pulled a rug from beneath him.
