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“So what happened? How did you end up marrying this guy?”
Terri could hear the pure hatred in Luke’s words and knew he was judging her, wondering how she had let herself fall into Randy’s trap of abuse. “He wasn’t like he is now,” she defended. “For all his brute masculinity, Randy was actually pretty sweet. He let me off that night with a warning, when most students were spending the night behind bars. The next day, he showed up at my work, bought me lunch.”
“How did he know where you worked?” Luke asked suspiciously.
Terri looked at him for a minute, seeing that same critical look in his eye that she saw in Randy’s. “That’s the thing. You think faster, know all the right questions to ask. I was a kid. Young and naïve. I was just having fun, breaking the chains of being suppressed all my life, and Randy stomped in trampling everything in his path, and swept me off my feet. By the time I finally thought to ask him all those questions, how he knew where I worked, lived, my phone number, he told me flat out that he had hacked into the police database, but I was flattered. The idea that a man like him would go through all that trouble just to see me again…”
She turned to Luke, desperate for him to understand where she was coming from. “I’d never had someone pay so much attention to me before. To want to be around me, who seemed to really enjoy my company. It was heady, and I grabbed onto it with both hands, determined to keep that slice of happiness for as long as I could.”
Reaching out, Luke took her hand in his, his thumb stroking small circles across her knuckles. “So when did it all go south?”
Terri sighed, her mood deflated. She remembered that day exactly. How excited she was. How happy she expected him to be. Nothing had turned out the way she expected it to. “We had been married barely six months when I found out I was pregnant.” Luke’s finger stilled. She should have stopped then, but the gates had opened and she couldn’t stop herself. “He was so angry,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
Randy had come home early that day, upset over something that had happened at work. She thought she could shine a little light by telling him her news. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Randy lashed out, slapping her across the face. He accused her of sleeping with another man, then of trying to ruin his life. He never wanted kids, but he had never told her that, so how was she to know? He threw things, ruined furniture and eventually turned his fury on her. The beating she’d suffered that day had been the first, but not the last. She’d called the police a few times early on, but learned quickly that Randy was above the law as long as he was a part of it. There was nowhere to turn.
“I lost the baby a couple days later.” She’d never had the courage to say that aloud before. From that horrible day on, it had become a dirty little secret that only she and Randy shared. The confession was humbling, the truth of it crippling. At that moment, something inside Terri broke, and she began to cry, hard, wrenching sobs that only grew stronger when Luke knelt in front of her and pulled her into his arms.
She wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but after a long while Terri’s cries idled down to small hiccupping fits and a few sniffles. Luke sat back on his haunches, used his thumbs to wipe away the moisture under her eyes, and regarded her with sad, sympathetic eyes. “I’m sorry for what he did to you,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say.
“It’s okay,” Terri sniffed. “It was a long time ago.”
Luke stood, pulling Terri to her feet along with him. As he led her inside, he said, “Judging by what just happened, not long enough.”
“It’s nothing a warm bath and a cup of hot chocolate can’t fix,” Terri said resolutely, already tucking her painful past back into the black box in the back of her mind. While she had been telling Luke her story, she had made a promise to herself. Never again would she allow Randy to rule her. Her future was her own, and she would make of it everything she had ever wanted and dreamed of and he had denied her.
Wrapping her arm around Luke’s waist, she allowed him to steer her to her room, feeling the warmth of his comforting embrace all the way to her soul.
