The Wall of Winnipeg and Me (29 page)

I didn’t. Because kids that young shouldn’t have been left alone to begin with.

His chest started puffing against my back as if his breathing was difficult. “She did nothing to your sisters?”

I wanted to crawl into myself. The tone he was using raked at my nerves, pulling the sides of the stab wound called my childhood wide open for inspection. It made me feel small. “No. She yelled at them, but that was it. I mean, she stayed home for a month or two afterward” —that was one of the times I remembered her being mostly sober— “and I slept with her every night. After that, I moved my things and shared a room with my little brother.” I’d started locking the bedroom door after that as well.

The fingertips on my knees kneaded for a second, but I bet my life it was a subconscious gesture, mostly because his labored breathing hadn’t gone anywhere.

“I have to sleep with a light on,” I admitted to him, feeling his chest huff behind me. Dumb, dumb, dumb. “I don’t know why I just told you that. Don’t make fun of me.”

There was a pause. A hesitation before, “I won’t,” he promised effortlessly. “I wondered why you had so many at your apartment and in your room.”

I
knew
he’d noticed. “Please don’t tell Zac. I wouldn’t hold it passed him to hide under the bed when I’m sleeping to try and scare the crap out of me.”

“I won’t.” His palms shaped my knees. The insides of his arms seemed to frame my shoulders and arms. His breathing was low but not so steady against my ear. “It isn’t stupid that you’re scared. You shouldn’t be embarrassed. It’s everyone else who should be ashamed of themselves.”

The only way I managed to answer was with a nod that I wasn’t sure he knew of or not. Another rattling breath made its way out of my chest like a gust and I touched a patch of skin somewhere around his knee as I kept my eyes closed. “Thank you for helping me calm down, big guy. I haven’t lost it like that in forever.”

“Don’t worry about it,” was all he muttered in return.

I kept my hand on his leg, my fingertips against the coarse dark hairs that covered his legs. My breathing sounded too loud, my heart was still beating a little weird, while Aiden’s was soft and barely audible. I focused on the in and the out of my lungs.

The other woman in the elevator mumbled, “This sucks.”

It did. It really did.

The silence ate up the minutes, and I let my back loosen, the top of it touching Aiden’s pectorals. The insides of his upper arms cradled me. His breathing was so even it made me sleepy.

The elevator gave a jerk that had me opening my eyes in reaction as the lighting flickered twice and stayed on. The woman on the other side squealed, but I couldn’t even be remotely scared. I only cared about the lighting.

And it was right then, not being plunged in the dark, that I finally witnessed with my own two eyes the sight of me sitting on Aiden. Two long, muscular legs circled me, so long that the knees jutted out way passed where mine ended. Two heavily muscled triceps popped on either side of my arms, playing my bodyguards. But it was the big hands on me, the wrists propped up so effortlessly on my thighs, that made something in me react.

He was hugging me. For all intents and purposes, Aiden was hugging me. Surrounding me.

Tilting my head back, I swallowed that thing making its way from my stomach to my throat, and prepared a nervous, slightly shy smile over my shoulder. Except when my gaze landed on Aiden’s face, it was so serious… so damn serious. It wiped the expression right off my mouth.

The elevator gave another jerk and almost immediately, the phone on the wall began ringing.

With a light tap to my knee, Aiden picked me up and moved me off to the side, as if my weight was nothing to him—and it definitely wasn’t nothing. He got to his feet and reached toward the wall, picking the phone off the cradle. His gaze drifted over me in the process, those ultra-sober features making me feel like I’d done something wrong all of a sudden. “Yes… It’s about time… Yes.” Just like that, he hung up, probably in the middle of the conversation. “It’ll be about fifteen minutes.”

Drawing my legs up to my chest, I wrapped my arms around them and nodded at his comment. He didn’t sit back down; instead, Aiden leaned against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. One ankle went over the other.

Not ten minutes later, a loud noise pierced through the elevator, and the next thing I knew, it began its ascent again. When the doors finally opened, two building employees were standing there, asking if we were fine, but Aiden walked right passed them as if they weren’t there.

“Are you okay?” one of the employees asked.

Was I okay? I hadn’t been, but I wasn’t going to say anything. Mostly, I was a little bit embarrassed I’d freaked out and uncertain what the hell the look on Aiden’s face had been about when the lights had come back on.

“Are you coming?” the big guy asked from where he was waiting.

There was the man I knew. “Hold your horses, sunshine. I’m coming.”

His lips moved in a way that told me he wasn’t particularly fond of ‘sunshine,’ but most importantly, he knew I didn’t care that he hated it. “Let’s go. He’s paid by the hour and we’re already late.”

It didn’t take long to find what we were looking for. A hardwood-framed glass door with etchings on the front and a plaque on the wall right next to it, deemed that this was the lawyer’s office.

Sleek, beautiful, hardwood furniture in warm shades of brown and green welcomed us. It hit me again right then that I looked like a fifteen-year-old hoochie mama in a giant-sized sweater that made it seem as if I didn’t have any clothes on underneath. Aiden didn’t look much better; his T-shirt was clingy, he had on long, black shorts that went past his knees, and he was in running shoes. The difference was, he didn’t give a single crap what he looked like.

Directly in front of the doors, an older woman behind a desk smiled over at us. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“Yes. We had an appointment with Jackson. I’m the one who called to say I was running late,” Aiden explained.

That changed everything. “Oh, Mr. Graves. Right. One moment please. The lighting issue pushed his meeting late.”

The lighting issue. Aiden and I looked at each other.

I couldn’t freaking help it, especially now that we were out of the elevator of terror, I snickered and let the uncontrollable smile take over.

Those underused corners of his mouth tipped up just a little—just a freaking little—but it was what it was. He’d smiled. He’d fucking smiled at me. Again. And it was just as magnificent as it had been the first time.

When we took a seat to wait, he turned that big body to the side and pinned me in place. “What’s that look on your face for?”

I reached up and touched the sides of my mouth and cheeks, finding that, yeah, I was mooning. Not smiling. I was mooning.

He’d smiled at me. Was there any other way in the world to react?

“No reason.”

His lids dropped low. “You look like you’re on drugs.”

That wiped my not-smile off my face. “I like your smile. That’s all.”

The big guy shot me a sour look. “You make me feel like a Grinch.”

“I don’t mean to. It’s a nice smile. You should do it more often.”

The grumpy expression on his face didn’t assure me of anything. Eventually, when I sat up straight, he draped his arm over the back of my chair. Waiting until the woman at the desk was on the phone, I whispered, “What exactly are we doing here?”

“He wants to go over some information with me,” he explained.

Couldn’t the lawyer just have e-mailed it to us, I wondered, but kept my question to myself. “So I can’t wait here?”

“No.”

I fidgeted and lowered my voice even more. “The lawyer thinks this is real, doesn’t he?”

“It’s fraud otherwise.”

Damn. I slunk in my seat, the bare heat of his forearm grazing the top of my neck. That damn word sent fear coursing through my spine. I didn’t want to go to prison.

As if he was reading my mind, Aiden whispered, “Nothing is going to happen. No one’s going to believe this isn’t real.”

I didn’t know where he got his confidence from, but I needed to find some.

Luckily it didn’t take too long for the door leading from the waiting room to the office to open. A couple came out, too busy speaking in a language that sounded like German to pay attention to us.

It was show time apparently.

The second after we stood up, the receptionist waved us forward. I slipped my hand into Aiden’s and gave it a faint squeeze.

He squeezed mine right back.

“
Z
ac
! Are you almost ready?” I yelled down the hall as I shoved my heel into my running shoe.

“I’m putting on my shoes, Mrs. Graves!”

Idiot. “I’ll wait for you downstairs.” I told him as I slipped my other one on.

“Okay,” he yelled back just as I hit the stairs. Down them and into the kitchen, I found Aiden sitting in the breakfast nook with a big glass of something brown and funky looking in front of him that I’d bet a kidney had some kind of bean and vegetable in it.

Heading to the refrigerator to get a sip of water before the start of our jog, I asked over my shoulder, “Big guy, do you want anything from the fridge while I’m up?”

“No thanks.”

It was Monday afternoon after the Three Hundreds played an away game the day before. The poor guy had gotten home from Maryland at four o’clock in the morning, and he’d had to drag himself out of bed at nine to meet up with the team’s trainers, then sat through one meeting after another. His body language expressed just how exhausted he was. How could he not be?

I filled half my glass with water and chugged it down. Across the room, Aiden finally took his attention away from the current puzzle he was finishing, and asked, “Where are you two going?”

“For a run.”

“Why is he going with you?” he plainly asked, a crease forming between his eyebrows. His long fingers seemed to swallow the puzzle piece in his hand.

“I talked him into doing the marathon with me.” Was this really the first time he’d seen us leaving?

Something about what I said must have intrigued him because his head jerked back and what looked like the beginning of a laugh took over his mouth. “
He’s
going to run a marathon?”

Well that sounded insulting even to my ears. The fact that Zac walked into the kitchen the moment Aiden began his question, didn’t help the situation any. He scrunched up his nose as he cast his ex-teammate a long look. “
Yeah
.”

“You have the worst cardio I’ve ever seen,” Mr. No Social Skills claimed, not at all embarrassed that he’d been overheard.

I couldn’t disagree with him there. Considering Zac was an elite athlete, the first few times we’d gone running together was like going with a clone of myself during those initial two months after I’d decided I wanted to start training. I hadn’t even been able to get two miles done without severe knee pain and panting, and I’d thought that was pretty good.

Zac, on the other hand, made it seem like I was leading him across the Mojave Desert barefoot and without water.

“I do not,” he argued. “Why are you nodding, Van?”

I stopped what I was doing. “You do—oww! You didn’t have to pinch me.” I glared at who I thought was my friend, suddenly standing right next to me. “You do have terrible endurance. Your breathing has been worse than mine.”

“I can do a marathon if I want to.” Zac’s cheeks turned slightly pink as I tried to back away from him to avoid getting pinched again.

“Of course you can. Your breathing just blows right now.” I slapped him on the back, dodging out of his reach a second later. “Let’s get this over with,” I said, making sure I was at least five feet away from him at all times. “Let me pee first though,
Forrest Gump
.”

Zac laughed, half-assed lunging at me one more time.

I jumped back. I casually noticed Aiden out of my peripheral vision looking at me. Specifically my legs. My tights were all dirty and I’d had to dig out a pair of shorts from my drawer that I hadn’t worn in years. They were too tight and too short, and I’d had to put on a baggy T-shirt so the elastic band digging into my stomach and hips wouldn’t be noticeable. I’d lost almost fifteen pounds since I’d started running, but I still didn’t have anything close to a six-pack.

So I was a little surprised when those thick eyebrows knit together, his gaze focusing. “What happened to your leg, Van?”

I’d worn skirts and dresses around him on a few occasions when I worked for him. I had always figured he just hadn’t cared to find out where I’d gotten the scarring that went from above my knee to below it. Hell, I’d been wearing cut-offs when we’d gotten stuck in the elevator together and sat in his lap afterward. His hand had been on my knee. How hadn’t he noticed?

Now I realized he hadn’t even looked at it.

I didn’t care that it wasn’t pretty, and I’d never tried to hide it. It was my badge of honor. My daily reminder of all the physical pain I’d gone through, of all the anger I’d had to get under control, and what I’d done with it. I’d finished school. I got back on my feet. I’d accomplished my goal of growing my business and venturing out on my own. No one else had done it for me but me. I’d saved. I’d worked. I’d persevered. Me. No one else.

And if I could do all that, when I was strong and when I was weak, I could remember it and let it lead me. My achy knee never let me forget what we’d been through in the last eight years.

I made my way out of the kitchen because the truth wasn’t a big deal. “I got hit by a car.”

I just usually didn’t tell people that it was my sister who’d been the driver.

By the time Zac and I made it out of the house, the sun had just started to hang low in the horizon. We jogged steadily for six miles one way before turning around to get back home. That last two miles on the way home we used as our cool down. After we’d caught our breaths, Big Texas abruptly snorted and asked, “How the hell hadn’t Aiden noticed your knee ‘til today?”

I let out a sharp snicker. “I was wondering the exact same thing.”

“Jesus, Vanny, I think I noticed it the first week you started workin’ for him.” He shook his head. “He doesn’t notice stuff that’s not football related unless it smacks him in the face.”

It was true.

Then he said, “Like you.”

And it was like something crashed down on my shoulders. Not necessarily a bad thing, but the truth was like a boa. It could be this heavy snake that could wrap around your neck and kill you, or it could be a feather boa, a nice, fun accessory to your life. In this case, I was going to force myself to take the truth in the form of the feather version. I’d already faced reality and that reality was the one Aiden had admitted to me: he hadn’t appreciated me until I left.

It was what it was. You couldn’t force someone to care about you or love you. I knew that way too well.

But Aiden was a man who only loved one thing, and if you weren’t that one thing, too bad. It was all he’d known for so long, he hadn’t looked in his peripherals at everything else surrounding him. I could accept that nothing else was anywhere near as important as football. What I wasn’t able to do was wrap my head around what Leslie had said regarding Aiden’s grandparents and the grief he’d gone through when he lost them. He’d never even mentioned them in front of me. But I guess that was just the way he was.

Now though, in his own way, I knew he cared about me. That said something, didn’t it? I didn’t think I was trying to pull at straws or make something bigger than it needed to be. I was simply taking what I could get and not making it out to be something it wasn’t.

I could live with that.

So I shrugged at Zac. “Yeah, exactly like that. He’s just so focused he doesn’t care about anything else. I get it.” I did.

With a big sigh, Zac sniffed. “It’s workin’ for him. He’s the only one on the team that’s an All-Pro.” The shape his mouth took after he finished talking made a bittersweet sensation go through my heart. I couldn’t help but think: Poor Zac.

So I smacked him in the arm. “Quit pouting. You’re only twenty-eight. That one quarterback played until he was almost forty, didn’t he?”

“Well… yeah. He did.”

“See?” That was enough for now, wasn’t it? I went with changing the subject. “Are you doing anything for Halloween?”

“
W
here are you going
?”

I stopped at the door and held out the jack-o-lantern shaped bucket I’d bought the day before, so he could see the three bags of candy I’d torn open and dumped inside. “Nowhere. I was going to sit outside.”

Sitting in what I’d began to consider calling his throne—the breakfast nook—the big guy had a puzzle spread out in front of him. I didn’t know why I thought it was so cute but it was. It really, really was. Those big shoulders were always hunched over while he worked on them, and I didn’t need to catch him unawares to know he sometimes stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth when he was really into it. Now though on Halloween Day, his entire body was turned to the side as he caught me on my way out.

Aiden’s eyes dropped to my body in what I might have thought was the third time since we’d met, and he cocked a thick eyebrow, his face a plain, stony mask. “You’re all dressed up.”

“It’s a costume,” I said a little self-consciously. “For Halloween.” For the record, I loved Halloween. Other than Christmas, it was my favorite holiday. The costumes, the decorations, the little kids, and the candy… it had been love from the first October 31
^st
I could remember.

Aiden tilted his head just slightly to the side. “What are you supposed to be?”

Was he serious? I looked down at my costume, thinking I’d done a pretty good job putting it together three years ago when I’d last worn it to a friend’s party. The overalls, the yellow shirt, the one-eyed goggle pressing into my forehead. It was obvious. “A minion.”

The Wall of Winnipeg blinked. “What the hell is a minion?”

“A minion.
Despicable Me
.” I blinked when he stayed silent. “Nothing?”

“Never seen it.”

Blasphemy. I’d ask if he was serious, but I knew he was. I stared right at him. “It’s one of the cutest movies in the entire universe,” I explained slowly, hoping he was joking.

He shook his head, his eyes flicking low again. “Never heard of it.”

“I don’t even know what to say to you, and at the same time, I’m not sure why I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it,” I said. “You have no idea what you’ve been missing out on, big guy. It’s probably the cutest animated movie after
Finding Nemo
.”

“I highly doubt that.” But he didn’t say he hadn’t heard of
Finding Nemo
. That was something.

“I have the DVD in my room, borrow it.”

Before he could respond, a knock sounded at the door and a bolt of giddiness shot through my chest as I clutched the bucket of candy in my hand and prepared myself for the trick-or-treaters on the other side.

Two small kids who couldn’t be more than six years old stood on the doorstep with really elaborate cloth sacks extended.

“Trick or treat!” they pretty much shouted.

“Happy Halloween,” I said, taking in the petite Power Ranger and Captain America as I dropped a few pieces of candy into each bag.

“Thank you!” they shouted back simultaneously before running to the adult standing at the end of the sidewalk waiting for them. The adult figure waved at me and I waved back before sticking my head back into the house. “I’ll be outside,” I called out to Aiden, grabbing the collapsible chair that I’d left right by the door earlier for this occasion.

I’d barely settled into the seat on the small patio outside when the front door opened and the legs of a chair just like mine peeked out, the big six-foot-almost-five man I was legally married to following after it.

“What are you doing?” I asked as he dropped his chair next to mine, further away from the door.

“Nothing.” He eyed me as he pretty much fell into the canvas. Honestly, a small part of me was worried it was going to rip at the seams when he plopped down, but by some miracle it didn’t. Leaning back, he crossed his arms over his chest and stared forward across the street.

And I stared at him.

He never sat outside. Ever. When would he have time? And why would he?

“Okay,” I mumbled to myself, moving my attention back to the street to spot a pair of kids three houses down. It was still early, only six, so I didn’t think much of the absence of little ones crowding the streets. In my neighborhood growing up, it would be five o’clock and the streets would be lined with the smallest children first, and by eight o’clock, the older ones would be busy making their rounds. Most of the houses in that neighborhood had been decorated to the best of their abilities—never ours though—but it had been
awesome
. Everyone had been into it.

My mom never really went out of her way to buy us costumes, but that didn’t stop my little brother or me from dressing up. I’d gotten really good about making something out of nothing. Every year, hell or high water, we dressed up and went out with Diana, chaperoned by her parents.

Even at my apartment complex, there were quite a bit of kids who had dropped by in the two years I’d been there. This, on the other hand, was a bit of a disappointment, but maybe it was just too early?

“You like all this stuff?” that gruff voice peeped up.

I sat back in the chair and plucked a small Kit Kat from the jack-o-lantern on my lap. “Yes.” I shoved half of it into my mouth, letting it hang out like a cigarette. “I like the costumes and the imagination. The candy. But I love the costumes the most.”

He eyeballed me briefly. “I can’t tell.”

I crossed my eyes and angled myself slightly toward him. “What? It’s not like I’m dressed up as a sexy rabbit or nurse at the Playboy mansion or something.”

His gaze stayed forward. “Isn’t that what most girls aim for?”

“Some…
if you have no imagination
. Pssh. Last year, I dressed up as Goku.” Diana and I had gone to one of her friend’s Halloween party. I’d gotten her to dress up as Trunks.

That had him glancing at me. “What’s a Goku?”

Yeah, I had to clutch the sides of the canvas seat below me as I leveled my gaze at his bearded face. “He’s only the second single greatest fighter in Anime history. He was a character on a show called ‘Dragonball’.” I realized I was whispering and ranting at the same time, and coughed. “It was a Japanese cartoon that I love. You’ve never heard of it?”

Those thick eyebrows knit together and one big foot crossed over the other as he stretched out in the poor, poor chair. “It’s a cartoon… with fighters?”