Uncommon Passion (31 page)

assumed he’d made at least a cursory effort to get clean. He held open the shark towel embroidered with

Jonathan,
and the kid dried himself off. As kids, they’d never had anything with their names embroidered

on it. Sam and Chris were trying so hard.

Ben opened the door to head down the hall, into Sam and Chris’s bedroom in search of a dry pair of

shorts for himself.

“Where are you going?” Jonathan demanded.

“I’m going to go into Sam’s room and get some dry clothes,” he said.

“I wet my pants,” Jonathan whispered, tears welling up in his eyes.

“It happens,” Ben said matter-of-factly.

Still wrapped in the shark towel, Jonathan blinked then followed him, sitting down on the floor behind

the bed to pull on his underpants and shorts while Ben rummaged through Sam’s dresser. Jonathan

scrambled to his feet to follow Ben back into the bathroom.

“Wait out here, buddy,” he said.

The boy’s enormous, red-rimmed eyes got bigger. “Don’t close the door,” he whispered. His breath

clogged in his chest, no wonder given that he’d been bawling flat out for nearly half an hour.

“I won’t,” Ben said.

He stripped to his skin, took a thirty-second shower, then pulled on Sam’s shorts and a T-shirt. When

he was dressed he found Jonathan sitting on the floor outside the door, his attention focused on the stairs.

Ben heard the rustling of plastic sacks.

“Somebody’s here,” he said.

He knew who was down there, but he said, “Let’s go see.”

Rachel stood behind the butcher block island, unpacking a plastic sack from the grocery store.

Chocolate chips. Vanilla. Brown sugar.

“I told you to go home,” Ben said roughly as Jonathan hid his face in Ben’s side.

“Bear told me to make cookies,” she said, then nodded at the bear, sitting at the kitchen table.

Ben and Jonathan both looked at the bear, like stuffing and fur were going to explain what the hell that

meant, then Ben transferred his gaze to the clock set into the rooster’s abdomen. “It’s almost midnight,” he

said.

“Bears don’t care what time it is when they want cookies,” she told him evenly.

“What kind does he want?” Jonathan asked, his face still buried in Ben’s borrowed shirt.

“He likes chocolate chip,” she said. She wasn’t looking at Jonathan, Ben noticed. “What kind does Sam

make?”

Jonathan looked at her like she’d fallen out of the sky. “Sam doesn’t make cookies,” he said. “Chris

makes cookies.”

Rachel still wasn’t looking at Ben, or Jonathan. “Okay, so what kind of cookies does Chris make?”

“M&M’s,” Jonathan said.

“Is that what Chris likes?”

“That’s what me and Sam like. Chris likes oatmeal chocolate chip.”

Rachel seemed to consider this. “Bear likes M&M’s,” she said. “We could make the oatmeal chocolate

chip cookies and put M&M’s in some of them.”

Jonathan didn’t say anything, and Rachel went ahead, opening cupboard doors for mixing bowls,

drawers for measuring cups, the pantry for ingredients. “Can you show me where Chris keeps his recipes?”

A beat passed, then Jonathan slid out of Ben’s arms and went to the shelf that held the cookbooks to

remove a three-ring binder. He and Rachel paged through it while Ben pulled a chair back from the kitchen

table and settled into it. An unexpected emotion surfaced through Ben’s turmoil: gratitude. Her slow, calm

movements caught Jonathan’s eye but weren’t frantic or even upbeat. She was doing something routine,

giving the boy something that would anchor him in the present and distract him from what happened

earlier.

She was doing what Ben couldn’t. She was comforting Jonathan. Humming quietly under her breath

she studied the recipe. “Want to help?”

He nodded. Together they measured out flour, sugar, salt. Rachel opened the bag of chips and sprinkled

four or five into the batter.

“Bear wants more,” Jonathan said.

Her eyebrows rose. “He does? Want to measure them for me?”

He nodded, found his stool, and carefully poured a cup of chips, then the bag collapsed and a bunch

extra fell onto the counter. “Oops,” Rachel said matter-of-factly. “Dump in what you poured out.”

Jonathan did, then looked at Rachel. She sectioned off most of the spillage, swept them into her cupped

palm, and added them to the batter. “The rest are for us,” she said, and popped one into her mouth.

The silence had an odd note to it, as if the night’s terrifying events took everyone somewhere they

didn’t want to go. Ben, Jonathan, even Rachel. “Who taught you how to make cookies?” Ben asked. That

wasn’t what he meant. He meant,
Who taught you to make cookies for terrified children at midnight?

“My mama taught me,” she said, talking to Jonathan. “But my daddy used to make them with me when I

woke up with bad dreams.”

Bad dreams. He thought about the Pleasure Pier and kinky sex and standing her up. Shame crawled up

his spine.

“I have bad dreams,” Jonathan said.

Rachel nodded. “What do Sam and Chris do?”

“We talk about it. Sam sings, sometimes.”

Ben looked up at that. But Rachel just continued mixing the cookie dough. The little boy’s chin

trembled.

“What if I have bad dreams tonight?” he whispered.

Rachel flicked Ben a glance that read,
Do you sing?

Not since I was sixteen.

He shook his head. “We’ll deal with it if it happens, buddy,” he said. Jonathan swiped at his eyes and

went to sit with Bear, not Ben. Rachel dropped spoonfuls of dough onto the cookie sheet she found in the

drawer under the oven. In just a few minutes the smell of baking cookies permeated the air. She stayed next

to the oven, busying herself with tidying up. Wiping counters. Folding dishtowels and aligning them neatly

on the oven door handle. Putting everything away, except the half-eaten bag of M&M’s she’d found in the

cupboard.

When the timer beeped she pulled the first batch of cookies from the oven, slid three onto individual

plates, and topped one with M&M’s. She poured Jonathan a glass of milk, and sat down across from them.

Jonathan sat up and reached for the cookie.

“It’s gonna be hot, sweetheart,” Rachel said.

Jonathan waited, then bit into the cookie carefully. He ate it like it was the only thing keeping him from

a horrible black void he faced far too often, slowly, carefully, staving off God only knew what. Terror,

probably. Bedtime, for sure. The kid’s eyelids were drooping even as he ate.

“Can I have another one?”

Rachel’s eyes met Ben’s. He shrugged. She looked back at Jonathan. “Not tonight,” she said gently. “But

you can have three more M&M’s.”

“Five?”

“Deal.”

He ate those as slowly as the cookie, but when Ben stood he didn’t protest at all. Ben carried him

upstairs and laid him in his bed, surrounded by the kinds of soft things little kids loved. “Will you sit with

me?” Jonathan whispered.

It had to be bad if not-Sam was an acceptable substitute, so he stayed while Jonathan wriggled his way

into a comfortable position. Light picked out the bumps of his fragile spine, and after a minute, Ben stroked

the smooth skin of his back, once. Again. Jonathan’s eyelids drooped, then closed. Ben kept his hand

between his shoulder blades until he twitched.

Back downstairs, Rachel was sitting on the sofa. She looked up when Ben dropped into the chair

opposite her. “Why didn’t you tell me about them?”

“Same reason you didn’t tell me you were a virgin. We don’t have a talk-about-family kind of

relationship,” he said, too strung out to filter to his words.

“You assumed I’d judge your brother for being gay,” she said.

Fine, they’d go there. “I’m careful who I bring into my brother’s home.”

She looked around, at the house decorated like something out of a Pottery Barn catalog. “It’s a beautiful

home, but that’s not what you’re careful about letting someone into,” she said quietly. “You assume I’m

quite the hypocrite if I’ll sleep with you in place of going to church and at the same time judge your

family.”

Ben just shrugged. “Good old-fashioned heterosexual sex with a cop on Sundays is totally normal. None

of this is normal.”

“I grew up at Elysian Fields, so I don’t know much about normal,” she said. “But I know love and

compassion when I see it.”

“Your dad made cookies when you had nightmares? Sounds like something a mom would do.”

“My mother’s death caused the nightmares,” she said, still calm. “I’d wake up screaming for her, and

when I got older I started dreaming that the cancer that killed her was inside me, eating me like it ate her. At

the end she smelled like something rotting, and the smell was in my dreams. I was terrified to sleep. My dad

made me cookies because the smell reminded me of better times with her, and after we baked, I could go

back to sleep.”

The words were a slap across the face. They spawned a hundred questions he had no right to ask and

tilted his perception of Rachel’s previous life entirely on its head. Because dads who made cookies for their

scared daughters weren’t the kinds of Bible-thumping repressive monsters daughters left behind easily. She

hadn’t walked away from unilaterally horrible. She’d walked away from people who loved her, people she

loved.

He was in too deep, she was too deep for a man like him, and he didn’t have anything left inside to give

her. The way she studied him, the way her golden eyes peered right through him made him feel naked.

“Take my truck and go home,” Ben said. “I don’t know when I’ll be out to get it.”

Rachel considered this. “I’ll drive it back into town when the Truck Garden comes tomorrow and catch

a ride home with them.”

With Katy out of town for who knew how long, he didn’t argue with her. “Just tell me where you leave

it,” he said.

“I’ll stay if you want me to,” she said quietly. “If you don’t want to be alone.”

“Right now all I want is to be alone,” he said just as quietly.

It should have been him. He should have been hurt. Not Sam. Never Sam.

He didn’t mean it. She took him at his word, and left.

Chapter Nineteen

Spring sunshine winked off Ben’s black truck, hulking over Rachel’s Focus and Jess’s VW Bug.

Coffee cups in hand, Jess and Rachel stood on the front porch, contemplating this new addition to the

apprentice parking lot.

“Why did you drive his truck home?”

“He had a family emergency,” Rachel said, fairly sure that Ben Harris wouldn’t want his family issues

trumpeted to all and sundry. He’d been vibrating so hard she expected him to shatter at any minute.

Probably she should have left the first time he told her to, but there was no way she was leaving that

terrified child without trying to help him.

His screams took her back to a place no child should ever have to go and no adult ever wanted to

revisit, and Ben’s obvious heartbreak in the face of Jonathan’s fear and grief nearly broke her heart. Doing

the only thing she knew how to do to comfort someone wasn’t an impulse. It was a need, a way to

reconnect with the father who considered her dead, a way to help in the face of overpowering anguish. The

grocery store was five minutes away. Sam and Chris must bake quite a bit because the list on the fridge

included vanilla and chocolate chips. She picked up the milk and orange juice and whole-wheat tortillas

because she was going, and she might as well.

Flinging her childhood terrors at him like scalding oil on what had to be one of the most difficult nights

of his life wasn’t in the plan, either.

Still eyeing the big black truck, Jess said, “Is he compensating?”

Yes, in a hundred different ways, but weren’t we all?
“For what?” she asked as she set her cup on the

railing and picked up a covered casserole dish.

“You know. Big truck. Small dick.”

“No,” she said distractedly as another piece fell into place. Ben would drive the truck because it could

handle anything. Nothing would stop him from getting to someone who needed help. The truck, the

attitude, the muscles, the job . . . all of it fit together seamlessly to form the shell of Ben the Indestructible

Protector.

Some piece of grit in Ben’s soul formed that shell, the uniform, the weapon, the smile and the attitude,

the truck. It was a life lived as impenetrable armor, invisible to the casual eye and like a character hidden in

a cast of thousands, plain as day as soon as you saw it for what it was.

She wiped her thumb across her forehead, then glanced at the activity in the farm’s parking lot. They’d

loaded the Truck Garden and the A&M boys were ready to head out for the day. At the sharp whistle and

wave Rachel carried the casserole dish and a bag of fresh-picked vegetables to the truck and climbed in,

jockeyed it around until it pointed out the driveway, and led them onto the highway into Galveston, to

Sam’s house.

In the daylight she saw Craftsman-style homes with neatly tended lawns and flowering shrubs. The