Braxton rolled her eyes when Houston ordered her to talk, but then her gaze landed on me when I leaned forward to listen, and somehow, I made her soften. It could have been the orgasms I’d given her this morning when Morrow left her hanging, or it could have been my desperate need to know that I didn’t bother to hide. Either way, she gave us what we wanted.
“Did I ever tell you how I learned to play?”
“No,” we each said at the same time.
Deep in thought, she nodded absently as she fidgeted with the ends of her red hair.
“Faithful isn’t the kind of place that grows, you know? It closes in until you feel like you’re trapped in a box with no escape and no air to breathe. The only people who stay long enough to be buried are the ones who were born and raised, unless they get out and don’t look back.”
“Like you,” Loren filled in.
Braxton nodded. “Seven years ago, I met a stranger named Jacob Fried. He was on the road with his band, and they were passing through our town when their drummer fell asleep behind the wheel. The van was totaled and everyone died except Jacob. His injuries were so bad that he slipped into a coma while the doctors were fighting to save him. When he woke up six months later, Father Moore claimed God had delivered him to Faithful, and the reason for it was why he was spared. Jacob believed him.”
Braxton fell quiet, but I could tell her mind was still sifting through her memories.
“In hindsight, I realize now that he was a broken, grieving man desperate to understand why he’d lost all his friends in one night and was left to bear it alone. He needed to believe there was a higher purpose to keep going. He stayed in Faithful, but it wasn’t to find his calling like he thought. He couldn’t bring himself to leave the last place he’d seen his friends alive.”
Braxton studied each of us, and I knew she was wondering if we would have done the same.
Yes.
“Did he ever find his calling?” Houston asked. His eyes narrowed as he tried to piece together Braxton’s memories for himself. He was anxious to understand her. We all were.
“Eventually,” she said with a shrug. “Despite being the pious Christians they claim to be, Faithful isn’t welcoming to strangers or strange people—even if we’re all His children.” She rolled her eyes. “Jacob was left utterly alone in a strange town for weeks until a sixteen-year-old girl decided to befriend him.”
I stopped breathing.
I tried to fill my lungs, but it was like I’d forgotten how.
There was only the hope that this story wouldn’t take the turn I knew it would.
“I was on my way home from school when I heard him play. He’d gotten a place, and when I walked by…I don’t know why I turned in…or why he never sent me away. We didn’t speak. I listened until he had nothing left, and then I went home. It was the same the next day, and we continued like that for a week before he finally spoke to me. He asked me if I played. I told him maybe one day.”
She stopped speaking for a while when the plane began to take off, and she didn’t speak again until we were in the air. “It started with him just showing me a few things. Once he realized how quickly I was catching on, he started to challenge me. I adapted, and Jacob found his calling. He never talked about himself during those times, and neither did I. We never stopped being strangers. I was his student, and he was my teacher. That was all we were to each other…at least for a while.”
“What happened?” I heard myself ask.
“He fucked her,” Loren blurted bitterly. His eyes were angry when his gaze met mine briefly, and then he slowly turned it on Braxton. “Am I right?”
“It was my idea,” she argued as if it made a goddamn difference. Her eyes were wild and determined as she met each of our gazes. She didn’t want to be a victim. “I came on to him.”
“Oh, was he just a kid who mistook gratitude and adoration for love and attraction too?”
Loren and Braxton stared at each other, neither willing to concede. For once, I sided with Loren, and I couldn’t recall the last time that happened. Braxton might have been the aggressor, but it didn’t change the gut-turning truth that she’d been taken advantage of by someone she not only trusted but idolized.
And what about you?
I tried to shove the thought away, but it kept coming back.
I wasn’t ready to face the truth that I’d waited too long to tell her about Emily. I wasn’t prepared to accept that Braxton may never forgive me. My betrayal would hurt her more than Houston or Loren’s ever could because she never expected it from me. I could see the unshakable trust in Braxton’s eyes each time she looked at me.
Fuck.
“How old was he?” Houston asked, and I knew he wasn’t merely curious. The dick wanted her to admit out loud, even indirectly, that she wasn’t to blame.
Braxton fidgeted in her seat, her eyes and voice low when she mumbled, “Thirty-six.”
There was nothing but the sound of the plane’s engine and the air circulating through the cabin.
I watched as Braxton forced herself to meet Houston’s gaze, who never wavered. Her shoulders were back now, but her breathing seemed erratic. She was swallowing and flaring her nostrils at whatever teased her senses. It was a reaction, easily missed, that I’ve seen from her before. The cause was something else we needed to unveil and soon.
“Come here.”
Braxton hesitated for only a moment before unbuckling her seatbelt and crossing the small space between them. Houston made sure she faced us too when he pulled her into his lap. Her legs were thrown over the arm of his seat as she stared down at him.
“What if it had been Rosalie?” he questioned softly, going straight for the motherfucking kill. There was a reason Houston was our unspoken leader. “Would you have blamed her?”
Braxton’s brown eyes were hard when she stiffened in Houston’s lap. “Never.”
“So how could you think we would ever accept that what happened to you was your fault?”
Seeing for myself what Braxton’s parents made Rosalie do before she’d even learned to drive, nausea slammed into me like a relentless tidal wave.
It could have been Braxton.
If they’d known, if Jacob had knocked her up…the Fawns would have made their daughter marry a man old enough to be her father. They would have done it to hold their heads high in a middle-of-nowhere town.
Justice wouldn’t have been an option.
Braxton wouldn’t have been an option.
Their beliefs and their pride would have mattered more.
Braxton’s gaze snapped to me as if she’d read my thoughts, and it was at that moment, the first crack in her armor appeared. I could see it in her eyes even as she tried to reason with us. “It was a long time ago.”
Houston closed his eyes, and Loren responded.
I couldn’t do anything. My goddamn stomach was in my throat.
“And the fact that you’ve been carrying it ever since is what pisses us off, baby fawn. You’re never going to convince us any differently.”
She looked at Loren, who was strangling his seat as if it were Jacob fucking Fried. I was tempted to call my private eyes and pull them off Emily’s trail. I had a new mission.
“Is he still in Faithful?” I whispered.
Catching my drift, Houston didn’t react, but Loren was grinning like a Cheshire cat. Neither would stop me if I put the play in motion.
Braxton was none the wiser when she shook her head. “I promised him I’d never tell anyone, but it didn’t matter. He skipped town, and I never saw him again.”
“Is Fried the reason you believe you’re a sex addict?”
“No.” Laying her head on Houston’s shoulder, Braxton closed her eyes. “It was the ones who came after. It was their parents. It was my parents. It was everything I was taught. I was stuck inside a town too rigid to understand what was happening inside of me. I had all this energy and no conduit. All I wanted was to breathe. Jacob gave me that when he taught me to play. I had an outlet. I could express myself. I could follow my soul through the dark and find the light that called to me. The world my parents chose was no longer my sole reality. I understood who I was meant to be, and what I was meant to be—free.”
Her eyes slowly opened, trapping Loren within their depths.
“You were right. Jacob used me, but I used him too. Music wasn’t enough anymore, and he was the only one I trusted to understand. I preyed on his grief, and he preyed on my desperation. We were both too alone in this world to say no. After he left, I fought it. I was afraid of my parents finding out what I’d done. I didn’t just sin, I enjoyed it, and I wanted to do it again. Sex consumed me. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. Eventually, I didn’t fear my parents as much as slipping back into my shell.”
Braxton rose from Houston’s lap before returning to her own seat and curling into herself. I didn’t know why until she spoke again.
“It was three months before it got back to my parents.” She looked at the three of us before inhaling deeply and exhaling slowly. “By then, I’d seduced twelve boys from our parish.”
“How did your parents find out?”
Braxton blinked at me as if she’d expected a different reaction. I admit I was stunned by her confession. Most of my shock, however, was due to my first impression of her. I’d never been so wrong.
I didn’t care, though. It changed nothing.
She’d been around the block, but her body count was only shocking to her. It didn’t alter my feelings or diminish our determination to possess the only thing that truly mattered.
From the start, our existence has been so thoroughly entangled. We’ve only ever been one entity.
Houston, Loren, and I were bound.
Braxton would only ever give her heart once.
“One of them feared for his soul enough to come forward. What I didn’t know until my parents dragged me to the church and before all of Faithful was that he wasn’t alone. Eight more had confessed to sleeping with me, and their parents wanted justice.”
I didn’t miss her hesitation and the indecision in her eyes whether to tell us the rest.
“I was allowed to atone for my wanton behavior by standing before the altar for three days without food or water or sleep so that the good people of Faithful could be restored and comforted by my sacrifice.”
Braxton’s gaze traveled between the three of us, attempting to gauge the reactions we were careful to hide. Whatever we decided to do regarding her past, our first step was making sure she retained her innocence.
“The others never said a word,” she slowly proceeded when we said and gave nothing, “but they avoided me after that.”
Because they’d gotten what they wanted from her and had been fine letting her walk through hell alone.
I blew air through my nose.
“Names.”
I didn’t miss Houston and Loren’s heads snapping toward me and their silent demand for me to keep it together.
They could blow me.
I was too far gone to regain my composure.
Braxton pursed her lips at me in disapproval, and it took the last of my control not to grab and shake this need to punish herself out of her.
“I disregarded their beliefs and who they were to get what I wanted. The only guilty party here is me, Jericho.”
I couldn’t accept that.
Neither Jacob Fried nor any of those assholes were forced into anything.
And if it had been someone else, anyone else, Braxton would never let them feel this shame she was so determined to hold on to.
“What about the three who didn’t feel guilty?” The temperature in the cabin dropped sharply at the quiet fury in my tone. “Tell me where to find the ones who fucked you and then abandoned you. I have questions.”
I’d simply beat the nine names out of the three when I got my hands on them instead.
No question they knew since men gossip as much as women do.
We were just too macho to admit it.
“What will that solve?” she challenged with a raise of her brow. “What will it change? By now, they’ve forgotten me.” She looked away, staring out the window as she whispered, “I’ve forgotten them too.”
I could tell she had another pointless argument to make when her head swiveled toward us, and her big, brown eyes narrowed to slits.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” she offered to all of us. “I’ll consider that you might be right when you explain how you’re any different. How many women have you tossed aside? Do you even remember their names?”
The cabin was silent as the three of us watched her, and I wondered if they were considering pulling Braxton over their knee as well.
Loren, as usual, chose to bat first.
“For one, I’ve never blamed and shamed a girl for a decision I made using the wrong head,” he deadpanned. “Only pricks with small dicks do that.”
I swallowed my laugh, and I could tell Braxton was fighting back a smile.
She was a scrapper, which meant changing her mind wouldn’t be easy. She’d lived with her shame for too long. Since we had plans to stick around, there would be plenty of time to open her eyes.
Shaking her head while still fighting her smile, she mumbled, “Whatever,” before returning to staring out her window.
“I still haven’t heard the reason you think you’re a nympho,” Houston said.
He’d drawn her attention back to us, and she frowned her confusion. “I just told you.”
“Sounds to me like it was never about fucking,” Loren told her. “It was always about your need to rebel. Music was your battle cry. Sex was your weapon.”
“Your only mistake,” Houston added, “is that you waged war only to run and hide when the other side fought back.”
“You weren’t ready then,” I told her while holding her gaze. “Are you ready now?”
Houston, Loren, and I wouldn’t have the luxury of hiding our relationship with Braxton. The four of us would be ripped apart from every corner of the world by people who couldn’t and wouldn’t understand it. Braxton would bear the brunt of it, and we’d shield her as best as we could. We just had to be sure she wouldn’t fold under pressure.
The three of us waited for her answer.
We waited to see that fire in her eyes that consumed us from the start.
When it came, I felt it burn inside my chest while my goddamn dick saluted her.
“I’m ready.”
