Finally, I felt myself melting against his embrace. By his smell, I knew it was Drake. I allowed him to pick me up and cradle me against his chest. I tried to draw from his quiet, enduring, forgiving-to-a-fault, demeanor. Finally, I felt my tears abate; it had been a cleansing cry. A much-needed release.
Drake stroked my back the whole time. He didn’t speak, and I appreciated it. Every now and then I didn’t need words. From time to time, I just needed to know someone was there. I didn’t need empty platitudes or the fake sense of sympathy. I despised when people automatically assumed they understood the struggle the person grieving felt, even if they knew the pain of loss. Grief wasn’t one size fits all. Everyone experienced grief differently. No two scars of death left the same mark. I had lost my father at an early age. Drake had lost his father at an early age, but I am sure we had grieved differently. Our fathers had been unique to us, just as our expression of grief was unique to us.
When my sobs quieted down, and the shudders stopped coursing through my body, he finally spoke.
“I was thinking about throwing together some French toast for tomorrow morning, want to help me? We can put them in the oven before our run, and they should be finished by the time we get back,” Drake asked hesitantly.
I giggled. “Yes, that sounds like a plan.”
Drake was so meticulous and organized when he cooked. He hated a messy work station, so it always surprised me when he pulled out his numerous binders of recipes that were thrown in all haphazardly. The cabinet above the ovens were packed with recipes he had been collecting since he was 11.
Light reading for him was pouring over cookbooks with a notebook perched in his lap. He scribbled in his notebook, tweaking the recipes to his liking.
We worked in companionable silence for a while before I looked over at him. “Do you really want to pursue this career in cooking, or are you running away from Rose?”
He gave me a contemplative look before he spoke slowly. “I have to admit, not having to see Rose every day has helped make this decision easier, but I have been living a lie for years. I let Rose dictate my life for a long time. I love children, and I find the human mind fascinating, but after doing my rotation in the children’s mental ward, I began having my doubts. How do you fix something that’s broken? I have a deep belief that some of these children are born broken. I’ve seen loving mothers and fathers, and then they have this child filled with rage and instabilities. They say and do things that creep even me out. I can’t see that, day in and day out, without it affecting me some day.”
I cleared my throat. “When I was 10, I was admitted to a mental health facility. My step mother caught me talking to Jaxson. Back then, I didn’t know I could communicate with him silently. She sent me away. They believed I had created an imaginary person to help me cope with my father’s death. Nothing was wrong with me. Jaxson was real. There was this little boy I was in there with that was slightly older than me. He would tell us about accidently killing his neighbor’s cat. He felt no remorse. It was like he couldn’t express it. It was like he was broken. Then he went on to hurting other neighbors’ animals. He would lure them away into the woods and hurt them. He had a false sense of power from it. One day, he was playing with his friend and his friend wouldn’t let him borrow his baseball mitt. He took a rock and hit him numerous times. His friend died. When I met him, he still thought it was his friend’s fault. He believed he should have just let him borrow the mitt and he wouldn’t be dead. He couldn’t even pretend to feel remorse or guilt. It was like there was a void within him.”
Drake barely suppressed a shudder. “There’s been a few cases I’ve seen like that.”
“So, yeah, cooking doesn’t give you nightmares,” I laughed uneasily.
“No, it does not,” he gave me a crooked smile. “Can I ask you a favor?” he asked hesitantly.
“Sure,” I said as I placed my pan of French toast into the refrigerator.
“Can I sleep with you or will you sleep with me? Just sleeping,” he held up his hands. “I just want to hold you and go to sleep.”
I smiled up at him. “Yes. I would like that.”
As much as I wanted to know how it would feel with him physically, right now wasn’t the right time. With Rose unwilling to have a DNA test we had no clue of knowing if the child she carried was his; Ella’s prediction or not. We didn’t need to muddy the waters any more than what it was.
I had come to care for him deeply. Sometimes, he was my quiet in a storm that raged on. I didn’t want to fall for him anymore than I already had. We would be free to be ourselves with each other when Rose was finally out of the picture.
Chapter 20
“Up in the mornin’ with the rising sun,” Jemmy sang out as our feet pounded on the pavement. The early morning sun was just beginning to rise. It really was a site to behold.
It had been two weeks since we began our training program. Our group of 16 had grown to a group of 30 or so. Some of the instructors had taken to joining our runs, and some of the other Knights as well. We still had to push Jemmy to get out of bed every
day, but I think she was secretly enjoying the rewards of her work.
Today she began to sing a cadence, and I knew she was up to no good. Everyone humored her, repeating her words back except for Remy and Jace. They just tossed her back a warning look. The gaps between runners had narrowed, and Sam wasn’t in the back anymore. That was still Jemmy.
“Don’t know why we gotta run all day, since we’re the gifted ones,” she called out. She was barely breathless. I was impressed. I heard a few snickers as the group repeated after her. “Remy and Troy are sons of guns,” she giggled at her own joke as everyone repeated after. “Gonna make us run just for fun.”
I found myself singing along, and Remy and Troy gave me mock annoyed faces.
“One, two, three, four, sound off.”
“One, two, three, four,” we all shouted back at her.
It seemed to help us as she continued to shout out made up cadences. I could tell she had spent a lot of time researching them.
When I looked down at my watch, I noticed we had made excellent time getting back to the house. Drake and I had plenty of time to get breakfast ready before everyone went to school.
I found my new schedule to be amazing. I wasn’t as tense or anxious. We had our morning runs during the week. If time permitted, we had breakfast ready for everyone by the time they got ready for school. Everyone pitched in, getting the children ready. I didn’t worry about taking a shower until we were finished with getting everyone out the door. I generally got showered and dressed, then headed down to the den to do my class work on the computer. Micah often joined me on the laptop as Ms. Tanya—or Tanya, as I called her—looked over his shoulder. Then I headed to the recovery center and observed the despondent females. After that, I would head over to the training facility.