"Miss Collins, what happened to your face?" Manny Thompson frowns at me and nudges his brother Tommy. "Look, she's all blue!"
I smile at them. The turtleneck and make-up are evidently not enough to look like nothing happened to me this weekend. I'm a horrible shade of purplish blue. Wonderful, really. What a nice way to start my week.
"I'm just clumsy," I lie to the kids. "I fell and hit my head on the table."
"Oh that happened to me once." Tommy nods in understanding before losing all interest in me. He and Manny see Rose and Theresa come in and they head over to them to play before class starts.
Luckily, only a few parents come in today and I give all of them the clumsy Miss Collins explanation, which they seem to buy. It's a relief, but it also makes me sad. It was just one stupid night for me, not a regular occurrence. If I had an abusive boyfriend though, no one would ever know. How many times can someone tell people that she's clumsy before people start figuring out that someone is beating her? It's sad, really. Right now, I am grateful for it, though. I really don't want to explain to the parents what I got up to during the weekend.
Tiffany is harder to lie to. She sees me during the lunch break and she immediately pulls me aside to ask me what happened. She knows I went out with my friends from back home and she instantly assumes that something bad happened. It's nice to know that she's concerned about me and that she's not even given me a finish my 'I fell' excuse. Still, I don't feel like talking about it. The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. It just keeps bothering me and I'm not even sure why. Danny called me at least fifty times, but I'm not picking up and luckily, he doesn't know where I live, so he can't just show up at my place.
I throw myself into work the entire day, which is quite easy since Tiffany and I still have to do a lot of work for the Christmas dance this Friday. We order some food around dinner time and eat it at the school so we can get some more work done before heading home. It's her day off tomorrow, but I'm sure I can get John to help me out of I need to. I've lost most of my initial excitement about the celebration, and it's all Danny's fault. I just hope I can get my mojo back before the dance. The kids deserve me at my best.
I get home late, in the dark, and for the first time since I moved here, I feel uncomfortable walking through the empty streets in the dim lamp light. Stupid, of course, ridiculous, but true nonetheless. I even consider calling someone just to talk on my way home, but that's just childish. I do pick up my pace involuntarily, so I get home in record time.
The first thing I notice when I get home is the fact that right behind my car is Nathan's. He's not in it and Annabel's lights are on, so I guess they're on yet another date. At home. So, they're having sex again. Great. Just wonderful.
I don't feel as gutted as I did last time, but I don't like it. Not even a little bit. It's for the best though. I'm done with men anyway. After everything with Dshawn, Danny, Darius, Nathan... Yeah, I am done with them. I'm just fine on my own.
It's not until I reach my front door that I realize I don't have my keys. I know where they are, though. On my desk. At school. The school that Tiffany locked up behind us. I don't even have the keys to the school on me, so I'm locked out. Crap.
Cursing, I take out my phone and call Tiffany. She picks up right away and tells me that she's just getting in the shower, but she'll be right over to hand me my spare key. I'd walk there, but she lives a little far for that. Crap. It'll be at least twenty minutes before Tiffany will get here. That leaves me three options: sit on my own front porch, see if Mr. Galf from next door is home and wait there or ring Annabel's doorbell. I decide to see if Mr. Galf is home, but his lights are out and he doesn't answer, so I grunt and walk back to my front door and sit down on the damp ground, cursing myself. I really need to put a chair or a bench out here if this is going to keep happening. At least it's not raining and I've got a friend with a key nearby.
After about fifteen minutes, the front door of Annabel's apartment opens and I hear laughter. I wish I could hide, but there's nowhere I can go, so I just hope they won't see me. I kill the light on my phone so I'm just sitting there in the dark, praying to stay invisible.
"Thank you so much for a lovely night," Annabel is saying in a flirty tone. "Are you sure you have to go?"
"Really sure," Nathan's deep voice responds. "Thanks for dinner, Annabel."
She says something else, but it's too low for me to hear. He chuckles softly and tells her goodnight. The door shuts and I hear his footsteps move toward his car. The click sounds when he unlocks his car, the door opens and...
"Caroline?"
Fuck. So close.
"Hey." I get up and brush off my clothes. "Locked myself out again. Don't worry, a friend is coming over in a few minutes to let me in."
Instead of leaving like I pray he will, he shuts the car door and takes a few steps in my direction. "It's cold," he says. "Why didn't you come over to Annabel's? I thought you were friends?"
Truth be told, we stopped having tea the moment she and Nathan started dating. Neither of us ever tried to pick up our weekly teatime. I have a feeling Annabel knows perfectly well that Nathan and I know each other very well and she dislikes it just as much as I hate seeing Nathan go over to her place. That budding friendship is dead for sure.
"Didn't want to barge in on your date," I tell him sternly. "I'll be fine. You can go."
He opens his mouth, but he frowns and takes another step toward me. "Caroline, what happened to your face?"
"I fell and hit my head on the table."
"No, you didn't." He crosses the last few feet between us and puts a hand to the side on the good side of my face, tilting my head to he can take a better look.
I flinch away from him and end up with my back pressed against my own front door. "I'm fine."
"You're wearing a turtleneck," he says, his expression dangerous now. "Why?"
"Because it's cold," I shoot back. "You just said so yourself."
Nathan doesn't even seem to hear me. His green eyes spark with anger and he pulls the fabric of my sweater down a bit so he can see the bruises on my throat. "Fucking hell, Caroline," he breathes. "Who did this to you?"
"You know better than anyone that I like it rough," I say, trying to sound teasing. My voice catches on the word rough and I can feel that I will break if he doesn't move away from me sooner rather than later. "Just got a bit carried away."
"Like hell you did." He's not buying my story for even a second. "Who did this to you?"
"Nathan, it's not your place to ask me these questions." Truth be told, it is nice to know he still cares.
His eyes meet mine and he gives me a hard look. He puts a hand on my face again and the other moves to my shoulder, squeezing gently. "Caroline, whoever did this to you needs to be held accountable. Sure, you like a bit of roughness in the bedroom, but that doesn't give anyone the right to beat you up. No way you wanted someone to slam your face into a table or a wall or whatever happened to you."
My breath hitches and I feel my resistance to him slipping already. He just sees right through me, voices what has been bothering me for days now, without even me knowing exactly why I kept feeling so guilty. Part of me feels like... like I deserved this. Like I asked for it. I like it rough, after all. And what Danny did... while it wasn't what I wanted at all, it was rough.
"Caroline," Nathan says, softly caressing my face. "Talk to me. I want to help."
Just when I want to answer him, Tiffany's tiny pink car stops in front of my apartment and she gets out, looking absolutely bewildered. Nathan and I jump apart, but it's too late already. Her eyes move over the both of us and her jaw set.
"Did you do this to her?" She gestures at my face while she yells at Nathan. "What the hell are you doing at her apartment at night? Shouldn't you be at home with your kid?"
"No, no, Tiffany, it wasn't him." Bloody hell, how did I end up in this situation?
"Don't you dare give me that stupid excuse about falling again," she snaps at me, her eyes shooting fire. "Someone hit you. Was it him?" She points at Nathan again. "God knows he's done it before."
"Tiffany!" I'm starting to get angry myself now. I know she means well, but I don't like the wat she speaks about Nathan. "That was – what? – twenty years ago? And it's not like he hit an innocent man. Besides, he didn't hit me. It was Danny."
"Danny?" Nathan repeats, his tone dark. "Your ex-boyfriend?"
"Why does he know who Danny is?" Tiffany grunts as she pieces it all together. "Bloody hell Caroline, you move away from an abusive ex and start messing around with an ex-convict right away? Rose's dad, even. You do realize that you could lose your job over this, right?"
"We're not-" I stop talking when I see her knowing look. Yeah, we're not fooling anyone.
"John said that the two of you were acting suspicious at the parent-teacher conference, but I was foolish enough to think that you wouldn't do something so monumentally stupid." She grunts and hold outs the spare key. "It's cold. Let's get inside."
I open the door, silently cursing my life. This is not even remotely how I wanted to spend the remainder of my night. As I step inside my dark apartment, I hear both Tiffany and Nathan follow me in.
"You should go home," she bits out at him, arms folded as she gets in his way. "I think you've done enough."
"I'm not leaving." He sounds much calmer than she does, but I see the look in his eyes and know that he's not going to budge.
"Fine," I groan. "Both of you, get in here. I'll tell you what happened and then you're both leaving."
I turn up the thermostat and flick on the lights. Nathan sits down on his place on the couch – well, not his place, just the place he used to sit before we ended things – and Tiffany sits in a chair opposite him. Nathan looks around the room in wonder and I realize he hasn't seen it with the new furniture yet. I put on some water for tea and slump down on the couch right next to him. It's no use pretending we don't know each other, and Tiffany is not going to rest before she knows all there is to know, so who cares how I sit or where I sit or that I just want to lie down and let Nathan hold me. I don't do that last part, but I do let him put a hand on my knee.
"Start talking," she orders. I've never seen her look so angry, not even when one of the kids from my class whacked one of hers on the head with a book. And she was pretty angry then.
"I think that we should focus on the fact that Caroline has obviously had a difficult weekend," Nathan tells her, squeezing my knee in support.
"Oh, yeah," she realizes. "Sorry. Of course." Her gaze softens. "Are you okay?"
I nod. "It looks worse than it is. I was out with some friends and Danny showed up because he thought I was with someone new, so I tried to talk to him, but he was drunk. And he..." I really don't want to talk about this. "He choked me and pushed my head into a wall."
"He choked you?" Tiffany gets up and looks appalled when I show her the bruises beneath my sweater. "Oh God, Caroline, that's horrible. I just knew that you didn't really fall down. You're not clumsy like me. Please tell me that you reported Danny to the police and that he's rotting away in a jail cell right now."
When I don't respond, they both grunt in exasperation.
"Car, you need to report this. What if he does it to someone else?"
Nathan nods, agreeing with her. "I'll come with you," he says softly. "Were there any witnesses?"
"You're not going with her!" Tiffany stands tall, towering over him since he's still sitting right next to me. "I think you've done enough, Mr. Storm. Or should I call you Nathanial from now on? Since you're obviously not here in any sort of professional capacity."
"Shut up!" Just like that night with Danny, I'm suddenly fed up with everyone shouting and telling me what to do. "Just shut up. I didn't report this because I didn't want to and I still don't. Danny won't do this to anyone else. He had a very specific reason to do this and he's normally not an abusive drunk. He's never hurt me before and he's been trying to apologize to me ever since. I'm not in a relationship with him, haven't been in a year, and I'm not planning on seeing him ever again."
Nathan and Tiffany exchange a look and that makes me even angrier. Who do they think they are?
"Does he have a key to this place?" Nathan asks suddenly, his green eyes intent on my face.
"What? No, of course not."
He gives me a pointed look, reminding me silently of how soon I gave one to him. Doesn't he understand that every single aspect of what he and I had was different from anything I've ever experienced before? I have never been so utterly trusting, not even with Danny.
"Does he know where you live?" He lets out a breath when I shook my head. "Good. Dshawn does, right? Is he still friends with Danny?"
"No." I know for a fact that Dshawn is way angrier with Danny than I am. "Trust me, Dshawn is not telling Danny anything about me ever again."
"Who the fuck is Dshawn?" Tiffany looks from me to Nathan with a scowl. "Seriously, how long have the two of you been dating?"
"We're not dating," we say in unison. It would almost be funny it the whole thing wasn't so damn annoying and maddening.
"Oh, you are." She clacks her tongue and rolled her eyes. "I have eyes, you know."
"Yeah, and I do too," I shoot back. "The only reason he's even here is because he was on a date with my neighbor and he saw me waiting for you."
"A date?" Nathan gives me a perplexed look. "With Annabel? What makes you think that I'm dating her?"
"Come on!" I am so done with this whole thing. "You're over there at night, she's in the sluttiest dress I've ever seen. You're sleeping with her. Which is fine, because you made it perfectly clear that I mean absolutely nothing to you." I shove his hand away from me and get up from the couch. I try to make tea in the kitchen, but my hands are shaking too much to pour boiling water into a cup without spilling. Cursing, I run my burned finger under cold water.
"Caroline..." The way he says my name still makes me feel like I matter somehow, like I'm not the little girl I sure as hell feel like right now. "You're the one who ended things with me once you found out I was Rose's dad. Which was the smart thing to do, of course. I know that. I agreed with you. But don't you dare say that I don't care." He moves over to the kitchen and reaches out, but drops his hand before he touches me.
"I didn't end things with you!" What the hell is he talking about? I turn off the faucet and take a step in his direction, jabbing my finger against his chest. "You're the one who said that we were never really dating. You said that this was just a fling!"
"And it was," he replies, sounding sad. "Because that's all we ever should be, Caroline, not because I don't want more. God knows I do."
"You do?"
As I look up into his eyes, watching him smile down on me, I know he's telling the truth. I reach up to touch his face and he leans into my touch with a sigh.
"Jesus fucking Christ, are you for real?" Tiffany complains from the living room. "This is not the time for heartfelt speeches and don't you even think about moving in for a kiss. He's still the father of one of the kids in your class, way older than you are and a criminal."
"Don't call him a criminal." That is seriously annoying me. It did when Shaughna called him that too. I know that there's still a lot about him to figure out, but I still trust him. He would never hurt me like Danny did. "As for the other stuff... Yeah, that's problematic."
"That's the understatement of the century," she grunts. "I warned you about this exact thing, didn't I? You'll end up like Hillary. Alone, without your job, fleeing the country."
"Maybe." Fleeing the country seems a bit extreme, but the rest might indeed happen, even if Nathan and I never see each other again. "I get that you worry and that you don't want to lose another friend, but it's not up to you to make this decision for me. If I want to date Nathan, the only person who can tell me no is... well, Nathan."
"I'm in." His response is instant and I'm taken-aback by it.
"Well, whoo-hoo," Tiffany says in a sarcastic voice. "Congratulations on making the biggest mistake of both of your lives. There's no way this is going to end well. You know that, right?"
"Maybe." I put an arm around Nathan's waist and sigh as he embraces me, pressing a kiss to my temple. I'm done fighting this. I'm done being reasonable. I was reasonable when I talked to Danny and look where that got me. Everything I've done to put Nathan behind me has only brought me into dangerous and annoying situations with guys that are not even half the man he is.
"Fine." Tiffany takes the spare key from the table where I put it when we got in. "I guess I'll hold onto this. I'm going home." She points at Nathan. "And you're leaving right now as well. I don't care what you do tomorrow, but I'll be damned if I leave you here with Caroline right now."
"Fine," he agrees with a smile. "No problem."
She huffs and storms into the hallway. We hear her calling him from the front door, but he turns to me first with the most radiant smile I've ever seen on his face.
"Are you sure?" he asks.
"Yes," I reply. "Completely sure."
We grab the other at the exact same time and our lips crash together with such force that our teeth clatter tighter. We laugh and kiss again, softer this time. He's careful not to touch my bruises, but I can tell he wants to grab me much harder than he is. I knot my hands in his hair and kiss him back hungrily. Oh, how I've missed him.
"Stop kissing!" Tiffany yells from the hallway. "He's leaving!"
We break apart and Nathan runs a hand through my hair before moving towards her voice.
"Tomorrow?" he asks hopeful.
I nod. Yes. I definitely want to see him tomorrow. One hundred percent. Not a question in my mind.