Page 73 of Deliver Me

He was a grown man, nearly thirty, and he’d never signed his own paperwork or driven his own car.

It had become painfully obvious again at the DMV, waiting in a line for hours while people snuck blatantly hostile glances at him over their shoulders only to discover that he would need a permit to practice driving until he could pass the driving exam. Mia would have to sit with him in the passenger seat, guiding him on the rules of the road and trying not to wince when he cut too close to a parked car. She’d been patient, but he was humiliated and irritable, ashamed that he’d found yet another way to burden her.

The money he knew he’d soon have to give her didn’t keep his failures from creeping into his dreams. Mia’s face mingled with the women of his past, merging with Brittany’s and his mother’s, with women whose names he had never known as they swam in and out of his nightmares until he bolted upright in bed and slunk to the kitchen to stare at the time on her microwave as it crept toward dawn. Sometimes she followed him—urging him to come back to bed until he complied or snapped at her with words like daggers that cut them both—but that had become less frequent as his tone became harsh and his eyes bleary from lack of sleep.

She’d gotten more guarded around him, probing his mood before settling in beside him on the couch or telling him about her day. Far too often they ate in silence, his bubbling and impotent fury smothering any words that might have arisen between them. Having the apartment to himself, no matter how lonely, had almost become preferable to the sad confusion in her eyes.

“Will you be okay here by yourself?” she asked, sucking her lip between her teeth as she looked at him.

He knew what she was really asking, the same thing she asked every time she went.

Are you sure you won’t come with me?

He answered as he always did, each new string of words always adding up to the same sentiment.

No

“I’ll be fine,” he said, hating himself as she grimaced at his tone. “Have a nice time.”

She nodded, shooting him a weak smile at the barely there attempt at civility that he’d tacked on at the end.

He sat on the couch once she’d gone, his head buried in his hands as the anger faded away and left him with nothing but a hollow hole in the gut carved out of him by the disappointment he’d seen on her face. How had life been easier when he was in prison?

Church had not gotten easier since her last encounter with Mrs. Newberry and Mia crept in late, hoping to avoid being forced to speak to anyone and shrugging a haphazard apology at Lilly as she sank into a seat at the back.

Several heads turned to look at her, their frowns and whispers the only proof she needed that Mrs. Newberry was still spreading word as far and wide as she could about what Mia had said to her. In hindsight, telling the biggest gossip in church that her boyfriend had a big dick might not have been the best decision that she’d ever made but Mia tipped her chin up anyway.

She hadn’t had the time to think it through and the whole thing had come at the end of a very bad day. What she’d said couldn’t be unsaid, and she refused to let Mrs. Newberry oranyone else make her feel worse than she already did. She was still consistently attending church functions alone, a fact that caused a few more raised brows and suspicious whispers each week.

She always offered, but she knew he wasn’t going to come.

Gabriel had been irritable and distant since their fight. He rarely left the apartment even when she was home to help him drive, and he was often out of bed before she woke in the mornings. She wasn’t sure how much time he spent actually sleeping at night but the dark circles under his eyes told her that it wasn’t enough, and he wasn’t willing to discuss whatever nightmares plagued him.

She hadn’t expected the transition from prison to be immediate or free of problems, but the longer he was out the more there was an itch under her skin, a thought that ran through her head on an endless loop. It was both frightening and incredibly unhelpful, but she couldn’t escape the relentless refrain.

He wasn’t adjusting well.

She drummed her fingers on her knee, barely listening to Lilly and the others. She knew it was true, but the way to help him eluded her. Standing with him had been easy when the common enemies had been the prison itself and the state. The bars that had kept them apart were something that Mia could see, the law something that she could understand.

Now the enemy was something else, something far less tangible. It was Gabriel’s mind, still carrying his past and all the pain that he’d learned to bury but never learned to live with. It was the skills he didn’t have and the life he’d missed and the bitterness that not even her love could fully erase from his heart.

Even after everything, she’d never given up hope, never wavered on her conviction that she was on the path that God had chosen for her—after all, why would God have given her thismountain if it could not be moved?—but she’d believed that the hardest part was behind her. That when he’d walked out of that prison, their lives would get better, and she wouldn’t have to be so strong anymore.

Realizing now that getting him out of prison may have actually been the easy part was enough to make her want to scream and rail at the heavens until God answered her and told her why she was the one that had been given the burden of such an impossible love. What had He seen in her, what had He made in her, that she would be the one fashioned to love Gabriel through all these challenges, through all his pain?

It was a question she often wondered about these days and one that inevitably led her back to her own parents. Had they thought that about loving a broken-hearted little girl that had been all skin and bones? One that bit and yelled and hid food in every available crack of her bedroom until the whole thing had smelled of rot? Had they ever thought about giving up when she pushed them away or they’d had to spend yet another afternoon driving her to a doctor or a therapist or another meeting with the caseworker as they tried to adopt a child that they weren’t sure would ever be able to love them back?

Mia had forgotten most of that time but some of her earliest memories were of curling up in her mother’s lap, surrounded by the smell of home and sweet perfume and listening to another story of how they’d chosen her. How they’d asked for her and fought for her and tried their best every day for her. If they’d ever thought about giving up, she’d never heard them speak of it and she wasn’t going to shame them by turning her back on someone who loved her, who needed her. She would not turn her back on the path that God had chosen for her no matter how difficult it was. If there was one thing she knew—that her family had taught her—it was the power of love to change the life of a person and she was counting on that now.

He wasn’t adjusting well. That was fine. She’d just have to keep trying with him until he did. There was no other option for her, no way for her to quit on something that mattered this much.

“You seem distracted today,” Lilly said, and Mia jumped, a guilt flush on her cheeks as she realized the meeting had been dismissed and she had been too deep in her thoughts to notice. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Mia said. “Just trying to work some things out in my mind.”

“Well, if I was you, I think I’d try and get out of here before Mrs. Newberry corners you again.”

“Why? What’s happened now?”

---