Page 11 of I Dream of Danger
Oh fuck.
That was the last thing Nick wanted, to make Elle cry. She was sitting across from him, crying her heart out without making a sound, and it nearly brought him to his knees.
She nearly brought him to his knees.
She’d been a beautiful little girl when they’d found him that summer night. He’d run away from his fourth foster home. The last one had been the worst of all, run by a true sadist. Everyone in the household walked around with scars and hollow eyes. How the fuck the authorities managed to avoid reading the signs was beyond him. But they did. They kept shipping kids to Carlton Norris, and Old Man Norris just kept taking them in and cashing the checks. His beaten-down wife fed them shit food and did just enough housekeeping to keep cockroaches at bay, and disappeared into her room when the old man got that crafty look in his eyes.
It wasn’t rage, it was addiction. He fed off other people’s pain. He didn’t feed off Nick’s. Nick was five-foot-ten by the time he was eleven years old, and he kept himself strong. No one messed with him. Norris didn’t want to mess with him, anyway. Norris liked the smaller kids.
One night Nick stopped the beating of a small boy, Tim, who had that look about him. The look of someone who wasn’t going to survive this much longer. There wasn’t anything Nick could do to help the kid’s long-term survival but by God he was going to survive this beating. Nick swung at Norris and connected well. He pulled the punch at the last minute so all Norris got was a black eye. It could have been a shattered jaw.
Nick woke to blinding pain. Norris had taken a hammer to his wrist and was shining a blinding light in his eyes. Just past the light Nick saw a gun barrel.
“You run, boy,” Norris growled. “You run as fast as you can, because in an hour I’m calling the cops and reporting a dangerous juvenile on the loose. He beat me up and he beat up a younger boy. And don’t think for one minute that little worm won’t rat on you and say you gave him the scars and bruises.”
No, Nick knew enough of the world to understand that Tim would be too terrified to contradict Norris.
The safety went off the gun. “Run, you fucker.”
He ran.
He ran and ran. He hitched rides, was a stowaway on long-haul trucks, and once hid in the luggage compartment of a Greyhound bus. He didn’t even know where he was going. He survived on stolen food and water bottles from service stations, but in the end his wrist blew up like a balloon and infection set in.
He dropped. He was dumpster diving in an affluent part of a town when he dropped unconscious with—he was later told—a temperature of 104.
He came to very briefly to see an angel looking at him, so he knew he was dead. She was beautiful, a tiny sprite with light blue eyes, fair hair a halo around her head, screaming Daddy Daddy!
That’s nice, he remembered thinking. I died and went to heaven. Fucking A.
Only he hadn’t died and gone to heaven, he’d gone to Lawrence, Kansas. And his life split into two, because he was picked up by the finest man on the face of the earth, Judge Oren Thomason.
He was taken to a hospital where the little blonde angel rarely left his side, and when he was better, he was taken home, to the kind of home he never even knew existed. Calm and gentleness reigned there, along with love and respect.
The angel turned out to be Elle, a beautiful little girl who became his shadow. Nick had never been loved before, but Elle made up for that. She loved him fiercely. He went home with them—to his own room! With a bed with clean sheets, a closet full of clean new clothes, books, and a laptop on a desk. All his own. He’d gone from the hospital straight into bed, still too weak to stand up for long. Elle ferried in trays she could barely carry, full of food for him, and stayed with him until he finished every bite, and read to him endlessly from books he’d never heard of but which fascinated him. A wizard called Harry Potter. Lions and witches and wardrobes. A whole world called Middle Earth.
And in the meantime, Judge Thomason was working his own wizard’s magic. By the time Nick was on his feet, he was a ward of the Judge and enrolled in middle school.
Kindness like a warm, gentle tsunami washed over him, a strong and utterly irresistible tide that carried him forward.
Somehow Nick Ross, mongrel dog, had been folded into this loving family, and he simply lapped it up.
Until his body betrayed him. He had just turned eighteen and had a man’s body. One summer evening, Elle came in from the garden. Overnight, it seemed, Elle was turning into a woman. She’d been a beautiful little girl, but she was turning into a spectacular woman. Right then, on that summer day, with a sundress that outlined her small perfect breasts and tiny waist, shiny pale-blonde hair rippling down her back, she dazzled Nick. From being Elle, his little shadow, she had suddenly morphed overnight into Elle, a stunning girl on the verge of womanhood, and his body reacted instantly, instinctively.
He’d been having sex for a couple of years, but none of his bed partners had been anything like Elle.
Before he could think, before he could shake himself from staring at her, he got a massive hard-on. Right then Elle was the most desirable sex partner any man could ever want, and before he could will his dick down, before he could even be ashamed of himself, he caught the Judge’s hard gaze. Nick was wearing sweats and the Judge could clearly see the effect Elle had on him. A boner, big as a house.
And his life split into two once more.
No words were spoken. None were needed.
That afternoon, the Judge called Nick into his office. The huge safe was open, empty. A stack of bills in plastic-wrapped bricks sat on the Judge’s desk.
The Judge was sitting behind his desk, his gaze stern but not enraged. Nick understood completely. The Judge had a beautiful and innocent young daughter to protect. Nick would have done the same. Actually, being more hot-blooded, Nick would have beaten himself to a pulp if he had a daughter like Elle to protect and some mongrel like him got a woodie staring at her.
The Judge shoved the bricks of hundred-dollar bills across his desk and pointed to an open sports bag on the floor. Inside were some of Nick’s clothes, clean and ironed, but most of the space was for the money. Nick stacked the bills inside, looked at the Judge, nodded, and walked out of the study, out of the house and out of that life.
In the bag he later found $60,000 in cash, obviously all the cash the Judge had at hand. More than he deserved.
