Page 50 of Hideaway Whirlwind
“I don’t need you to ride with me to make sure I leave,” I tell her, sliding into the driver’s seat.
“What you need to do is think about Teagan,” she says when she buckles her seat belt and adjusts it around her baby bump.
“She’s all I can think about.” I drag my hands down my facebefore turning the key in the ignition and pulling away from the ditch. What a fucking, heartbreaking mess I’ve made. “I know—”
“You don’t know shi–oot, Elliott. Either that, or you’re willfully ignorant of what Teagan has been through—what you’ve been putting her through, too.” After that barb, Layla sighs and says, “Look, Teagan and I have been getting to know each other, but there are still some things I’ve had to put together myself. That, and what Goldie has shared with me.” She takes a deep breath, then says, “Teagan is only twenty-two, and—”
“I know I’m too old for her,” I say, taking the pitch-black road away from my family.
“This isn’t about you, Elliott. This is about her, and—”
“I know.”
Layla twists in her seat. “Do not interrupt me again.” When I first met Layla, she was shy and soft spoken, beaten down by family and life itself. Dealt a shitty hand of cards that was crushing her, and not just figuratively. But my sister-in-law’s voice is steady and strong, fire blazing in her eyes when she says, “Right now, what you need to do is stop feeling sorry for yourself and just listen.”
I grunt, pinching my lips together.
Counting on her fingers, Layla lays out the facts. “Teagan grew up in a sickening cult and was forced into marriage when she was fourteen—a child. She had her first baby when she was sixteen. Escaped to Las Vegas with two small children when she was eighteen. She had no money and no family or friends to call for help.”
She’s not telling me anything I don’t already know, and I flex my knuckles on the steering wheel, trying to keep frombutting in, which is unnaturally difficult right now.
“She had no formal education past the fifth grade and zero options except working a few low-paying jobs off the books. At nineteen, she met Quincy and got pregnant almost immediately afterward. And then, even though she couldn’t afford rent on her own with three young children to take care of, when she found out who he really was, she kicked him out of her apartment. Andyet,” she emphasizes, “she somehow still ended up getting pregnant again. How do you think that happened?”
My hands shake with the implications I should have seen ages ago.Birdie kicked him out.She wouldn’t have taken him back. My breath comes quicker, hysteria rising as it did that night at Birdie’s apartment, red bleeding into my vision.
Staring directly at my profile, Layla says, “I love you, and I’m sorry—this is going to hurt, but you need to hear it from outside of your own perspective. Teagan has just barely survived and escaped another horrific situation, and the six-foot-six felon who carries a shotgun at all times and once kept her isolated at his cabin in the woods is now stalking her and her kids.”
“It’s not like that,” I insist.
She gives a sharp shake of her head. “He gives her a car, buys her kids presents, and brings home cute little puppies to win them all over. Almost immediately after they meet, he tells her that they already feel like a real family. That her kids are his kids. Thatsheishis. In fact, he starts to act and sound just…like…Quincy.”
“No. No, that’s not—” Lightheaded, I drift out of my lane and have to swerve at the last second to avoid a head-on collision with a jalopy coming the opposite direction, thedriver throwing their hands up in front of their face in my headlights. I stomp my feet on the clutch and brakes, the Bronco skidding forward on the asphalt until it comes to a lurching stop. I clutch my chest over my heart that’s beating wildly out of rhythm. “You’re twisting it all up to make it sound dirty and manipulative. I love her. All of them! I’m nothing like Quincy!”
“Stop thinking about yourself!” she yells with frustration, slapping the dashboard. “Think of Teagan and her kids and her experience with the men who claimed to have loved her, and then answer this question: did shechooseany of that?”
I bite my fist and turn away, wanting to throw myself out the door so I don’t have to listen to any more.Me, me, me. I flinch when Layla lays her hand on my arm. She waits it out patiently until I can finally bring myself to meet her dark brown eyes, wishing it were Birdie and her amber eyes staring back at me instead.
I know nothing will ever be the same again when Layla asks, “Or did Guxxer, Quincy, and you choose for her, even when she begged y’all to stop?”
I drop my face into my hands with a head-splitting gasp, dealt a deathblow by Layla’s words, knowing tonight, in Birdie’s nightmares, the monster who slayed her demons will have joined them. “How do I make it right?” I ask when I can come up for air.
She tells me exactly what I don’t want to hear. “You stay away from her and the kids until she chooses you.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
Layla shrugs. Her fire is extinguished, replaced by a deep well of sorrow when she says, “Then you have to accept her decision and love them from afar.”
Chapter 22
Teagan
It takes longer than I’d like for my adrenaline to run its course and my brain to stop melding Elliott’s face with Guxxer and Quincy’s while I take a cold shower. It’s comparing apples to oranges. Where Elliott had meant well, out of his mind with worry for me and the baby, the others most certainly had not when they had taken from me what I was not willing to give. And yet my body had reacted the same when he wouldn’t stop touching me, my skin crawling with revulsion, every nerve ending pinched, my head flooded with white hot terror and the animalistic need to fight or run and hide from a predator, especially one as large as Elliott.
If only he had stopped to listen, given me space, or sat silently beside me while I calmed. But he simply couldn’t in the moment, his past trauma with the woman he loved—because I do know he loves me, too, even if he hasn’t said it—having been hurt took control of him. I know it as well as I know my own birthday. And even if I shouldn’t, I care that he’s upset after what happened. More than that. Bereaved for what he unintentionally did to me.
“He’s gone,” Goldie says when I exit the bathroom. She’s leaning against the opposite wall with her arms crossed, lips pinched with disdain. “You don’t have to worry about him anymore.”
“What’s that mean?”
