Tara Quinn - My Sister, Myself

“Know what you mean.”

“You been married?” The vet glanced over at Ben.

“Yeah.”

“How long?”

“Eight years.”

“Six, here.” Zack sent him a purely male look of commiseration. “Eight years,” he repeated. “You must have married young.”

“I was eighteen. Just finishing high school. I traded my education for a couple of dead-end jobs that allowed me to support my wife.”

Zack whistled, motioning for Ben to turn. “It’s the last house on the right,” he said. And then he added, “She must’ve been some looker to get her hooks into you that deep.”

“Yeah,” Ben said. Mary had been beautiful, but it wasn’t Mary who’d hooked him.

It was Alex.

ALEX SANDERS wondered how far Shelter Valley was from California. She didn’t know what streets she had to take, but she might have to walk there.

“Ahhh!” she cried out when the next blow hit her back. She bit her lip. But she didn’t cry. She was a big girl now. Daddy had said so the last time he sneaked a phone call to her at this man’s place.

One more blow and Alex huddled in the corner. Her lip was bleeding now from biting it. And her back hurt so bad she thought it might be broken.

“Never, ever lie to me again,” the man said.

“I won’t,” Alex whispered. She’d try her best not to. She just wasn’t sure how she could stop doing something she wasn’t doing. How could she promise not to lie again when she hadn’t lied in the first place?

She thought of the phone number she had hidden in the pocket of her Cabbage Patch doll. Somehow she was going to have to call Daddy. He’d know the answer. He was her real daddy and he knew everything.

This other man who hit her—Mommy kept telling her to call him Daddy.

But she wouldn’t. Not ever. No matter what he did to her.

One more blow landed on her bottom when she wasn’t looking.

And Alex started to cry.

TORY WAS IN Christine’s office after her last class on Friday, double-checking to make sure she’d done everything she’d needed to. And feeling relieved that she’d made it through her second week as a teacher. There’d been no uprisings in any of her classes.

She had a few telephone calls to return—one about an assessment committee Christine had been chosen to sit in on, a student who’d missed class, and Phyllis. She also had a roster to update.

And she had a permanent knot in her stomach.

Yet, as she looked back over the past two weeks, she had to smile. She hadn’t been half-bad. What was more, during those moments when she’d forgotten who she really was, she’d actually enjoyed herself. She’d always known she loved literature. Reading it. Studying it. Discussing it. She’d just never known how much she liked teaching, too.

“Come in,” she called when a knock sounded at the door.

Her stomach flip-flopped when Ben Sanders entered. The man was definitely something to look at. Six feet tall, with his curly dark hair and big brown eyes, he’d probably led more than one woman astray.

But not this woman.

Dropping his backpack on the floor, he sank into the chair across from her desk. Tory stiffened.

“I just stopped by to let you know I sent off the paper this morning.”

“Oh!” She smiled. “Good.” Though she tried to keep it in place, she could feel her smile fading. He could just as easily have given her the news in class that morning. Why was he here? What did he want? What did he know?

“Thanks for the suggestion.”

“There’s no guarantee anything will come of it,” she felt compelled to warn him.

“Don’t worry, Teach.” He grinned. “I gave up on guarantees a long time ago.”

“I’m impressed, you know,” she said, thinking like a teacher—and suddenly horrified when she heard how the words sounded. She wasn’t a teacher; she was Tory Evans, failure and fraud.

“Oh?” He gazed over her shoulder at the window behind her desk.

“You not only read the assignments, you think about them.”

“I’m here to learn.”

“I can’t imagine how much time you must spend on homework if you do for all your classes what you do for mine.”

Ben leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “I have the time.” He was looking at her again, and the genuine niceness in his eyes, the ease, relaxed her a tiny bit.

“You’re not working?”

Shaking his head, he smiled, almost apologetically. “I got a loan, at least for this first semester, so I could concentrate fully on my studies.”

“You’re older than most of the students in the freshman class,” Tory said, though she knew she shouldn’t have.

This conversation was traveling places it mustn’t go. There was no place in her life for personal conversation between her and a man. Whoever he was.

But for some reason, he was on her mind often….

And there was a big solid desk between them.

“I worked for a number of years after high school,” he said.

“Doing what?” It shouldn’t have mattered. Shouldn’t have interested her.

He shrugged and Tory noticed the breadth of his shoulders. In her fantasy world, they would have been shoulders to cry on, to offer protection. To make her feel safe. In the here and now, the real world, his strength and maleness made her uncomfortable.

“Whatever would pay the rent,” he said. “I worked for a moving company in Flagstaff during the day for most of those years, and usually had another job at night. Working on cars, on loading docks, in a grocery store. Even did some construction work on weekends.”

The heroes in her mind were always hard workers. Not always rich, but hard workers. Money didn’t impress Tory. It couldn’t buy anything that mattered.

“I’m surprised, then, that you didn’t have enough money saved to pay for college.”

She had no idea where her impertinence was coming from. Or her nosiness, but as he sat there looking at her, he seemed to invite the questions.

“I had a wife who liked to spend the money before I managed to earn it.”

Her breath caught as she glanced at his left hand. “You’re married?”

He shook his head. “Not anymore.”

“Oh.”

Sitting up, he frowned. “Before you go getting any ideas, she left me, not the other way around.”

“I wasn’t getting ideas.” Okay, maybe she had been. Men deserted women all the time. Why should he be any different?

“Guess I’d better go and let you get back to whatever you were doing,” he said, standing. He slid his backpack onto one shoulder.

Tory stood, too, feeling at too much of a disadvantage remaining seated. “Thanks for coming by,” she said. When she realized how much she meant the simple words, she added, “To let me know about the submission. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.”

“Thanks.”

He turned and left, but not before he’d sent her another of those odd smiles that confused her. Scared her.

He’d smiled the same way that first day of class. Almost as though he was reassuring her, offering her a kindness she hardly dared to recognize.

It had to stop.

“I’M SURE DR. PARSONS and his wife don’t want to be bothered with me,” Tory said later that evening as Phyllis drove them up the mountain toward the president’s beautiful home. “The invitation to dinner was for you.”

Phyllis, already sweating in her sleeveless yellow cotton shirt, threw her a sideways glance. “It was for both of us.”

“Why would they want to spend one of their few free evenings with me?”

“Why wouldn’t they, Tory?” Phyllis asked, her voice serious. “You’re a delightful woman with compassion and insight. You have a sense of humor—when you let yourself relax—and intelligent things to say.”