Kit went as if to rise up, but he couldn’t bear to see the disgust on her face, so he used his grip in her hair to keep her down. Not resisting, she stayed.
“To his credit, he didn’t yell. Instead, he asked me why I had the gun. I told him it was to shoot the monster so he couldn’t hurt us.” Noah could still see his father’s face as Noah finally told him about how the monster liked to do “bad things” to Noah: a mix of shock, pain, disgust… and shame.
Noah sometimes liked to imagine the latter two had been directed inward or at the man who’d done the crime, but Robert St. John’s later actions had made it clear the disgust and shame had been directed solely at Noah. “To cut a long story short, my father told me we wouldn’t be going to the Cape, I gave him the gun, and two weeks later, after a discreet medical examination to make sure there was no permanent physical damage, I was shipped off to boarding school.”
This time when Kit jerked up her head, he couldn’t keep her down. Turning his face away, he stared out into the garden.
“What about counseling?” she said, horror in her tone. “Did they even talk to you about—”
“No.” After the medical exam, no one in his family had ever again discussed the events of the summer of his sixth year. “My mother couldn’t even bear going with me to the doctor, and my father… he looked at me and was ashamed of me because I’d allowed it to happen.”
“You were just a child!” Open rage in Kit’s voice as she sat up beside him, her knees brushing his side. “They didn’t report the man, did they?”
“No. I spent my first year at boarding school having nightmares about him hunting me down.” It was after a screaming nightmare that Fox had tried to comfort him and he’d spilled the whole truth. His best friend had responded by putting a chair under the doorknob so no one could get into their room, and together they’d rigged up a noisemaker across the window.
“Tell me they didn’t just let that monster walk free,” Kit pleaded.
“On my eighth birthday, my father gave me a cutting from a newspaper. It was the man’s obituary.” Putting one arm under his head, he chanced looking up at the stars again, Kit in his peripheral vision. “It wasn’t until I was older that I searched online and discovered the man had been found in his study at home, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
“Suicide. He did the world a favor.”
Noah wanted to laugh. “He did nothing. My father used to defend small-time mobsters, did you know that? The kind of men who’d do him a solid, no questions asked.”
“You think he had the bastard killed?”
“I know he did.” Noah was certain Robert St. John had done it because that man had dared shame the family name, not because he’d hurt Robert’s son. “When I turned eighteen, after a big-ass party my mother threw because that’s what she does, my father found me fucking some random debutante. Later that night, he slapped me on the back and said, ‘Good to know that asswipe didn’t ruin you, boy. I hear the pussy begged for his life.’”
Chapter 33
If Noah’s parents had been in front of Kit right then, she’d have slapped them both sideways. They’d sent away a traumatized, scared boy without offering him any help. What must he have thought when he was shoved out of the family home? When he was abandoned?
Just like the monster had predicted.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said softly, conscious those beautiful gray eyes hadn’t met hers since he began speaking. “You know that, don’t you?”
“That night? The one of my eighteenth birthday party?” Noah said instead of answering. “It was the first time in eleven years my father asked me if I’d like to go on a hunting trip with him and the rest of the males in the extended family. Every other boy had been going since he could hold a weapon.”
Kit had never hated anyone as much as she hated Robert St. John right then. “That makes him an asshole. It doesn’t make any of what happened your fault.”
He still wouldn’t look at her, but he moved one hand to touch her lower back, the contact hesitant. “I don’t like sex,” he said, the words blunt and hard. “I fuck women because it makes me feel like a man, and for a short time afterward, I can forget that I had my manhood taken from me.”
Kit didn’t know how to deal with this—Noah’s pain wasn’t something that could be fixed with kisses and hugs or love. This was a down-to-the-soul wound, one that was still bleeding. But she knew one thing, and that was that she loved Noah. “Bullshit.”
His eyes finally flicked to her, the dark gray unreadable. “You never say bullshit.”
“I’m saying it now.” She held his gaze. “You’re one hell of a man—that bastard hurt you, but he did not make you any less a man.”
Jaw tight, he broke the eye contact. “Yeah, okay.”
Gripping his jaw, she made him face her. “What if it was me?” she asked him. “What if it had been a child Kit in that room instead of you? Would you consider me any less a woman?”
“No, of course not.” His fingers dug into the flesh of her hip. “But I’m a man, Kit. I was brought up to be the man of the fucking house. To take care of the people who were my own and to gut anyone who dared hurt any of them, and I couldn’t even protect myself.”
“Noah, you were six years old.” Kit was speaking, but she knew her words were hitting a stone wall of rage and self-recrimination and indoctrination. “Girl or boy, no six-year-old can protect themselves against an adult. The hurt is the same, regardless of the gender, and deserving of the same care.”
That held true no matter the age of the abused, but right now, she had to focus on the fact Noah had been a child—she might actually stand a chance of getting through to him if she made him consciously think about the fact he was pitting a small boy against a full-grown adult.
Her attempt didn’t work.
“I should’ve shot him,” Noah said. “That’s what my Dad said the day he found me with the gun. After I told him, he said I should’ve shot the bastard.”
“I want to shoot your father right now,” Kit ground out. “Jesus Christ, that man has no business being a father.” Her parents might be feckless and self-involved, but the one time she’d had a bully come after her in school, they’d marched in and torn the principal a new one, then confronted the bully’s parents. “Where was your mother in all this?”
“Shopping, tanning, taking Emily for walks in her stroller, anything to get away from the reality of a defiled child.” A vicious smile on his face. “She can’t look at me, did you notice?”
She had. Now that she knew why, she wanted to pound Noah’s mother into dust, just crush her out of existence. “That’s on her.” Kit’s voice shook with sheer fury. “It’s the job of a parent to be there for their child, to kiss the hurts and fight the monsters. It sucks that yours failed at that.” She reached out to brush back his hair.
When he grew stiff, she nearly withdrew, but gut instinct forced her to keep going, keep running her fingers through the golden strands. If he wanted her to stop, he’d pull away.
He didn’t.
Inch by inch, second by second, his muscles eased until she braced her back against a tree, stretched out her legs, and coaxed him to put his head in her lap so she could continue to play with his hair. “Have you ever spoken to anyone about this?”
“Fox knows.”
“No, I mean a counselor, or—”
“No. And that’s not going to change.”
“Noah—”
“No.” He closed his eyes, one knee drawn up on the picnic blanket and shoulder muscles bunched again. “I’m not going to spill my guts to some shrink. Not now, not ever. It’ll end up on the front page of a tabloid the next day.”