Page 11 of Vows In Corruption

I let out a sigh, wishing I had an answer at the moment. I won’t know until I talk to Drake, that is if he even tells me. Every time I ask him about having nightmares he closes up and tells me he doesn’t remember them.

“If they are, then that would make two of us.”

My nightmares are understandable. I experienced a lot as a kid. What with my parents dying and my brother walking out my life a month later, my abandonment issues know how to make the dark stuff come out.

But when it comes to Drake and his nightmares, I continue to scratch my head as they come with more questions than they do answers.

When he came to live with me, he was too young to possibly remember anything that he might have witnessed or experienced. He was just a baby. But I guess nightmares come at every age because he had just turned one when I experienced his first nightmare and it scared the living shit out of me. So much so that I rushed him to the emergency room because of how much and how badly he was screaming. Thankfully nothing was wrong with him physically, but the nightmares have persisted through out the years.

Maybe his issues are similar to mine.

He was abandoned after all.

Ten years ago, at the bright age of twenty-two, I became the sole guardian to four kids that I had no idea existed the day before.

My older brother, Robert, the very one that decided that he decided needed to go live out his life god knows where, at the age of sixteen and leave me behind to never see or talk to again when I was eight years old, showed up one day on the doorstep of our childhood home with his four kids in tow.

He was in crisis. Something had happened back in Mexico, where he and his family called home, and he needed to get the kids out of there before things got to point that one of them got hurt.

It’s to protect them.

If they stay there, Bennett, something could happened and I won’t be able to live with myself if it does.

I promise, it won’t be a permanent thing. I will be back. It will just be until things with the cartel settles down.

Please. Do this for them, if not for me. Do this for them. I’m begging you, brother. Please.

At the time, it had been fourteen years since I last saw my brother. He had walked out one night about a month after our parents died and he had never looked back, no matter how hard I had wished he had. I didn’t know the man that was standing in front of me. I wanted to be mad at him for thinking it was okay to come back to the home he left so out of the blue, but the kids, even though I didn’t know a single thing about them, had me pushing the anger down.

But I did try to make him see reason. I did try to make him stay. But as much as I fought with him to not leave his kids like he left me, other things took president for him apparently, and he left anyways. Leaving me to take care of his four kids.

Ten year old Elliot, seven year old Samantha, four year old Grayson and ten month old Drake.

I didn’t know the first thing about taking care of kids. Hell, that very morning Henry was giving me a lecture about how I needed to stop with the partying and drinking and at the very least try with the company that was left to me by my parents.

If I couldn’t get my shit together, how the hell was I going to make sure four kids stayed alive? They didn’t even know me and Henry. We were literal strangers to them, and yet we were all that they had at the moment.

It was a hard fucking road, but with Henry’s help, we were able to pull it off. And when my brother broke his promise about coming back, the second time he had broken it in his life, taking care of the kids became top priority.

I may not have been a dad, but I was going to act like a damn good one since the one that the kids knew never came back for them. All contact was lost that day. To this fucking day, I don’t know where my brother is. I have all the resources in the damn world, and I can’t find the one singular person that I need to find. For all I know he’s dead, but until I have confirmation of that, I’m going to keep looking.

That day not only changed me, but it changed the kids too. I didn’t have to know who they were before to know that their dad leaving them here with me, impacted their life in ways they may never be able to talk about. But I have tried to give them the best life that I could and I think I’ve succeeded.

For the most part.

There has definitely been times in the last ten years where I was told I was hated by one of them.

“The nightmares are back sir?” Henry’s question takes me out of my own head and from chiding myself about the parental mistakes that I have committed these last few years.

“Just tonight. But I wouldn’t call it nightmares. More like memories that can’t seem to be forgotten.”

“Sir.” Henry starts, letting out a sigh before he continues. “What you went through as a child is not a normal thing. That is something that you will never forget. No matter how hard you try or how much therapy you attend. It simply gets easier over time,” Henry states, getting up from his seat and walking over to the sink to dump out the remainder of his coffee.

I take a second to run through his words.

He’s right.

Of course he’s right, he always is.

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