Page 74 of Entwined Hearts
Voicemail Jeremy Watson (15)
Jeremy Watson:Bring my son back home. Now. Before I come get him myself and drag u back here by ur hair.
There wasa slew of other texts just like that. All of them meant to scare me into going back. At first, it had nearly worked, but the longer I’d been home, the less terrified of him I became. And now, he was right, hewouldhave to drag me by my hair, kicking and screaming, to make me go back to living under his thumb.
I’d rather be dead than go back to the life I had.
It was this newest text, though, that made my hands shake, that made me force down a sob so I didn’t draw any attention.
Jeremy Watson:I gave u ur time Tess but it’s run out now. I’m hiring a PI to figure out where the fuck u are. U can’t keep my son from me. And ur not gonna like what happens when I find u both.
My vision tunneled.The noise around me faded. I couldn’t breathe past the weight of his voice in my head.
“You okay?” I jumped at the sound of Levi’s voice. I shoved my phone in my back pocket, nodding quickly.
“Y-Yeah.” I gestured to the sea of people we were wedged into as we all funneled into the arena to watch Weston’s last ride. “Just hate crowds.”
Levi stopped walking then, and I, for whatever reason, did too.
“What did he say, Tess.” It wasn’t a question, but a demand to know.
I still didn’t understand how he knew when I was lying after only knowing me for a few weeks.
But I didn’t mind when Levi made demands, because it was nothing like when Jeremy did. Jeremyordered. He ordered without any room for negotiation because when I tried to negotiate, he’d throw things, hit things, or worse, me. It didn’t matter if Luke was there or not. When Levi demanded things, it was with good reason and intentions behind it. Because he was a good, decent person who’d rather cut off his own arm than hurt someone else.
I handed him my phone, unable to look at him while he read it. I winced at his sharp inhale and wanted to crawl into a hole when he muttered, “That motherfucker,” under his breath, likely reading the other texts. It was humiliating to show them to someone else. I still hadn’t been able to tell my siblings much of anything. Levi was the only one who knew everything in all its traumatizing glory.
But he was my lawyer, so he kind ofhadto know every detail, no matter how much I didn’t want him to.
“You’re keeping all of these, right?” his voice was strained.
“Yeah, backing them up to my computer like you told me to.” I put my phone back in my pocket. He told me to do that when we met last month to help provide evidence for my custody case. While he never explicitly threatened Luke, Levi said it was enough that Jeremy was a threat to me to keep him out of our lives.
I forced myself to look up at Levi then. His square jaw was tight, hazel eyes fierce behind his glasses, handsome as ever. Butterflies swarmed in my belly the longer I looked at him.
I knew it was wrong, and admittedly stupid, to be crushing on my lawyer, but I couldn’t help it. Not when he was sodedicated to helping Luke and me. Not when he held me while I sobbed during our first meeting, and I told him every horrid thing that had happened to me in the eight years I was in Corpus Christi. And definitely not three weeks ago when he was a little drunk at the Bull Pen and told me I was beautiful when I laughed.
“Mommy! Wevi!” Luke called from above. Levi and I both looked up to find him hanging over the railing of the arena, Emmett’s arms tight around him. “Are you coming?”
I grinned at his little smile, all my worries fading. “Yes!”
“Let’s go,” Levi said, taking my hand in his. I told myself it was purely so we didn't get separated in the crowd. That it meant nothing.
Because itcouldn’tmean anything.
But that didn’t stop me from tightening my grip.
Or him from tightening his.
The crowd roaredas Weston flew out into the arena on the back of a bull. My heart seized, just waiting for something to go wrong, but nothing did.
I looked over at Savannah, her hands clasped against her chest as she watched him, standing at the fence line. I wasn’t even sure she was blinking. Or breathing, for that matter. But that could’ve been the Xanax she popped as she walked out the door, mumbling about how ecstatic she was that this was the last time she’d have to watch him ride.
“Four… Five… Six…” the crowd yelled out as the last seconds of Weston’s professional bull rider career ticked by.
My ears rang when the crowd got to eight and Weston jumped off the bull onto the back of a horse to get him out of the bull’s way. People were blowing air horns, ringing cowbells,yelling into megaphones, shooting confetti cannons. It was the most chaotic thing I’d ever been a part of, that I’d ever seen.
Weston slid off the horse to his knees in the dirt, sobbing in the middle of the arena while everyone celebrated him. I couldn’t imagine the torrent of emotions hitting him right now.
