“Have you seen a doctor yet?” Woods asked, concerned, resting his large dark-skinned hand on her upper arm and rubbing it up and down.
She smiled inside. She wanted to grab him, ravish and kiss him. “No, I’ll call and make an appointment after my work here is done,” she replied. She had to walk away from him because she knew she wouldn’t be able to handle the feelings she felt flowing through her body. She could feel his warm, large hand still on her arm. She didn’t trust herself and quickly walked away and sat down at her desk. She had to get ahold of herself, but she could still feel the weight of his hand on her arm. The motion of him moving it up and down. She could imagine her lips on his mouth. It’d been awhile since any man had touched her, even if it were only a friendly gesture.
~ ~ ~
By one, she finished her paperwork and headed out the door with Officer Woods behind her. They drove in separate vehicles because Moore wanted to stop at the hospital after they ate lunch.
They settled in a booth and Moore ordered her usual, Turkey and Swiss on wheat with a side of fruit, hoping that she’d be able to eat it.
She was always on the latest diet, not that she stayed on it long. Food was her enemy. She loved food, but food seemed to make a home in her body like an unwanted cockroach that never left.
“Been to see any movies lately?” Woods asked.
“No, I have Netflix at home.”
“Oh, well, maybe you’d like to go see one for change. You know, get out of the house, hit the town.”
“Hit the town?” Moore questioned. “What town are you talking about? Have you seen where we live?” she chuckled.
“I meant we’d go into Franklin and see a movie. They have some new ones coming out this weekend. Have you ever been there?” Woods asked.
“Long time ago.”
“Then you haven’t seen what they did to the place. They have leather lounge chairs instead of the old theater seats,” Woods said. “And you have to pick your own seats when you get your tickets.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“What’s so complicated about picking your own seats?”
“Well, for one, I like to be able to go to the movies and just sit wherever I want to. I can’t stand sitting too close to the screen; it hurts my eyes. What if we go and those are the only seats left to sit in?”
Woods scrunched his eyebrows together before replying. “Guess you got a point there. If it helps and you’re interested in going, I have the app on my phone and I can preorder the tickets and pick our seats before anyone else.”
“An app?”
“Yeah, it’s the latest thing. Don’t you have apps on your cell phone?”
“No, I only use mine for calling and occasionally texting someone. Isn’t that what they’re for?”
Woods chuckled and smiled. “You make me laugh, Moore. Still stuck in the past, before cell phones took over the world, I see,” Woods said in his deep voice before taking a bite of his hot roast beef sandwich. He chewed, swallowed and then spoke. “I guess that’s what I love most about you.”
Moore didn’t look up after Woods said the word love. She was afraid to. He said love? But how could he love her when they hadn’t spent any time together? Though she had said the words to herself, she never uttered them aloud. Never around people. Because she did love him too. She had fallen in love with him the moment she’d met him, but she couldn’t tell him that.
She took a drink of water. “Fine, I’ll go see a movie with you, but it isn’t a date. Are we clear?” But she knew it was. She not only liked Woods’s smile, she loved the way he laughed. It brightened her day when she was with him, so what the hell was her problem? She had this great looking—no, HOT looking—man wanting to be with her and she kept shooting him down. She was being stupid and afraid. She looked down and then over at him again before eating her sandwich.
12
One Week before the Accident
Ben sat inside his Chevy Malibu, looking at the rundown two-bedroom ranch. The place was a piece of shit! But he wasn’t the one living there so it didn’t matter to him how crappy it was. Besides he didn’t expect her to have anything nice, nor did he want to see her after everything she did to him and wished that he hadn’t come to the house at all.
So why was he here? Wasn’t that always the question he asked himself when he came to Iowa on a business trip? Sure, he had a job to do, but part of him felt obligated to come and sit across the street from the house he grew up in. He knew when he drove to the house he once lived in before he was shipped off to foster care, it would bring back memories of his abuse.
He looked out the window of the driver’s seat when he heard the door open. She was letting a cat out and that’s when he saw her. He hadn’t expected to see his mother still living in the piece of shit. She hadn’t changed, just older and skinnier. She looked like fucking shit! Her hair looked dirty and straw-like, as if she hadn’t showered in weeks, maybe even months. Once he saw her, part of him wanted to meet her face to face and talk about what she did to him all those years ago when he was just a child and couldn’t protect himself, but he couldn’t get out of the car. He didn’t want to get out of the car.
As he sat there, his thoughts wandered back to when he was growing up under his mother’s care, before child services took him out of the house. If he had known that he would be just like her when he got older, he would have fucking killed himself. He knew he still could, but why? He had a great life with a beautiful wife he was sure loved him back. He just had to make sure she understood the rules. The same rules he had to learn. His mother, on a daily basis, beat the shit out of him for every tiny thing he did or didn’t do. He had to make sure that his room was pristine. If it weren’t he would get a beating that would keep him from attending school for a week if she hit him on his face or in places that would be seen by others.
If he mowed the lawn and there was a single line not straight, he got a beating. His mother didn’t always use a belt. No, she would grab whatever she could find around her. Anything she could grasp and knock him upside the head with or use on his body, breaking his bones.
He didn’t have a father or at least not one he knew about. Men came to the house, but they weren’t his real father, just some disgusting shithead that wanted a quick fuck and then they’d leave. Sometimes they came back, sometimes they didn’t, but he didn’t care. He stayed hidden in his room as often as he could.
He’d seen enough doctors in his time growing up and wondered why they hadn’t noticed how often he was there. Granted, his mother did take him to different hospitals in the area. This went on until he was twelve years old. When the school found out about the abuse, they had him removed and put into foster care. This was when Ben began to change and be like his mother. Anyone that was mean to him in his new school, he beat up. Eight foster homes and eight schools later, Ben finally learned to manage his anger and show it only when it was necessary. He left Iowa and moved to Illinois the first chance he got. A place where no one knew him. He couldn’t very well start a new life and be someone else in the same crappy town he was raised in.
~ ~ ~
Ben drove away from his childhood house and was back on the road and heading home to Kaitlyn. Although he loved driving, he wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep this traveling to different states. He’d never thought about the time away as being an issue, until today. He could hear it in Kaitlyn’s voice on the phone. The sadness of his absence from her was tearing her in two. At first it had only been one day a week, but then one turned into two and then maybe even a whole week. It’d be different if he wanted to be away from her, but he didn’t. He would have to talk to his boss. The traveling needed to stop once he arrived back at work on Monday.
Kaitlyn was the one he loved the most. She was beautiful, smart, and the kindest person he had ever met. When he saw her for the first time on that fall day in November of his first year in college, he had to know more about her. He had followed her around fo
r a year before talking to her. He had never told her about watching her. He didn’t want to scare her and think that he was some kind of freak, a stalker who watched her every move. Come to think of it, it did sound creepy as he played it out in his head. Just the way he liked it. He knew he’d get her to fall in love with him and then he’d teach her The Gordon Way. The first rule was to never talk back. That rule didn’t take as long as he thought it would. She talked, he hit. No, he liked punching the best. Punching made her understand that he was the one in control of their relationship, not her. He tried to keep it below her neck, so it didn’t show when she was out of the house. Couldn’t have people asking questions, especially since she worked at a school and did the grocery shopping.
Ben didn’t care that she was working at the school several miles from their house as long as she was home when he got there. Dinner was to be hot and ready, and the house was to be clean. That’s all he asked of her.
Rule two, everything must be in its place. Not one piece of clothing wrinkled. Not one speck of dirt was to be found and he checked with a white glove, too, sometimes. He may have been raised in a filthy house; it didn’t mean as an adult he had to live in filth.
Not one can of food turned slightly to the left or the right. It had to be exactly centered, all of them. Words facing the front. He checked them too. There was to be no dirty laundry in the hamper for more than two days. And all clothes must be ironed with a precise fold down the front of every pair of slacks he owned.
He’d made her afraid of him and that was a good thing. Although things had changed when she got in that car accident and the tracker he had placed under the car had been damaged. Now, he couldn’t watch her every move. He’d have to buy another tracker for when she got the car back from the collision center.
He stopped at a Mobile gas station a few miles down the road and filled up the car before getting onto Interstate 80 and heading toward Illinois. If he made good time, he would stop at work first before heading home to Kaitlyn. He put in a CD of his favorite music, zoning out his thoughts for the drive home. He didn’t want to think about his life at this moment. Escaping into the music of Mozart and Beethoven helped him through many of his days. It kept the stress from eating at him and helped his head not to hurt as much.
Two hours later, Ben pulled into the rest stop. After using the restroom, he sat in his car, not because he needed to rest, but because of the pain he had been having in his head for the past couple of months. He shrugged it off, thinking it was just from stress at home and from all the driving, but the pain had gotten worse, along with some dizziness, which caused blurred vision. He had gone to see a doctor before he went out of town. The doctor had done some tests like MRI, EEG, and bloodwork. Ben had been more stressed since the appointment a week ago as he waited for the results, which came back as the worst news he ever received in his life. Worse than being taken away from his mother and living in a foster home.
Ben backed out of his spot and got back on the highway. He’d forget about work until Monday and enjoy the weekend with his wife Kaitlyn. He needed her and only her. She was what got him through his days. He decided at that moment he would try to be a better person. A better husband to her. The husband that swore he would love her until their dying days. Through the good times and the bad times. He wouldn’t be this man he had been since he was a child. He would be home more and that was a promise he would have to keep. The hitting, well, he’d try and control his anger as long as Kaitlyn did what she was told and didn’t provoke him.
13
Kaitlyn had spent the last three days since she’d found out about the pregnancy hugging the toilet. She couldn’t ever remember being this sick before in her life. She spit into the toilet one last time and stood. She filled a cup with water from the bathroom sink, swishing it in her mouth then spitting it out into the sink. She wiped her mouth and left the bathroom.
God, she felt like shit! And the worst thing was, Ben was coming home. He’d been in Iowa the day before she had found out about the pregnancy, and then he had called that night to tell her he had to stay a couple more days to help train. She had pretended to be sad and upset about him having to stay, but the truth was, she was thrilled that he wasn’t coming home. God, she couldn’t let him find out about the baby. She couldn’t let him kill this one too.
The memories of that day still seemed fresh in her mind. She had made a special dinner for him and then once they were finished eating, she had him sit down in the living room and told him she was pregnant. At first, he seemed to be okay with the news. Maybe even thrilled. She thought she’d seen him smile. He stood, taking her hand in his as if helping her to stand. She assumed they were going to hug and celebrate this precious moment. When she was on her feet, he swung back and drove his fist into her lower abdomen. Once, twice, three times. After the third hit, he let go of her hand and she doubled over in extreme pain. She gasped for air as if it had been knocked out of her. The next day she’d lost the baby. He let her grieve for two days then told her to get up and go back to work.
“There will be no more poor me,” he screamed at her, then added, “I don’t want children, ever! So you better figure out a way to not get pregnant.” But that was the thing: he didn’t allow her to use birth control pills. He had said that they would make her gain weight. Make her body change in ways he didn’t want.
Kaitlyn shook the memory away, her mind going back to the conversation they’d had on the phone. Ben had sounded tired when she talked to him this morning, but he said that he was fine and had stayed up late going over things with the new people at the bank. It wasn’t ten minutes after she’d hung up the phone that she was in the bathroom puking her guts out and had been in there for the past twenty minutes.
Kaitlyn padded in her bare feet to the bedroom and crawled back under the covers that were once warm from her body, but now had turned icy cold. She was thankful that she had taken the last two days off work. She hoped by Monday, she’d feel better and could go back to teaching her students. Kaitlyn had heard of women being sick all through their pregnancy and prayed that she wasn’t one of them. She couldn’t see herself lying around in bed for nine months. But if that were the case, then she’d have to leave Ben soon and move as far away as she possibly could and pray to God he wouldn’t find her.
Maybe it was a good thing she’d been in the car accident, otherwise she wouldn’t have found the tracking device on her car. She couldn’t believe Ben would do that, but then again, why was she surprised? And how long had he been tracking her? This she didn’t know—probably from the beginning of their marriage, she was sure of it. He’d been extremely controlling right after they’d been married and then a different side of him came out that she’d never seen before. But what surprised her the most was that he hadn’t hit her for wrecking the car. He was upset, but he didn’t punish her, which to her was a good thing.
As a wave of nausea came over her, she leaped out of bed and ran to the bathroom, lifting the toilet seat just in the nick of time. Once she felt better, she decided to go in search of a bucket to keep beside the bed. Then it occurred to her that she should call the doctor and let her know about her symptoms. Maybe the doctor could prescribe her something for the nausea. She couldn’t let Ben see her this way; he’d know that it wasn’t the flu.
She went into the garage and found a bucket sitting high up on a shelf. She figured Ben had placed it up there because she couldn’t even reach it with the tips of her fingers. She looked around the room and spotted the step ladder. Ben liked everything in a certain spot and knew when something was moved, even a millimeter. She hadn’t realized how anal he was.
She grabbed the bucket before climbing down the ladder. She then placed the ladder back in the exact spot she’d taken it from, which was right next to a huge box. A box she didn’t remember seeing a few days ago. She stepped back and read the side of the box. Generator? What did Ben need a generator for? She didn’t recall them ever losing power when they ha
d a storm. She decided she wasn’t in the right frame of mind to be thinking about this at the moment. Ben did what Ben wanted to do. “If he wanted a generator then so be it,” she said aloud as she walked back inside the house.
She stopped in the kitchen and poured a glass of Sprite to help her stomach. Physicians said to drink Ginger Ale for an upset stomach, but she didn’t care for the taste and Sprite seemed to help. While standing in the kitchen, waiting for the fizz of the soda to settle, she thought of where she would live. Maybe California, even Arizona sounded good—no more winter days, but then Ohio slipped into her mind. Her lost love was from Ohio, but she didn’t know if he were even alive, if he’d come back from the war after ending their relationship almost nine years ago.
Kaitlyn felt not only mentally drained but physically exhausted as well from the morning and needed to go lie down. She needed to clear her mind and figure out a way to leave Ben. She needed to think of the baby, but at the same time she needed to think about herself. If she could just make it through the mornings in the first trimester, then she would be fine. But she knew she didn’t have control over her body. She would also have to tell the school and see if the principal could have someone in the class with her until the morning sickness passed, but eventually she would begin to show, and that meant Kaitlyn needed to run.
~ ~ ~
She sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. No dizziness, so that was a good sign. She planted her feet on the cool wood floor and stood. The clock next to the bed read 11:33 a. m. She still had a whole day ahead of her.
The Accident Page 7