The Darkness Within

by Taylor K. Scott

  “No! Even if they do, who the hell cares?” he argues, frowning in anger. “I don’t care, do you?”

  “You used to,” I reply petulantly, “and you used to see me the way she saw me just now; like I’m as tainted as he is.”

  “But I don’t anymore,” he says slowly, then pulls me in even closer.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” I swallow sadly, “I’ve applied to Stanford, Bowie, what do you think’s going to happen then?”

  “Nothing,” he shrugs with a cocky grin, “I’m going there too!”

  “What?!”

  “Kind of changed my choices last minute,” he hooks hold of the top of my jeans with his index fingers and pulls me straight against his hips, sharing his heat like I’m now a part of him. “I don’t know how long we’re going to last but I’m kind of in it for the long haul, if you are?”

  I don’t even allow time to wrap my head around what he’s just told me, instead I leap into his arms as he pulls my legs around his waist and we kiss like idiots in the car park. We suddenly forget all the other shit for a few short minutes and just see one another.

  Chapter 26

  Sam

  “You need to go and apologize…right now!” I wipe at my face furiously, then turn back to watch Bowie and Millie dancing around the car park in their enviable honeymoon period. I am so angry with Trixie I could quite easily lose my shit with her.

  “Oh, come on, Sam,” she paces to my side and watches them with an obvious look of disgust on her face. “Don’t you think it’s a little weird? First off, it’s brother and sister dating brother and sister. Throw the whole rape thing into the mix and it’s like something out of the twilight zone!”

  “I don’t care what it looks like! My brother is happy and so is Millie,” I hiss at her. “Lord knows she deserves something good in her life right now.”

  “Please don’t tell me you feel sorry for her?” she scoffs like I’m clinically insane or growing an extra head. I huff noisily at her, crossing my arms defensively for both Millie and me. I can’t understand her intense reaction towards Millie, it’s not like she attacked me. Amelia Thomas has always been sweet and caring towards me, even when my confession led to her brother’s imprisonment.

  “Just what the hell is your problem?” I turn towards her with angry tears gushing from my eyes.

  “You are, Sam!” she cries out in frustration. “You haven’t been with anyone else since you moved here, you actively avoid parties, you feel this weird sense of guilt towards the guy who attacked you, and his family apparently, and don’t even get me started on keeping the photo of you two together up in your room. When are you going to move on? When are you going to get angry at the motherfucker?!”

  “I can’t!” I yell. “I still love him and maybe, I don’t know, maybe he was just drunk and lost his mind or something. Maybe I blew it out of proportion or maybe he thought, as my boyfriend…”

  “Christ! Do you actually hear yourself right now? You sound like some sort of woman who is stuck in an abusive relationship, telling herself she deserved to be beaten around the head!” She grabs my shoulders and shakes me until we fall into a tearful hug.

  Trixie is extremely outspoken, but she has been my rock for the past few years. She stopped me from going to see Grant when I first told her everything. She took away all the letters I wrote to him, probably burned them in the throes of casting a warding off spell, and has been my makeshift bodyguard ever since. I don’t think I would have lasted this long without her.

  As the tears gradually subside, if only for a few, short moments, I cling to her and lean against her shoulder; something I have done on too many occasions to count. She never complains though, just pats me like a sad, trembling, fragile, lap dog.

  “That was us once,” I look out to where Bowie and Millie are sharing a searing, hot kiss, “and not just during the honeymoon period, I mean that was Grant and me all of the time. We couldn’t get enough of each other. Even after a whole year together, we were still that couple you hated but secretly envied over how in love they were. I actually thought we were it! High school sweethearts, destined to get married, have kids, and live the whole suburban dream.”

  “My idea of hell then!” Trixie chuckles and I smile because she would seriously hate that.

  “Please don’t tarnish Millie with what her brother did,” I finally manage to look at her with such an expression she tries to avoid my gaze. I know I’ve got to her now, that I’ve managed to make her feel bad for behaving so cruelly towards Millie. “That girl has always been like a sister to me, and you don’t know how lonely she must have been over the past two years. Their parents have always been pretty useless, so they only had each other, but now they don’t even have that. I need you to go and make things right, so she feels ok to be around me again.” Trixie looks away huffily, no doubt preferring to go and join the local church choir rather than go and do as I’m asking her to do. “Please, Trixie…for me?”

  “Oh, alright,” she concedes reluctantly, and I kiss her on the cheek before untangling myself from her. “You’re a pain in my ass, Phillips!” She stomps towards the door to go and apologize to Millie but then turns to me at the very last minute, “But I love ya!”

  “If only I was a lesbian!” I chuckle, to which she makes an obscene gesture with her hand before walking out the door.

  Bowie

  I’m currently above Millie, burying myself deep inside of her. It’s a place I could quite happily set up camp in, especially when I see she is close to orgasm right underneath me. Usually, I love to hear her screaming my name out loud, it makes me feel like she belongs with me, but seeing as we are in my sister’s apartment, I smile and stuff my arm inside of her mouth. She bites down hard when she finally comes undone before me and her face morphs into one of my picture-perfect moments, right before she clenches down hard on my dick. It’s enough to fast forward to my own explosion with a loud, throaty, growl.

  Upon my rather noisy eruption, she points at me and laughs around my arm, which is still firmly lodged between her teeth. When I finally release it, we both burst into fits of laughter, knowing full well that both my sister and her roommate probably heard everything. My attempts to conceal our post-declarations-of-love sex was a complete waste of time and will no doubt make for an embarrassing conversation tomorrow morning. However, right now, we’re laughing. Millie is happy and laughing with me. What else matters?

  “I love you,” I lean down and kiss her grin while taking in how cute she looks mid-giggle.

  “I love you too,” she whispers, “and not just for your dick by the way!”

  “Yeah, sorry about my crudeness earlier on, but you know how brothers and sisters like to jibe with one another.” As soon as the words leave my mammoth-sized mouth, I want to grab them and stuff them back inside again. My laughing girlfriend, who only seconds ago was somewhere beyond all the misery of her family, now looks so hurt I want to punch myself. Of course, that won’t help the situation at all, so being the new and hopefully improved guy, I hope to be for her, I curb my temper and grab hold of her. “I’m sorry, Mils, I didn’t mean to… I wasn’t trying to be a jerk.”

  “I know,” she smiles tightly but clearly isn’t feeling the emotion behind it. She says as much when I watch her face fall to the floor.

  We lie in awkward silence, staring up at the ceiling in my sister’s living room, with its ugly and hypnotizing Artex pattern from the seventies. I can’t even stretch out on my sister’s old sofa bed so feel even more uncomfortable. In the end, I get up and head to the kitchen to grab some water.

  I stand against the sink and sip slowly, thinking how much I wish I hadn’t mentioned brothers and sisters at all. I wouldn’t wish what happened to Millie on anyone and now I just made myself sound like the biggest insensitive ass going. That, or an incredibly stupid one.

  Don’t get me wrong, I hate Grant. I despise what he did, but I know how much he meant to Millie and I can’t fault her for it
because that’s how I feel about my big sister. I bet all she remembers is him being her big, protective brother, whereas all I can remember is how broken Sam was after he had violated her.

  Sam felt ashamed for a long time afterward and often told me how dirty she felt. After her first few weeks here, I came up to stay. She kept trying to think of how it could have somehow been her fault, how she might have been the one to blame for it all. I couldn’t reason with her because she wasn’t rational at the time. As much as I wanted to scream at her over her scrambled thoughts, all I could do was be there for her.

  She cried on a daily and nightly basis, because not only had she been raped, she had also lost the love of her life. It was like having a breakup that would leave a big dirty mark on her for the rest of her life. I can’t help wondering whether she’ll ever let anyone near her again. And who could blame her when the one person you thought was there to protect you, betrays your love in the most unspeakable way?

  But now I have Millie. Now I’m the one who needs to protect her from the rest of the world, even though I can’t protect her from the hurt of losing a brother. Her parents are pretty shitty from what I’ve witnessed. I’ll admit I relished the fact that they publicly disowned Grant afterward, but it was a pretty harsh reality for both of their children. That’s betrayal in a completely different way but just as fucking brutal. They just left their daughter to face it all, plus the rest of her life, all on her own. Every time I think about it, it makes me so Goddamn angry, however, they’re still her family. I knew getting together with her would be hard, but I thought it would be hard because of outside judgment. I never even considered how I would need to support her with everything she’s lost.

  The trouble is, after we slept together, I knew I was done for. It wasn’t hard to fall for Amelia Thomas, not when I’d been harboring a boner for her since she developed breasts and a feisty attitude towards me. I had told the truth earlier, when I said I had changed my options last minute; it was a two-minute thought process before I sealed the envelope. I’m also fairly certain I’ll get in, seeing as my GPA is one of the top scores in our school. Put that together with my skills on the football ground and I’m a shoo-in. My parents didn’t give a shit because Stanford is still an Ivy League school. I’m just afraid I’ll mess things up with Millie or I won’t be enough for her. If that’s the case, it means I’ll just be another constant reminder of everything she’s lost.

  “Hey, are you coming back to bed?” Her small voice breaks me from my runaway train of thought.

  “Yeah,” I smile back at her, “I just thought maybe you needed a minute without Mr Insensitive here.”

  She slinks over to me and snakes her arms around my waist before reaching up on her tiptoes to peck me on the lips.

  “I would worry if you stopped being you,” she teases. “Come back with me?”

  “You’re a cheeky bitch sometimes,” I grin darkly at her, “I think I need to spank that ass of yours!”

  She giggles and wiggles her little butt against my groin so I slap her ass cheek before hauling her over my shoulder. We both laugh as we march back into the living room and it makes me think how much I just want it to be like this forever with her.

  Amelia

  The morning after the whole debacle between Trixie and me, Bowie and I are woken up by the sound of Sam throwing the curtains open and singing “Morning” to us. Bowie grumbles and flips over onto his front, all the while muttering a whole host of obscenities. I open my bleary eyes, then sit up and stretch, fully prepared to get dressed and help Sam with breakfast. I then remember last night and Bowie’s rather vocal climax and instantly blush in front of our host. You’d think months of listening to her and Grant bang like bunnies would help me to not care but it seriously doesn’t, not even a little bit.

  “If you were trying to be quiet last night, you failed miserably!” she smirks before handing me a cup of tea, which I gratefully take from her, all the while I continue to die of embarrassment. Bowie chuckles mischievously from his place on the bed, so I nudge him hard with my foot, especially seeing as it’s all his bloody fault anyway.

  “Hey, Big Boy!” Trixie purrs as she enters the room and ruffles Bowie’s hair. “You two are certainly noisy fuckers.” I wince a little more because I’m well aware she is not so keen on me being here, and yet here I still am, having kept them up all night with our sexual antics. She doesn’t even look at me once, just marches towards the door and throws her backpack over her shoulder. “I’m away for the weekend so you can use my room, but if you infect it with your juices you have to change it. Do I make myself clear, Bowie?” He chucks his thumb up in the air while I sink a little lower into the bed, hoping it will swallow me up whole. At least she’s going, I can’t say I’ll miss her.

  By the time I get up and dressed, Sam has laid the table for breakfast and prepared a whole host of delicious-looking treats for us. I almost cry when she shows me the strawberry flavored pop tarts, the ones she must remember as being my favorite. Her brother is still snoring away on the sofa-bed, so we leave him to it and sit down together, almost like old times.

  “You really love him, don’t you?” Sam breaks me out of my silent thoughts, and I look over and smile at her in answer. “And I can tell he’s smitten with you. I always had my suspicions about his teasing you over the years. However, I suppose I always thought you’d end up with Matt.”

  “I think Matt did too,” I reply with a certain level of guilt. “You can’t help who you fall for though.”

  “No,” she says with a distant look in her eye. “Bowie told me what he did to you, Millie, at one of his parties?”

  “You mean Matt?” Of course she means with Matt, you dumbass. I’ve only ever been to one of those parties and that’s when Matt lost control for a crazy moment. “It sounds worse than it was.”

  “Millie, promise me something,” she reaches out to take my hand, her face full of what I can only describe as fear, “please don’t go to one of those things again. They are toxic, full of inebriated boys and girls who are too immature to deal with drugs and hormones. I would hate for you to get hurt like I did.”

  “I would only ever go with Bowie now anyway, so I think I would be in good hands,” I try to reassure her.

  “I know, and you are, but you can never be too careful unless you don’t go at all!”

  I frown at her because I don’t know if she’s trying to suggest that Bowie would lose control, or if she thinks someone else might.

  “And please don’t leave yourself in a vulnerable position with Matt again…he’s already shown he lacks control around you.”

  “You sound like Grant,” I laugh softly, but then freeze in horror over what I’ve just let slip from my mouth. Sam’s eyes double in size and they look at me in such a way I can’t quite decipher what she’s thinking. It’s a cross between fear and curiosity.

  As if coming to the same horrifying thought, we both look over my shoulder towards Bowie and let out a collective breath when he continues to snore, blissfully ignorant to what I’ve just revealed.

  “H-how is he?” she mutters as she nervously tucks her hair behind her ears.

  “Sam, I’m not sure we should be talking about him,” I reply, now beginning to fluster with my knife and fork on my plate. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Please don’t tell Bowie I’ve seen him. I’ll tell him, I promise, but I just need to find the right time.”

  “I won’t,” she smiles reassuringly, “but please, tell me how he is…please?”

  I let out a deep sigh knowing that the last thing I should be doing is telling her about the guy she thinks raped her. Bowie would never speak to me again and I can’t say I’d blame him.

  “Sam…”

  “PLEASE?!” she shouts, suddenly banging her hand on the table in frustration, which makes me freeze mid-fluster and look a little nervous in front of her. She softens her features before looking up again. “Millie, I have to know, or I’ll go mad.”

&
nbsp; I check once more to see if Bowie is still asleep before I brace myself to spill the beans, even though I still think this is a terrible idea in that it’s both awkward and stupid.

  “Ok,” I relent on a heavy sigh, “I’ve only seen him three times, all recently. He looks different, older, bigger, more troubled. His hair has grown out and he is sporting a lot of facial hair at the moment.”

  “Yes, but how is he, Millie?” she says through her teeth, clearly irritated by my skirting around the real information she’s searching for.

  “Ok, grrrr, this is so not good for you, Sam!” She just continues to look at me with impatience and hope in her wide eyes. “He…he still claims his innocence, Sam. He’s worried about me because he knows the person who did attack you is still out there. He worries about you and tries to milk me for any information I have on you, which up until now has been very little. He still…” I shuffle uncomfortably in my chair while I consider whether or not to finish my sentence.