Beastly

by Laura Belle Peters

  It only took two months to get them back to flinging themselves on me, hugging me tight and telling me they loved me.

  My life should have been so good.

  My sisters loved me.

  I was taking five classes and getting straight A's, since I had plenty of time for the writing center.

  I had barely any cleaning to do.

  I hadn't seen my father alone since September.

  I had a quiet room in a pretty house to myself.

  No one had slapped me or tried to corner me since the last time I'd seen my father.

  It was all I'd ever wanted – school, my sisters, and no one hurting me.

  Once I had it, though, it suddenly didn't seem like enough. For a few short weeks, I had felt like maybe Beast and I were going to become more than friends, that maybe he liked me, maybe the soft smiles he gave me were something I felt like I could return to him.

  Then his place turned into a goddamn meeting point for tweakers.

  When they were over, I felt like I couldn't leave my room, like I was a princess in one of Karla's books, trapped in a tower and waiting for someone to rescue me.

  Except, in her books, the princess usually ended up rescuing herself, and I didn't see how I could possibly do that.

  There was nothing but waiting.

  First step, get a degree. Second step, get a job. Third step, get an apartment. I might even have enough money to get custody of the girls by the time Karla was eighteen. Maybe. No time for dating, for love.

  And then they'd go off to college and I'd be alone again.

  I knew, finally, with a painful certainty, that I couldn't just build my life around them. I wanted to, but they weren't my children. Not seeing them for a while had taught me that. I had no control over what my father and their mother told them about me, I only got to see them because Kandy liked it.

  If I built my world around them, it could fall apart at any moment.

  For my own sake, I had to find something else.

  I still loved the girls so much it hurt, and I still had fantasies about them coming to live in a snug little house with me, but I couldn't let them be the only good things in my life.

  I had to find some other good things, too.

  Beast had been giving me cash for a while, and mostly I put it in the bank, in an account my father didn't know about, but finally, I started keeping a hundred bucks in my wallet.

  “Next time we go to town, can we go to WalMart?” I asked him a few days later.

  He looked up, startled. It was the first time I'd spoken at dinner in months.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. “Want to go now? It wouldn't be a problem. I don't have anything to do tonight.”

  “It's not important,” I said. “Just next time we go to the store.”

  He ate his last bite and stood up, rinsing his plate before he put it in the dishwasher. “Really, I'm happy to go now. Haven't gotten out of the house in three days, starting to feel a little nuts.”

  I nodded, dealing with my own plate and following him to the front door.

  “Would you like to drive?” he asked. “It's not quite dark, and you haven't practiced in a while.”

  I shook my head, and he didn't press it.

  We didn't talk on the drive, but he turned the radio to the country station I liked.

  At the store, he followed me around patiently as I found the craft section and started to figure out what I was looking for. I wasn't expecting that many choices, dozens of colors of yarn in different brands and styles. Some was almost as thick as my hair, and some was basically rope.

  “Are you going to start knitting?” he asked.

  “Crocheting,” I said. “I think. I wanted to try to make little animals for the girls. I'll start with hats, though.”

  He nodded. “How about this?”

  I laughed out loud, surprising myself – and Beast. He smiled at me again and I felt like maybe the world wasn't quite as terrible as I had thought, looking at Beast's eyes.

  “You have their taste down,” I said, taking the yarn from him. “Pink and sparkly? You'll be their hero.”

  I went away with a crochet hook and a basket of yarn. The pink-and-gold stuff he'd found, and some plain white and yellow yarn for me to practice with.

  Just before we left, I grabbed two skeins of a deep green yarn that was soft and plush.

  I told myself that it didn't look like Beast's eyes, and I knew I was lying.

  He offered to pay for the yarn, but I pulled out my cash. It was pretty much his money anyways. It wasn't like I really did enough to earn getting paid – I felt like I should pay him rent.

  We drove back making guarded conversation. He asked me a few questions about the crocheting I wanted to do, I told him about my classes.

  I didn't ask him about his work.

  He mentioned a house he'd been helping one of his old friends fix up. I hadn't asked where he'd been disappearing to. I had assumed it had something to do with drugs.

  Sitting in the car, talking quietly with Beast, I could feel muscles relax I didn't know were tight. I had missed this so badly.

  I had missed Beast.

  I watched his hands on the steering wheel, big and scarred and strong, and I realized that I wanted to reach my own hand out and rest it on his arm, his leg, his shoulder. I wanted to touch him.

  The thought made me shiver.

  I still didn't know if I could trust him, but I longed for him in a way I wasn't ever used to.

  It was totally bizarre to me. I felt like touching him would make me happy, would make both of us happy. I thought about reaching out and crossing the divide between us – less than a foot of space kept us apart.

  “Are you okay? You went quiet,” Beast said, just as I was working up the nerve.

  “I'm okay,” I muttered.

  I turned and looked out the window again at the vague dark shapes we were heading past.

  “I missed you, Tabitha,” he said quietly. “Thank you for talking to me again.”

  I felt my heart pinch, and I remembered the look on his face when I'd said that he could hurt me. Had I hurt him again? Had he really missed talking to me?

  “I'm sorry,” I whispered.

  “Don't be,” he said. He sighed, a long exhale, and bit his lip. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't tell you until it was too late. I'm sorry I still can't tell you everything I want to. It's not fair to you and it sucks and I'm sorry.”

  “Why can't you?” I asked.

  “If I told you why I couldn't tell you, I'd basically be telling you exactly what I can't tell you. Fuck. That sounds so stupid when I say it like that.”

  He paused again.

  “If I keep doing this for just another few months, I can be done. I can clear my debts and I can move on with my life and stay the fuck away from meth and tweakers and all these assholes forever. It's not much longer now.”

  “Right,” I said, when it didn't seem like he was going to go on.

  “If I don't, shit. It will hang over me the rest of my life. I probably wouldn't be able to stay here, you know? I'd have to run for it. Everything in my life is going to fall apart unless I stay the course and finish this up.”

  I didn't say anything.

  “But... I don't want to lose you, okay? I think you're amazing, and when all this finishes up, I want to ask you on a date.”

  A blush spread up my cheeks and I turned to look at him.

  “Are you serious?” I asked.

  “Fuck yes,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I like you,” he repeated.

  “Why?” I asked.

  As soon as the question left my mouth, I wished I hadn't asked. It was a stupid question that would sound like I was fishing for a compliment. That really wasn't what I meant, though. I just wanted to know why a man like Beast – strong, attractive, funny, from a decent family – would want to date me.

  “You don't have to answer that,” I mumbled.

  �
��You love your sisters,” he said. “You make them a priority and schedule time for them, even when you have to cancel meetings with your tutor. They always come first. You are polite to everyone we meet. You're really good at stuff I wish I could do, you know? You keep my house looking beautiful while you cook these amazing meals and still make straight A's. You make that sort of shit look easy, but I know I couldn't do it.”

  I swallowed, once.

  He thought I made college look easy.

  That was the nicest thing anyone had said to me in ten years.

  “You're really smart,” he said. “You make me laugh, when you laugh. I wish it would happen more often. I wish I could make you laugh ten times a day. More.”

  I blinked a tear out of my eye.

  “I'm not,” I whispered. “But I'm glad you think so.”

  “Don't sell yourself short,” he said.

  I had never been more grateful for my phone buzzing in my pocket. I pulled it out, apologizing to Beast, in case it was Kandy and I could see the girls soon.

  It was their mother, but she was just texting me a picture of something Karla drew at school.

  “I don't know why Kandy suddenly likes me,” I said, “But it's pretty great. She's been texting me pictures of the girls and telling me what they're doing at school. I didn't think she even bothered to tell my father about that.”

  “Maybe she knew you'd care more,” Beast said.

  “Never seemed to matter to her before,” I said. “Nothing's really changed.”

  He shrugged.

  I was glad to have an excuse to stop our conversation. Beast had told me more things than I wanted to hear about myself.

  We talked about the girls the rest of the way to his house.

  I couldn't help but feel his presence by me in the car, and be warmed by it, all the way to my toes.

  The parade of tweakers in and out of the cabin started to get more and more disruptive. It went from one or two a week to six or eight a day by the end of the year.

  Every time, I hid in my room.

  I still felt like Rapunzel or something, locked in a tower, nothing to do but brush my hair and study some old books.

  For a while, I listened to the people coming and going, but there was nothing more boring than a conversation about buying drugs.

  “Hey, you got the shit?”

  “Yeah, I got the shit, you got the money?”

  “I got the money if you got the shit.”

  Repeat forever.

  I didn't know how Beast could stand it. For one thing, I didn't know how he could stand selling the drugs. Every time someone stopped by, I was afraid it was a cop.

  Cops came by and I was in the house, I'd get arrested too, and lose any chance I had of getting custody of my sisters someday.

  There was not really anything else I could do, though. I had three choices: Stay with my father, stay with Beast, or leave my sisters to my father's mercy.

  That was hardly a choice at all.

  The best thing about Beast's cabin – besides Beast himself and his smile that made my knees weak – was that my father was never there. It was the thought I comforted myself with over and over when the tweakers coming and going freaked me out. At least my father wasn't there.

  Until, of course, one day he was.

  I was reading back over an essay, painstakingly checking each line like Miranda had showed me, to be sure that I hadn't fucked up something obvious, when I heard the front door open.

  I sighed to myself and went back to my essay, until I heard his voice.

  Even muffled, it was unmistakable. Proud, hard, cold, I could pick it out from a thousand men talking.

  I eased my laptop off my lap and crept over to the door, trying to make sure I didn't make so much as a breath of noise.

  “-Tabitha?” he asked.

  “Around,” Beast says. “I don't let her out when I'm dealing.”

  “Good call,” my father said with a nasty laugh. “She needs a firm hand or she fucks up everything she touches. Just like all the other bitches.”

  “Hey, asshole,” a woman said.

  It wasn't Kandy, fortunately.

  “Yeah?” my father demanded. His voice was flat. I shivered. It did not bode well.

  “Shut your fucking mouth, don't say shit like that,” she said. “Why the fuck are you talking about women like that?”

  I flinched even before I heard the blow land, a meaty thud followed by a crash.

  “Shit,” the woman said.

  It sounded like she was crying.

  I waited for the sounds of a fight, for Beast to hit my father back or kick him out. It was what I thought he would do. It was what a good man would do, and I was trying, so hard, to think that Beast might be a good man.

  “Enough,” Beast rumbled. “Are you here to buy or are you going to get the fuck out?”

  I heard my father laughing and walking away from the sounds of the woman crying.

  Fifteen minutes later, the door opened and shut and two cars drove away.

  Beast was at my door almost instantly. He knocked, softly. I didn't say anything at first, but I took a shaky breath and stepped away from the door.

  “Can I open the door?” he called.

  I nodded.

  Then, I realized he couldn't see me.

  I opened the door myself and stood there, waiting for him. I kept my eyes on the floor.

  “I didn't know he'd be coming over,” Beast said. “I would have made sure you were out of the house. I'm sorry, Tabitha. I'm so sorry.”

  “Was she okay?” I asked.

  My voice sounded tiny, like I was even younger than Karla. I hated myself for it.

  “She's okay,” Beast said. “He hit her, she fell over. She'll probably have a black eye, but her pupils were fine, she didn't hit her head on anything. No concussion.”

  He didn't seem totally convinced. I wasn't either.

  I swallowed.

  Beast was filling my doorway, and my little room had never felt so tiny.

  He didn't say shit to my father.

  My father hit a woman, right in front of him, in his own house, just for telling him not to treat women so badly, and Best did nothing.

  For the first time, I felt trapped, not by my father, not by college, not by my sisters, but by Beast.

  I took one small step away.

  Another.

  “I'm so sorry,” Beast said again. "It's not forever. I swear to you. All of this, it's going to end. I just have to do this one last thing."

  He spread his hands helplessly and then dropped them by his side.

  I didn't say anything. I turned away and waited for Beast to speak, or to come in my room, or to reach out a hand and drag me out.

  After a few long minutes of silence, he walked away.

  The front door slammed.

  I drew the curtain aside and watched as he crossed the clearing in long, fast strides and stood by the edge of the woods.

  He picked up a rock almost as big as my head and threw it against a tree so hard that snow fell off all the branches.

  I didn't stay to watch him lose his temper, now, when there was nothing to be done to protect the woman. She was long gone. I lay back on my bed and pulled the covers over my head, but I could still hear the thumps and crashes echoing through the crisp winter air.

  It was only a few hours later that Kandy texted me that she was heading over to my father's house and I should stop by.

  Beast was nowhere to be seen.

  I called out for him a few times, but never heard an answer. It was time to go, and, truth be told, I didn't really want to see him anyways.

  I took the key off the hook by the door and drove off.

  He wasn't my jailer, was he?

  I could go see my sisters.

  When I got there, Kandy and my father were hanging all over each other.

  Better and better. I tried not to picture Kandy with a black eye, with a split lip, with wide, terrified eyes.r />
  I didn't know why he didn't show that part of himself to her.

  Maybe by now he got a kick out of pretending, out of being the family man, the local businessman, someone anyone in town would trust.