“Let’s get you cleaned up,” he says. He takes my hand which he hasn’t been doing for a while and he leads me out of the kitchen.
As we walk down a path my laughter dwindles until I’m left with watery eyes and a huge smile on my face.
I notice we’re not going to Adam’s house and I ask, “Where are we going?”
“To the river. I’m hot from all the laughing.”
We follow a trail and I try to take in all the beauty around me.
I’m outside. I just had my first food fight and it was amazing!
A tear sneaks from the corner of my eye and I quickly wipe it away. If this is what it feels like to be happy then I want to be happy for the rest of my life. It’s the best feeling in the world!
When we pass a clearing, I can’t help but gasp. “It’s so beautiful,” I whisper. Although there is equipment and bags everywhere, and plants that still have to be planted, it already looks so pretty.
“Oh yeah, Jack is livening up the place a bit. It’s still a work in progress. It’s going to look amazing once he’s finished here.”
“Jack mentioned a chapel, is this the one?”
Adam nods and a look of pride shines from his eyes. “Yes, this is the one. Jack is really good with plants.” He looks at me and asks, “Were you and Jack friends before you came here?”
I nod quickly. “Yes, Jack was my only friend there. We grew up together and he was the only one I could talk to.”
Adam squeezes my hand and says, “Well, now you have lots of friends. You know you can talk to me and Miss Ella about anything right? And there’s River too.”
“I know.” My eyes wander and that’s when I see the water. “That’s the river?”
“Yeah, let’s go swim.” He starts to pull me but I dig my feet into the dirt.
“Is it safe to swim? The water won’t take us?”
Adam laughs and it makes my belly feel funny. I place a hand over my stomach so the funny feeling will go away.
“We’ll be fine. The current isn’t that strong and I’m a good swimmer.”
We start to walk again and I mumble, “I’m not.”
Adam~
I hear her mumble, “I’m not,” and it makes me grin. Walking into that kitchen and seeing her laughing like that – I can’t even put to words how that made me feel.
I was laughing because she was laughing and it felt amazing.
We get to the stretch of sand and I pull my shirt off. Sophia stands and watches me. Before she gets the idea to strip, I say, “You can keep the dress on, just take off the sandals.”
I get rid of my shoes and then the jeans until I’m standing in my boxers.
She’s struggling with the clasp of her sandal. I crouch before her and quickly help her. Once she’s barefoot, I take her hand and run into the water with her.
She shrieks as the cold water splashes around us. I grab her around her waist and pull her in deeper with me, until we’re covered with water.
She’s laughing and wiping the hair from her face. Her eyes are shining with delight and it makes her heartbreakingly beautiful.
Heartbreakingly, because I will never have her.
The thought is a punch to my gut and it wipes the smile from my face. Where the fuck did that come from?
No … No! I can’t have thoughts like that! She’s way too young and I don’t do relationships. I have too much baggage for someone like Sophia. Sophia needs someone who can take care of her. Someone who will be able to love her the way she deserves to be loved.
I swim us back to the shore and get out. I let go of her as soon as we’re on dry land.
I see the look of confusion on her face and it only makes it worse.
“What did I do?” she asks.
I shake my head and I can only manage half a smile. “Nothing, I just forgot I have something to do.”
Her dress is clinging to her body, showing every curve and her erect nipples. She’s a walking dream.
“I’ll see you later,” I say way too harshly, and I rush away from her and my thoughts of her.
~*~
I’ve been avoiding Sophia as much as I can over the past few days. At dinner I’m quiet and everyone is starting to notice it.
I walk into the the kitchen and immediately Sophia stops mid-sentence with what she was saying.
“Nanna, have you seen those nails I bought the other day. There’s a panel-” Sophia walks right by me and out the backdoor. I wonder who’s avoiding who now.
“Son, now you listen to me!” Nanna starts to scold, her cheeks going beet red. “That poor girl has been a mess. I don’t know what happened but you better go and fix it or I’ll be nailing your ass!”
My eyes widen at Nanna’s threat. She hardly ever curses, so that alone tells me she’s really upset.
I hold up my hands, surrendering before she decides to carry out her threat. “I’ll go talk to her.”
She points to the back door a look of thunder on her face. “I’m going right now.” I backtrack out of the kitchen and then look for Sophia.
Jack comes walking towards me, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with manure. “Have you seen Sophia?”
He shakes his head. “I last saw her at brunch.”
“Thanks.” At least I know she didn’t go in the direction of the lands. I head to the stables, taking my chances there.
As I walk in I blink a few times so my eyes can adjust to the dark. I go from one stall to the other, but there’s no sign of her. I’m just about to head out so I can go look somewhere else when I hear soft sniffling. I walk to the stall right at the end and peek over the door.
Sophia is curled up in the corner, her legs pulled to her chest and her face buried in her arms.
My heart sinks like a dead weight. I caused this. Fuck, I’m a bastard.
I open the door and her head snaps up. When she sees it’s me she quickly gets up and wipes the tears from her cheeks. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were coming here,” she whispers. She aims to walk by me but I quickly reach out to her. I take hold of her arms and pull her to me, but she resists, not coming like she always used to do.
“You don’t have to do that. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine, Sophia,” I say, but I let go of her anyway. “I’m sorry for being such a dick. The way I’ve been treating you the past few days …” I sigh heavily and look down at my boots like a kid who got caught with his hand in a cookie jar.
I glance up only to see she’s turned away from me. She wipes a tear from her cheek again and then whispers, “You have nothing to be sorry for. I need to learn faster, that’s all.”
“No, Sophia,” I sigh. I reach for her again, but she takes a step back and I let my hand drop to my side. “This is not about you having to learn faster.”
I’ve fucked this all up. How am I going to explain to her that it’s all me and not her?
“These past few days I’ve had a lot of time to think,” she says suddenly. She reaches for the wall and she starts to trail her finger down the length of it. “I come here to think so I won’t be in anyone’s way.”
“What have you been thinking?” I ask carefully.
She trails her finger back up the wall and then whispers, “I’m just like this piece of wood. To others it looks pretty here, but at the end of the day it’s just a dead piece of wood. It died the second they chopped down the tree. I was chopped down a long time ago and ever since I’ve been just like the wood. Actually, I’m worse than the wood in this stable. At least there are beautiful horses being kept in here. I was just used for a fuck.”
Her words are unbearably sad. She’s starting to realize that she was abused and it must be a horrible realization for her!
I take another step closer to her. “You’re not dead, Sophia. You survived. Terrible things were done to you, but it is in the past. It might always be a part of you, but you’re growing stronger every day. You’re not letting it shape the person you are today. You could easily have let you
r past beat you down. You could’ve given up, but you didn’t. You have a whole future ahead of you, one that will be filled with beautiful things.”
“It will never be in the past,” she snaps. Her sudden outburst catches me off guard. I have never seen her lose her temper.
She slams a fist against the wall and cries out, “Every single thing I’ve done is squashed so deep inside of me, I can’t dig it out! Every time those men and women fucked and whipped me it yanked a piece of me away! There is nothing left of me but this filthy body!”
She slams her fist against the wall again. I’m scared she’s going to hurt herself. I quickly take hold of her hands and press them to my chest, holding them there. She starts to pull, trying to free herself from my hold, but I’m not letting go this time!
My heart is racing as fast as her breaths are coming.
She screams again and the sound rips a hole in my heart. I quickly move my arms around her and I hold her as tight as I can.
“Let it out, Sweetheart,” I whisper.
She struggles against me and her growls turn to sobs, and then her body slumps into mine. Her hands dig into my shirt, holding on for dear life.
Her cries are filled with anger and agony. She’s realizing what she’s lost, what’s been stolen from her. This must be so hard for her! I can’t even begin to understand what she must be feeling.
“I’m …” she tries to speak through her sobs. “He … was … right,” she hiccups between her sobs.
“Who was right, Sweetheart?” I caress her hair and I feel a lump forming in my throat. Her pain is breaking my heart!
“David,” she whimpers and the sound makes my eyes burn. If I’m feeling all this rage and heartache then she must be close to breaking point with everything she has to be feeling. “I’m … a … filthy …whore,” she sobs and those words break me.
Tears start to spill from my eyes and I don’t even bother wiping them away.
“You’re not,” I whisper hoarsely, the emotions threatening to choke me. “You’re a beautiful woman, Sophia.”
“I’m not!” she screams again, yanking herself free from my arms. “If I was beautiful, you wouldn’t reject me over and over!”
“I-”
She cut’s me off, crying, “First at the party! You couldn’t even look at me! Then the other day when we went swimming!” She slaps her hands over her face and stutters through her fingers, “You … you couldn’t … get away … from … me fast … enough.”
“No, Sophia!” I take hold of her hands and I pull them away from her face. I step right up to her. “You have this so wrong. That’s not me rejecting you. That’s me protecting you. You’re in no condition to start a relationship! I’d be a fucking asshole if I were to start something with you. You’re so much younger! You’re still healing!” I suck in a breath of air and I don’t even try to calm myself down anymore.
I’m fucking angry with myself. I did this to her. I made her feel like she didn’t matter.
“You’re a beautiful woman, on the inside and on the outside. It would be so easy to forget the age gap, to forget that I should be the one protecting you – and to just take you for myself,” I admit to her. There is no holding back now. I have to fix the mess I made and I can only do that by being honest with her. “But if I did that to you, if I just took you, then I would be no different from those monsters.”
She looks up at me with those beautiful shining eyes. “But I want you to take me,” she pleads and her words are just another blow to my crumbling heart.
“I can’t, Sophia. You think it’s what you want but it’s not. I was the first person there for you when you woke up. You’re seeing me as the person who saved you and not as a man. You’re confusing your feelings of gratefulness for love.”
She shoves hard at me, and her eyes are sparking with anger. “That’s how you feel! That’s what you think! You don’t have a clue what’s going on inside of me! Yes, you were the first person there for me! Yes, I’m grateful … I’m so fucking grateful you’ll never be able to comprehend how much.” Her breaths are racing. There is so much emotion on her face right now, it’s as if I’m seeing her alive for the first time. “I’ve been fucked. I’ve been beaten. I’ve been degraded and treated worse than an animal, but I’ve never been treated the way you treated me. You made me feel happy for the first time in my life and then you took it away! You made me want to be with a person for the first time, not because I was forced to but because I wanted it – and you took it away.”
She drops her face into her hands again and weeps and it fucking sucks to know that I did this to her.
“I’m so sorry, Sophia,” I whisper. My heart is filled with regret. I’m so angry with myself, but most of all, my heart is aching because she’s hurting. I hate seeing her in any kind of pain, especially the kind I caused her.. “I’m so sorry that I made you feel like that. I never meant to hurt you.”
“You say I’m not ready, but I’m the one who knows how I feel, not you. You want me to make my own choices and when I do you tell me they are wrong, that I should wait because I can’t possibly be ready for a relationship.” She keeps looking down, not making eye contact with me and then she whispers, “You said I would find a man that I could give my heart to. You said you wouldn’t let anyone hurt me.” She finally looks up with a world of hurt in her eyes. “You lied. I gave you my heart and you hurt it.”
She rushes past me, leaving me behind in the stables.
I hurt her. She put her trust in me and I let her down.
“Fuck!” I shout as the anger threatens to choke the life out of me.
I slam my hand into the wall and welcome the pain as it ripples up my arm.
I don’t even know where to begin to fix this. I thought I was doing a good thing by staying away from her! It’s only been a month! She can’t possibly be ready for a relationship? Can she? Fuck, what if she focuses on one of the other guys?
I shove my hands through my hair and grab fistfuls.
“I can’t let that happen. If one of them touches her I’ll rip his arms off and shove it up his ass!” I kick at the floor knowing that’s a stupid thing to say.
I hear movement behind me and scowl darkly when I see that it’s Tristan. “Just face it. You don’t want someone else to have her but you’re too much of a coward to make a move yourself.”
“What the fuck do you know?” I snap at him.
“Enough,” he chuckles but there’s no humor in the sound. “I’ve been doing the same thing with Diane. It’s been a year and I still keep telling myself, she’s too young, she’s too raw. I keep telling myself she needs time to heal, but you know what I’ve realized by watching you and Sophia?”
As much as I hate it he’s right. “What did you realize?” I ask when he pauses.
“Diane will never heal completely.” He points to the door where Sophia ran through. “Sophia will forever have those marks, they won’t heal completely. If we wait for them to heal completely then we’ll wait forever. We’re using it as excuses to keep ourselves away from them. We are the ones who are scared, Adam. Not them. Fuck, they’ve been through hell, why would they be scared of dickheads like us?” He nods, making his point. “We are just two shitheads who are scared of the woman they care for. We’re scared we’ll hurt them and in the process we hurt them anyway.”
He turns around and walks away. I hear him say, “I’m done hurting Diane. Life is too short, and I’m not wasting another day by running from the one woman I want.”
Once again I stay behind. Tristan is right. I’m the one saying she’s not ready, that she’s too young – but what the fuck do I know about how she really feels. I’m hurting her more by staying away. It should be her choice too.
As fucked up as I am, I’ll never be able to turn her away if she says the words right to my face. If she says that she wants me, then I’ll act on my feelings, but not before then.
Sophia~
I make sure I stay out of Adam’s
way. I’m not angry with him. He did what he thought was best for me and I can’t blame him for my own stupidity and my own silly feelings. I’m angry with myself. I’m angry for telling him the things I did. I’m angry for liking him too much.
I’m enraged at those bastards for what they did to me! I’m angry and a whole lot of broken, but it’s getting better every day that I spend with Miss Ella.
I try not to think of my time as a slave. It’s starting to feel like the life I have now and the life I had as a slave belongs to two different people. Mostly, I feel disgusted with myself for letting them abuse and use me like that.
My skin crawls with repulsion when I remember Lowery with his milk and cat fetish. I feel nauseated when I remember David, how he emotionally and physically abused me.
It feels like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff. Below is darkness and every single thing that was done to me – and it feels like I can fall at any moment – and then that darkness will consume me. The thought scares me to death!
So I focus on Miss Ella. I focus on helping in the kitchen. It’s a simple routine, but to me it’s everything – it’s my sanity.
As awkward as things are between Adam and I, I can’t make myself move out of his house. I still want to be close to him. I feel safe knowing he’s always close by.
I make sure I leave before he gets up and I make sure I get to my room before he gets home. I don’t want things to get more awkward.
The rest of the day I stay with Miss Ella. At least the days go by fast.
Adam~
I give Sophia time to do her thing before I go home. I don’t have the guts to face her yet so our unofficial arrangement works at the moment.
I’ve started sitting out on the patio after dinner. It’s peaceful out here.
The door slams open River comes rushing out. She goes to stand by the railing, her whole body tense.
“What’s nipping at your heels?” I ask.
She walks over and sits down next to me. We don’t get to see much of each other nowadays.
“Jack kissed me.” She drops the bomb.
Saved By Him (The Monster Series Book 2) Page 10