by Stacey Lynn
“I think you should go.” My voice shook.
Why was he scaring me?
“Your mom’s at work,” he said, taking my hair into his fingers again. Tears welled in my eyes, making him go blurry. “She won’t be home for a while. I think you should thank me for all the nice things I’ve done for you.”
—
My eyes shot open and I looked around my room. My heart thundered against my ribs, and I pressed my hand to my chest to stop the overwhelming sensations.
“Holy crap,” I whispered, scanning the room as if Evan were actually inside it. Years. It had been years since I’d seen his evil face in my nightmares, but they all rushed through my mind as I struggled to breathe, struggled to forget. To lock up that day in the recesses of my memory banks where I’d forced them long ago.
Gasping for breath, I rushed to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. Nothing helped.
I was still shaking. Trembling so violently I barely managed to fling open my shower curtain and turn the water to scalding.
I stripped quickly. It took me three tries to push down the sweats I’d bought at the Miami airport, where I then threw away the dress I’d been wearing. I stepped into the shower with my underwear and bra still on, one hand bracing me up on the wall.
The water pounded the top of my head and my shoulders while memories rolled through me, over and over again, growing more violent with every passing moment.
The way he’d touched my body. My hair. How I’d struggled and fought. How I’d cried and screamed, and no one had been there to help me. How his breath stank. How change from his job working in some run-down biker bar jangled as he’d undone his belt and whipped it through his belt loops.
The hair on his jaw and then the hair on his chest. The way it scraped against my bare skin when he pushed me to the floor and forced himself on top of me.
Vomit rose in my throat and I forced it down. Squeezing my eyes closed, I forced myself to remember the good parts.
The after parts.
When I’d gotten out, injured, blood running from my thigh, a knife still in my hand, his blood and mine mingled together dripping onto my dirt driveway while I screamed and screamed and screamed until my drunken neighbor stumbled out of his own trailer.
How I’d gotten away before he could completely damage me.
How my mom had become my biggest champion. I’d never seen fire fly from someone’s eyes, but I was certain that day, my mom had somehow managed it.
“Damn it,” I gasped in the shower, my tears mixing with the water as it pooled and swirled down the drain. “You’re okay. You got out. He didn’t hurt you.” Not too much, anyway.
To this day, Evan was still locked up in a jail cell, behind bars where he belonged. I wasn’t the first young girl he’d tried to rape…I was just the first to get away without him finishing.
“You’re safe,” I whispered, trying to pull to the front of my mind all the coping techniques I’d learned from years of therapy.
“He can’t hurt you and you’re safe.” I mumbled them repeatedly while the hot water burned my skin. I closed my eyes, remembering my lists, remembering the way Dr. Gryle always taught me to make three columns. What’s the worst that could happen? What’s the best? What’s the most likely?
He had taught me to trust. He had taught me to hope, in whatever shape I could. He had taught me how to claim my victory, to celebrate how I’d fought and survived, and he had taught me that I could move on from that horrific day. Twenty minutes that had seemed to last a lifetime, and over sixteen years later, I still struggled to believe him. When the nightmares took hold, they sometimes took days to shake away, sending me spiraling straight back to the aftermath, when I’d chopped my hair above my shoulders because I couldn’t bear to have anyone touch it again. When I’d started wearing sports bras and sweatshirts to hide my changing my body. It had taken me through most of high school to have the courage to let my hair grow back out and wear clothes that weren’t loose. It took four years of counseling for me to understand that by changing who I was, I was still allowing that monster to maintain some control over me.
Never again.
I had promised. Never again would I put myself in that position.
It had taken almost six months for me to even admit I was attracted to David. It had taken a night to succumb to temptation, to admit the way my body wanted his touch. It had taken a day for him to somehow get me to begin trusting him.
And it had taken one look, one moment, for him to burn that trust to ashes.
I’d let him in because I was riding high on the idea that I needed to do something more than just survive in life, that I needed to be brave, and I needed to figure out a way to get my slice of happiness.
I should have known better. I should have known that when girls like me, when people like me, reached outside their comfort zone, we got burned. It had happened enough times; why would David be any different?
Because he’s different.
Somewhere inside me, I had trusted that given the chance, David would make life way more exciting than anything I’d ever experienced.
What a bunch of bullshit.
I forced the weekend and my nightmare to the back of my mind. In the shower, I took off my soaking wet underclothes and turned the water down to a more reasonable temperature. I washed quickly and dried off, wrapping my hair in a towel.
The clock on my nightstand caught my attention, and I stared at it. Six o’clock? I’d slept for over four hours, and it felt like it had been minutes. My body was still slow, my eyes still dry and my head foggy.
I wanted nothing more than to crawl back under the covers, hide, and pretend that life could be rewound.
Forcing myself to my closet, I threw on clean clothes instead and went back to the bathroom.
As I saw my pile of hair ties, a shiver rolled down my spine. A rainbow of colors on David’s wrist sparked to my mind’s eye. He’d broken through every barrier I had without even realizing it. Gingerly, I reached out and ran my hand around the circled bands as if they could grow mouths and bite me.
For a moment, I debated. Wear them or not? Move forward or backward?
Heaving a sigh, I unwrapped the towel from my hair and picked up a band.
Moving forward could wait. I’d survived for over sixteen years by being careful. It worked for me. And when my world had just exploded more quickly than I’d ever thought possible…there were two things I needed.
My coping techniques…and my mom’s cookies.
Chapter 15
Camden
When you grow up in a life where you scavenge for change when payday is still too many days away and you desperately need a gallon of milk, luxuries are unheard of. I grew up not knowing the taste of cake until I was ten and invited to Suzanne’s birthday party. My first party, my first slice of chocolate cake with a hot-pink buttercream frosting, and polka-dotted paper birthday hats we’d been too old to think were still cool but young enough to pretend.
It was the best party I’d ever seen.
As delicious as that cake was, though, to me, nothing ever beat the taste of my mom’s homemade chocolate chip cookies. I could practically taste them as I pulled my car into her tiny dirt driveway.
The nightmare still close to the front of my mind, I stared at the spot where I’d screamed. Tremors started in my fingertips and spread up my arms. As much as I’d admired my mom and loved the way she’d fought for me afterward, I’d despised the fact that we hadn’t been able to move. Every time I came home, which wasn’t often since I’d gone to college and didn’t have to be there, the memories flickered far more brightly.
I hated it.
Swallowing down the taste of bile in my throat, feeling it down deep in my gut, I turned off my car engine and pulled out the keys. Next to our trailer, Johnny Jacobs was long gone. The man who had helped save me that day had died a few years ago. He’d never kicked his alcohol addiction, but next to my mom, he’d always
be my hero. He’d seen a scared-out-of-her-mind, shrieking and bleeding kid and had barreled into our trailer, somehow knowing exactly what had been going on.
I never saw Evan again, but based on the thumps and grunts and shouts coming from inside my trailer, and the way Johnny’s knuckles had been bloodied when he’d walked out, stumbling from exertion and drunkenness, I knew he’d beaten the shit out of Evan.
He didn’t say a word to me. He stood close to me, but not too close, and stayed between me and my trailer where Evan still lay, until cops and then my mom had arrived.
Movement caught my attention in my peripheral vision, and I swiped my eyes toward it.
My mom stood on the tiny front porch, stairs crooked from age and wear and lack of upkeep, staring at me.
Her chin wobbled, as if she knew what I was remembering, and her hands tightened around the railing.
Seeing her get emotional made me move and I scrambled out of my car, hurrying to her.
“What’s going on?” she asked, light green eyes just like mine looking me over quickly, scanning me like she’d done that day. “What happened?”
I lost what little hold I had on my emotions and threw my arms around her, shoulders shaking. “I just needed my mom and cookies.”
She sniffed through sudden tears and held me tight, laughing softly despite the heaviness I knew she felt seeping from me.
“You’re in luck.” She pulled back and tenderly wiped tears from my cheeks I didn’t realize were falling. “I just made a fresh batch.”
Of course she did. It was Sunday night and the only night she never worked. Because it was our night for cookies and hot dogs, a step up from bologna sandwiches, and even once I’d moved out, she still did the same thing.
She let me stay silent while I followed her into the house, but I knew she flinched when I cringed at the living room floor. Hurrying to the kitchen, she piled cookies onto a plate and slid them in front of me at the small kitchen counter. It was still a sickly green color straight out of the seventies, and cracked and chipped at the edges. I dropped my purse on the counter next to them and slid onto a stool.
We didn’t speak while she puttered around, filling glasses of milk, moving skittishly.
I watched every one of her movements, afraid to lose my connection to her.
Years and hard work had aged her too quickly and even though she had me when she was seventeen, with her graying hair, deep wrinkles, and lack of meat on her bones, she looked much older than her forty-five years.
I ate three cookies before she pulled a stool to the other side of the counter and took a bite of her own cookie.
“So,” she asked, nonchalant as possible. “Want to talk about it?”
I picked at the cookie I was eating and shoved a tiny piece into my mouth. It wasn’t up for debate. I needed her wisdom and her kindness and to know that she hadn’t been hiding anything from me all these months.
“I met this guy,” I started. Her green eyes lit, and her lips tipped up.
“And?”
I thought of David and his smiles and his touches and his laughter and the way he’d pulled me back from the ledge when he knew I was terrified, but how he’d pushed me to snorkel with him. I thought of the way I felt next to him in bed, telling him about my childhood. Then I thought about the pier and the collapsed man, and David’s cold look when I figured out he’d been lying to me flashed last but brightest.
I scowled. “And he’s a liar, like every other man.”
“Oh, sweetie.” She reached out, covering my hand with her small but toughened one, and squeezed. “They’re not all bad. You know that.”
“Not all of them,” I admitted, muttering. I took a swig of milk and thought of Tyson and Declan and Aidan and Jackson…how good they all were. How nice they were. How well they treated their women. “But the ones we find sure do suck.”
Because there were still Jack and Dan and Trenton…all men I’d tried to have relationships with. One had cheated, one just quit returning phone calls, and Trenton, whom I’d spent over a year with, one day simply walked out, saying he couldn’t handle the fact that I hadn’t been able to tell him I loved him yet. None of the men I had ever dated were patient or kind or protective.
My mom’s soft laugh grabbed my attention, and I glared at her. “What?”
“Sounds to me like my girl has had her first heartbreak. Tell me what happened.”
“David. David happened.” Before I knew it, I spilled everything. From the first night he walked into Fireside, to the first night he flirted, to his continued flirtation and my finally succumbing in Jamaica. I told her all of it. The laughter, the way I felt with him, how free I felt and how happy, for maybe the first time. Being with David was like being swept in the clouds of adventure and excitement, and what a bunch of crap it had proven to be. Because then I told her about the pier and discovering that he’d been lying to me. That Trina had known the truth and hadn’t told me. That he hadn’t even tried to stop me from leaving, just watched me walk away, knowing how hurt I was…knowing he was the cause of that hurt.
“But he did come after you,” my mom said when I was done ranting and raving and eating my weight in cookies. “He was at your place this morning.”
How he’d done that was still a mystery I hadn’t yet solved. I had caught the last flight off the island and as far as I knew, there weren’t any direct flights from Jamaica to Detroit.
“Yeah, probably to tell me more lies.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Why would he do it the first time?”
“I don’t know.” My mom shrugged. “Perhaps you should have let him explain.”
I gaped at her smirk and her scolding tone. “What? This man has lied to me for months, and you think I should have just listened to whatever he had to say now?”
“I’m saying that you’re not exactly an open book, either.”
I flinched, shoulders tightening. “Wow.”
She sighed and leaned forward. She turned her coffee cup in circles in her palm, staring at the milk inside as if it held answers. “What happened to you when you were young…that was horrific. Life altering. But while you’ve done so well in many, many ways, and I don’t want you to think I don’t see that…” She trailed off and took a sip of her milk. I could see her figuring out what to say behind tortured green eyes. “Well, you also closed a large part of yourself off to people. I mean, Trenton was a really nice boy and he really liked you, and that boy tried for a year to get you to open up to him and finally left because you couldn’t.”
“Yeah…he left me,” I said, irritation prickling at my spine. Dating him right after college and I first got my job at the accounting firm where I still worked made sense. He was just a couple of years older than me, and had talked to me for three months before ever asking me out. A year later, he’d kissed me goodbye and walked away.
“Yeah, because you wouldn’t let yourself love him and he got tired of trying. But even then, when he left, you weren’t nearly as upset with him as you are over this guy. So how’s he different?”
David’s smile and his warm hand, the way he’d patiently stood by while I gathered my courage to jump off that rocky ledge, flashed in my mind. He’d pursued me for months. He’d never gotten upset with my rejections, instead using them to try harder. And somehow…he’d beaten me back to Latham Hills in order to talk to me.
But more than all of that…there was one thing that stood out about David from all the other men I’d tried to date.
Forcing down a thickness in my throat, I whispered, “He made me feel safe.”
Silence filled the space between us, and my mom eventually turned, grabbed a new mug, and filled it with coffee. “You know, after everything that happened, I didn’t trust myself to date for a long time. You were in college before I ever went out on a date again, and even then, I kept every single man at arm’s length.”
“You dated?” My eyes widened. I hadn’t seen her with a man s
ince that day and had honestly never given it any thought.
Tears filled her eyes, and her hands began to shake. She set down her coffee and wiped a finger around the rim of the mug before she met my eyes again. “Bringing that man into our home, knowing what he tried to do to you, learning the way he’d looked at you and wanted you…God, Camden. Can you understand the guilt that I carried for putting you in that position?”
“Mom.” Both of us were crying now and I could barely speak. This wasn’t the visit I’d wanted. I came here for comfort and cookies, not to face a past better left buried.
“You have no idea what that does to a mom, Camden. To me…when I’d struggled every day to give you a decent life and knew you deserved better, knew I wanted better for you, and then to have that happen…”
“You were a good mom.”
“Maybe.” She sniffed and swiped her eyes clean. “But it wasn’t exactly like I trusted myself for a long time, either, or my ability to choose a decent man. I had to get over that. I had to force myself to see the good in people, not push them away when they were innocent. I hate that I see you doing the same thing. We can’t put the past behind us until we move on from it, honey. Running and avoiding isn’t the same thing as moving on.”
Warm tears trailed down my cheeks and I looked away. My gaze locked on the living room floor. Where Evan had thrown me to the ground, where he’d climbed on top of me.
Where, in his fumbling to remove his belt, I’d been able to knee him in the balls hard enough to get him off me.
I’d gotten free with only a stab wound. My thigh burned at the memory and I wiped my leg to remove the sting.
My chin shook. “The problem is that with David, I thought I had, and in the end he’d been the one lying to me.”
“But if you haven’t told him all about your past yet, then why would you expect him to tell you his?”
Her words stung like a punch to the gut. “I see your point.”
After that, we ate our cookies and gossiped about everything we could think of before I knew it was time for me to go home. Then she timidly mentioned Jim, the new guy she’d been dating for the last three months. He was a mechanic, owned his own shop, and when she said his name, her green eyes sparkled like the dew on grass. I’d left her house smiling. At least one of us was getting her shit together.