“I’m not ready to die.”
“Me either, but I’m ready to move.”
I loosened my grip and was shocked to feel how free it felt to move along the streets with a lot of assistance from Lucas.
I pulled into the empty field his treehouse was located, and for the life of me, I couldn’t even tell you how we got there.
“See, you didn’t do too bad. I only thought you were going to kill me twice,” Lucas said as he slid my helmet onto the handlebars.
I slapped him across the chest. “It was your idea.”
Then I brushed my fingers through his long hair, gathering it together at the nape of his neck. He growled in approval.
“My idea was to get to hold you, not to get killed,” he said. His voice so heavy it came out barely above a whisper. “I want to show you something.”
He grabbed my hand, and after he squeezed it a couple of times, pulled me, leading me up a small hill. He continued until we came to the edge of the field to a clearing of grass and wheat.
We then walked another good two acres. I glanced around me. His house had recently gone out of our view, but my mother’s grave still stood prominent in my sight.
We moved around a couple of trees when he lowered himself onto the ground and tugged on my arm to have a seat next to him.
“What are we doing?” I asked and slipped off my shoes.
“Look around.”
I glanced around and took in a sharp intake of air. There was a vast opening of nothing. No houses, no people, no animals, nothing but Lucas and I were within sight.
It was peaceful and haunting at the same time. “Why here?” I asked.
“When I was little, my mom brought me back here. She told me it was her happy place. The place where she could be herself, be with who she wanted to be with, escape the pressures of the world. I didn’t understand why she would like a place like this. It was lonely to me. That was, until I thought about coming here with you.”
Lucas reached over and took my hand in his. I felt an inner peace like I’d never experienced before. A nirvana almost. Every few moments, he stroked his thumb over the base of my hand.
“It’s serene,” I said.
“Lay down,” he said and reclined in the tall grass. “Trust me.”
I leaned back next to him and laid my head on his shoulder. The sky was a prism of a thousand shades of blue and full of fluffy white rain clouds.
“This world is bigger than any of us, yet all we do is compare our lives with the stranger next door. And what’s the point, we’re all just trying to make it to the next day. Life is a fleeting moment. You have to take each second and live it to your fullest. To love every moment and every person you’ve been blessed us with,” Lucas said.
He didn’t bring me out to the middle of nowhere to make out, but to share a part of himself that wasn’t physical but spiritual. I wanted to be what he needed. Lucas Carter was it for me. The ‘it’ I didn’t deserve. The ‘it’ I never thought I would find, because I sure as hell wouldn’t go looking for it. He called me precious, but it was his heart that was precious. Not me, I was dirty.
“That was a mean punch for a guy who recently needed a cane to walk.” It was an abrupt and stupid change in subject, I know, but I had no idea how to express how his words made me feel. I wasn’t even sure if I knew how I felt.
“Don’t,” he hissed through his teeth. “That’s why I didn’t want you or anyone to know. I’ve only needed the cane a few times. Usually for only a day or two. I’m still quite capable of taking care of myself and you.”
“Lucas, I was just kidding. I’m fully aware that you’re capable of taking care of anything you put your mind to.” Even someone like me. I paused and let out a breath. “I’ve never felt safer than when I’m with you.”
“Always, safe,” he said then rolled onto his side to face me. He tucked his arm under his head and watched me. He was way too close for me to even glance in his direction, and the way my heart was pounding in my chest I knew what we had was more than I ever experienced before.
I needed to let him know about the hidden secrets of my past especially after his willingness to share a part of himself with me.
I traced her profile as she stared up at the clouds in her own little dream world. Her nose had become my newest fascination. The slope of it, the upturn of the tip, the way it perfectly emphasized the pout of her lips. Everything about her called to me. Then she turned to her side and brought those green eyes in line with mine. Damn, I would always keep her safe.
“I know I’m not one of your whores, but I am a whore.”
I wiggled my finger in my ear. I had to have heard the wrong words come from those plump, kissable lips. My life had been a never-ending revolving door of sluts and whores. My Annie was neither of those things. She might no longer be a virgin but she carried herself with a modesty and self-respect no whore would ever do.
“If this is about that picture … Precious, that was about me. Not you. You’re no whore,” I said and paused. I wanted to add the most important part, if any girl had ever been mine it was her. She possessed my dreams, and had slipped into every corner of my heart. I bit my lip. Maybe, she was right. She wasn’t mine. I was the one owned by her.
“It’s not about the picture. It’s about me.”
Not sure how I should have responded, I stared unapologetically, not the least ashamed that I couldn’t stop watching her.
Her hand grazed against mine, and I couldn’t let the movement go to waste. I placed my hand over on top of hers and pulled it onto my chest.
She threaded her fingers between mine and our palms met, then I was pretty sure I hummed. I wished we were something more, much more.
“This feels better than anything else,” she said. “With you, everything feels better.”
I froze. She said what I’d thought a million times when I was with her. Everything was against us. The words of my mother rolled over and over in my head and cut me to the core. How could the one person who saved me also destroy me?
She shifted on her side and accidentally kicked my leg with hers. We both laughed, letting the tension of the day leave our body.
“How did you learn you had MS?”
I squinted my eyes to study her. There was no look of pity on her face, no trace of fear flickered in her eyes. She simply cared.
“I was driving and my legs went completely numb. It caused me to wreck. So, I ended up in the ER. Long story short, they performed a MRI and turned my life upside down.”
“Is it safe to drive?” She rolled over onto her back, as if she knew it would be easier for me to talk without any meaningful eye contact.
“Probably not. I think that is the main reason I got the bike. It has both a hand and foot brake. Mom also had a hand break installed on the steering wheel of my Jeep. She has an unnatural fear of car wrecks.”
Annie looked back at me. Her eyes were dark pools of doubt. “Do you hate yourself because of the MS?”
Never thought of it in those words. I hated when my legs didn’t cooperate, I hated when I dropped things because my hands refuse to close, I hated walking into walls, I hated the pain, I did hate myself and the body I was locked in. I nodded.
“Then you’ll hate me, because I’ve been broken beyond repair.” She squeezed her eyes shut and turned her head as if it hurt to even look at me.
Hate and Annie were two words I couldn’t connect in my head. No matter what she was hiding nothing would have caused me to hate her. I didn’t even like the train of thought.
She didn’t wait for a response. She took three deep even breaths and then shattered me. “I already told you about Mimi and Pawpaw, and how my life had been magical. I’d known nothing but love and security. Then it was ripped away. My Mimi died, and three days later they took me to live with this family. Cruel doesn’t begin to describe them. The mother was vindictive and controlling. Narcissistic might be the correct word to use in describing her. The father was a
workaholic and pretended to not notice what his wife and son did. Their son was the worst. He was a drug dealer. I was a source of income for the family.”
She paused long enough to move closer to me and placed her head on my chest. I blew out a breath of air and wrapped my arms around her. I shivered at the realization she was finding comfort in me.
The only calming effect I could hold onto was when her fingertips played with my fingers before intertwining hers and mine together. Her grip was snug. I closed my eyes, bracing myself for what she was about to say.
This is going to be bad, this is going to be very bad, the voice in my head repeated again and again. The air around us changed. In an instant, her breath had become my breath, and I found myself counting each breath we took in, ensuring she got the oxygen her body craved. It terrified me.
“The son wasn’t only addicted to drugs but also porn, and I was the lucky girl who happen to share a room with him.”
Her tears came and pooled onto my shirt. It pulverized what was left of my heart. I leaned forward to kiss each eyelid that were coated in tears, trying to ease some of the hurt. It was a useless gesture. She was right when she said we could be broken together.
“Did he force you?” I asked, wincing from the ache that was wrecking my body. I hated the fact she saw her past as a fault in her character.
She shook her head as she buried her face against my chest. My hand went directly to her hair. I’d dreamed of holding Annie like that more times than I would had ever admitted and was torn. Part of me wanted to live in that moment forever, and the other part wanted to escape from all the shit in our lives. I wanted to take every ounce of pain she had suffered away.
“Not really. He played those movies over and over again on this big TV that hung on the wall. It was on a constant loop. I didn’t know things like that really happened. They fascinated me, and quickly became an escape from my reality. His addiction had become mine. “
The shame and hurt in her voice was undeniable. She was crying again. Sobbing would’ve been a better term to use. The word heartbroken played in my thoughts. A word I heard all my life but a phenomenon I didn’t really believe in had become a reality. My reality. My heart ached to the point, I wanted to reach inside my body and rip it out of my chest. Anything to keep from feeling like this ever again. The fact I didn’t even know if she wanted me, the fact I would have such a reaction to her in such a short amount of time scared the shit out of me. I banded her to my side because I needed it. I couldn’t stand to see her upset and not do whatever I could to take it all away.
“I’d been there for four months. It had been hell. At school, I knew no one and I was just the poor foster kid that was to be watched because surely if my parents didn’t want me I had to be a bad seed. At home, if you could even call it a home, the man was always at work, the son entertained a different girl every night, and the woman pretended to not care. Then one night, the son came home and turned on one of his movies. I guessed he noticed I was watching the movie because he came over and sat down on the bed I was on. He pushed my hair behind my ear and told me I was pretty. It dawned on me that no one had purposely touched me in four months.”
The grip she had on my shirt tightened, it was as if she was trying to release the pain building inside of her. The pain of her grip couldn’t even touch the pain in my heart. I kissed the top of her head, trying my hardest to speak with dry eyes. I failed.
“Precious, you don’t have to say anything else.”
“He called me beautiful.” Her angelic voice was soft and weak and was a knife to my heart. “I wanted to be beautiful and wanted. He made me feel that way. He quit bringing home girls. He didn’t have to. He created his own whore that happen to sleep in his room. That went on for a few months then one night he brought home three of his friends and they decided I should act out one of the scenes in his favorite movie. Lucas,” I heard her say through muffled tears, “I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to at all.”
She went from whimpering to sobbing to crying convulsively. It was too much. It was too damn much. I felt her in every cell on my body. It was a new feeling. It was intense and heavy. Tears stung the back of my eyes. I was on the verge of crying like I did when I was eleven and fell out of the treehouse and broke my arm. Her embrace was the only thing keeping me together.
“I blamed myself. I told the mom. She blamed me too, but thank God, they had me removed from their home.”
The words brought about instant nausea. No one deserved to have someone force themselves on them. No always means no. I was a bastard, but I’d never forced anything on anyone ever.
“It wasn’t … It wasn’t your fault. Nothing you could’ve done would make that your fault. You can never believe another thing I say, but believe that, precious.”
Please, God, let her believe that. I didn’t even know if I was making sense, but the idea she was carrying around that grief hurt worse than any physical pain I’d ever suffered.
“I know that now, but I was just fourteen. It hurt like hell at the time. Eventually, it just numbed. Now, I go days without it even crossing my mind.”
My hand involuntarily formed into a fist. I had to work to keep my temper in check. The metal image of shoving that dude’s head in a box helped. But not near as much as Annie’s sweet voice did.
“But the next three homes were not much better. One was a single mom who worked sixteen hours a day and viewed me more of a nanny to her two-year-old and six-year-old. She didn’t realize I needed someone to take care of me too. But the guys could sense it. They figured out real fast that if they made me feel special I would screw them. I learned as long as I spread my legs some guy would tell me I was beautiful. Over the next four years, I went from home to home and bed to bed. I slept with twelve different guys not including the three who raped me.”
I hated myself, and it had nothing to do with the MS. She didn’t simply describe her life but mine. I was one of those guys who told a girl what she wanted to hear to get her in the bed of my truck. I didn’t take the time to see if there was anything special about them. I didn’t care. I just wanted my dick wet. I took their body and used it and then threw it away like a piece of trash. One day every one of those girls were going to become the most precious person in the world to some guy, and I wondered if they were going to want to kill me like I did every boy that had ever touched Annie. I twisted my body and wrapped myself around her and lowered my forehead to the side of her head.
Annie sat up and started to remove her shirt. I gripped her hands. “What are you doing?”
“I need to show you something,” she said and pulled the shirt over her head.
I almost swallowed my tongue when I took in her chest, and stroked my finger over the soft skin of her breast. She froze except for her shoulders that moved with each sharp intake of air.
Smattered around her upper body were faint, round scars. I would say they were chicken pox scars except for the ones that formed a perfect cross over her left breast. It became clearer they were scars from where some jackass had been putting out cigarettes on her delicate skin.
The raw emotions pumping through my entire body were a mix of searing pain and a burst of rage. “Who did that to you?” I asked and scraped my fingers over her chest.
Fear radiated off her skin in stark, rolling waves as I moved my fingers across each scar. I wanted to kiss each of those scars and pray I would wipe away some of the pain.
“Those boys. It was part of that scene. I’d let him tie me up before, they thought I wouldn’t care.” Her arms wrapped around her torso, covering her breasts. “I’m sorry,” she murmured.
She was apologizing for what those monsters did to her.
Hell, she was making excuses for them.
“I don’t know how people have made you feel about this in the past, but never apologize for this again. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“No one has ever said anything. I’ve never let anyone see my chest before
. I didn’t want to broadcast I was a slut.”
“You said you’ve slept with other guys. How did they not see them?”
“All they cared about was getting in my pants. They didn’t care that I left my shirt on.”
I bolted to my feet and paced a foot-long patch in front of Annie. My body radiated with fury. Had no one ever showed her what a treasure she was? What a precious gift she was?
I looked at Annie and she had her head held down and was embracing her body as if she was trying to hold herself together. “I’m going to kill them,” I snapped, vibrating with pent-up rage. “I’m going to hunt them all down and destroy them.”
And I meant it, too. She wore that damn t-shirt when we went swimming to hide those damn scars. She had been hiding for six years.
Annie was on her feet and had her arms around me in an instant. “They’re not worth it. You said you told your friends last night we were a couple. I need you spending time being with me, not letting them turn you into a monster, too.”
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