by King, V. L.
I shook my head frantically while my tiny skittish sniggers emitted along my exhale. “Laurie, I can’t.”
The ledge of the island was gripped by her small, firm hands. She studied me carefully with unrestrained wisdom radiating in waves from her encouraging gaze. “There is no such word as ‘can’t’.”
“Okay. I cannot.” By the stern expression carved into her face, my sarcasm wasn’t going to help me escape this hole. It was just going to dig me in further.
“Just try. I’ll be here. You’ll see how relaxing it can be.”
I didn’t believe that another chore could be deemed as relaxing. This was a bad idea. The fisted apprehension worming its way through my system and choking me was my confirmation of that.
As she drank in a liberal breath, her face softened and her shoulders dropped when her death-clutch on the edge of the island loosened. As if she knew exactly how my mind worked, she incited me with: “It could be a surprise for Liam.”
Me surprising Liam and making him happy is all I wanted. I wanted to be a good girlfriend. I wanted to do something nice for my man. He looked after me. He deserved it. An unexpected surge of enthusiasm and excitement floored all negativity, and I was soon smiling at the thought of his praise.
“Okay. What do I do?”
Standing side-by-side, Laurie walked me through each step, from measuring out to mixing. When the mixture began to curdle, my system was overridden by instant panic. If I was on my own, I would have been terrified and disheartened by failure. But Laurie continued with words of encouragement and told me to spoon in a little flour if it began to curdle again. Somehow, with a little faith, I managed to save Liam’s surprise.
Taking extra care and making sure all the coconut flakes were mixed in properly and evenly, the yellow substance was then equally poured into two sandwich tins. Before putting them in the range. I smoothed over the surface with the back of a spoon, making a little dip in the center, just as instructed. When I turned back around, Laurie was gazing at me with an approving smile; it was like she was proud of me. Damn, I was proud of me. I just hoped Liam would be too.
“See, I told you there’s no such word as ‘can’t’,” she mocked before lifting her hand in a silent gesture of a high-five, but I ignored her gesture, and beaming like the Cheshire cat, I stepped into my tutor—one of my best friends…one of my only friends—and wrapped my arms around her shoulders.
“Thank you, Laur. I couldn’t have done this without you.”
Her shoulder shifted and her warm, soft hand was lowered from midair then gently patted against my back. “You are more than welcome, girlie. I told you it was relaxing.” Holding me at arm’s length after pulling away, her head tilted back a fraction to look me in the eyes. “How do you feel now?”
I perused the area which was my kitchen. I didn’t like the mess which came with this baking malarkey, but I felt somewhat…achieved? Accomplished? I couldn’t remember a time I’d felt that way without shame overshadowing it. Let’s just say, you couldn’t generally feel accomplished by getting the most tips in one night when you were stripping to get them.
I grinned and answered candidly. “I feel like I’ve accomplished something.”
My smile was reflected. “You have.”
It was 6:35 p.m. and I was standing rooted to the spot in my kitchen, gazing at the platter in the heart of the island, adorned with the simple masterpiece I’d created. Yes, okay, I had guidance, but I did everything myself. I even topped the cake off with a layer of raspberry jelly and sprinkled extra coconut flakes on top like they were snowflakes.
Liam could never get enough of coconut. It was his guilty pleasure.
Minutes passed swiftly as I smiled at my success. Drawn from my moment by the ringing—along with a loud buzzing—of my cell phone, I raced to the dining table, rummaged through my purse, and without a glance at the flashing screen, I pressed the green button.
“Hello.”
“Kady?” a sniveling, hesitant voice whispered down the speaker.
“Brittany? Is that you? Thank God you’re all right. Each time I called, Mom and Dad said you were busy,” I rambled, my words desperately needing liberation after so many weeks of zero contact. And I was thankful to hear her voice.
“Yeah, I’ve been up to my eyeballs.”
“So have we, what with the move—” I bit my tongue and cringed as soon as I realized my slipup. Damn me and my big fucking mouth.
“You moved?”
Shit, shit, shit. “Yeah, umm…” Internally scolding myself, I was interrupted before I could continue digging myself a bigger hole.
“Kady, I need to talk to you.” She sounded serious. Brittany never did serious. “But I’m scared to—”
“What?!” I didn’t know whether to feel annoyed or hurt. “Britt, you are my sister, my baby sister. Have I ever given you reason to feel scared?” I screwed my eyes shut before holding my breath. “God, are you pregnant?” Waiting for her answer, air was finally ousted when she hissed ‘no’ down the speaker. Thank God for that. I loved her to death, but Brittany could hardly take care of herself, let alone a baby. “Then what is it?”
With the handset resting against the side of my face, I strolled back to the kitchen.
“Kady…Liam made a move on me.”
The world stopped moving as did my steps. The room spun mercilessly on its axis, while my ears rang. I had to force a swallow before I choked on the two simple words which I could only just push passed the lump in my throat. “Excuse me?”
“On Halloween…”
“No. No. No.” The monosyllable words journeyed down the speaker on a suspicious snicker while my hand found its way into my hair. “It was you and your man-obsessed brain that was going around pinching everyone’s asses. You had a lot to drink, Brittany. You must have been mistaken.”
“Kady, I’m not mistaken, he hit on me. I told him no, but he wouldn’t let up. He was the one who jammed your bedroom door shut the following morning, and near enough forced his tongue in my mouth when we in the kitchen.”
There was nothing there in my head to absorb what she was saying. Her frank words merely rebounded against my skull, making my head throb. This couldn’t be right. Liam wouldn’t do that. Not to me. Not after everything we had been through. I felt my blood go from simmering to its boiling point, almost immediately. “Brittany, I suggest you stop with this nonsense right now. Liam wouldn’t—”
“Kady,” she interrupted me with a stern and urgent tone, a tone very un-Brittany-like. “He forced me up against the goddamn wall. I tried to push him away when he grabbed my ass, but he wouldn’t budge. He told me it was a thrill to live in the moment, to do things which should be forbidden. I wanted to tell you, Kady, I really did. It’s been killing me keeping it to myself, but he told me that it would be useless because you would always believe him. Please, Kady, you have to believe me.”
Standing in the center of the kitchen, the void in my skull was filled by her echoing words. My body shook, my breathing was ragged, and my head was pounding, as I unintentionally allowed myself to be devoured by so many haywire emotions. “I–I have to go,” I muttered in a daze, ended the call, and dropped it on the island countertop as though it had just burned me.
Each anxious breath, alongside my mouth gaping, caused my lips to wither. The walls, the floor, everything around me faded into oblivion. Liam and my sister? Brittany and Liam? No. It was lies. It had to be.
The degree of my denial came to run short. I sensed and familiarized myself with the intensifying rage and collective emotions bubbling and steaming in my body—confusion, misunderstanding—I felt cheated and betrayed. I didn’t want to believe it; you name me one person in this lifetime who wants to believe that the two people they trust more than anything in the world would participate in some immoral, treacherous act such as that.
Blame, however, seeped and trickled through my veins melding with my upsurge of adrenaline. I blamed myself. If Brittany was tell
ing the truth, then I was certain more than anything in the world that it was me that had forced him into someone else’s arms—me and my goddamn insolent habits. Why didn’t I ever listen to him? I should have treated him better.
Trudging through a conflict-ridden storm, it was impossible to focus on one particular emotion and work through it before diffusing the next. Everything, the feelings, my reaction, along with the words of my sister, obstructed my natural ability to neutralize each emotion and come out the other side with reason, and a greater understanding of the situation as it stood.
Next thing I knew, an intense sensation of hurt overcame me, but with hurt should come pain, right? Yet there was no pain; there was no shock, nothing to make me feel human. It was as though my brain was registering the hurt, but it couldn’t register that the hurt wasn’t physical, the hurt was in my heart. I was hurting emotionally and on some inexplicable level, I didn’t and couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t know how to. I just wanted it to end.
My heart was shattering, and in a way, I needed to feel that way too.
I have no idea why, but in a daze, I yanked open the dishwasher which had just finished its cycle. I just needed something…something to help me focus…something to concentrate on and help defog my mind. I needed to somehow send a message to my brain, a message where it could decipher that my hurt was due to the act of physical pain.
As bizarre as it sounds, I ran on my pure instinct. An instinct which had never presented itself before.
I fetched one of the middle-sized silver spoons from the washer, and even with a cloth shielding my fingers, I could still feel the heat of the metal scorching through the weave of the fabric. When I braced my right foot up onto one of the barstools, I closed my eyes while heaving each labored and shaky breath, and tossed back my head. My arm felt as weighty as lead, so I let it drop and called out in pain as the hot steel pressed against my inner thigh. The natural reaction to withdraw from the heat of the implement was fought against with every ounce of strength I had. Every muscle in my face bunched together and I felt warm tears falling from my eyes to trickle down my cheeks.
I concentrated on nothing more as I slipped into my own little world, my own very dark place in my psyche where there were no walls holding me captive, no misunderstandings and most importantly, no blame. With each few seconds that passed by, the wounded flesh beneath and surrounding the hot steel which lay against my inner thigh became less sensitive. I was becoming familiarized with it, and in that moment, I was free. I was getting what I needed alongside what I deserved. I needed that time to escape into my mind; I needed that moment of discomfort to bring me a form of detachment. I needed to fight through the form of physical pain, to quell my emotional pain.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
By the time my eyelids had fluttered open, Liam’s briefcase was already set on the dining table, and he was charging towards me like a bat out of Hell. Nonetheless, I pressed that slowly cooling metal further and further into my skin, desperately seeking complete numbness, not physically, but emotionally. And I was nearly there. I was only a moment away from emotional numbness. I just needed that moment, that one measly moment.
“Kady?” Liam shouted in a bid to get my attention as he rounded the island in haste. I watched as his eyes fell onto my right thigh and the back of the silver spoon which was flattened against it. Embarrassment should have bred from the situation, but I was consumed in the moment of knowing what I needed that I just didn’t care. I was helping myself because only I knew what I needed.
Control.
Wrenching my hand away from my leg as his forceful hand circled my wrist, I protested during his attempt. “No, no. It’s mine. I only need a minute, just a minute, please—” I writhed, sounding like a pathetic crack addict begging for her latest fix, but I was shameless. During the months, I felt everything had been taken away from me, some for good reason, I could understand that. But living in the constant fear and anxiety which I felt while inside that house as I strove not to push my boyfriend’s buttons, along with the level I went to in a bid to make certain I had a constant reminder not to fuck up, and the feelings which had stirred inside me—whether it be due to feeling like a prisoner under my partner’s hold, or because of the words and actions of disloyalty that my sister had entrusted me with—I no longer felt in control of my life.
And I hadn’t for a while.
With that small circle of torrid steel on my body, I had regained what I felt was no longer my right. I could control the heat by having it hover above my surface and feel the relaxing warmth, or hold it down tight and allow the intense burn to take hold of me. I could control the duration, the way in which it was placed, the area which would be taken next, and how much area would be affected. It was mine, and mine alone.
“Kady, give me the fucking spoon!”
“No!” It was a futile attempt to pull away and fight him off, but I tried anyway with a flailing of my head as tears of desperation and the need to have him understand, took a hold of me. “It’s mine. It’s mine. It’s mi—”
Clattering upon the tile sounded as the spoon was relinquished from my grip, and my head whipped ferociously to my right as the back of Liam’s heavy, authoritative hand collided with the side of my face. I stumbled and fell backwards, my lower back cracking onto the title, the legs of the barstool griping before being kicked over. Cradling the side of my face, my cheekbone throbbed, and I was certain my eyeball was going to explode. Yet I found that the shock of his assault completed the sequence that I craved, the progression that I had sought after the initial control: shock and unresponsiveness. He halted my intention to gradually seek that mental state, but the shock of his strike was just another method to free myself from the clouded, overrunning feelings in my head.
I was literally shocked into reason…I was shocked into numbness.
From the floor, I tipped my head back to peer up at the man which was looming over me with an array of differing emotions in his eyes. He raked his hand back in his slicked brown hair and lowered himself into a crouch. “Kady.”
My name was a rapid sound journeying on a conflicted gasp. The back of my left hand, which was cradling my face, was encased by his warmth when he settled his hand above it. Lips curled with worry and eyes thawed with apologetic assertions.
“I am so, so sorry, baby. I don’t know why…” His voice was lost to silence while he hung his head and slowly removed his hand from my cheek.
“Did you do it?” I asked, breaking the deafening silence and feeling somewhat serene and levelheaded.
His head shot up. “Did I do what?”
Blinking slowly, for that brief moment, I felt as though nothing could harm me. I felt blissfully at peace, totally uncaring…detached. I just wanted honesty. “Did you make a pass at Brittany on Halloween?”
I studied the crumple of his brow and the slight presence of his laugh lines as his face tensed into a perplexed scowl. “What? No, of course I didn’t. I would never do that to you.” His opposite hand lifted to comb the hair back from my face and set it behind my shoulders. “What would make you think such a thing? What’s been said?”
The screaming red blemish on my inner thigh was stealing my attention. When my thumb grazed around and over the area of the wound, tingles shot through my body. The flesh was still heated, and in the light the wounded surface appeared to shine.
“Brittany called,” I began mindlessly, staring into a void that was becoming my life. “She told me you made a move on her. That it was you that locked me in the bedroom the following morning. She said you near enough forced your tongue in her mouth.” I stopped to sniffle, my rapt attention remaining on my leg. “She said you told her that if she told me, I’d never believe her anyway.”
In my peripheral vision, I saw cautious, gentle fingers approach my own on my thigh. I should have winced when his fingertips skimmed over the ugly red mark, but I felt…restful, near untouchable. Things felt and appeared more vivid.
“And because of what was said, you decided to do this to yourself?” His tone was borderline on pitiful, but I knew differently.
I knew what my new mark was to me, I knew how it helped. I didn’t think Liam would ever come to understand the extent of how something like this could help. Some would call it attention seeking. That’s not me, I had never been an attention seeker. To me, it was an escape. It was a way to have control over a situation. To me, as the temperature of that metal began to gradually lessen, the overwhelming collection of thoughts in my mind lessened too. Like a graph. The pain was the peak, it starts out high, but it pulled you back from the anger and rage. Once you become familiar with it, and as the temperature was reduced, the compressed sphere of burdening emotions was unraveled and clarity, levelheadedness, and detachment took place.
This was my form of emotional numbness.
This was my anchor.
When I failed to answer his question in knowing that he wouldn’t understand, he muttered, “Kady. Can you see how Brittany’s words have affected us today? Can you see what has happened? Because of her, a line has been crossed, a line that we never thought…” Wavering, he inhaled deeply and exhaled loudly through his nose before resuming. “Kady, it’s nothing but lies. I love you, but I’m sorry, I’m not going to allow anyone to worm their way between us and rip us apart, or turn us into people that we don’t recognize.”
I heard his words, but they were just that: words—a raspy, deep voice blanketing everything in my mind and holding me there in reality before I slipped further into emotional stillness. I had to do this. I had to do it now while I was still in my realm of detachment.
“Could you please pass me my cell, Liam? It’s on the island.”
When he came to squat down before me again, he handed me the handset and asked what I was doing.
“I’m drawing an end to this,” I mechanically replied.