by Cecilia Tan
“I…I suppose that’s fair to say.”
Good. I got her to admit that much; there was hope I could get through to her. “Now, you were saying that the rampages stopped after a while?”
“Yes. After Chino left town. Father…calmed down a lot. For years. I thought he mellowed with age. But lately…” She trailed off and seemed unable to say anything more.
“It’s okay, Flora. Can I ask you if you’ve ever felt unsafe with him?”
“Well, we were always afraid when we were kids, but that’s normal.”
That’s normal, I thought to myself. Oh dear. “So what’s changed since Vincent finished school?”
“Mom’s changed. She’s anxious and nervous. I mean, more than usual. But she’s depressed, too. Like she’s not interested in going to our knitting group anymore. I still go, but the women there treat me funny.”
“Funny how?”
“Like they don’t really like me or trust me? But they’re too polite to say it to my face so they’re ultra-polite instead. But it feels weird.”
Maybe they’re afraid of your stepdad, too, I thought to myself. Try to be neutral. Try to be neutral. “Well, if your stepfather is known for his rampages, they might be leery?”
“He’s a very well-respected member of our community,” Flora said primly.
“Sometimes ‘respect’ is just another word for fear,” I said. “Flora, you’re not responsible for how other people feel or how they react to your stepfather. I’m just saying, if they’d ever seen him smash a pot of hot coffee or a television, they might worry, okay?”
“Okay. Yeah.”
“But they probably don’t want to say anything. So they don’t know what to say.”
“That makes sense, I guess.”
“I think I agree with them that your stepfather could be dangerous.”
“He’s done so much for us, though. Fed and clothed us, put a roof over our heads.”
“Is that what you think or what he thinks?”
There was a long silence before she spoke again. Then her voice was soft. “You’re right. That’s what he says. When he’s angry. That we ought to be grateful.”
A wife shouldn’t have to be “grateful” that her husband gives her food and shelter, I thought angrily, but now wasn’t the time to rail about that. I kept my voice calm. “Being grateful doesn’t mean you have to put yourself or your mother in danger, Flora. Let me ask you one more thing. If you tried to leave, do you think he’d be angry?” I used the words she used: “Would he ‘go on a rampage?’”
Again there was a long silence, before a single word: “Yes.”
“Flora, I want you to take down my number. I want you to know you can call me anytime you need to talk about it, okay?” I could hear rustling as if she were shifting the phone and I gave her my phone number. It sounded like she was writing it down. “And please tell your mother, too? And give her the number of this national domestic violence hotline: 1-800-799-7233.” Again the writing sounds. Good. “Tell her she doesn’t have to want to leave her relationship to get support. They’ll listen. They won’t judge.”
“Oh, Maddie,” she said before she hung up without saying good-bye, “people always judge.”
I found Chino boxing his reflection in the mirror in the bathroom. When he saw me he chuckled and shrugged like he’d just been goofing around, but his moves had looked legit to me. I handed him the phone.
“Well?” he asked.
“I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t know if I say he sounds dangerous,” I said. “But you can’t make your mother leave him. If he is an abuser then he breaks her down psychologically so she believes she’s worthless without him. They typically isolate the victim from their families and other people, and convince them that only the abuser is trustworthy, and to be paranoid of everyone else. Then if someone tries to intervene, it’ll look like he was right when he said people will try to split them up. His paranoia will seem justified.”
“That’s twisted,” Chino said.
“Very. But if that’s what’s going on, you can’t make her see it. She has to come to see it for herself. The only thing you can do is try to get her to trust you. To believe that she can tell you anything and you won’t judge her for it.”
Chino’s shoulders slumped. “How am I supposed to not judge her? She’s the one who kicked Dad to the curb and then fell for this guy. She’s the one who uprooted us from here and moved us halfway across the country to marry him.”
I knew those were childhood wounds talking, but I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound condescending. Instead I put a hand on his shoulder and found myself suddenly pulled into his arms. I wrapped mine around him, too, feeling the quaking of rage deep inside him, helpless about his mother and unable to do anything about it, no matter how deeply he cared for her.
“It’s going to be okay,” I ended up saying, because I had to say something. “We’ll keep trying.”
He let go of me as suddenly as he’d embraced me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yank you into all my family’s bullshit.”
I grabbed a handful of his shirt. “Is your family another thing you don’t let people see?”
“What do you mean?”
I wasn’t the only one he had kept all this from. “You don’t let your bandmates see your apartment. I bet they don’t know about your family, either.”
He didn’t meet my eyes though he put an arm around me. “They know my family’s so religious they don’t listen to rock music. That’s pretty much all they know.” He closed his eyes and his voice was thready with pain. “But you think he’s abusing her. You think she’s abused.”
I tried to keep my voice gentle, but it seemed to echo in the tiled bathroom. “Yeah. I do.”
“I can’t believe I left her there. No wonder she won’t ever talk to me.”
“Your mother?”
“I mean, it’s obvious now; isn’t that what you’re saying? That we should’ve seen it sooner. I was just so glad to get out of there and I blamed her. I actually blamed my own mother for it…”
“Hush, you were sixteen and you were under threat, too.” I tried to pull him toward sitting down in the living room but he didn’t move, just swayed like a tree rooted to the spot. “Did he ever smash anything else like the TV?”
“It’s like Flora said. Because he never crossed the line to raise a hand to her, she can believe maybe it’s only things that happened by accident. You don’t want to believe that the man your mother loves is going to hurt her.” His eyes were still shut and he was practically vibrating with rage. “This is the first time Flora came out and admitted that she’s scared.”
“Abusers are very good at keeping people on their side and convincing them nothing’s wrong.” This time when I tugged him toward the living room he let me lead him onto the rug, but then stopped short, clenching his fists.
“I’ve been so angry with my mother for so long, for choosing that bastard, and then…you know, I try to call her and sometimes she doesn’t call me back. Or when she does call all she wants to do is ask me when I’m going to let Jesus save my soul.”
“Keeping her from talking to her family or friends, isolating her, that’s a classic thing abusers do.”
“Shit.” He bowed his head. “And here I’ve been thinking all along it’s that…she doesn’t love me.”
Chino was too much of a tough guy to cry at that admission, but I wasn’t. I felt wetness on my cheeks while he sucked in a breath in a kind of dry sob. He looked up at the skylight. “And I left her. Abandoned her. I don’t deserve—”
“Hush, no, Chino.” I hugged him and he hugged me reflexively, hard. “You didn’t know. If you’d stayed it might have only gotten worse.”
“What am I going to do?”
“You’re going to keep in touch with your sister. She might be able to get through to your mom. Maybe…maybe your mom is getting ready to break away and he knows it, and that’s why he�
�s escalating.”
“I want to go get her,” he said.
“Rescue her, you mean? How, kidnap her? If she’s not ready to go, Chino, you’ll really make it worse. She needs to trust you.”
“How’s she going to do that?” He spoke through clenched teeth: “Her devil of a son.”
“You don’t believe that,” I said softly.
“I’m too much like my dad, my real dad,” he said, anguish squeezing his voice. “That’s what she said. She’ll never trust me.”
“It’s been years, you said. You’re a good man, Chino.” I kissed his cheek, his ear, trying to assuage his pain with little affections. “Maybe she’ll be ready to see the man you’ve become.”
* * *
CHINO
When you’ve believed something for a long time it’s so difficult to see something different. I knew that, but I was counting on my sister to believe something other than what she’d been told all her life: that our stepfather was a saint and that rock and roll was a one-way ticket to hell.
But I had to challenge my own beliefs, too. Some of them didn’t even make sense, contradicting each other. Like part of me believed my mom had only married him for the money, because she was tired of being hungry and overworked and sending me to school in the same jeans every day because I was outgrowing them faster than she could afford to buy new ones. Another part of me believed she did it for love, that the only thing that could justify what she’d done to my father, to me, was love. Now to find out maybe it wasn’t either of those things, or maybe that it was somehow both? To have it thrown at me like this when I was two thousand miles away—and unable to do anything about it—crisp-fried my brain. I felt simultaneously like I was going to collapse and like I was going to explode. Everything was raw. Everything was wrong.
No, not everything. Soft kisses trailed my jaw. Madison. Madison was everything right in my world. The scent of her shampoo, and the enticing heat of her skin as she sweated anxiously on my behalf, penetrated the fog of rage and hurt clinging to me.
I pulled her closer, bringing her mouth to mine, and was amazed to find her tongue coaxing mine out, gentle licks encouraging me to part my lips and a sinuous tongue tip drew its counterpart out to play. A moment later I had her head in my grip and my tongue fucking her mouth. Yes. Taking her mouth felt right. Here was something I could control, something I understood. I kissed her until my own lips went numb, but when she tried to pull back I held her firmly until my tongue forced lustful moans from her throat.
One of her legs was wrapped halfway around my hip. Mm. I pulled back at last to look at her. Her lips were slick, her eyes glazed, her mouth slack and ravished. She blinked at me once, then in one swift motion peeled free of her T-shirt. Her bra was beige and I could see her nipples pressing the fabric.
I gave the barest nod and she reached behind herself and unhooked the bra, then tossed it aside.
Yes, gorgeous breasts, and very much mine. She bared them, lifted them and offered them, and in her eyes I could see the supplication, offering them for pleasure or pain, for whatever my desire should be. I ducked my head directly to one nipple and suckled hard, tonguing the nipple and nipping it with my teeth. When she yelped I moved to the other, biting it first, then soothing it with laps of my tongue.
But my thoughts continued to tumble and fall. What if that bastard hurt her? What if he’d been hurting her in secret all these years? Guilt turned my insides to icicles, fearing the worst, fearing everything that could have happened and which still might. The sixteen-year-old me that had left home wanted to go back and kill the bastard. I took a step back from Madison, trying to take deep even breaths.
Madison looked at me, her eyes searching mine. “Chino, please,” she whispered. “Don’t pull away from me now.”
I shook my head. “I’m sliding down into the darkness.”
“Don’t.” Such a simple little word, and spoken so quietly you’d think I could have brushed it aside. But I couldn’t. It was the tiniest grain of defiance—how dare she tell me what to do?—but it caught my attention. “Slide down into this instead.”
She slipped her jeans and panties off and then stood there stark naked in my living room, hair loose, skin glowing in the light from the skylight overhead. I drank in the sight of her but tried to act unmoved, as if the most beautiful woman I’d ever known stripping herself naked in front of me was no big deal.
She held my gaze, her eyes blazing with magnetism, as if she were readying herself to say something devastating. But instead of saying another word, her tongue darted nervously to the edge of her lip, and then she slowly sank to the carpet, to her knees, her eyes never leaving mine.
My blood, which had been pounding with rage and hate, now pounded in a different direction. I popped the button on my fly with one hand and twitched one eyebrow.
She got the message. I don’t know which was more arousing, that she instantly knew my desire or the way her hands felt as she lowered my zipper, pulled my erection free of my shorts, and cupped my balls in preparation for taking me into her mouth.
She remembered what I’d told her about what I liked, the way to work the shaft with her tongue and the head with her fleshy inner cheek. I pulled off my own shirt to give myself an unobstructed view down my front to her mouth being stretched by my cock.
“Slowly,” I told her, because I wasn’t interested in coming, I was interested in her working me, in her submission and obedience.
And she didn’t falter. Even when I could see her jaw was tired and she needed to wipe her nose and her lips were sore. Her eyes were closed and I could see her lids were shiny with unshed tears. That was when I took hold of her head and pumped my cock in and out, never deep enough to make her gag but kicking my arousal up to the next level. “Good girl,” I said, words starting to spill out of my mouth as I let the troubles of the outside world fall away and the world of just us two close around me like a bubble. “Good girl, oh that’s it. Yes. Give me your mouth, give me your body. Yes, girl, yes.”
When I pulled her up to give her a break, to give her air, her eyes were closed and her mouth was open like she was ready for me to plunge back in whenever I wished. “Tell me what you want now, Maddie.”
I was expecting her to beg to be fucked again. I was expecting her to tell me this was as deep as she could go and she needed me that much. We were both as raw emotionally after Flor’s phone call as we’d ever been, and I had never felt how much I loved Maddie before that moment. “Tell me what you want, sweets. Time for a reward.”
She opened her eyes and said something completely unexpected. “Did you come home with the paddle?”
I knew the one she meant. The leather studded one she’d taken from the Governor’s Club and brought to Palm Springs. “Yes, it seems to have made its way into my toy bag,” I said. “Wonder how that happened?”
“Paddle me? Please?” Her voice was tentative, quiet, but clear.
I rubbed my palm along her arm since her butt was out of reach. “And why should I paddle you, sweets?”
Again, what she said wasn’t what I expected to hear. “Because you love me?”
“You are a delight.” I pulled her up into a hug. “Toy bag’s in the bedroom. Go get the paddle and bring it to me.”
Her leaving the room gave me a moment to gather my wits. Did she know how good this was for me? Just when I’d been ready to slip into a hopeless, dark place—a shadow of my time on the streets, motherless and fatherless, helpless against the power of a man I couldn’t touch—here was Madison, reminding me of what power I had, giving me strength. And I needed her strength, too.
When she returned with the paddle, she appeared at the doorway of the bedroom with it and then hesitated. “How should I bring it to you?”
“Oh, you mean, should you crawl over to me with it in your mouth like a puppy? Puppy doesn’t feel right, does it?”
“No, sir.”
“What feels right to you, Maddie? Do what feels right.”
She took a breath, then carried it in two hands and knelt in front of me, offering it up like a scepter to a king. I took it and swung it in the air. “You must want to find out what’s going on in your head as badly as I do.”
“I want any barriers between us to be gone,” she said. “I realized if I don’t know myself, I don’t know if I can love you the way you need. Or if I can even b-be loved the way I need.” Her voice shook a little, as if admitting she needed love had been hard for her.
Maybe this was going to work, then.
“Knowing you better can never be bad,” I said. “I want you to be mine, Madison. Wholly, truly mine. Body, heart, soul. Good, bad, and in-between. Maybe we’re going to find nothing inside Pandora’s Box, but I’m going to try to open it anyway.”
Chapter Thirteen
MADISON
“I think you know the position and the rules.” He gestured to a suitable spot on the apartment wall.
“Yes, sir.” I put my hands against it and glanced back at him.
“Stick your rump out a bit more, would you, sweets?” Chino said. I bent over further and spread my feet flat against the rug. He rubbed my bare ass with the palm of his hand. “Are you nervous?”
“Yes,” I said. Then, “I mean, I’m kind of jittery with anticipation but I’m not, um, using the warning word.”
“Good. Points for being clear.” With that he began to spank me with his hand, warming me up slowly, intimately.
I was already in subspace, but his touch and the sensual sting of the spanking stoked my arousal. I loved being spanked this way, each swat layering atop the previous in a gradual buildup of intensity.
He paused to shuck his shorts. I stole a look back at him. His cock strained upward and he was swinging his arms, loosening them up.
He picked up the paddle and rubbed the non-studded side against my bottom. “Here we go, sweets.”