He ducks his head in from the kitchen, holding up a bottle of my long-lost buddy Jack and two glasses. I nod and wave him in.
“My life is a mess. I’m an accomplice to an as-of-yet I don’t know what. No, I do know what. Start with Mommie Dearest in the basement. Strike one. And when has Gretchen ever had hard words for me? And I’m a problem she needs to deal with now? Not to mention Blue, my misplaced friend. And Javi, breezing in, acting like she never existed? Like he drove out to the forest and rehomed a wild bunny, for Pete’s sake. I’m in the middle of my own funhouse, no exit in sight, so, yeah, I’ll have a drink. Make it a double.”
I hiccup as he pours two glasses, both to the rim, and hands me one. “Drink for me on three. One, two…” But I don’t need the foreplay. I’m pouring another by three. He shrugs at my brazen downing of a full juice glass of fire, then downs his own brown liquid. It’s one of those days, his shrug seems to say.
I nod. It is. I wipe my mouth and head to the throne room.
I go and wash my clown face while he finds a T-shirt and a pair of his sweats for me. “You’re staying here,” he commands through the closed door, and for some reason, I feel relief. I do not want to go back to the Chubby House tonight.
“I’ve got clients,” I say halfheartedly, feeling the fear that has gripped me since the moment I heard the truck in our driveway start to loosen.
I open the door only to find him standing there, bouncer-style. “You are not going anywhere.” He drapes sweats over my shoulders, using the legs as a scarf, which he wraps around my neck. He uses it to pull my chin up. “No ands.” Kiss on the forehead. “Ifs.” Kiss on the nose. “Buts.” He wriggles his eyebrows suggestively, before saying against my willing mouth, “About it.”
I melt into his kiss, happy that at least the spike in his pants doesn’t think I’m a burden.
“Perfect,” he says, and I laugh, looking down at my cupcake-covered kitty standing out like a sore thumb.
I swipe the Harley Davidson T-shirt out of his hands and say, “Out!”
I think about leaving the cupcake thong on since he likes it so much, but it sticks out like I’m sporting a strap-on.
I don’t need Riley getting excited. This is so me not in the mood. I opt for commando and head out to the living room, minus the tear tracks.
He looks up when I come in. Takes in my freckled face sans tear tracks and makeup.
“You good?”
I nod and take a seat beside him. He’s rubbing the grease off his arms and hands on a shop rag. It seems my lady drama caught him mid oil change.
“This might in no way be related to what’s got your nipples in a twist.” I wind my hand. I don’t need a disclaimer. “I gotta tell you about a phone call. I think it might have something to do with this state you’re in. Frankie, my buddy from the bar, remember him?”
I nod, “I do, the one that graffitied all over Blue. What’s this have to do with the price of tea in China?”
“Yeah, well, he called. Sounded good and lubed up at first, and I asked him, but he said, ‘Nope, sober as a judge.’
“Seems he hasn’t been sleeping. ’Cause when he does, he dreams of a girl in trouble.” He pulls me against his chest, hugging me to him, steeling me. “Your girl Blue.”
My kitty ears perk up at this. “What in the mother of all fucks could tagger biker boy from the bar have to do with my missing friend?”
“He saw her, in his dream but not really. He called it one of his visions. He’s talked about them before. Says he saw her chained or tied to a bed, crying, desperate.”
I cringe at his words. Just thinking of my girl, who I promised that I’d keep safe—hell, even promised that Javi was safe, too—hurting, alone and in need, cuts me deep.
He hugs me closer. “Sorry, babe. It’s just Frankie and his own brand of crazy. He thinks he’s been touched and given the gift of sight or some shit. More like touched in the head.”
He taps the side of my head to drive his point home, but I push away, facing him.
He says through a soft smile. “Maybe she called him. To go get her.” He’s trying so hard to get my kitty hopes up.
But I don’t think so. She’d be too broken up. Too hurt. “I wanna talk to him.”
He nods and takes a swig from the bottle of Jack before handing it back to me. “And you will, but first I need to know whose ass I gotta beat. Who’s the fucker that got my brass-titted girl all worked up?” I look at the pure violence in his eyes, and think, we’re gonna need a bigger bottle.
“Can you call him?”
“Later. I just hung up with him when I saw you sitting out in the car in the middle of a breakdown. He’s in the foothills, no more service.”
I look at him, wondering why he thinks I should know any of this.
He sees that I’m not following his line of man talk and adds. “Driving up to meet your friend, Gretchen.”
“What? And you’re just telling me this now?”
“Yeah, one emergency at a time.”
I call Gretchen. No answer.
Riley keeps calling Frankie. No dice.
We’ll know soon enough, but I gotta know. “How did those two even meet?”
Riley shrugs. “Thought it was you.”
Blue
I’ve crested the hill of the dying and entered the valley of the dead. I ate the last of the roll early this morning. Tasted like sweat and Secret. I cried when I ate it, it was so good.
There was little to no sleep for me last night. Between the leg cramps and full-body tremors, I almost missed the incessant terrors of the shadowed corners.
It’s weird. I was so hungry yesterday, I was sure my stomach would start eating itself, and now, twenty-four horror-filled hours later, I don’t feel as much as a rumble. It’s as if my appetite’s already gone. Shrunken, shriveled right up and died.
The pain, torture, humiliation, thirst, agony, just all of this whole fucked up situation catches up to me and a single thought sums up my day.
Today, at around what should have been lunchtime, I sharted down my leg. As the hot liquid oozed down my leg, tracking shit through my menses-coated thigh, I laughed out loud.
“Of course!”
To the empty room. My dried-out body continued on with its bodily functions. I stopped having a say when I got myself into this situation.
That was the first time I heard it.
The giggle.
I know. I thought the same thing. Critters. Surprisingly, Javi buttoned me up nice and tight. At night, I see four-legged shadows outside. But just me and the fly in here. And he’s not talking.
Maybe he’s tittering though. Then it becomes my life’s mission to see the fly. My neck feels like it’s a loaner that hasn’t been taken care of. With any type of movement, the throb in my temples turns into icepicks.
I give up on trying to see him. It’s too much work. May he rest in peace.
I try to go back to sleep—the only place I can go and get some reprieve. No pain, no hunger, no quicksand throat, which feels like it’s starting to fill in.
Once I’m asleep, I dream of the ocean. Sea lions. A blue-eyed one in particular. The eyes look wise, like it knows more than what it’s saying, which is nothing. I just want to float and look at my sea lion, but the sun’s too hot. My back’s on fire. The refreshing saltwater lapping my back now feels like acid.
I need a shower. Gotta get this acid of off me.
“I don’t even want a drink anymore, just splash the hose over my body, would ya?” I sound like I’m drugged.
“Hello, blockhead.” I feel a ghost fist rap my skull. “Ee…dee…ot, hello! Is Sara in there? Or have you just planted roots and turned my girl into a drooling idiot?” Two more raps for good measure.
My whole body goes slack.
“Sara’s here,” I whisper, keeping my lids tightly sealed.
I don’t need to see her. I can smell the stink of desperation under a heavy top coat of Chanel No. 5.
&nbs
p; “Hello, Mother.”
I suffer through a wracking case of the shivers as a fever ravages me, burning me from the inside out. Yet she drones on. How I ruined her life, how I couldn’t stay off the laps of the daddies, how she could have made something of herself if I wouldn’t have done her the discourtesy of planting myself in her belly.
Muscle cramps seize the soles of my feet; the pain is excruciating. Somehow, I muster my energy and bark hoarse shouts that turn into maniacal screams. Every scabbed spot in my throat ripped raw.
I feel something essential tear in the middle of me, burning my stomach raw, like the head of lit matchsticks.
She never shuts up, so I don’t either.
At one point, “Home girl, you talk too much,” blurts out of me. I bob my head to the beat that sounds suspiciously like rap. That is my wretched, sickly heart.
I make the dreaded cry face, devoid of tears. My body’s a few vials short these days.
Sometimes I scream. A few times, full belly laughs tear my stomach in two. But always, I sweat.
I’m drenched. My hair’s wet.
My mouth has a dank, mushroomy undertone.
The mother rants on, making the fillings in my back teeth ache.
“Won’t you just shut up?” I try to command the mother, a woman who has lived her entire adult life pliable, bending to the will of others. Accommodating to a fault, can she just, this once extend her daughter the same courtesy that she extended to her husband? The pedophile in priest’s clothing. That’s who she gave all her allowances to.
Stuck in a fever haze with a mother hell-bent on chewing the fat off my ass, I scream myself hoarse, anything not to have to listen.
I sleep. No, this isn’t sleep. I’m right on the brink, hanging on by my fingernails. It’s there that I remember the first time she asked me to change myself. For a man.
Mothers, as a rule, are supposed to nurture and love you unconditionally, are they not? Well mine never did. She treated me like her monkey on a leash in this great organ grinder called life.
The only people who got allowances for bad behavior? Her many boyfriends. If they shit on the rug, I was called in to clean up the mess. She was in charge, even when I knew better. And I slid right over and let her take my control. That’s what it always comes down to. She wants the fucking wheel back.
I could just fall over the brink, tumble in and…give it to her.
I come to and after listening for a full minute, realize I’m raving about shadows that bite. Maybe I’ve already been rescued and am just too delirious to even know it. I might be, at this moment, tied to a cot in an emergency room, ranting about her.
She would love nothing better than to stick a bridle in my mouth and chain me to her little doo-be wagon. Wants me for the dirty work. The chitck! of an expensive cigarette lighter scares my eyes open.
There you are.” She breathes a dragon’s breath of cigarette smoke in my direction. I smell the acrid smoke.
“I’m much prettier when I’m not tied to the bed.” It sounds childish, but it’s been a long time. She needs to know. I’m not at my best.
“About time you woke up. I’ve been talking to myself all day.” She wrinkles her nose and points with the hot end of her cigarette towards my soiled girl parts. “You really have got to do a better job in the Hi Jean department, little Miss Sara with no H.” The pet name comes out like a curse.
I nod. If I could cry, I would. This reunion is going just the way I’d always thought it would. Drama, guilt and shame have entered the building.
If I had tears, they’d be pouring down my face. “I’ve missed you, Mom.”
I drift off during our hellish reunion, my disheveled state and pitiful life bared naked for her perusal.
Mean snickers and devious whispers invade my dreams. The words stab my heart, reopening poorly healed wounds. An evil laugh makes me lift my head, now filled with bricks and mortar, to peer into the corner. By the moonlight, I see her there. My mother, a movie star in her own right, touching heads with the preacher.
Two conspirators, huddled, sharing a snicker over a little girl who screamed and squeezed her eyes shut at the first act of lewd behavior.
“I don’t believe it, a daughter of mine…” She leers suggestively my way, and my bones feel like shards of spun glass as I remember this exact conversation. I’d been hiding, waiting for her to come find me. He said he was gonna tell and he did!
“…Acting like a scared little church mouse.” Her act is not lost on me. An Oscar winner in her own mind, she tosses her perfectly coiffed blonde locks back and chortles out an amazingly fake laugh. It’s a move I know all too well.
She’s pissed but holding herself in check. Keeping her anger at bay, wrestling the leash around its neck. Waiting for the exact moment to sic it on me. My mother would never even think of confronting the bastard and losing her meal ticket.
No, she’ll store the sickening rage in one of her favorite green Tupperware containers. Her heart probably has a pop-in seal container for freshness. She’ll hoard those leftovers of hurt, pain and jealousy and will gorge me on them later when the preacher’s out of earshot.
And it will sound like we’re discussing the weather and not how to avoid your stepfather at all costs.
The he’s spoken for kind of mother-daughter talk I can recite in my sleep.
A single sob escapes me as he raises his head—blond crewcut shorn to the skull, gray glistening just around the edges—and grins at me, taunts me. His eyes, black as coal.
To my mother, he jeers, “I wonder if I can make her scream now.”
He pulls away and stands. The harsh rip of a zipper and the cackle of a conspiring shrew get left behind as my mind mercifully hovers somewhere on the brink again.
My skin crawls under his papery skin. “Another inspection? In my state?” Then, no more. I dive into unconsciousness.
“I passed out or slept, but who’s counting?” I croak to an empty room. The first rays of dawn pierce the gloom. I watch the sunrise on this day. My last, please God. I’m sure my eyes would cry. If they could.
Sasha
Later, as I drift into sleep, both phones on loud next to our heads, I replay Gretchen’s harsh words on the lawn. Turning them this way and that. Trying to turn a negative into a positive, I mull over them without the fear of Javi clouding my judgment.
Safe and secure, tucked in next to my man, her words replay differently. It goes something like, “I’ll never get to the bottom of it with you snooping around Nancy Drew-style and riling him up like you always do with your accusations. Honestly, Sasha, I don’t know where your head is half the time...” before she turns her back on me. No sisterly hugs going on now. “Every time you rile him up, it takes me twice as long to convince him you’re not a spy. That you are, in fact, on our side and can be trusted. Everything is questioned, so thanks for that, Sasha. It’ll take me all afternoon just to get him to give me anything to go on now.”
Were those the words? Muttered out of the side of her mouth so cameras couldn’t see? Muffled so microphones wouldn’t pick up her words? While my anger thermometer was reading Overload, was she trying to tell me something?
I sit straight up in bed, which doesn’t disturb the lump sleeping next to me, he sleeps like the dead. Gretchen didn’t need to say it. It was there if I shut my mouth and really listened to what she wasn’t saying. I sit up. “She was worried for Blue, too!”
The rhythm of Riley’s snores marches on.
Blue
“Why!” I scream at the darkened room as the clouds roll in, blocking the sunrise. By tomorrow, my body may still be here, but the essential me, my mind will be gone.
Today, being the worst day of my life and all, I was a fool to think I could sleep.
“Why did you leave me?” I beg through a veil of tears, though my face is dry.
“Why?!” I scream again and again, cursing the evil that put me here in the first place. Javi. He did it. No one with horns and a forke
d tail. It was my sweet, adorable Javier who did this to me.
Sometime during the night, through a haze of fever, I felt an inspection starting. Hands roaming over me, and without even waiting to be told, like a good little girl, I let my thighs relax and attempted to splay my restrained legs—for his viewing pleasure—before diving back down into a fretful sleep.
I keep telling myself it wasn’t real. Fever dreams. They couldn’t be here. But the inflamed, violated skin of my private area begs to differ.
He waits for me, there in the shadows. The stepdad. Her husband. My captor. Swirls of Javi’s face intermingle with that of the stern preacher’s. Taunting me. “Wider.” As my mouth is wrenched open. The official tooth count, making sure no adult teeth were in my head. Who knows why.
That’s how it always started. I let my jaws be pried open, careful to sheathe my teeth with my lips. I’d bitten him once back then.
As a confused little girl with something foul breaching my tightly sealed lips, I remembered or dreamed it. But it really happened. I gagged on the coppery taste of blood, gagging, pulling away from him. He tried to push me, but in my panicked state, with him holding his dripping Penis! That dirty meat was in my mouth. Ugh, gag me with a spoon! I used my pink Sears coverlet to wipe my tongue dry.
His curses were what lured the mother. She should have stayed in bed, feigned sleep. I wish she would’ve, because what happened next changed my view of her. “I said no touching, Herbert! What part of ‘only looking’ don’t you understand? Hands to yourself!” she shrieked as her hard gaze took me in.
I tried to hide, cover myself, but I didn’t know what happened to my pajamas. I was naked.
“And you!” She whirled back in my direction after the husband was tucked away out of the room. “Keep your drawers on, girl! Last goddamn thing I need is a grandchild!” With that, she slammed my door shut.
I ran to the dresser, ripping open my underwear drawer and hastily pulling on an elastic pair of white ones with blue flowers, and the matching T-shirt with the bow on the front. So fast, I tore the elastic in two places.
Black and Blue (Chubby Chasers, Inc. Series Book 3) Page 13
