“I said you can’t leave,” she repeated coolly. The mood between them had changed so quickly, she found it unsettling. Moments earlier, they had been completely naked together, lost to desire, and now they were both fully clothed with Sean shooting her a confused, accusing glance.
“I can and will leave,” Sean said tersely, almost baring his teeth at her like a cornered animal.
“No,” Erin said sternly, placing her hands upon her hips in a dominant gesture. “You will stay because you owe me an explanation.”
“I don’t owe you anything,” Sean shook his head and made for the front door but Erin was too quick and moved herself to the hallway, blocking the entrance.
“I can break you as easily as a matchstick. You know that, right?” Sean scoffed, his eyes crinkling with amusement.
“Is that a threat?” Erin queried, the temperature in the house suddenly feeling cooler.
“No,” something about Erin’s question made him falter and his shoulders dropped and he backed away from the door, then wandered aimlessly back into the lounge.
“I’m not…I’d never hurt you,” he looked at Erin with wide, sincere eyes. She nodded but felt alarmed at why he would take such a comment so seriously. She’d meant it only to provoke him.
“I’m not like that,” Sean continued, flopping down on to the sofa. His face looked pinched with despair.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Erin sat beside him and placed her hand upon his back. “It’s just, you can’t leave. You do owe me some sort of explanation for everything.”
“Explanation for what?” Sean asked, his eyes fixed ahead.
“Why you left the other night while I was sleeping, why you quit your job, why your apartment is empty,” Erin listed all the questions to which she was desperately seeking answers.
“You went to my apartment?” Sean asked his voice indignant.
“You left me no choice!” Erin blurted.
“You shouldn’t have gone there,” Sean shook his head angrily.
“Sean, please, I just want answers!” Erin begged.
She was desperate to know more about this man who was such a mystery to her. She was so inexplicably drawn to him and his life was completely shrouded in secrecy. It felt like he had some sort of second hidden life that she was oblivious about. But she wanted to know, wanted to forge a connection with him which went deeper than sex.
She saw the troubled look upon Sean’s face and became determined to get him to open up to her.
***
“Why do you always choose these bad boys?” Erin’s mother had asked for what felt like the millionth time as she stood in the hallway of their home, her eyes boring down on her daughter who was standing with one hand on the door handle, ready to leave.
“It’s none of your business,” Erin answered from behind clenched teeth. She was fifteen and angry at the world.
“It’s my business when you bring it here.”
“I’m not bringing anything here, I’m leaving.” Erin was ready for a night out, dressed in her ripped denim jeans and leather jacket, eyes dusted black with makeup.
“He’s bad for you,” her mother warned.
“Why? Because he went to juvenile detention?”
“He’s done bad things,” her mother said, her gaze level and wise.
“And he got locked up for them! He’s paid for what he did!”
“But he won’t change.”
“He will!” Erin protested.
“You think you can change him, but you can’t, Erin. Once someone lets the dark in, they cannot let it back out. I just want you to deviate from this path before it’s too late.”
“You’re such a hypocrite!” Erin screamed at her mother, feeling fill of teenage rage, needing to release it at the nearest object.
“You talk of being a good Christian, of forgiveness, yet you judge Jared based on what he’s done in the past! Why can’t you forgive him?” Erin raged.
“Do you even know what he did? Why he was sentenced?” her mother asked, her voice remaining calm and level.
“I don’t need to know,” Erin retorted defiantly. “I judge him for who he is now.”
“You should really ask him what he did. He won’t change, Erin. You can’t turn people back from the darkness.”
Angered, Erin threw open the front door of their Connecticut home and dashed out in to the night.
Jared, her current boyfriend, was waiting for her on his motorcycle. With his dark brooding eyes, he looked handsome and demonic at the same time. Erin pulled herself on to the back. Neither of them wore helmets; Jared didn’t believe in them.
“You ride a bike for the thrill, for being on the edge,” he’d said when she asked about them. “Helmets ruin that.”
Back when she was fifteen, Erin didn’t fear death, she didn’t fear anything. She admired guys like Jared for going against convention and being brave enough to forge their own path.
“Where are we going?” Erin asked in to his ear as he kicked the bike in to life.
“You’ll see,” Jared replied mysteriously as the bike roared off in to the night, leaving Erin’s mother peering from behind the curtains of her home, her face pinched with despair.
Jared drove Erin to an abandoned barn on the outskirts of town. Some of his friends were already there, lounging around in the vast empty space, drinking whiskey from the bottle and smoking joints.
As they entered, his friends greeted Jared and high-fived him. As always, they ignored Erin. She was transient to them; soon enough, he would be escorting another girl around town on the back of his bike.
The night darkened and the group drank, smoked, and listened to music. Erin’s own mind became fuzzy from it all. Jared sat beside her the whole time, his arm draped protectively around her.
Erin liked being Jared’s girl. He was so charismatic and brooding. And when he kissed her, it was full of intense passion. At fifteen, Erin was convinced that they were soul mates.
The night wore on and couples among the group began to disappear to more secluded parts of the barn. Jared followed suit, taking Erin by the hand and leading her up a rickety old ladder to the higher part of the barn where hay had once been stored. Now there was only rotting wood, which creaked precariously beneath their weight.
“Is it safe up here?” Erin asked nervously as Jared pulled her over to a dark corner.
“Safe as houses,” Jared replied flippantly. They began kissing but Erin pulled away. Something about what her mother had said stuck in her mind.
“What’s wrong?” Jared asked, his tone sounding more annoyed than concerned.
“Can I ask you something?”
“I’ve got protection.”
“No, not that,” Erin blushed profusely. Even though she liked to pretend that she was womanly and wise to the world, she was still a teenage girl merely playing dress-up to be like a woman and at times, her true self showed.
“I know I’ve never asked before, but I’ve wondered what you did, why you ended up in juvenile detention?” Erin asked carefully. As she watched Jared’s features darken, she immediately regretted asking the question.
“I thought you didn’t care,” he said bitterly, his jaw clenched.
“I don’t!” Erin implored, stroking his cheek. “I just want to know; I thought it would make us closer.”
Jared stared deep into Erin’s eyes, ascertaining her true intent, and then sighed.
“You really want to know?”
“Yes.” Erin held his hands, wanting to show him that no matter what he did, she still loved him; they were still soul mates.
“In high school, I was accused of raping a girl.”
Rape. The word fell between them like a lead bullet.
“Obviously I didn’t, but it was my word against hers and let’s just say that I didn’t have the cleanest record even then.”
Erin wanted to believe him, if only to prove her mother wrong. She wanted to believe that the darkness that had o
nce inhabited his heart had gone, that people could be redeemed. But as she sat there in that old, disused barn, she recalled the times they had been together. Each time was forced and heavy, but Erin reassured herself that it was normal. Jared could be rough and brutish when they made love, but Erin had confused his heavy-handedness for passion. Realizing her mistake, she shrunk into herself.
“You believe me, don’t you?” Jared demand, looking at her accusingly.
“Of course I do,” Erin smiled weakly. And there on the rotting wooden floor, to prove her loyalty to him, she allowed him to have her as beneath them, his friends continued to drink and smoke until the small hours.
Arriving back home, Erin tried to creep in the front door as quietly as she could but she needn’t have bothered; her mother had sat up, waiting on her return.
“Did you have a good night?” her mother asked from her vigil in the kitchen where she was sitting with the light on nursing a cup of coffee.
“It was fine,” Erin replied flatly, unable to meet her mother’s inquisitive gaze.
“I don’t like you coming in this late.”
“I’m going to bed,” Erin declared, eyes still trained to the floor. Her mother watched her skulk upstairs with a heavy heart. She realized in that moment that her daughter had unwittingly began to let darkness in to her life and now she risked it tainting her future forever.
***
“Sean, you owe me an explanation for it all,” Erin pressed, her mind briefly remembering the painful moment when she had confronted her teenage love, Jared. She’d not liked what he had to say to her, had not been prepared for the bombshell he had dropped and how that had ultimately made her feel. But she was older now; she told herself that she could handle whatever Sean had to say to her, no matter how bad it was.
She already assumed that he had a drug problem that he was going to confide in her about how he was addicted and owed money to bad people. It was a story she’d heard countless times before from the guys she had dated. Few things had the capacity to shock her anymore. People did bad things; she accepted that.
“Sean, please, if you care about me at all, you’d tell me what is going on with you,” Erin urged, her voice soft and gentle. She rubbed his back, impressed as ever with how muscular it felt beneath his t-shirt. She wanted to deepen her connection with Sean, didn’t want them to be just about sex.
But she braced herself for what he might say, for the damage his secrets might cause. As she’d learned with Jared, there are some secrets that should stay buried. Following the rape revelation, she tried to stay with him, to see the good in him, but all she could see was the power-hungry, selfish man he could be and how poorly he treated her during and after sex. Erin could fool herself no longer; she’d fallen in love with a monster and allowed him into her heart. The worst part of it all was how that made her feel to have judged someone so poorly. And as her mother had feared, Erin then felt like she didn’t deserve the good guys, the ones with pure intentions. She was tainted and needed to feed only her bad-boy addiction because she didn’t dare risk ruining a genuine good guy.
“I…I can’t talk to you about it,” Sean lowered his head in to his hands and sighed.
“Why not? You can trust me!” Erin urged, feeling hurt by his apparent lack of confidence in her.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me,” Erin pleaded. She thought of Jared and the other troubled guys she had dated. The one thing they all had in common was their dark secrets, and Erin took those secrets in and kept them safe with her own. They could trust her. She, more than most people, understood how destructive darkness could be once it had a hold of you.
“I’ve…done things,” Sean said mysteriously, glancing at Erin from the corner of his eye.
“Okay,” Erin rubbed his back, comforting him, encouraging him to relax and confide in her.
“I’ve done terrible things,” Sean continued, his voice growing strained with emotion. Erin was silent, watching him without judgment, waiting for him to reveal his innermost secrets.
She felt there was no deed terrible enough to shock her anymore. She’d dated men tried for rape, murderers and criminals. She had the ability to see past the awful things they had done to the men they were trying to be. At least, that was what she told herself. Her mother saw it a very different way.
“They will taint you,” her mother sternly told a seventeen-year old Erin.
“I don’t care,” Erin had shot back, still wearing her uniform of all black. She even wore black lipstick now, enjoying how gothic it made her look when coupled with her naturally black hair.
“You can only dance with darkness for so long before it consumes you.”
“I don’t care,” Erin said the words slowly as though explaining something to a very young child. Her mother frowned at her condescending tone.
“Just because you dress like a witch doesn’t mean you have to be one,” the older woman said, tucking a loose strand of grey hair back behind her ear.
Growing up, her hair had been as black as Erin’s, shining when it caught the light. But since her daughter hit puberty, it had quickly greyed. As a child, Erin was always fascinated by the darker elements of fairytales, focusing on grim details like a curse or the villain who cast it. Her mother tried to dismiss the behavior as childish fantasies that she would eventually grow up, but as Erin began to progress from a girl in to a woman, her obsessions became darker and thus more dangerous.
She watched her daughter flirt with danger, even get into bed with it. And each night lost to worry cost her a strand of her raven hair until eventually she had none left to give; it had all turned grey, aging her beyond her forty years.
“You’re just jealous because I’m young and having fun and your life is over,” Erin spat spitefully, pulling on her jacket, preparing for yet another night out.
Her mother watched her with sad eyes, drooped in resignation. She felt that the battle had been lost, that Erin had allowed herself to become tainted with the darkness. But it wasn’t entirely her fault. She didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was born of both light and dark because she herself had once fallen for the lure of a bad boy. Only his wickedness transcended the discretions of petty thieves; he was a man who was cursed. His curse had defined him and ultimately taken him from her, but she had loved him with her whole heart, a heart which was pure.
The child they made was a product of both, a perfect symmetry between the balances in the world. But a physic had warned her early on in her pregnancy that no one can exist between the two extremes, that one day her child would turn to one side or the other; Erin’s mother had tried desperately to lure her child away from the darkness, but it had all been in vain. It seemed that her daughter was destined to repeat her own mistakes and that was a life she wouldn’t wish on anyone.
“Erin, please stay in tonight, just this once,” her mother pleaded. Erin looked at her, flashing her an angry scowl from eyes that seemed as black as coal. She had chosen her path.
“Goodbye, Mother,” she said before storming out of the house, making sure to dramatically slam the front door behind her.
***
“How are you feeling?” Erin asked gently as she handed her mother a fresh cup of coffee which she accepted in her frail hands. It was hard to understand how her mother could be aging so rapidly. She looked to be in her eighties when she was actually more than two decades younger than that.
“I bet it’s nice to be home,” Erin continued, glancing around the home that had once been hers. The wallpaper was now faded, as were the carpets, but the house retained its comfy charm.
Her mother was silent, looking out of the window at the trees dancing slowly in the late afternoon breeze.
It had been a week since she’d been out of the hospital and it was the first day Erin had come to visit her at home and she’d not said a word.
“I don’t get why you’re not talking to me,” Erin said, sitting down in a chair close to h
er mothers and leaning forward, her expression taught with concern.
“I had a lot of time to think in the hospital,” her mother sighed wearily. In the yellow sunlight that fell upon her, she looked so fragile; her skin, which looked like paper, stretched over bones that ached with arthritis.
“But you’re out now,” Erin said brightly.
“The more I thought, the more I realized that I failed you.” Her mother blinked back tears.
“Mom, don’t be stupid, you never failed me,” Erin confirmed, weary from the countless conversations they were having lately along a similar subject.
“I did,” her mother turned and looked at her with watery eyes. “I did because I let you fall to the darkness. And now it’s too late.”
Erin sighed at the doomsday talk. Her mother kept lamenting about how it was too late, that they were out of time, yet she only skirted around the topic, never actually divulging what she really meant so it just sounded like crazed empty threats to Erin and she’d heard it all before.
“Mom, you need to rest, you’re talking crap again.”
“He’s close, you know.”
“Who is?” Erin demanded, losing patience for the conversation. She preferred her mother’s silence to the crazed laments about time and darkness.
“The man who will be your end. He will cement your place in darkness.”
“Oh good lord,” Erin shook her head and blew out an exasperated breath. “I’m a disappointment, I get it. I don’t pick the right guys. You’ve said all this crap a thousand times. I came to see you today to check in on you and all you do is bully me as usual.”
“You never had a chance,” her mother sighed sadly to herself. “I see that now.”
“Well, I’ve got to get back, I’ve got work early tomorrow and it’s a long drive home.” Erin stood to leave, checking around the room for anything else she could do for her mother before she left but the place was looking pretty tidy and maintained. Even in her feeble state, her mother remained house proud and would tire herself cleaning before she’d let herself rest.
Phases of Passions (Trilogy Bundle) (Werewolf Romance - Paranormal Romance) Page 8
