After my suicide attempt in high school, I lost myself in a crazed, sexual frenzy. Cutting only did so much for me, but sex . . . Sex did something for me. It took away the pain. Amazingly, there were a lot of guys who wanted to take away the pain.
I entered our kitchen, still decorated like when I was growing up: light, orangey looking wood cabinets and laminate flooring accentuated by a hideous floral-patterned wallpaper. Dad never changed a thing after mom died. It’s not like she would have noticed. She never noticed when she was alive.
“This smells delicious,” I said feigning appreciation at the TV dinner my dad had laid out on the table. “You realize it’s not even Thanksgiving yet? Don’t spoil me now.”
“I can’t help it!” My dad grinned, pouring me some juice. “You’re my little girl!”
It’s a day before Thanksgiving and my dad hasn’t planned any type of dinner.
“Oh, Lennox, I didn’t think about it,” My dad said when I asked what we were doing for Thanksgiving. “Why don’t you go to the store and get a turkey and all the other stuff?”
I looked at him like he was crazy. It was a day before Thanksgiving. The only turkeys left were the ones hiding in the attic and that one that gets pardoned by the President every year. I suggested ordering Chinese or some other ethnic food from a restaurant that is always open on Thanksgiving but, somehow, I ended up at the market looking for a goddamn turkey the day before Thanksgiving.
I was browsing the aisles, looking for something to make for our increasingly hopeless dinner, when—
“Lennox.”
Naturally, I jumped. What kind of creepy fuck sneaks up on a person and says their name like that?
It took me two seconds to recognize the voice. Two seconds to remember the kind of creepy shithead that sneaks up behind a person and says only their name like some serial killer in a movie: Vic.
I was anything but pleased to see him. In fact, it was a good thing that I wasn’t on the aisle with turkey carving supplies. I might have had to carve me up some Vic for Thanksgiving.
I folded my arms, waiting for him to explain why he was in Seattle. Why he believed it necessary to track me down and ruin my holiday.
“I’m sorry,” Vic said after a few moments of staring.
I wasn’t expecting that. I wasn’t really sure what I was expecting, but the last thing I expected to see was Vic Wall in a Seattle market. Inside I was surprised, curious, and a little swoony, but outside I was stone. In reality Vic Wall’s apology didn’t change anything, and I was trying to learn to live in reality.
I glared at him, my arms still folded.
“I know that doesn’t change anything,” Vic continued, like he was a mind reader. “But I need you to listen to me, Lenny.”
I scoffed, shifting on the balls of my feet. I should step on his foot or knee him in the balls. Calling me “Lenny” after everything? Coming to my town? I balled my hands into fists. As though anticipating my actions, Vic took a step back.
“Listen, Lennox, things have changed.” Vic ran a hand through his long, black hair. He was wearing it down today. The black tresses caught the fluorescent supermarket lighting.
I mentally cursed him. Even in this horrible lighting, he still looked drool-worthy. Under supermarket lights, I looked like a witch.
“You’re in danger,” Vic said matter-of-factly.
I laughed. “Christ, what else is new?”
Vic stepped forward and took my chin in his hand. “This isn’t funny, Lennox. People are after you.”
I blinked and wrenched my chin away. “Don’t touch me.” I over-enunciated each word.
Vic hesitated for a moment, appearing to wrestle with the idea of letting me go, but stepped back. He lifted his hands up in surrender.
Being the masochist that I am, I prolonged his stay by asking him what people were after me. It wouldn’t change a thing. I don’t care if the KGB is after me, I’m not returning to Vic. I’m not returning to that life. I’d already made up my mind the minute the plane landed on the tarmac at SeaTac.
After Thanksgiving ends, I’ll quickly get my stuff from my apartment in Santa Barbara, pay an exorbitant fee for ending my lease early, and come back to Seattle. I don’t know what I’m going to do after that, but I do know I needed to stay the hell out of Santa Barbara.
“People in my line of work. That’s all I can say right now.” Vic glanced around the supermarket as if at any moment a bad guy was going to pop out of the cereal.
I frowned, disbelieving. It’s unbelievable the amount of money and pills that have gone in to making me “normal” but every person I meet seems to be abnormal. There’s Dean, of course, who was clearly off his rocker. My mom, she’s long been six feet under for her abnormality. It only takes a few days with my dad to realize he’s not quite there. And now Vic, acting like a poster child for paranoid schizophrenics.
But I’m the abnormal one. I’m the one who needs pills.
Okay.
The entire mess with Vic and Dean has given me a chronic tension headache. I’m popping painkillers like they’re gummy vitamins. Let’s say Vic isn’t crazy. Maybe people are after me because, after all, my life has devolved into a Spanish telenovela. I don’t care. I don’t give two fucks. Nothing is going to change my mind. I want away from Vic. I want a new life, one where I have the option of actually making choices for myself.
“You need to come live with me,” Vic said, taking a step closer to me.
If I had been drinking water, I would have spit it out all over his face. “You’re insane. After everything, you think I want to live with you? I can barely stand to be in the same room with you.” My tension headache was threatening to explode into a full-blown migraine.
I was here to get a turkey (an impossible task in itself), not debate the improbable with my so-called ex-lover. It was like I was Alice and had fallen down the rabbit hole. The supermarket, with its price checks, sales, and families shopping, had become the deviant in my life. Vic with his death threats and outrageous propositions, they were the norm. How had that happened?
It made me want to cry, but I had already cried all my tears.
“Lennox, please. People are trying to kill you. If it makes you feel better, it will only be temporary,” Vic pleaded. His eyes were big and the blackness in them seemed to be stealing me away to another realm, like the time in the black room at the Regal party.
I shuddered, looking away.
“Yeah, that makes it loads better.” My words were almost unintelligible coming out between clenched teeth.
“Look,” Vic said. The timbre of his voice had hardened like stone.
Instinctively, I readied myself for a fight.
“You’re staying with me whether you want to or not. Your safety is non-negotiable.”
I stared at him, my eyes wide. Was he fucking joking? I’m not going to be a prisoner to him just because he thinks he's a white knight. I was trying to think of the best way make him understand this when he said:
“Lennox, you don’t need to love me to let me protect you.”
Hot molten anger shot through me. Sometimes I hate Vic Wall so much. He is just so brilliantly stupid. He says asinine things like “You don’t need to love me.” I do love you Vic. I love you so much that I can’t stand to be in the same room with you, you fucking twat. And the fact that he comes up to Seattle asking, no, telling me to move in with him like it’s no big deal?
“I can protect myself Vic,” I replied. Clenching and unclenching my fists until the skin was white, I continued, “I have to get back to my dad. He’ll worry if I’m gone longer than an hour.” Total bold-faced lie. I was gone for months and my dad didn’t do anything. I think he’ll be fine if I’m gone longer than an hour, but Vic doesn’t need to know that.
“These are vicious special ops. They have training you can’t even dream of. Dean is a cuddly bunny compared to them,” Vic growled.
“Oh, I don’t know. I think if I tried really hard I cou
ld dream up some of their training,” I spat. We both stared at each other, in an aisle of a supermarket, while strangers went about with their shopping. Occasionally one of us would say “excuse me” when someone needed to get at an item we were blocking. It was all very surreal.
I sighed, and with that sigh, all of my frustration and anger wafted away like the ash cloud in a volcano. Noxious, deathly fumes leaving my body. I sagged against my cart, only filled with pumpkin puree.
“Why do you even care, Vic? You make it so clear anytime I start to get close that you don’t give a shit. Do you get off on torturing me? Is that it? You just don’t get enough of it in your day job that you need a little thing to torture at home?”
Vic snapped his head to the side like I’d smacked him in the face. “Fuck you, Lennox.”
“You’ve already done that,” I pointed out.
“Stop acting like the victim,” Vic said.
That did it. I shoved the cart away from me, and it crashed into a display of canned cranberry sauce knocking the topmost ones to the tiled floor.
“You keep making me the victim!” I shouted. “First the cabin, then Dean, then your wife,”—I was attracting stares now—“and now this!”
“You came to me about Dean!” Vic jabbed a finger at me, his voice rising in volume to match mine.
A young shelf stocker was quietly picking up the dented cans of cranberries while pretending to ignore our heated conversation.
“Only after I exhausted all my other options,” I countered. “I’m not some porcelain doll that’s going to break! Dean threw me against a fucking wall, stalked me for months, and yet I’m still here. My mother killed herself and my father checked out, I’ve been battling mental illness my entire life . . . I know how to take care of myself! Stop treating me like a child!” I was standing as tall as I could make myself, arms straight against my sides and my head held high.
“It’s the only way I know how to care for you. How am I supposed to love you when you’re running around banging your head on rocks and getting raped by perverts?” Vic asked me in a serious tone.
I scoffed. “I wasn’t wearing come-fuck-me heels or something and wearing a sign that said ‘rape me.’” If I had been wearing a sign that said “come rape me,” did that constitute consent? Alright, I’m getting off topic now.
Vic’s voice cut into my rambling thoughts: “Did you hear me, Lennox?”
I peered up at him, glaring. “Yeah, you basically said I can’t handle myself. Ass.”
Vic shook his head. “I said ‘I love you.’”
I frowned. “What?”
“I love you.”
“No, you don’t,” I said caustically. This back and forth, this push-pull, was breaking my bones as well as my heart.
“Yes, I do.”
I folded my arms. “Then why do you keep hurting me?” Emotionally, I was a bruised peach from all the times he’d dropped me.
He frowned. “I don’t know. I’m not very good at this. Will you help me?”
His question stunned me. Vic was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a man to ask for help. Was I willing to help him? Was I willing to put myself out there yet again? I don’t know. I don’t know if I was willing to allow myself to be vulnerable to him again. If I did, and things went south, well, it might actually kill me. I can survive vicious physical attacks, but I can’t survive another heartbreak by Vic.
Having been silent for more than a minute, I finally asked, “Are you actually saying you want to try?” I paused, collecting my thoughts, then continued, “That you’re not going to run away the first time it gets hard? No more of this ‘I’m not good enough blah- blah-blah’ shit?” I said, mimicking his voice.
Vic’s mouth twitched at my imitation of him, then he broke out into a grin, nodding.
I shifted a little, trying to ignore the effect his smile had on me. It wasn’t okay for him to use me up like tissue and then come down here acting like nothing happened. But, I did want to try with him. Fuck, every molecule in my body wanted to try with him. There was no denying I was going to say yes. My mind wasn’t allowed the option to consent, because my being had already given itself up.
Still, I hesitated. I wanted to be strong, self-reliant, and deny that I needed him. Ultimately, I lost to the magnetic force that linked me to him.
“Okay,” I said, “because, for a tough guy, you’re kind of chicken-shit.”
Vic laughed. Oh, my God. It was a beautiful laugh. Loud and bellowing. It warmed me from the inside out.
“Well, Lennox,” Vic said, “you’re kind of scary.”
I stomped my foot. “Am not!”
Vic laughed at my petulance. “Yes, you are. You’re so like a diamond: hard, but easy to shatter.”
I frowned. I really was easy to shatter.
Vic lifted my chin up, like he’d done so many times before. “I love you, Lennox Moore, and I’m never letting you go again.” There was a finality to his words. The type of cadence you hear from a man about to be hanged, not one declaring his love.
I swallowed. I didn’t know what to say to that. I was still so utterly furious at him, but more than that, I was terrified. I’d tried to give myself to him so many times, and so many times he’d said no. I recognize that a lot of that was my fault. He’d told me that he wasn’t ready, that he couldn’t handle it, and I didn’t want to hear it. Notwithstanding, I’d done it anyway and I’d been hurt. And what about his wife? I wasn’t exactly cool with being a mistress; before, I hadn’t known. Now I did, and I didn’t relish being that woman.
Rationally, I recognized how fucked up it was to go back to him. I understood that it was a terrible, insane notion to follow him back to Santa Barbara. Sort of how I recognized watching a scary movie would make it hard to sleep, but I watched them anyway. Rationality flew out the window when it came to Vic, because I needed him like I needed air and water. So, even if it killed me to be with him, I would keep trying, because it was killing me to be without him.
I didn’t tell him I loved him back.
He went home after I agreed to stay with him until the threat passed. Vanished right out the automatic grocery store doors.
Maybe I was a fool for believing him so easily. If you look back at my life choices, a lot of them could be labeled foolish. It was foolish of me to date Dean in the first place. Foolish of me to drop out of college…
Maybe I was a fool.
We agreed the living situation would be temporary, but we were going to work on keeping our relationship lasting. He said he loved me, after all.
Still, I couldn’t tell him I loved him. I did love him, of course. Utterly and completely, and probably long before he realized he loved me. Which was why I wasn’t telling him. He had a history of breaking my heart, and I wasn’t giving him any more ammo. I didn’t trust him anymore.
And so, in our typical Vic-and-Lennox messed up way, we had established a solid start for our new relationship.
I didn’t want to stay in Seattle for Thanksgiving anymore. Everything was up in the air, and I didn’t know if I was up there with it.
My dad knew something was up, but he didn’t ask. He would never ask. He just wished me good luck on the return home and told me to call him. Absentee parenting at its finest.
Before I dropped my suitcase off at my apartment—or Vic’s apartment, I guess—I stopped by Zoe’s. She was home, by some twist of fate. I’d forgotten it was Thanksgiving Day and that people had lives and families. She looked mildly surprised.
“Moving in with me?” She asked, eyeing my suitcase.
“No,” I said, deflecting. “I just wanted to see how you were.”
Zoe eyed me suspiciously. There was so much shit between us now; I didn’t know where to begin. The last time I’d seen Zoe, she’d been unconscious on the floor. Before leaving for Seattle, I’d found out that she was still alive, but I hadn’t tried to contact her.
I know. Friend of the year award goes to…
We had
n’t talked since that night. I’d seen her occasional social media updates, but that’s the extent of it. (Yeah, now that Dean’s gone I’m on social media.) Zoe went from being the closest thing I had to a best friend to someone I stalked on social media. Everything is just so goddamn fucked. I don’t know what I can say and can’t say about Vic and Dean. I don’t know what happened to her after Dean threw her into the wall outside my apartment, and I don’t know if I can ask. So I just don’t. I just let the rift keep growing.
Twice before in my life, I’ve experienced a very bizarre feeling; it was now happening for the third time: my life isn’t mine, it belongs to another. The first time happened when my mother killed herself. The second time was when I tried to kill myself. And now, here it was again. You’d think I’d have some cheat sheet to snap myself out of it—I don’t. After years of therapy and medication, all I can say now is that I can recognize the feeling. I feel lost. I feel confused. I feel sad that my friend is gone. And I feel out of control. Years of therapy have given me the power to acknowledge my feelings. Whoop-dee-freakin-doo.
“I’m good,” Zoe said, still standing in the doorway. “There’s actually a lot of business over Thanksgiving. Families visit and screw up people’s home systems. It’s easy freelancing money.”
I nodded along, not really listening to what she was saying. I was watching her; watching for a clue that let me know how she felt about me. Nada.
“So, really,” Zoe continued, “Why are you here? It’s got nothing to do with me, I know.”
Ouch.
“I’m really sorry, Zoe,” I said. “I’m no good at friendships. The only friends I’ve ever had were in high school and those were only the fucking kind.”
Zoe crossed her arms and eyed me up and down, deciding if I was still worth her time. “Well, here’s a tip: friends don’t completely ignore friends and then show up only when they want something.”
I nodded.
Zoe unfolded her arms, apparently accepting me again. “Okay, so why are you here?”
“It’s not important,” I said, wanting to leave. I wasn’t about to start Zoe Friendship 2.0 off on the wrong foot.
You Own Me (Owned Book 1) Page 18
