Pretty, Dark and Dirty: A Forbidden Romance

by Margot Scott

  “I knew you were sitting for him during the day,” my mother said, wringing her hands like she was trying to squeeze the blood from them. “I thought that was the extent of it. Then I found a sketchbook in the trunk of his car—he’d let me borrow it while mine was in the shop. I saw that he’d been drawing you in your sleep. The thought of him sitting there, watching you in the dark while you were helpless made me...uncomfortable, to say the least.”

  The bottom sketchbook was only halfway full. I recognized the pajamas I was wearing in the first drawing from the year I’d turned twelve—the same year Mason had left without so much as a Catch you later.

  “I asked Mason how long he’d been drawing you at night,” she said. “He told me not long, a few months. I said I didn’t want it to happen again, and he assured me it wouldn’t. A few weeks later, I stopped over at his place to pick something up and I found these. He’d lied to me.”

  I flipped to the very last drawing: me on my stomach with my arm dangling off the edge of the bed and my hair fanned out across the pillow. Obviously, my father had been coming in to draw me a lot longer than just a few months. But surely that wasn’t enough of a reason to banish him forever.

  “That’s it? He lied to you about drawing me?”

  “It was enough.”

  I squinted at the pages in front of me. “I don’t understand.”

  My mother closed her eyes and pressed three fingers to her lips. She looked fragile, more so than usual, like she’d shatter if I tried to pick her up.

  “I didn’t grow up like most people, Jett. My parents were wealthy—and I don’t just mean they were rich. I mean we had old money. Our house was a historic Victorian mansion sitting on hundreds of acres of untouched land that’d been handed down for generations. We had a name that meant something to the town we lived in.”

  She pressed a hand to her stomach, then took another bite of granola bar, chewed and swallowed.

  “My mother homeschooled me for ten years,” she continued. “After she got sick, my father hired tutors, music teachers. I didn’t meet anyone who wasn’t a relative or an employee the entire time I lived there, and I only left the property once when my appendix burst.”

  I stood with my mouth hanging open. I’d never heard the story of my mother’s upbringing, and hearing it now, I could hardly wrap my brain around the strangeness of it.

  “My father let most of the staff go after my mother died. The place became a tomb. The housekeeper could hardly keep up, so she closed off the parts of the house that no one used. I used to sneak into the old drawing room to get away from—”

  She closed her eyes.

  “To get away from what?” I asked after a long stretch of silence.

  “Our groundskeeper demanded my father let him hire an assistant to help with the mowing. That’s when Mason came to live with us, in the groundskeeper’s cottage. He was nineteen. I was fifteen. He was the only person remotely close to my age I’d ever met besides my cousins, and we hardly ever saw them.”

  My mother began to pace, scuffing her boots with each sharp turn. She looked deep in thought, like she’d fallen down a rabbit hole inside herself. The next time she spoke, it was like a levee had burst, and the only way out was through her mouth.

  “We were broken people, Mason and me. His mother had given him up for adoption, and the foster-care system hadn’t done him much better. Of course, my father forbade him to speak to me. That lasted all of a week. We began seeing each other in secret. Then I got pregnant.”

  My whole body went taut. Pregnant?

  “Mom, are you saying...”

  “I couldn’t raise a child in that house,” she continued, ignoring me. “I knew we had to leave. I told Mason my father would kill us both if he found out we’d been sleeping together, so we made a plan to run away. We left the day after my sixteenth birthday.”

  My stomach plummeted twelve stories.

  “It was harder than I thought it would be,” she said. “I couldn’t stand crowds and I couldn’t hold down a job. But Mason took care of us—all of us. He swore he would never let his child starve, and he kept that promise.”

  “Mom, are you saying... Is Mason my real father?”

  She turned to look at me. “Would it be so terrible if he was?”

  I had to brace my hands on the table to stop my knees from buckling.

  “But you said he wasn’t.” I clamped my mouth shut. I couldn’t let her see how much the possibility that Mason was in fact my father had rattled me—and was still rattling me.

  “Honestly, I wish I hadn’t said anything. Maybe if I’d gone on letting you believe he was your real father, you wouldn’t have let him get close enough to abuse you now.”

  “He’s not abusing me.” I was so fucking confused. “Mom, for once in your life, please just tell the truth. Is Mason my real father, or isn’t he?”

  She gazed down at her hands, which had begun to shake. I rounded the table to take her hands in mine.

  “Please Mom,” I begged. “I need to know.”

  My mother’s throat shifted as she swallowed. “I was seven years old the first time my father raped me. When I told my mother what had happened, she said I was just having a bad dream. I tried to tell her again and she slapped me. She knew what he’d done, and she did nothing to stop it.”

  “Oh... Mom.” My stomach revolted at the thought of my mother being violated by the man who was supposed to protect her—

  Her father. My grandfather. My mother’s rapist.

  Bile washed the back of my throat. I dropped the sketchbook and ran to the sink just in time to vomit into the steel basin.

  My thoughts ran in circles. It can’t be true. How can it be true? But I knew in my heart that it was. Acid burned my throat. My mother gathered my hair into a makeshift plait, stroking my back the way she used to when I got sick to my stomach after eating too much candy. When the nausea subsided, I rinsed my mouth and the sink, then turned to face her.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  She took my hands in hers. This was the most forthcoming she had ever been with me, and I could tell it was taking everything she had not to crumple in on herself like a dying spider.

  “It didn’t happen all at once,” she said. “It started when I was little, the slow chipping away at my boundaries. We were so isolated... I thought it was normal. By the time I met Mason, my father was raping me almost every night. I wanted to tell him, but I was scared he wouldn’t believe me.” Her voice cracked. “You believe me, right, Jett?”

  “Of course I do.” I pulled her into a tight hug. She felt like a sprite in my arms, like she could sprout fairy wings and fly away.

  “Don’t you see?” She left my grasp, coming to stand before the pile of sketchbooks. “When I found these, I realized what I’d thought was a healthy fascination was actually the makings of a sick obsession. I was so scared for you. I told Mason to leave immediately and cut off all contact with you, or I would take these sketches to the police.”

  Glancing back at the very last drawing, I tried to see it as anything other than a charcoal study of a sleeping figure. But I could find nothing sinister in the portrait, nor in any of the others, nothing to differentiate them from the kind of drawings I’d be making in art school. It had to be the sheer volume of them—pages upon pages of sprawled limbs tangled in rumpled bedsheets—that had struck a nerve with my mother.

  To the untrained eye, these drawings could look criminal. But I knew better. What my mother had gone through wasn’t the same as me and Mason. For one thing, he’d never forced himself on me. For another, I wasn’t a child. I was old enough to make my own decisions.

  “Mason told me I was insane to think he’d ever hurt you,” she said. “But even if he hadn’t touched you, that didn’t guarantee he wouldn’t someday. Turns out I was right.”

  My thoughts swirled like water circling a drain. As far as I could recall, Mason had never abused me. But my mother wanted me to believe that the p
ossibility had always been there, lurking in the shadows at my bedside. That had to be what she’d hoped to convince me of by showing me these drawings.

  I picked up the sketchbook I’d dropped on my way to the sink and joined her at the workbench.

  “You’re wrong, Mom. I am so, so sorry for what happened to you. But Mason isn’t like that. He never abused me.”

  “Then how do you explain that?” She pointed at the painting. “What person, in their right mind, would let their child pose for them like that? What child would feel comfortable masturbating for their parent?”

  “It’s art, Mom. It doesn’t have to make sense to make a statement. And I’m not his child.”

  “But you were.” She took a deep breath to steady herself. “If I hadn’t kept him away from you all these years, would you have let him paint you like that?”

  I honestly didn’t know. It was possible that I would’ve felt comfortable enough letting my father see me naked. It was also possible that in forcing Mason out, my mother had made us mysteries to one another, and mysteries needed solving.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m here now, and I feel good about it.”

  My mother’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Every decision I have made was for your protection. I took you far away from the only home I’d ever known. I gave you another man’s name. I became a single parent overnight, and I never asked for one cent of Mason’s money. Now, I’m not asking for gratitude, but could you at least respect my sacrifice?”

  “You forced my father out of my life based on a hunch and threatened to use his own art against him. I’m fucking devastated for you, Mom. I really am. But it sounds to me like Mason made the bigger sacrifice.”

  My mother flinched as though my words had physically hurt her. A small part of me was glad. I blamed her for separating me from my father, and then I felt awful for blaming her, and then I didn’t know what to feel, so I felt nothing and then everything.

  She wiped the tears from her eyes. “Can’t you see that he’s just using you to punish me? That painting is a slap in the face. My face.”

  I scoffed. How typical that she would try to make his painting of me about them, as if our relationship was merely an offshoot of something they’d started. “That doesn’t make any sense. You weren’t even supposed to see it.”

  “Jett, wake up! Of course I’m supposed to see it. Everyone is going to see it. Shining a light on things that should be private is what Mason does.”

  I needed to step back, to reclaim some space, to remind myself that I wasn’t as trapped as I felt and that I still had a choice. To believe her or not. To remain here, in this room, or not.

  “You won’t understand,” my mother said. “Not until you have children of your own. Not until you have to look into the face of the man you love and ask yourself if he’s really a monster.”

  I stared her down. “Mason is nothing like your father. He loves me. We love each other. He would never hurt me. You’re wrong about him now, just like you were wrong about him back then.”

  “For your sake, Jett, I hope I’m wrong.” Her bottom lip trembled. She leaned forward, as if gazing deeper into my eyes might help her see the truth more clearly. “If it’s not too late, if he hasn’t already fucked you, do yourself a favor and get out while you still can. Because once you cross that line, it changes you. There’s no going back.”

  I’d never seen my mother cry more than a few solitary tears before tonight. Now it was as though the floodgates had opened, allowing a rare, unguarded glimpse at a person I’d spent my whole life struggling to know. I saw the defenseless child and the hardened, distrustful teen, the overprotective mother burnt by the past and terrified of the future.

  She stood before me vulnerable and exposed, as she must have the day she’d told her own mother what her father had done—the moment her mother had chosen to side with a monster against her own child.

  “I had hoped to bring you home tonight,” she said. “But I see now that you have no intention of letting me help you out of this situation.”

  I pushed past the twinge of revulsion and frustration corkscrewing through my belly. “Because I don’t need help, Mom. I’m okay.”

  She shouldered her purse, took one last plaintive look at me and said, “Take care of yourself, Jett, since you obviously have no interest in letting me take care of you anymore.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  I watched my mother leave and then sat on the futon with my head in my hands and my heart in my throat. Another wave of nausea washed over me, followed by a flood of pity. Pity for my mother and everything she had gone through, and for the havoc her decisions had wrought upon the lives of those closest to her.

  My father hadn’t wanted to leave me. It was my mother who’d pushed him out. Because she wanted to keep me safe from the shadow of the man who had hurt her.

  Of all the potential reasons behind Mason’s abandonment, I had never considered anything like this. I felt wrung out like a rag, limp and useless. I wanted to wrap myself around him and let the strength of his body support me. I wanted to press my ear to his chest and listen to his heartbeat. The slow, dependable throb I’d come to rely on to lull me to sleep.

  I rinsed my mouth again and took a moment to dry my eyes before returning to the apartment. Mason stood at the kitchen sink, staring into the drain as though hypnotized. I approached him slowly.

  “Mom told me who my real father is,” I said. He closed his eyes. “She says she was raped by her father... My grandfather.”

  Mason let out a long breath as he reached for me. I let him pull me close.

  “I’m so sorry, Jetty.” He cradled my head in his big, warm hand. “I can’t imagine how difficult this must be for you.”

  “Did you know?”

  His body tensed in the seconds before his reply. “Not for sure. But there weren’t a lot of men in your mother’s life at the time, which left only a few possibilities.”

  My eyes burned with tears. I’d thought I was done crying; apparently, I was mistaken. I clung to him like a small child as he lifted me up and sat me down on the kitchen counter.

  “None of this changes who you are, Jetty.” He kissed my trembling lips. “You’re your own person, and you’re a good person. What that evil man did has no bearing on who you are now.”

  I desperately wanted to believe that.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “I’m going to reach out to a few people, find you a professional who can help you get through this.”

  The thought of talking to anyone about the awful truth made my skin crawl. “Can’t I just talk to you?”

  “You can always talk to me. But your first semester of college is going to be hard enough without the shadow of this ugliness hanging over you.”

  “I just want to forget I ever knew any of it.” I sobbed into his chest. He smoothed my hair and rocked me gently in his arms.

  “I wish you didn’t have to know any of it, sweetheart. And I wish I knew the right things to say to make it all better. But you need to process this, otherwise it’ll haunt you. I’ll make some calls in the morning.”

  He held me as my sobs tempered into sighs. I doubted I’d ever feel comfortable talking about the things my mother had told me, but Mason was right. If I tried to bury the truth, I’d end up just like her: cold and bitter, a body haunted by secrets and shrouded in lies.

  “Well,” I said, trying to sound chipper, “at least now we can tell people you’re not really my dad.”

  “We will, I promise. But not just yet. If the bastard is still alive, he might try to find you. I want to know where he is before we say anything.” He dried my tears with his thumbs and then kissed both my cheeks. “I’ll kill the fucker with my bare hands before I let him come within a ten-mile radius of my little girl.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at the possessive tone his voice had taken. I was still his little girl, even though we both knew where I’d come from. He kissed me gently on the li
ps. I tried to deepen the kiss, but he pulled back, his expression restrained.

  “What else did Gretchen tell you?”

  I didn’t want to talk about the drawings or why she’d made him leave, because as far as I was concerned, there wasn’t a drop of truth to it. But I didn’t want to lie to him, and a lie of omission is still a lie.

  “She told me why you left,” I said. “She even brought your old drawings for me to look at. I think she thought seeing them would make me feel differently about you, which is ridiculous.”

  Mason closed his eyes and took a step back. Something in the air around us shifted, as though a sinkhole had opened up between our feet.

  "People hear the word love and automatically think sex,” he said. “You were my daughter and I loved you. You were beautiful, so I watched you. Photography wasn’t my forte, so I found other ways of capturing you. I would've sooner put a bullet in my head than let anyone lay a finger on you, including me."

  He rounded the kitchen island. With every step, I felt him slipping away, like air leaking slowly from a balloon.

  “Maybe it was for the best that I had to stop drawing you,” he said. “Being scrutinized like that when you’re still growing into yourself has to be tough. At least you got to have a normal adolescence."

  If normal meant happy and well-adjusted, then there’d been nothing normal about my adolescence. “You really think I was better off not knowing why you left or where you’d gone?”

  “Compared to the alternative? Yes. Leaving you isn’t something I’m proud of, but it beats having to tell your twelve-year-old that her mom thinks you’re a pedophile.”

  The abject pain in his voice hit me like a sledgehammer.

  “I thought about fighting it,” he said. “But if you weren’t my biological kid, I had no legal standing. Then I imagined what a big court battle would’ve been like for you. Having to answer a bunch of disgusting questions about our relationship, not to mention the possibility that other people would see what your mom saw in those sketches. I didn’t want to put you through that, and I sure as hell didn’t want you to have to carry it around.”