Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75022 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 375(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75022 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 375(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
“Baby…” Crow said, giving my knee a firmer squeeze. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I know,” I said, nodding. I did know that. “I even knew that then. But I also knew it was going to happen again if I didn’t get out of there. We didn’t have anyone else. So when my mom left to, I imagine, listen to Brent lie about how I seduced him or something like that, I packed everything I could carry with me, stole the Tiffany necklace Brent got my mom to hock, and got out of there.”
“Where’d you go?” he asked, his hand absentmindedly rubbing my knee as he drove.
“I took a couple buses into a shitty area where I knew people wouldn’t give a shit if I looked seventeen. I hocked that necklace. And I bought a really crappy old car with the money from it. That car was home for the next year. With the occasional break sleeping in the woods in a hammock or renting a motel room when if I was somewhere cold and winter had set in.”
“What did you do from there?”
“Worked. I worked odd jobs. Waiting tables. Working in stores. Walking dogs. Babysitting. Literally anything I could get my hands on since that car ate money and I was not only trying to take care of myself, but set money aside to build on the dream I’d been creating in my head.”
“Living off the land and away from people.”
“Well, working in retail and food service didn’t exactly endear me to the human race,” I said, getting an airy laugh out of him.
“How’d you… come to do what you do now?” he asked. “Did you go back and take out Brent?”
“No,” I said, hearing a certain hollowness in my voice.
Brent was a regret.
I think I’d been so young and feeling so damn helpless that there was no way I could have acted against him.
As I got older and wiser, as I built my knowledge, it was just so far to go back. And a part of me was terrified of running into my mom, knowing that wound still ran deep, still festered.
“So every one of these fuckheads that you take out, in a way, you’re taking out him?” Crow asked.
“I guess, yeah.”
“Where’d you learn all the poison shit?”
“That’s a combination of things. I was just really into nature learning as a kid. I devoured foraging books and biology books.”
“Yeah, normal kid shit,” she said, shooting me a smirk.
“But then, as I traveled across the country, I stopped in a town for a while where a lady had a particular interest in poison gardens. She taught me a lot. And, sort of with a wink, told me to ‘do with that what you will.’”
“So you did.”
“So, I did. I mean, it hadn’t ever been the plan, per se. But it seemed like everywhere I went, I came across more and more women who had a story like mine. One in three of us, in fact,” I said, cringing at that statistic, as I always did. “And one day, I just… snapped. I decided to do something after I heard a really horrible story. I went way overboard on the poison that time. He was bleeding out of… everywhere as he died.”
“Fitting end in my opinion.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, nodding. “Then there was one girl I came across. And she sort of said she would pay someone if they could make the man who starred in her nightmares go away. And I just… did it. Then it sort of spiraled from there. It sounds sick, but it’s cathartic. Taking them out. Knowing they won’t be able to do it again, to traumatize more women and kids.”
“It doesn’t sound sick to me,” Crow said, shrugging.
“Maybe only because there’s something dark inside you too,” I suggested.
I left it there.
Open-ended.
Giving him the chance to speak or move on.
I expected him to move on.
I never thought he would tell me his story just because I’d told him mine.
But that was exactly what he did.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Crow
It’s hard to keep your cool when a woman is telling you the story about how she was raped by a man she was supposed to be able to trust. As a child, at that.
But you had to keep your cool. You had to let them get it out. I got the distinct feeling that while Morgaine listened to a lot of stories of women like her, she didn’t often tell her own story.
I felt honored that she told me.
Even if it was clearly the darkest time in her life.
I couldn’t imagine that kind of betrayal.
I mean, I guess, most of us with complicated pasts had some amount of betrayal there. But to go to your own mother with the story of your assault only to be blamed for it?
Yeah, I couldn’t imagine that shit.