Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 88114 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 441(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88114 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 441(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
“Mom said he hit you.” Kellen says it with a sharp deadpan, struggling to keep his composure.
I nod once. “He’d shout at me for a while and work himself up into a frenzy. Once he was really mad, then he’d kick me to the ground. Sometimes I’d try to run, but he’d catch me and it would be much, much worse. He’d slap me, punch me, beat me until I cried. He’d only stop once I was crying, but sometimes he kept going until he saw blood. He didn’t scar me the way he scarred you, but he left bruises, dozens and dozens of them. I got good at covering them up.”
“God damn it,” Kellen says, voice low and husky with rage. “That fucking piece of shit.”
“The staff all knew. They saw what he did but nobody ever came to stop it. Most of the people from that era are all gone now. I think they were afraid of him doing it to them, so a lot of them quit and moved on and never said a word, but as far as I know, it was always me. He’d show up, vent his aggression, beat me lifeless, and walk away. On weeks he did it more than once, I’d be so hurt that I’d have to skip work entirely and sit around the cottage. One time he came around when I was too bruised to get out of bed and he broke inside, dragged me into the living room, and kicked me until passed out. I woke up to an empty house and slept on the floor for hours. I don’t know how I’m not dead because he was trying to kill me a little at a time.”
“Tara, I’m so sorry.” He comes toward me slowly, but stops before he gets too close. “I didn’t know. I had no clue.”
“I know you didn’t. You weren’t here, remember? You were out doing your own thing and I stayed behind in that cottage, digging in the dirt, hoping I could put my pieces back together, but every time it felt like I got close, your father would show up and beat the sadness back into me. It was a sick, vicious cycle, and it went on for years.”
He groans and closes the gap between us. I let him take me into his arms and I cry into his chest. I don’t know why I’m crying—the memories are so real still, but Orin’s dead and he’ll never hurt me again—but it’s like I’m breaking all over again. Kellen’s arms wrap around me and I sob for all the time I lost and all the pain I endured, all because I feel like I deserved it.
Because I lost Cait.
It’s my fault Cait is dead. Everyone knows I was the one who lost her and maybe that’s why nobody came to help me when Orin vented his anger. She overdosed while shooting up with me, and I was too high to notice that she passed out and stopped breathing. I was too high to see my best friend dying on her bedroom floor only a couple feet away, too lost in my own little world to see that gorgeous girl disappearing, the only friend I ever had, the only person that cared about me in the entire world. I came back from my high and found her there, cold and lifeless, and I screamed and screamed until Orin rushed in and found his dead daughter, and that was the beginning of the end.
I took the abuse because I hated myself.
I thought I deserved it. Sometimes I still do. I stayed in the cottage and treated myself like I was a prisoner of all the bad shit I did in my past, and told myself that one day I’d be able to move on and have a life again, but first I had to pay the price. I had to feel some of the pain I caused.
But my pain didn’t bring Cait back and it never seemed like enough. Not for Orin and not for me.
“I’m sorry,” he says, stroking my hair. “I’m sorry I put you in here. I’m sorry I got angry about you seeing my mother. Fuck, Tara, I’m sorry my father did that to you.”
“We can’t change any of it now.” I blink at him, vision blurry with tears.
He kisses me gently. “Nobody will ever hurt you again.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can and I do. I swear, Tara. Nobody will ever hurt you like that. No matter what.”
“Not even you?”
He grimaces as if struck, but instead of pulling away like I expected, he takes a fistful of my hair and tilts my chin up to stare into his eyes.
“Even me.”
He buries his lips against mine and I kiss him back with the full force of my want and need, and something breaks inside of me, some barrier that’d been erected over years and years of pain and sadness, some terrible wall I kept wrapped around my heart, and I melt against him.