Total pages in book: 171
Estimated words: 167204 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 836(@200wpm)___ 669(@250wpm)___ 557(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 167204 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 836(@200wpm)___ 669(@250wpm)___ 557(@300wpm)
“You don’t have to,” he says softly.
“And that went on as often as he could find an opportunity until I started dating Mitchel. That was my high school boyfriend. I don’t remember if I told you his name. Anyway, once I was seeing Mitch, I got meaner at home because I was protective of my relationship. AJ would try his old tricks, but they wouldn’t work, I’d tell him no and not care if he called me a little bitch or told my mom I had an attitude problem. And for a little while, that worked, too. But then he got tired of hearing no. One night, he’d been drinking when I came home from hanging out with Mitch, and he was on the couch waiting when I got back. I was wearing a short skirt, so he told me I looked like a whore, that I’d started dressing like a whore ever since I started dating Mitch.” I glance at Killian. “Before I started seeing Mitch, I mostly wore baggy, ugly clothes that wouldn’t draw unwanted attention from AJ.” Getting back to that night, I say, “But that night, I wore a skirt. And apparently seeing that much leg emboldened him. He… pounced on me and threw me down on the couch, and he was going to rape me, but then I started having a panic attack. It freaked him out, and he put his tiny dick away, and he went upstairs. I knew I couldn’t live with him anymore, so as much as I dreaded it, I told my mother the next day. I told her everything, about how he’d touched me in my bedroom years earlier, about how weird it felt when he asked me to ‘help him work out’ the nights he’d keep me downstairs and he would…” I shake my head, not even wanting to put it into words. “And then I told her about the night before. And she sat there, white-faced, while I told her everything. And I felt like I was… scooping out my soul and putting it on a plate for her. And she didn’t say a word. After an uncomfortable silence, I asked her to say something, and she said she’d take care of it. I went to school, and then I went over to Mitch’s house after. I felt… optimistic, I guess. It felt like a weight had been lifted finally telling her about everything. There were times over the years I got this feeling like she knew, but she couldn’t have possibly known. What kind of mother would allow a man to keep living in her house knowing he was preying on her daughter?” I swallow. “But she said she’d take care of it, so I knew things were finally going to get better. I even stayed at Mitch’s house later that day, thinking AJ was probably moving out his things and I didn’t want to have to see him.” I shake my head, remembering how fucking stupid I felt when I came back home that night. “When I got back, I remember walking in the door and seeing she’d made one of his favorite dinners. And I thought, ‘how strange.’ Why would she make his favorite dinner on the day she was kicking him out?”
Killian sighs, and I glance at him. He grabs me and tugs me up, dragging me across the mat until I’m planted between his legs, then he wraps his arms around me.
I smile sadly. “She didn’t kick him out.”
“No,” he says quietly.
Tears well up in my eyes. I don’t let myself feel sad about it anymore, but I still feel sad for the version of me I was that day. I’ve never been that girl again, but I have made a lot of progress this year, and I’m proud of that.
“I was just so fucking stunned,” I tell him. “I had no doubt when she said she’d handle it that she meant it, and I was so sure she would fix it for me. She would make sure it never happened again. She would protect me now that she knew, because the story I told myself about why she never had before was that she didn’t know.”
His arms around me tighten. He has already figured out that she knew, so he whispers, “I’m so sorry, Brynn.”
Those words open the floodgates. The apology I never got from her, and I never will.
“Since he wasn’t leaving, I did. That’s when I lived in my car.”
He brushes a tear off my cheek. “I figured.”
I’m quiet for a moment, then I tell him, “The worst part was how alone I had felt all those years. I thought I was bearing a burden all by myself to protect the people I loved, and…” I clear my throat. “I was angry after I told her and she did nothing. I wanted to lash out. To punish her for not loving me enough to keep me safe. I was spoiling for a fight back then, and living out of my car was hard, so I did have to go back eventually. But I couldn’t stand to look at her anymore. I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with her, and she infuriated me because the way she would talk to me… it was like the way she texts me now. Like everything is normal between us. Like nothing happened. Like she fucking expects me to live in denial with her and pretend… pretend she didn’t choose that bastard over me. Or to accept it, I guess. But I could never do that. The excuse I always made for her was that she didn’t know, but the truth was that she didn’t care. As long as she didn’t lose him, she didn’t care what kind of hell he made my childhood. She just didn’t care. All she cared about was herself. And that made me so angry. You’re supposed to care about more than just yourself, and you’re damn sure supposed to care about the people you bring into this world. So we got in a fight one day, and Geli came downstairs because she heard us yelling. And she joined the screaming match, and she called me a liar, and said I was making it all up, that her dad would never do that and I was just trying to make her lose her dad because I didn’t have mine.”