“Your arms felt empty, huh?” I ask, dragging my own fingers up and down his sternum. He wiggles a little and I grin. For a badass, leather-wearing biker, he’s awfully ticklish.
His free hand glides on top of mine, stalling it from its journey. “Need to ask you something, Demi, and I’m not sure if now is the right time to bring it up or not.”
“Worried I’m too emotionally damaged and charged after facing my foes to ask?” I question, understanding after what just took place why he may be worried about my reaction to whatever it is he wants to talk about.
If I were any other woman, my psyche would be in a dark cave, huddled in on herself. I, fortunately,amnotthat woman. I’venever had time to crawl into a dark hole and cower. And the fact that I haven’t, has made me who I am. My skin is as thick as my skull, I’m hard headed and set in my ways. I’m not an easy person to get to know, I have many layers that need peeling before you find the core of my mushy center, but once you’re in there—you’rein therefor life.
“I know you’re not damaged,” he growls, smacking the cheek of my ass. “It’s because I don’t want to mention anything else that may bring back painful memories.”
“My life up until now is nothing but a painful memory, Xavier,” I confess. “The past can’t cause me any more damage than it already has. Luna’s brand of therapy has helped… tremendously. Telling her things I hid from her throughout our younger years has been uplifting. Ask whatever you want, it can’t hurt me anymore, I won’t allow it.”
“I want to know about those years you just mentioned, as well as the dipshits that were supposed to protect and provide for you,” he grumbles. “They’re next up on my hit list.”
“I’d love nothing more than for you to be able to get your hands on them, but you can’t,” I tell him.
“Why the hell not?” he barks out. “They need to pay for the abuse they put you through.”
“I couldn’t agree more, but that issue has already been taken care of,” I state, closing my eyes.
He's fixing to learn that there’s another hidden layer, on top of the others, that he hasn’t found and peeled apart. I hope he doesn’t see me differently than he does at this very moment, but back then, I was so full of rage, and dead set on revenge, that Ididn’t stop and think about what I did and how it could come back to bite me.
“I’m about to tell you something I’ve never told another living soul,” I say, licking my suddenly dry lips.
“You can tell me anything, Demi,” he whispers. “Always.”
“When I was twenty, I had somewhat of a breakdown. I wasn’t sleeping, I couldn’t eat because it literally made me sick to my stomach, and I couldn’t concentrate on my classes or schoolwork. I had nightmares, they were endless and excruciating, both when I did try and catch a few Z’s, but also while I was wide awake. They were on a loop in my mind. All the memories surfaced one day and just wouldn’t go away. I tried to meditate, I took up running and hit the gym several times a day. Nothing worked.”
“What did you do?” he asks, dragging me tighter to his body, and wrapping his strong arms around me. “No judgment, Hellcat, never, not from me.”
“I stalked them,” I quietly confess. “I watched, and I waited, memorizing their routine. The drinking was worse than it was when I stayed with them. They weren’t able to foster anymore, so I didn’t have to worry about a kid being there and them hurting someone else, and I could’ve left them alone since they were miserable and broke. But seeing them again after being away for two years, something inside of me just… snapped.”
“I can see how that could happen,” he says. “Fuck knows I’ve been there and done that.”
“It was a strange sensation. I felt like I was a bystander to my body,” I say, fessing up. “My brain was online, but my body wasn’t under my control.”
“You disassociated,” he diagnoses.
“That’s what I’ve come to understand after doing some internet research,” I relay.
I suspect I did that when I was cage fighting as well, because there are times I remember touching gloves with my opponent, then I’m heading to the locker room to clean up. I know it’s a defense mechanism and obviously, I’ve been using it since I was a child, but from the little therapy Ididdo, it was my brain’s way of protecting me from shit that I wasn’t capable of handling at that age. But damn, when those doors crashed open, it nearly killed me because it invaded every single second of my day, until I took matters into my own hands.
Burying my head into his chest, I confess, “I killed them, Xavier.”
“That’s what I figured,” he mumbles. “Wanna talk about it?”
“He was so damn drunk that it didn’t take much convincing for me to talk him into a murder/suicide plot,” I admit, coming clean. “I tossed photographs I’d taken after a round of abuse, followed by the documentation which included a journal I’d kept. I threatened to ruin them, to announce what they’d done to me to all of their neighbors. I knew, Xavier, from living with them what buttons to push. He was a different person in town, he wasn’t the drunk abuser, they never saw that side of him. He was a hometown boy that helped put their high school football curriculum on the map. He was the star of the team back in his day and the entire town adored him. They won the state championship every year that he played. If I ruined his reputation, it’d take away his glory in their eyes and he couldn’t live with that. That's all he had left.”
“So you threatened to oust him unless he took himself and his wife out?”
Nodding my head, my hair brushing against his skin, I answer, “That’s exactly what I did. Plot twist, I’m a bad person.”
“Epilogue, you’re not,” he stresses. “What you are is human, a person that’s been raked over the coals and nobody saw the way you got burned. What you did was ingenious, my Demi goddess.”
“Ooh, I like that one, Xavier. Demi goddess. Can we keep it?”
“We’ll keep it,” he avows. “How did you cope afterward?”
“After I talked him into unaliving himself and his wife?” I ask for clarification.
