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The terrifyingly huge drug dealer—the sweetheart mobster—wanted me.
I hadn’t considered his offer for even a second.
Sure, Beck was attractive. There was something about his bear-like build, kind eyes, and bearded face. But he’d already been ruining my mom’s and my life for four years. In that time, bitterness had formed in my heart and turned to hate. There was no getting past that.
To pay him for everything my mom took, I’d had to find random jobs. But whether it was dropping out of school to have more time to work, my other jobs overlapping, or that my mom came in high too often . . . it proved difficult to keep a job for long. When my debts grew to the thousands and nowhere else would hire me, I began begging for money on street corners. Soon after, I started getting propositioned by men.
The worst kind of men.
So when Beck told me about his feelings that first night, I shut him down as soon as I heard the word love.
The second night, he promised to get me away from my life—the trailer I’d grown up in, my mom, and the people that hung around her. I told him he didn’t love me if he thought leaving my mom was something I’d ever choose.
The next night, one of the men who’d been regularly propositioning me tried to force himself on me when I’d been on my way home. But Beck had been there, waiting for me as he did every night, and had heard my screams.
It hadn’t been the first time a man had tried to force himself on me. There had been friends of my mom and other dealers when I was younger, but I always managed to slip away. I was as good at getting away as I was sneaking into places.
Still, it had been years since the last time anyone tried. And it had never been that man.
The encounter and his words that night had shaken me to my core. But I needed to stay strong. I’d always been strong. After he’d torn the man off me, I tried to assure Beck that it hadn’t affected me. Even though on the inside, I had silently begged him to make it go away.
All of it.
The men who came after me. My mother’s addiction. The madness inside.
Weak. So, so weak.
And then it was there . . . his offer.
That night . . . that night I might have agreed to anything—accepted anything Beck offered. All for the chance to get both my mother and me away from a life she’d surrendered us to long ago. A life I’d been struggling to keep us breathing in.
When he begged me to give him a chance—begged me to let him take care of me for the rest of my life—I gave in. On the sole condition he stopped giving my mom drugs.
In return, he shook his head subtly and told me how much I owed him.
Beck’s reaction was the cruel reminder I needed. I hadn’t kept us alive this long by being weak. By needing someone.
I laughed like a girl who lost her mind as I grabbed what cash I had on me and threw it at him. Unable to stop myself, I started doing what I always did when I felt weak and vulnerable: rambled and taunted Beck and watched his anger grow.
Make it go away, Beck.
My own sickness. My own destructive craving. No better than my mother’s.
Make it go away . . .
Beck snapped, unleashing a terrifying rage on the man he’d been holding in his unyielding grip. Beating him until his face was unrecognizable and promising worse when he least expected it. And though I never asked Beck what the worse was, I knew it was what I’d been protecting my mom from all these years.
I forced myself to watch until I no longer felt like I needed another human being to help me make it through this fucked-up world. When it was over, I shut up that weak, pleading voice in my head and left before Beck could say another word.
But that night, the man returned, making my dreamless night a nightmare.
My weighted eyelids and limbs. His heavy body. His hot, disgusting breath on the back of my neck as he ripped my clothes. “You’re mine, whore.”
I vowed no man would have control over me again. And if a whore was how they saw me, then that was how they were going to get me.
I started selling myself the next night.
Beck found out three days later. If it was possible to destroy the world, he would have done it that night.
