“Oh thank god.” I clutch my chest and sigh dramatically. It feels like it did seventeen years ago. We were just being dumb kids waiting around with goofy grins for each other. “So what movie are we watching?” I ask her.
“Hmmm…you choose! You’ve done so much for me, the least I can do is suffer through some action movie that I would have never chosen by myself.” She laughs, gathering the groceries back into the bag.
I watch with confusion as she heads through the doorway and takes a turn. “Ma’am, where are you going with the snacks?” I ask, following her.
“To the bed, I don’t wanna crash on the couch,” she says over her shoulder, without stopping until she reaches her bedroom door.
In that moment, she plops down on her bed with the snacks, peeling the blanket back and covering her legs, getting comfy in her spot. I stay leaning against the doorway, watching her become another version of herself I haven’t seen before.
“Hey are you gonna get in or nah?” she asks, and then her eyes go wide and she blushes bright red. “I already put on clean sheets and everything, and I haven't had anyone in my bed…”
I stride over quickly, putting my finger on her lips before she can finish her sentence, her eyes still wide. “I was just enjoying the view. I know you’re a grown woman, and despite me wanting to rip another man apart for being in your bed, it would be way too unfair to assume you haven’t had anyone in your bed in the almost two decades we lived life apart.” I remove my finger, waiting for Ember’s response.
“Ever,” she quietly finishes her sentence.
Ever what?
“I haven’t had anyone in my bedever,” she says in a tone I can't quite pinpoint. “I don’t like people to be in my safe space,” she murmurs. “When I got pregnant, Dean’s mom kicked him out and my parents let him move in with us. Despite them never even wanting me to be with him, they wanted him to have a decent chance at being active in the pregnancy and the baby's life.” She lets out a huff. “It wasn’t bad at first, because he was okay in the beginning. Actively going to work, and helping take me to work since I didn’t have my license.”
While she talks, I round the bed, strip off my sweatshirt and jeans, and slide into bed. Listening to her right now, she’s not in distress, and she doesn’t sound sad—just numb. So I just let her talk. Reliving the good times are easy for her, and that makes me happy.
“But unfortunately, things took a turn within a month or so.” And her expression takes that sad turn I had hoped it wouldn’t. “I really don’t know what caused it, and I guess anything could have, but every day I was going to school and right after school I was going to work. He stopped showing up to pick me up from work. He said he wasn’t able to make it to appointments because of work.” She leans back in the bed, getting more comfy in her spot.
“But I found out later, he’d actually been fired.” She pulls the comforter higher up on her body.
My blood boils.
Ember looks at me and laughs, really throwing my brain for a loop. “It's funny to say out loud all these years later, but I found out he was fired for stealing other employees' lunches from the break room.”
Ember’s laugh is contagious, and I cant help but join in, becausewhat the actual fuck?
We laugh for a little bit, before Ember continues on, “While I was at work, there were two versions of Dean that I could get. One version would blow up my phone my entire shift, and be livid with me if I couldn’t respond because we were too busy. And the other was when he would ghost me and I wouldn’t talk to him until he picked me up, or I got home from work.”
I hate this dude so much. The hard part for me, that I haven’t wanted to acknowledge, is that I was there in that itty bitty town and didn’t do anything. I was off with friends, smoking weed and skateboarding. Though I don’t know what I would have done had I known, considering I was just a seventeen-year-old hot-head.
“The night time was always the worst,” Ember keeps going, bringing her legs up to her chest and wrapping her arms around her knees. “You got the jist of a lot the other day, but there were other things too. Like, he had night terrors and he would sleepwalk.”
I scoot closer to her, and she absently leans into me. I put my arm around her and pull her in closer, trying to tell her without words that I’ve got her and she’s safe with me.
“I remember one night. I had worked an eight hour shift, and my feet were so swollen and we had to wear jeans for our uniform. Mine were too small, so I rigged them with the hair tie trick, and all I wanted was to peel those pants off and pass out when I got home. I did just that around 9 PM. By midnight I was woken up by Dean ripping the covers off of me and yelling. I was so confused, it took me a hot minute to realize he was having a night terror. He was making no sense, beating the ever loving shit out of my comforter on the ground.” She lets out a breath. “He was never physically abusive towards me, but you know, he’d gotten into plenty of fights at school, and watching the night terrors, he was clearly violent. So it made me nervous.” She toys with her hands, mindlessly. “He never remembered those episodes, but after that first one, I’d tried to lock my door one night. That was a really bad idea. He broke into my room, accused me of being with someone else, and when I tried to tell him I was just tired and didn’t want to be woke up by him because I had school the next morning, he spent a chunk of time accusing me of being with other men and telling me that I didn’t love him.”
I want so badly to be wrong, but my gut tells me I know what comes next.
“Once he’d start in on the ‘you don't love me’ bits, there was usually only one way to ‘prove’ that I loved him.”
I want his fucking corpse in my basement,I decide right then. The feral side of me, that’s been trained by Special Forces, just might make that happen. One way or another, I want him out of her fucking life permanently.
To think that he put her through all of this and she was only sixteen years old, and he still hasn’t stopped. I want to keep her safe from all the bad in the world, she’s already been through enough.
She finally exhales. “What movie do you want to watch?” I know she’s mentally wiped after opening up about so much. We settle on Creed, and within minutes, I hear her little huffs as she sleeps. I hope she knows that I would do anything in my power to keep her safe.
The morning light shines in through Ember’s bedroom window, and I let out a restless huff. I usually don’t have any problems sleeping, but I can feel the weightlessness of my body. I slept better than usual.
Looking down, Ember is curled up in the fetal position, Maggie filling the space by her head. I watch her as she sleeps and I hope that I brought her the comfort she was desperately seeking last night.
I grab my phone and scan through my notifications, alarms going off when I see “person seen” on the camera footage notifications. Opening the app, I see Dean get out of his car and walk up behind mine. I see him duck below my car and my body stills—within a few seconds, he’s already retreating back to his. Watching him drive away on the footage, I find myself puzzled, trying to figure out what that was. I’m glad that was all, but I’m still perplexed. Only one way to find out.
I stretch, then head to the bathroom in Ember’s room to pee. As soon as I enter the bathroom, I smell Ember everywhere. I feel a rush of emotion, realizing how much joy something so simple brings me. After I relieve myself, I shuffle through my duffle bag as quietly as possible, trying not to wake Ember.
