He glanced at me.“Yeah … I do.”
Fucking hell.
“She died when I was seven.It was very sudden.One day she was there, taking me to the library, laughing with me as we baked cookies, and the next day, my dad sat me down and told me she was dead.”
“And he never explained?”
“He was vague about it.I remember wondering why he wasn’t more upset.Why he never cried.I later realized he’d isolated her from her family.They had no idea about me, or her death, which was why they never came for me.Never sought me out.”
“Have you looked for them?”
His head bob and shoulder jostle were noncommittal.“Maybe I should put more effort into it.”
“When you’re ready.”
“Anyway, my dad remarried less than six months after my mom passed.A part of me wonders if he’d already been seeing Kyla and got rid of my mom to make room for her.But I’ll never know the truth.Because all he really needed was a live-in babysitter for me.He worked on offshore oil rigs and would be gone for months at a time.So, he married Kyla and left me with her.Two weeks after their wedding, he left for three months.”
“Jesus.”
A part of me was kind of scared to ask how the abuse started, but if we were going to go into this … whatever it was we were starting—with total honesty, I needed to hear it.All the horrific details.He listened to mine, after all.
“It started out really weird,” he said, his voice quiet.“She would come into the bathroom and insist on helping me wash myself.She said that was what moms were supposed to do.Bathe their kids.I told her I didn’t need any help, but she acted really hurt.Said she was just trying to be the mom I didn’t have anymore, and I was pushing her away.”
He wasn’t looking at me, just out at the waves and the birds.So I did the same.It was probably easier to unload without seeing the other person’s reactions.
“She’d insist that we shower together and that I help wash her too.Said it was a way for us to bond and get to know each other.I think I was around eleven when I had my first wet dream.She found the mess on my sheets and said that that wasn’t normal and that it was her job as my mom to help me take care of those things.A few nights later, I woke up to her with her mouth on me.”
My stomach twisted into a tight knot, and I had to unclench my molars before I chipped a tooth.
“She said that this was what mothers did for their sons.When I tried to tell her I didn’t like it, she would withhold food.She locked me in my room for an entire weekend.I wasn’t able to use the bathroom or eat, or anything.She would say that she did this because she loved me, and if I loved her, I would accept her as my mom and all the things a mom is supposed to do.”
“This woman sounds insane.”
He glanced at me sideways briefly before focusing ahead again.“Eventually, it escalated to her forcing me to perform certain acts on her as well.She wouldn’t let me out of the house to even go to school unless I … ‘satisfied mommy.’”
Bile rose up the back of my throat.
“I was really good at basketball and kept my grades up.I spent as much time at school and at my friends’ house as I could.I did everything I possibly could to not go home.I ran away a few times, but that just caused her to call the cops on me, then I’d get in trouble from my dad when he came home.He’d knock me around.Or Kyla would punish me for staying away.”
“Lennox … this is … nothing about this was okay.Your dad and Kyla are monsters.”
“I lost my virginity on my twelfth birthday.But I struggled to stay hard because I really hated what she was making me do.Lucky for her, she was a pharmacy assistant and started stealing Viagra from work.Then she’d mix it into my food so that I really had no choice in the matter.”
“She could have killed you with that.”
He nodded stiffly.“I’m assuming she knew the dosage to give a person of my weight that wouldn’t be fatal, but maybe not.Within six months of my twelfth birthday, she was pregnant.My dad obviously did the math when he was home and accused her of cheating on him because he’d been gone for four months and she was two months pregnant.He got violent with her, and a sick part of me hoped he’d rough her up enough that she’d lose the baby.Then she made the stupid mistake of telling him the baby was mine, and he tried to kill me.He broke my arm in three places, cracked a bunch of my ribs, shattered my eye socket and cheekbone.”
He spun his left arm around to show me scars hidden within the tattoos.
“Needed eight screws and a metal plate in my arm, and there are a few metal plates in my face.They get a little achy in the cold.But he’d punched me so hard in the ribs that I couldn’t stand up straight.If the next-door neighbors hadn’t called the cops, I’m sure he would have killed both me and Kyla that night.When the cops showed up, the entire situation was exposed.Kyla went to prison—that’s where Mabel was born.My dad went to prison and ended up getting his sentence extended because he killed his cellmate.But Kyla was just released.The woman who molested and raped me was just released from prison.”
At this point, tears tumbled down my cheeks, but I was also nauseous.I knew firsthand the kind of terrible people that existed in the world, but my brain refused to even contemplate someone as sick and twisted as Kyla.
I scrambled for the door handle behind me, twisting in his lap, and managed to open it just in time so I didn’t make a mess in his truck.I vomited onto the ground, and he instantly started to rub my back.His fingers gently tucked my wayward strands behind my ears as strings of saliva hung from my lips.I spat a few times, waiting for the next wave.
But it didn’t come.
After a moment, I sat back up, slightly embarrassed, and wiped the back of my hand across my lips.“Sorry,” I murmured as he handed me a tissue.
