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“I wasn’t okay, Jake,” I assured him. “I wasn’t at all.”
“That’s what I was afraid you would say. Abby okay is not the same as everyone else okay.” Jake said. “Look at your arm. Look at my brave fucking girl and her warrior ink.” He ran his fingers down the artwork covering my right arm. “I know this is one of your pictures, and this is obviously me.” He tapped the angel of death image on the motorcycle. “And this is our quote, but what is this one?” he asked, his fingers landing on the black and gray version of “The Scar” painting.
“It’s my favorite painting. The real one is in color, but I had him do it in black and white instead. It’s a woman with a scar down the middle of her entire body.”
“But he didn’t tattoo the scar itself?”
“He didn’t need to.” I’d had the artist use one of the reddest, most jagged of my scars as the red line down the center of her.
“Wow,” Jake said. “It’s beautiful and fucking amazing, just like you.” His eyes were darkening, but it didn’t push the crystal blue out entirely. Both the devil and angel in him were with me that night. “I don’t know how I ever survived without you, Bee.”
I hadn’t thought of it from his side. At least I’d had Georgia. Jake had no one. I could see how the last four years were so difficult for him.
“I turned off my feelings the second I walked away from you on the bridge,” I told him. “But when Georgia was born, it was like she just broke through it all. It was hard to do, but I had my baby, and when you have a screaming three month old with colic who won’t sleep through the night, it’s hard to get caught up in your own bullshit. The things that happened to me in the past just started not to matter with her around. They still hurt, and I didn’t avoid them. They just weren’t the most important things in my life anymore. She saved me.”
“You both saved me,” Jake said. “As much as I can be saved.” His tone became serious. “I need you to do something for me, baby.”
“Anything.” If he asked me, I would do it. It was that simple.
“I need you to tell me why you took those pictures, the ones of you after…”
“I took them for you,” I admitted. “I wanted you to see what he did to me. I wanted you to be mad because I wanted you—” I stopped just short of saying it.
“Say it Bee,” he insisted. “I need to hear it.”
“I wanted you to kill him.” The words didn’t hurt, and I wasn’t embarrassed. It was actually liberating saying aloud that I wanted Owen to die. “There’s something else, too, besides what he did to me and Georgia.”
His eyes were fully dark now. “What is it?”
“He killed Nan.”
“I need to see them, the pictures, now, and I need you to show them to me.”
“Why?”
“Because, baby, I am going to leave here tonight, and I’m going to track him down wherever he is, and I’m going to take him out of this world. I’m going to bury the pieces of him where no one will ever find them.”
I hadn’t looked at the photos since I developed them that night in the high school darkroom. I didn’t know if I could see that part of my life again. “What difference will the pictures make? You know what happened.”
“I need to see exactly what he did to you, because the more I know, the more detailed your description of your pain… the more satisfying it will be for me when I kill him, and the more I’ll enjoy it.”
“You want to enjoy it?” I knew right away that I was judging him. Who was I to judge anyone? Beneath that was a curiosity within me about what he felt when he did something like this. Jake had so many things at war inside him. I wanted to know as much as I could about what made him tick.
“Yes, I want to get off on it, as much as possible. I know that sounds fucked up. But in order to move forward, to enjoy what we have with our family and the rest of our lives together, I need to close this chapter first. But I can’t just kill him, Bee. I need you to understand…” He tightened his fists into balls. “I need to feel him die under my hands. I need to feel it so badly.”
He pressed his lips into my neck, and a rush of heat shot right to my core.
Then, he whispered into my ear, “When this is all over, what we have will be complete. The three of us under one roof, forever, as it should be, with no trace left of the fucker who tried to ruin everything for us.” His beautiful promises mixed with his warm breath on my ear made me whimper. “Not to mention, we have a lot of time to make up for, and I plan on spending a lot of that time with my head between your thighs.” He cupped his hand over my jeans between my legs and squeezed. I jumped at the sensation. “I’ve never gotten to taste that sweet pussy of yours, baby, and I think four fucking years is long enough to wait.”
I groaned.
“How about we start now?” I asked, pressing my chest to his. He shook his head and sighed, placing his hands on my shoulders and distancing himself from me.
“The second I get back Bee... the very second. I promise.” Jake leaned in and softly kissed my lips before deepening the kiss and opening his mouth to mine. His tongue danced across my lips, and then inside my mouth and over my tongue. It had been so long. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to wait much longer without bursting apart. He pulled away again as if he were reading my mind. He closed his eyes. “I love you, Bee.”
“I love you, too, Jake,” I said. “So much.” I’d never meant it more.
We spent the next hour inside, sitting on the living room floor. Jake sat silently while I told him the details of the night Owen raped me. I didn’t leave any detail out, as he’d requested. I used the pictures to explain each injury as it happened. As I spoke, his mood darkened into a much more sinister version of himself. My sapphire-eyed Jake shared his body with a monster. I could feel him moving aside as the beast within him firmly took control.
By the time I’d finished telling him, I was shaking like it had just happened yesterday. I remembered the feeling when I woke up in unending pain, wishing I was dead. And yet somehow, I had made it through, and my little miracle Georgia had survived as well.
Jake put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me to him. He kissed me with so much raw anger and passion I didn’t know if I was going to be able to survive the overwhelming feelings building inside of me.
Jake may have had a monster living inside him. But nothing about either of us had ever been just one way. Nothing was black or white, light or dark.
Coral Pines was a place that looked like heaven on the outside and felt like hell on the inside. Owen, the golden boy of our town, turned out to be the biggest monster of them all. And Jake, who had become accustomed to living within the dark shadows of his tortured soul, turned out to be one of the brightest lights in my life.
I had lived my life in both the dark and the light. Having my new family meant I had to walk a blurry line between the two. I was never going to be a normal person with regular thoughts and feelings.
I’d never known what “normal” meant, anyway.
Maybe what set Jake and I apart from other people was our acceptance of our feelings and emotions—the dark as well as the light. All I knew is there was no darkness in the world that could compare with the love we had for our daughter. Jake love for Georgia was proof that even the blackest hearts were capable of love. He was the light and the darkness, all at the same time.
Jake the angel, who comforted me at the hospital.
Jake the killer, who stood to leave, tucking his gun into the back of his jeans and checking for the additional clip in his boot.
“Tell me again you’re okay with this, that you won’t look at me differently afterwards.” His tone carried worry.
“I knew Owen’s death would be coming from the very night he raped me, and I wanted it to be you who killed him.” I didn’t hesitate to tell him. “I still do.” I held up the last of the pictures to him. It was the photo I had taken last, kneeling in front of the mirror with my legs spread open for the camera. The lens caught the bruises and dried blood caked in every nook of my body, over every inch of my already marred skin.
Jake’s nostrils flared and his eyes lost their light. The killer in him was being fed. I turned over the picture. In my handwriting was a note I’d written years ago.
Send him to hell, Jake.
Jake took the picture from me and read and reread the note on the back before folding it and tucking it into his leather jacket. He picked me up off the floor and gave me one last furious kiss before putting me down and stalking to the front door in quick, determined strides. “Thank you,” he whispered.
“Make sure you come back to us,” I reminded him. I hoped I hadn’t needed to.
“Leaving you was the worst mistake of my life, Bee. I won’t make it again.” Then, he was gone, disappearing into the blackness of the night.
The roar of his bike announced his leaving, but in minutes it was silent again, only the echoes remained.
“Make him suffer, baby,” I whispered to no one.
I once wondered if two broken souls could heal one another.
