AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He said her letters make him feel alive.
He read her letters in bed.
And he regretted how they met.
He signed the letter ‘love’, but he always did that. He probably signed the letters to his sister in the same way.
A slight pain went through the nailbed of her pinkie, and she rubbed it unconsciously. It happened every once in a while at weird times. A reminder of the night they met.
Back then, she didn’t notice her pinkie until the next day in bed. Twenty-four hours had passed after the attack, and the pain of an arm under her chin and at her neck had just started to fade.
It was moving day. She and her sisters were carrying stuff into the loft where they live now. Avryl didn’t have that much furniture, but it didn’t dawn on her that she might want a new dressing table, like the one Lydia had, or a fancy platform bed like Yasmin’s. She was just excited to live so close to work and finally be free of Larry. Their father made his money as a preacher at Cornerstone Baptist Church, and he disapproved of Nayomi owning a club. Especially in downtown Manhattan; the “City of Sin,” he calls it. The sisters were out later and later at night, and he’d be up when they got home with a Bible verse and a sermon ready. The more money they made, the worse he became.
When the attack happened, Lydia was in her room, setting up a bed. Yasmin had run off to meet the Uber delivery guy. Avryl was in the truck alone. She was trying to gather as much as she could on her hands and on her arms. Her stomach had growled loudly. So loudly she still remembered it.
He was behind her. Nayomi’s husband. The sun was still up, but his figure brought a storm cloud right inside the truck and blocked out all the light.
Whenever she thought of what happened, her heart started to beat too fast, and then she'd remember his body being lifted off her and flung to the side of the truck.
She didn’t see the face of whoever saved her at first. All that came into focus was his back and arms, raising and lowering the blows. The crunch of flesh and bones was so loud she had to crawl out of the truck and get as far away as possible. Finally, when it was quiet inside and all she could hear were her own sobs, a warm hand touched her back.
She jumped and spun around but calmed immediately at the warmth in a pair of deeply concerned light brown eyes almost a foot higher than her.
“You’re okay! You’re okay!” he repeated. His first real-life words. Over the years she’d forced herself to remember what his voice sounded like the scar across his left palm.
She nodded and was still scanning the body of the man who had saved her from being raped, but someone said something that made him back away. Those brown eyes went up, over her head, and then back down.
“I… Gotta go. I’m… Sorry this happened.” His final words. She only had time to nod before he was off.
In bed that night, Lydia snuggled up behind her, snoring lightly, with one arm over Avryl’s waist.
Her eyes were wide open, and her fingers were feeling at her neck softly. Lydia’s snores were disturbing, but she’d rather be slightly disturbed than alone. Nayomi was somewhere in the loft, sobbing with Yasmin, making cup after cup of hot teas and cocoas. Somewhere in the night, Avryl had lost the extension on her pinkie finger, and she’d only noticed it once she was in the dark.
Over the next month, the sisters were all occupied with tending to Nayomi. Lydia, Luma, and Yasmin had cornered Avryl after the funeral. They demanded she tell them what was going on with her, but she refused. Not on the day they buried Nayomi’s husband.
Having your husband murdered was a lot worse than someone trying to rape you. Even if that someone was the murdered husband.
Instead of going back to the condo she shared with her husband, the four sisters lived in the loft until Nayomi felt strong enough leave.
It was a month of near torture. Avryl thought she would double over in anxiety with her sister living right beside her and that heavy secret weighing on her. She could not, absolutely not, even think about tearing her sister down more by telling her that her beloved husband was a rapist, and that was why he was dead.
Axton was convicted by the end of the summer. Life in prison. He could apply for parole in ten years. Eight, now.
Before, he owned a successful start-up with offices in New York, LA, and Kenya. Employed hundreds of people. One of those types who avoided the spotlight, which made him even more of an eligible bachelor. And within minutes, he had lost everything.
The sisters left Avryl alone eventually. Luma said things to her every once in a while, made minor suggestions that Avryl politely ignored. Once she brought a little satchel that she said should be kept hidden from anyone else, but other than that Avryl’s secret had been safe.
Like all of Avryl’s secrets.
She makes sure to be the first one to get the mail every week, except for holidays. She never expected Axton would write back two years ago. That first letter was an apology. But he said the same thing back then as he said in his last letter. That none of what happened was Avryl’s fault.
She wrote him differently than everyone else. Emojis don’t read the same on paper, she soon learned, and aside from saving her life and the things she’d read online, Axton was a stranger. Until the weeks passed, and he went from stranger to friend, to… She didn’t know what now. Men sometimes approached her, in the club or on the street, but deep inside she knew she belonged to him. And she had a responsibility to him. Dating was out of the question, and compared to Ax, there wasn’t one man she would even think about entertaining.
The first letter opener he sent her was owned by a Spanish princess from the early 18th century. Sometimes Avryl imagines she and the princess felt the same excitement at getting a new letter from someone special. That was the one she kept on her. At the office. In her purse. On her desk at home.
Half a year later, and she has a small collection of openers. They are arranged on the red felt interior of the top drawer of an old vanity table Lydia gave her. Tips pointing up.
And two years after that first letter, he is the closest thing she has to family. Axton is the only person on earth who knows what’s happened to her and knows who she really is, but she has secrets from him too.
He doesn’t know she dreams of a life with him out of the city, somewhere warm all year round, where their future son, Axyl, has room to run around and find frogs outside.
And he doesn’t know she plans to get him out of prison. She just has no idea how.
With the yellow pages of his letter open on her desk and the door to her room firmly locked, Avryl starts to write.
