Font Size:  

“I…yeah, I’m okay,” I replied breathlessly.

“I need to get you home, then I can report this to my team and to the police,” he told me as he stopped about a foot before me, then bent down until his eyes met mine.

“You sure you’re okay? You’re shaking?” he pointed out. I lifted my right hand, holding it out before me and realised he was right, I was trembling pretty badly.

“I…I think it’s j-just adrenaline. The car…seeing it coming for me like that…again. I’m okay though,” I tried to explain.

“Let’s get out of here,” he suggested as he held an arm out, directing me back to his Escalade. I just nodded and did as he instructed, walking over to the car, and allowing him to help me climb in.

I hadn’t lied. I was pretty sure it was the car careening towards me that had set off the anxiety I was feeling, but it was the look and intention on Abby’s face as she tried to hit out at me that had sent me spiralling. The whole drive home flashbacks of the times my mum, her boyfriends, or her ‘customers’ had launched themselves at me and rained down blow after blow, came back to me one after the other. It was like Abby had opened the floodgates in my mind. Now the memories were racing through it so rapidly and violently, I didn’t have the strength to close them again.

As soon as we were back at the house, I leapt from the car and hurried inside, feigning exhaustion to Luca, and hurrying through to my room as fast as I could.

My bedroom door didn’t lock, so I went through to my bathroom and locked myself in there instead, not wanting Luca coming to check on me and finding me in a state.

It was a struggle, but I managed to climb into the huge free standing tub and I curled up in the bottom of it, laid on my side with my knees pulled up to my chest.

I tried, I really did, to stop those first tears from falling, but once the first one escaped, there was no stopping them. That just opened my mind up even more and the darkness flooded in through every opening, drowning me somewhere very dark and far away from the precarious safety I had found.

“Blake? Everything okay in there?” Luca called as he knocked on the locked door. I took a deep breath in an attempt to sound calmer.

“Taking a b-bath!” I yelled back, trying to sound angry in order to disguise the broken. To further sell it, I sat up and put the plug in the bath, then flicked on one of the taps, not even bothering to adjust the temperature.

I held my breath and listened, relieved when heavy footsteps moved away, through my room and then out in the hallway.

As soon as I was alone again I burst into huge, great sucking sobs. They came so hard and fast I could barely get a breath in between them.

“Why can’t you fuckin’ learn, you dumb little cunt!” my mum screams in my face as she looms over me. The first hit is a punch to the side of my head. I don’t remember what I’ve done. Definitely nothing that warrants the beating she is laying into me the moment my exhausted, half-starved body drops to the tatty, old, off-brown coloured carpet.

As adrenaline pumped through my body at the memory, I laid back and slid under the cold water, trying with everything in me to block out the past and the pain. In moments my body started to shiver violently, the only part of me not submerged in the too cold depths, my face.

“This’d all be a lot easier if you’d just be a good girl for me,” Ron, one of mum’s regular customers tells me as he leans over me where I lay prone under his bruising grip in my bed. “I wouldn’t need to hurt you if you’d just do as I tell ya,” he adds as he raises a knee to the bed and forces it down between my clamped legs.

The images all came back to me, one after the other, nonstop, and nothing I could do would make them end. I tried to recall the techniques I’d gone over with Lisa, my psychiatrist, but my head was pounding so hard that it seemed impossible to think straight.

“Such a pretty lass, aren’t you? You goin’ to be good for your Uncle Terry?”

“No!” I whimpered as Terry’s face flashed before me in that dark, terrifying room. “Please…please make it st-stop.”

CHAPTER 7

TRENT

I grabbed my phone the instant it started to ring, from the desk I had been sat behind, writing reports, for the last two hours.

I was finally back at work, and so fucking happy about it. It had been six weeks since Dad’s car crashed, and being holed up at home, unable to work, go to the gym or even drive my car, had been slowly killing me. I wasn’t a man who enjoyed sitting idle. I needed to get my life back and being in school was the first step in that.

Unfortunately, my whole class was on a week-long residential trip to a camp out in the wilds, about a two hour drive away, and I had been unable to accompany them with my leg still in a plaster cast. So my first week back to my job was going to consist of me doing a ton of admin work. But I wasn’t complaining too much. I was just glad to be back out in the world, and able to move around more easily. My cast still restricted me somewhat, but I could put weight on the leg now at least. My time in the plaster casts had given me a new found understanding of the struggles Blake had with her limited mobility. I admired her even more, now that I realized how hard it was to go from being highly active, to limited in every single movement you took.

I looked to the screen of my cell and instantly worried when I saw Luca’s name flashing up. I had asked him, before I left that morning, to call me right away if anything at all happened with Blake. I knew the guys had all asked the same of him, but I had quickly pointed out to all of them, that I would be the closest to home should one of us be needed.

“Luca?” I answered so quickly I almost dropped my damned cell.

“Hi Trent. Sorry to interrupt your day,” he began.

“It’s fine. I’m not busy. What’s going on? Is Blake alright?”

“That’s why I’m calling. I think maybe someone needs to come and check in on her. We had a bit of a run in with Abby earlier.”

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
Articles you may like