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Then, there was nothing. Neither pleasure nor pain. Just blackness.
Chapter 10
LAUREN
As Cooper tumbled into my arms, I screamed.
The kiss had been more than I’d expected because I’d had no expectation, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t wholeheartedly feeling it.
Being close to him, necking with him on a sofa had taken me back to a time where there had only been joy and no pain associated with him.
The feel of his lips against mine, the pressure of his tongue tangling with my own had been a heaven I’d tried and failed to forget about over the years.
Then, he’d been a deadweight against me.
So heavy, so overpowering that I hadn’t known what the hell was going on until my brain caught up and I heard the sound of a bat being dropped to the floor.
With his body slumping against mine, I stared up into Jane’s wide eyes.
They were a horrifying mixture of lucid and crazed. I could see she’d thought she’d protected me, and yet, she knew she’d done wrong.
At that moment, I was terrified and knew she had to be institutionalized.
This was the kind of thing Karen had been hiding from my mom and me.
What had she done to Karen in the guise of protecting her?
The sound of my scream had the girl racing from her room.
“Lauren? What on earth?” she yelled as she ran down the hall into the living room. Then, she saw me, saw Cooper, and saw her mother and the bat on the ground at her feet. “Oh God,” she whispered and closed her eyes. “Momma? What did you do?”
For a second, I was taken aback at how Karen handled her mother. Jane looked like a naughty girl who was about to be chastised by her parent.
It wasn’t the other way around.
The forty-seven-year-old toed her foot in and wrung her hands together. But before she could speak, I screamed, “Call 911!”
Karen blinked, her focus shifting from her mother to me. “How could I forget?” she grumbled to herself as she dragged her cell and did as told.
Within the minute, an ambulance was coming as well as a police escort as this was, technically, battery assault.
Even though I could see Karen knew the repercussions of this incident, knew there was no way of covering it up, she carefully led her mother to the other sofa and sat her down.
I listened with half an ear as the girl told Jane that everything was okay, that it was all going to work out fine, but I knew that wasn’t the truth.
Still, what could I do? What could I say?
Had I invited this onto mother and daughter with my good intentions?
Or was Jane really so off the cuff that she needed to be under medical supervision?
I bit my lip at the thought as I cradled Cooper against my chest. I didn’t know what to do with him, with myself.
Did I lay him flat on the ground? Did I cushion his head? What was for the best and what was for the worst?
The idea of hurting him further was a nightmare I couldn’t stand, so I just stayed there, beneath him, counting down the moments until the ambulance arrived.
When the sirens blared into the neighborhood, the relief that filled me was enough to make me feel sick.
