(For His Pleasure 14) With His Belief (11 page)

Yes. When will u be here?

Ten minutes.

She was already getting out of the tub, wanting to be at least somewhat presentable when he got there. The whole time she got ready, she was wondering what he wanted to discuss. She hoped that he wasn’t coming over just to fire her again or tell her he regretted what had happened between them.

Just the thought of it was enough to suck the wind out of her.

She tried hard not to jump to conclusions, especially when she hardly had time to change and tidy the place up.

She kept it simple, wearing a pair of navy blue track pants and a white t-shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She did her lipstick and a very little bit of foundation, but that was it.

Then she simply straightened up and lit some scented candles.

Scarlett was frightened and excited, hoping against hope that Bryson was coming for good reasons and not to say anything hurtful or difficult. A rejection right now would devastate her. It would prove that every fear she harbored about getting involved with him had been true.

It seemed like much longer than ten minutes before he finally came over. But when she finally opened the door and let him in, she nearly lost her breath.

He stared into her eyes for a long moment. “Thanks for letting me come by,” he said, still standing in the hallway. “I appreciate it.” He stared past her uncertainly.

“You’re acting weird.” She stood aside. “Want to come inside?”

“Sure.” He walked past her, hands stuffed in the pockets of the green windbreaker he wore. His hair was tousled, perhaps by the wind. It still looked perfectly stylish. “I’m sorry if I seem weird.”

Now she was getting nervous. This felt like it was heading for the whole “we made a big mistake” type of conversations.

She watched Bryson pace into her living room.

“Why don’t you just tell me whatever you wanted to say and get it over with?”

she asked, crossing her arms.

He nodded. His eyes met hers again and he looked away. “I’ve just been thinking a lot about what we did today.” He stared down at the floor and shook his head.

Scarlett felt sick, literally, sick to her stomach. “Fine. You think we made a mistake—I get it.”

He looked up, eyes wide. “Is that how you feel?”

“Bryson, don’t try to turn this on me. Say what you came to say.” She could feel the anger rising, like bile in her throat. She should have known this was coming, should have never allowed herself to dare to believe they could be anything together.

“I don’t even know exactly what I’m trying to say. I’m confused.”

She sighed. “I think I’ve heard this one before. It’s not you, it’s me—let’s stay good friends.”

“Don’t be like this, Scarlett.”

“Like what?”

“This,” he said, gesturing towards her. “Bitter.”

“I don’t want to be played with,” she said. “If you don’t want to see me, stop coming to my damn apartment, Bryson.”

“I never said I didn’t want to see you. You’re the one who keeps saying that.”

“Then what?” she nearly yelled.

“I’m confused!” he yelled back. “I lost control of myself today with you. I’ve never felt like that before.” His eyes turned towards her, his nostrils flared as he came forward.

Scarlett felt her nipples harden in response. Just like that, her mouth was dry and everything else was soaking wet. “Is that such a bad thing?” she asked, quietly.

“I don’t know,” he said. He looked bewildered. “It scares me to think that I could be that kind of guy who does crazy shit like that. What if I’d hurt you?”

“But you didn’t hurt me,” she smiled. “I liked it. I loved it.”

“Why?”

Now it was her turn to be stopped cold.

“Why?”

“Yeah, why?”

She raised her eyebrows. “That’s a big question.”

Bryson was only a foot or two away from her now. They were standing in the middle of her apartment, looking at one another. She’d never felt an electricity charge in the air the way she did at that moment. “I want to understand you,” he said, with a quiet determination that turned her on more than anything else he’d ever done or said.

“Are you sure about that?” she said, frightened now.

“Yes,” he said. Unfazed.

“Well then,” she said, “maybe we should have a beer or something. I know I’m going to need one.”

“Fine. You want to go to a bar?”

“I have some beer,” she said. “Wait here a second.” Scarlett went and grabbed two bottles of beer leftover from a six-pack she’d gotten some time ago. She opened them and sniffed. They didn’t smell like they’d gone bad or anything. She brought out the beer and then a bag of chips and a bowl of salsa.

They sat down next to one another on the small couch and drank their beer.

Bryson popped a few chips in his mouth. “Okay, so tell me why.”

She turned to him, peeling at the label on the bottle. “I didn’t exactly have a picture perfect home life when I was a kid.”

“I figured as much from some of your comments.”

“Well, it’s worse than you might imagine. My mother had me when she was young, and my dad…I don’t think the two of them had any business being together. Still, I suppose they tried to make it work for a little while.” Scarlett realized she hadn’t talked to anybody like this in a very long time—maybe ever. But somehow, right now, it felt right. “I must have been two or three when Dad left.”

“So your parents were married or…?” Bryson let the question fade into silence.

Scarlett shook her head no. “They lived together, but they never made it official for some reason. I don’t remember much either way. I know I missed him terribly when he was gone—I still can recall crying when months had gone by and he hadn’t ever come back for me.”

“And then it was just you and your mother.” Bryson looked at her. “That must have been really hard.”

“In some ways, yes. But in other ways, it was better than what came later.”

Scarlett thought about it and decided she needed a long drink. She tilted her beer bottle up and gulped. The burning in her throat felt good and right. Her eyes watered from it.

She turned back to him. “The next year or so was just Mom and me. I remember she worked a lot and I had a string of babysitters. One of them was an old woman who made me watch hours and hours of soap operas and game shows with her. But I liked her because she gave me lots of junk food to eat.”

Bryson laughed. “Back then they didn’t know as much about the danger of trans fats.”

Scarlett laughed with him, glad that he was making it easier on her. But her laughter died as she remembered what came after that. “When my mother first met Vince, I thought it was the coolest thing. He was friendly, and fun, and he gave me a lot of attention. For awhile, everything was good. Vince moved in with us and we were a little family. But the good times didn’t last long.” She grew quiet, lost in her thoughts for a moment.

Bryson put his beer down. “Tell me, Scarlett. I want to know what happened.”

“Everything changed when my mother got pregnant. I was so young, and maybe—I don’t remember exactly what happened. I was angry, I was misbehaving, and I don’t know why.”

“You felt threatened?” Bryson asked.

“Maybe. I just know that even before my sister Claudia was born, things were deteriorating. Mom was having a rough pregnancy and I had made things even tougher, and Vince had become impatient with me.”

Bryson’s expression darkened. “Did he hit you?”

“No, nothing like that. At least, not right then,” Scarlett told him. “But he yelled a lot, and I was always in trouble. They put me in my room constantly and I had tantrums.” Scarlett tasted bitterness in her throat. She could hardly believe she was saying all of this. She didn’t know if it was too much, she didn’t know but she was powerless to stop, now that it was pouring out of her. “And once Claudia was born, it was as if I didn’t even exist. I went from being always in trouble to hardly knowing if I was alive or not. I remember feeling transparent, like I was a ghost in the house.”

Bryson looked disgusted. “You were just a kid, Scarlett. You shouldn’t have ever had to feel like that.”

She shrugged and took a deep breath. “About a year later, Mom got pregnant again. This time, she had Dina. Dina and Claudia were like the dynamic duo. The two of them could do no wrong. Dina was cute and funny and Claudia was super bright and athletic. I was the weird one, the one who didn’t fit in with everyone else.”

Bryson folded his arms and shifted in his seat. His teeth were clenched. “So they just marginalized you? Left you out of everything?”

It touched her that he was so clearly angry on her behalf. “The way they saw it, I was being a brat most of the time and so I was just being punished for it. My sisters would tell on me for just about anything, because they knew my parents thought I was misbehaving. Pretty soon I decided to just go along with what everyone thought of me, and I embraced my reputation as the bad child.”

“Your parents are lucky they’re not here right now,” Bryson said. “I swear to God, Scarlett. If I ever set eyes on this stepfather of yours—“

She put her hand on his, and squeezed. “It’s okay.”

“No it’s not okay, it’s fucking horrific.”

And the worst part is, she thought, he hasn’t even heard anything yet.

“I started acting out more and more,” Scarlett said. “I argued all the time. The punishments got worse. I lost all my privileges. I can remember being in my room all day on Saturday and Sunday, listening to the rest of my family watching movies, eating ice cream, laughing and having a grand old time together. I wasn’t allowed to do much besides clean my room, do schoolwork, or do yard work outside.”

“What a raw deal. That’s insane.”

“Maybe so. I thought it was a raw deal,” Scarlett told him. “And when I got a little older and bigger, I really rebelled. I started refusing my punishments. I started fighting back.”

“Good for you,” Bryson said.

“Not really. The more I fought back, the worse everything got. If I wouldn’t go to my room, Vince and Mom would physically drag me in. I would resist. The physical altercations got worse and worse, with my sisters screaming and crying while they watched my stepdad drag me by my hair. Eventually he started throwing me on the ground and putting a knee in my back.”

Bryson’s eyes were slightly wet as he listened to her. He licked his lips. “You know that’s abuse, right?”

Scarlett smiled crookedly. “I know it hurt. I know I was afraid. But I also kind of got off on it, because I knew that they could never break me. I knew that I could take anything they dished out. Anything.”

“Jesus Christ,” Bryson whispered.

“It went on like that until I was twelve. I had bruises occasionally, but I knew how to explain them away.”

“Why didn’t you tell someone?”

“I still—believe it or not—loved my family. I didn’t want to get them all in trouble. It was my own little battle to fight and I wasn’t trying to get reinforcements.

Maybe I was just too dumb.”

“Don’t say that.”

She laughed. She knew this was affecting him greatly, and perhaps it was turning him off, making him want to run. She wouldn’t blame him if so. But it was the truth, and it felt good to say it aloud, for the first time in a very long time.

But now came the truly difficult part. She swallowed, trying to brace herself for it. “I suppose it hurt everyone, not just me,” Scarlett said. “I was getting the brunt of it, but nobody got off Scott-free. And maybe nobody noticed that Claudia was struggling in her own ways. Nobody noticed that she liked playing with matches, or the little fires that had started in a trashcan, on the stove one time, another in the backyard. Somehow, it was all explained away.”

Bryson was pale. “Scarlett, for god’s sake…don’t tell me…”

“I often ask myself if I knew. I feel like I should have known, that maybe I saw it coming and didn’t stop it. I don’t know the truth. I just remember waking up one night and there was smoke everywhere and I was coughing and choking. I got up, and my eyes were burning so bad and I couldn’t breathe. I was truly afraid for my life. But I knew something horrible had happened, and my first thought was for little Dina. I went and picked her up and carried her out of the house. Claudia was already outside, terrified, screaming and crying—begging me not to tell anyone what she’d done.”

Bryson’s hands were curled into fists, white-knuckled. “Did someone die?”

“No,” Scarlett said. “Luckily, nobody died. But Vince was badly burned. He had third degree burns on both his legs. My mother had a severe case of smoke inhalation.”

“And what happened when they found out that Claudia set that fire and you saved Dina?”

“They never found out,” Scarlett said, meeting his gaze. “I told them I’d done it.

I told them I set the fire.”

He put a hand to his forehead. “Why? Why did you take the blame?”

“Because I knew Claudia couldn’t handle it and I could. I knew I was strong enough.”

Bryson just stared at her. “Scarlett…I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”

She exhaled, relieved that the worst of the story was over. “I was sent away.

First, I went to a group home for children with psychiatric problems. But I was only there for a few months, because they soon realized I was very stable compared to the other kids in the program. After that I was sent to live with a distant aunt, a woman I’d never met before. She was older, and her husband was older, their kids all grown up.”

“Please tell me they loved you and treated you well,” he said. “Please tell me something got better.”

She shook her head. “It wasn’t so bad, I guess. It was a place to live. I don’t think either of them really wanted to deal with a teenage girl with the kind of baggage I had, but maybe they felt an obligation, being blood related to me. I can’t say. I just know that I felt invisible again. I was invisible for the next four years. And when I turned sixteen, I left and went out on my own. I never looked back.”

Bryson stared at her, clearly in awe. “You’ve been completely on your own since you were sixteen years old?”

Scarlett nodded. “Pretty much. Unless you count some of the dirt bag guys I got involved with who put me up from time to time.”