In Control (The City Series) (20 page)

I sat close to him, practically on his lap, and stared up at the coffered ceiling. Whenever I drank too much, my mind immediately went to details in my life that I’d always shut out. I wasn’t able to hold them back, and because my brain couldn’t prevent them from invading, I had to watch each memory flicker through. Since I’d met Wren, there had only been a handful of times that I’d gotten to this point, not able to withstand the memories, and I was thankful for that. In a way, without him knowing, his rule of not allowing me more than three glasses of liquor, protected me from the horrid images.

The first memory came to me. The night
it
happened. It was the worst memory of all, and the one that I kept hidden beneath all of the rest. To this day, I could still feel Mr. Henderson’s hands on my thigh. I could still feel his fingertips stroke my cheek as he told me how pretty I was. After all of these years, I still felt the ugly marks left behind.

Wren touched my hand and I abruptly jumped up from the couch. I didn’t realize how heavy I was breathing until the background music had stopped and all I could hear was my own panting.

“Are you okay?” Wren asked. He
stood up and put his arms around my shoulders.

I didn’t shake them away. Instead, I let them wrap me like a security blanket and basked in the immediate relief. My breathing slowed, but the disgusting image stayed in the spotlight.

“Kingsley?” Wren lightly shook my shoulders, trying his best to get my attention.

I focused on his eyes, trying to force myself to get away from the memory. I was clawing to escape but every time I tried, Mr. Henderson was right there, standing in front of me, stroking my cheek with his calloused hands. I screamed, pushing Wren’s body off of me, and ran to the opposite side of the room. I cradled my body into the corner, shielding my face from view. Tears spilled from my eyes, and my fingernails dug into the palms of my hands.

“Kingsley, please,” Wren pleaded, “please tell me what’s wrong.”

“Leave me alone!” I cried. I rocked back and forth, not able to stop myself. My hands were shaking. I could feel the pain from my nails but couldn’t undo my fists. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

Wren quickly grabbed a garbage can, forcing it between my knees. I adjusted my body and held onto the can tightly, taking deep breaths in through my nose and exhaling out my mouth. This seemed to help the nausea subside, and I continued doing it until I was able to finally look up at him. The room stopped spinning, but I could feel my brain seesawing inside my head. Up and down. Up and down.

Wren knelt down, placing the can aside. “Talk to me. Tell me what just happened.”

Many times I opened my mouth, thinking of ways to explain, but every explanation I came up with revealed too much.

“Please, Kingsley!”

The undeniable urgency in Wren’s tone made me feel horrible. I knew he wanted to know why I acted the way I did, but how do you tell a person you’d been raped? How do you tell someone that the incident lit a fire inside you, and every event that had happened since then played off of
that
night?

You don’t.

You hold it all in, and yes, you feel like your insides are going to burst with all of the negative memories you keep locked inside, but you don’t dare tell a soul unless you want to appear weak.

“I just felt sick for a second. It’s nothing,” I lied.

Wren looked down at the carpet for a few seconds before standing up and walking to the stereo. He turned it off, then spun back to look at me. “You’re never going to open up to me. How am I supposed to love you if you won’t allow me to love
all
of you?” He waited, seeing if I would answer his question. When he realized I wasn’t, he walked up the stairs, closing the basement door behind him.

The room was dark, the only light coming from the lamp in the corner. The soft wattage created a relaxing effect, but my insides were anything but. I sat against the wall, aware that I messed everything up. Again. I’d be surprised if my bags weren’t packed and waiting by the front door when I went upstairs.

When I left the Hendersons, it was a moment I’d looked forward to for such a long time, but it was also a terrifying one. I was still underage, so I went straight back to the children’s home I came from. I was heartbroken, lost, confused, and so completely damaged that I never thought I’d be normal again. The counselors told me that the depression would get better over time. They said that the medicine I had to take every day would start working soon, and then I’d feel human again. I sat in the room that was assigned to me, staring at the bare white walls and waiting for that moment that never came. I became restless and soon began refusing to take the drugs they were prescribing me. They weren’t helping anyway.

A week passed and a counselor came into my room, claiming that a nice lady was there to pick me up and take me to her home. I automatically feared the worst, remembering the exact situation with the Hendersons. What nice lady would want to meet a fourteen-year-old girl who had nothing to give? I walked into the waiting room and was greeted by a beautiful woman with a smile almost as sweet as Ms. Cole’s. Her brown hair was cut short, ending just under her chin, and her petite frame was covered by loose-fitting jeans and a green silk blouse. I approached the table, seeing that I was at least five inches taller than her. She wasn’t deterred by my height, instead she looked up, greeting me with the same warm smile.

“Hi. My name is Trish. You must be Kingsley.”

I noticed her accent, but couldn’t place where she was from. Her delicate voice produced a calmness in me I hadn’t felt since being with Porter. I took her outstretched hand in mine and shook it.

“I’ll let you two have a moment to get to know one another better,” the counselor said before leaving the room.

I sat across from Trish, staring at everything but her. She seemed nice, but so did the Hendersons the first time I met them.

“You must be really confused with what’s going on,” she concluded.

“Why do you want to foster me?” I asked blatantly, expecting to hear how I was just another paycheck, or her husband needed someone to touch in the middle of the night. Instead she said that she wasn’t able to have babies of her own. She told me that she’d been trying for years to become pregnant, and it was no longer an option. She exposed to me the truth, saying that she dreamed of caring for someone other than just herself.

“This morning I got a call from your counselor, and she told me that she had a scared little girl that just needed to be loved.” Her eyes filled with tears as she spoke. “I didn’t care that you were already a teenager. All I heard was that you needed someone. Five minutes later, I was in the car and now here I am.”

The genuine look on Trish’s face made my heart beat wildly against my chest. I was convinced the second I stepped foot inside this place, that my heart had stopped working, but Trish’s explanation, the tears that pricked her eyes, convinced me that maybe, just
maybe
I could finally have a permanent home.

When Trish brought me to her apartment that night, I was expecting it to be beat up. I looked in the empty bedrooms, searching for other children. It was just her and I, and a clean apartment decorated with fresh flowers and nice furniture.

Over time, I opened up to her. Not completely, but more than I ever had with anyone else. She cried when I told her that every time I looked at my naked body, I still saw bruises covering it. She understood my need to lock my bedroom door at night. She even accepted my lies of why sometimes I didn’t even come home. Trish didn’t punish me because somehow she knew I was doing what I had to do to cope.

Until I met Wren, I didn’t think another person could genuinely love me. I felt like with Trish it was just a fluke, but then he came along, and for reasons I won’t ever be able to understand, fell in love with me.

I ran up the stairs behind him, quickly, before I could change my mind. Past the hallway, through the dining room, and up to the third floor. Wren’s bedroom door was open and when I arrived in the doorway, he looked up from his bed, a blank stare on his face. My breathing was heavy and the words that were on the tip of my tongue were ones I’d never thought I’d speak out loud.

“When I was thirteen I was raped.”

When I left Porter’s yesterday, I walked around the city until I could feel my feet begging for rest. I arrived at the Hendersons ten minutes after curfew, and I knew the moment I stepped inside, I was in trouble. The house was silent, meaning the kids were upstairs in their rooms so they couldn’t witness the trouble that would ensue. Mrs. Henderson rushed into the hallway, holding a fork tightly between her fingers.

“Where have you been?” she screamed, approaching me at full speed.

I backed into the door, fearing the utensil in her hand. The closer she got, the more my insides twisted in fear. She grabbed onto my wrist and turned me around so that my back was against her chest. As she whispered how much she hated me, she held the fork against my throat. Her other arm trapped my body, so I wasn’t able to move an inch.

“Why are you late?”

Her tone became harsher each passing second. I was afraid to speak, fearing that if I said one wrong thing, the fork would pierce my skin.

“I-I,” I stuttered, unable to stay calm. “Tutoring ran late.”

Mrs. Henderson pushed my body away from her, and I fell onto the floor, my hands catching most of the fall. I lay on my stomach, knowing that if I moved the slightest bit, it would make her angrier. She placed her foot on my lower back, forcing her weight down onto me.

“You’re such a little bitch! Why must you lie all the damn time?”

Her weight shifted, and in that moment I took my only chance at escaping. I forced my body off the ground, but before I could get very far, Mrs. Henderson had me pinned against the front door.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” she snarled.

I turned my face away and closed my eyes, trying with all my might to block out the next few seconds. Her palm struck my cheek not once, but twice. She clamped onto my hair, tugging it in all directions.

“You’re an evil piece of shit!”

Her words didn’t hurt me, but her hands always did.

She yanked my wrist forward and I fell onto my back. The floor was the most dangerous place to be; I was most vulnerable lying down. I didn’t realize she had kicked me in the side of my stomach until it felt like my lungs had collapsed in my chest. I took three huge gulps of air only to realize that I wasn’t actually able to take in any. I was heaving on the ground, grasping at the tile and trying with everything I had to stand up and run.

Mrs. Henderson knelt down, and I was so afraid she was going to strangle me that with the only energy I had remaining, I put my hands up to guard my face.

“You’re not brave, little girl. You’re weak. Remember that.”

But I
was
brave. At least, I wanted to be more than anything. I wanted to stop plaguing myself with the things I couldn’t control. No matter how many times I was beaten or how many times I felt threatened, I needed to continue to breathe. Having Porter around helped me come to the conclusion that no matter what, I wanted to live.

When I woke the next morning, I did what I always did. I stared at the calendar. 150 days with Porter, but who knew if it even mattered anymore.

When Mrs. Henderson finally stopped hurting me last night, she instructed me, as always, not to say a word to anyone.
Or else.
It was in those
or else
warnings that I wondered what could possibly be worse than this.

The Hendersons had planned on taking the children to the bowling alley that day. It didn’t happen often, and after last night, Mrs. Henderson made it clear that I wasn’t invited. She explained her reasoning to Andrew, telling him that I had to stay at the house and wait for the plumber to come and fix the kitchen sink. She wasn’t lying about the sink. It had stopped working last week and since then, she’d been washing the dishes in the upstairs bathroom. Unfortunately though, a plumber wasn’t coming to fix it.

It would be my first time ever in the house alone, and I was looking forward to walking around the house without having to watch my back at all times. As soon as I heard the front door close, I grabbed my shower towel and headed upstairs. Stepping under the shower head without fear of someone banging on the door made it easy for me to relax and allow the water droplets to melt away my stress. For once, I wasn’t counting the seconds I had left before I’d have to get out. For once, the water was hot, and I allowed the steam to work its way into my sore lungs. A dark blue bruise covered my side, aching to the touch. I gently rubbed the area, wishing I could push a button and all of my pain would disappear.

Ashley must have forgotten to take out her body wash, and when I saw it sitting on the top shelf, I convinced myself to use some. I squirted a pea-sized amount into my palm and worked it into a lather. The scent of pumpkin mixed with cinnamon filled the space, and the decadent smell tempted me into squeezing more into my hand. My tense muscles relaxed as I spread the soap over my skin. I looked at my fingers, seeing that they were starting to wrinkle, and laughed. I’d never had the opportunity to see that happen.