Redeeming Rhys (7 page)

He was convinced he didn’t have a heart. Not anymore. Maybe not ever. His conflicted mind was belligerent, worse than ever, between his past, his current, and who he had to find. There was no way around it any longer. Rhys had always talked himself away from it, convincing himself that he could handle his needs with others like her, but he had been pushed over the edge. Gutted. He had started to feel, not for the women he took, but more for her. He didn’t understand it, but he wanted to. He needed to hear words spill from her pretty little mouth that she cared for him, that everything was going to be okay. He needed to know that she recognized why he did what he did.

In that moment, Rhys looked over at the dead girl, her once unappealing facial features absent and overtaken by the swelling from his fists. Soon, even that disappeared as his mind swayed with the idea of what Wren would look like now. Her dark hair long, wavy and softer than silk. Rhys put his hands in the dead girl’s hair, guileless by the dried blood and bits in it, and thought that it was Wren. He could have his Wren. He could care for her. He would care for her if she would give him a chance.

He bent down to her cold body and laid his head onto her chest, still without life. The girl’s once heaving breasts were unmoving. Her heart dead. Her breath sounds absent. That is when Rhys felt like he was at home. When he felt loved. But it was just a matter of time before the girl he dreamt of didn’t speak, didn’t say the words he thought in his head.

It’s okay, Rhys. I know you aren’t a bad boy…

Wren never said it. He only wished it, and he continued to do so for ten straight years. The insanity encircled him tighter than it did days before, so menacing while threatening to take his last will to survive. It came in phases, the stealing of the innocence if you will. He seized what he needed, fell prey to the nightmares of his past, awoke to pretend for just a little while until lunacy found him again, and then lost the last piece of himself until he came down from it again. Cyclic, just like evil.

Rhys came back to the current, understanding that he was just a repulsive, filthy animal. He stared down at the girl, the overwhelming odor of death, pungent and sour, along with mold, was enough to make any normal person vomit. When Rhys came to that conclusion, he understood he had likely been asleep for more than a few hours. The pattern of blood splatter on the awful peeling floral wallpaper above the headboard of the full-sized bed was dark. Not black yet, but it was just a matter of time before the tug-of-war between life and death was over. Death always wins. The finality of it is nothing to be reckoned with. There is never hope when it comes to death. You can’t bargain with it. You can’t come back from it. There are no second chances. It simply is.

Rhys clenched his jaw and swallowed hard, the acid from his gurgling stomach threatening to escape his hungry belly. He hadn’t eaten anything decent in a day or so, but his appetite was the last of his worries. He had to bathe away his sins. Make the wrong right, though a complete conundrum, it was part of his process. Take them. Break them. Make them his, then deliver them to the goodness he was sure they didn’t deserve. That is what he had been surviving on for ten years, but he knew it was a matter of time before he became victim to death’s ways. He tangoed with it all the time. He knew what it felt like, the whisper of irrevocability. The gruesomeness he loved to hate, or perhaps it was the other way around, how he hated to love it. It was who he was…

He brushed a tangled strand of dark hair away from the girl’s battered forehead, not an ounce of empathy filling his shadowy heart. He wished he could talk to God, but there was no God where he was birthed. God was learned. God was forced. He believed in Him once, only to be left. Stranded. Alone. Evil was easier. Turning to the darkness was the simplest route. Cutting them away from his life, making the hurt stop was the method to his madness, the start of something beautifully fucked that he would never be prepared for.

The girl’s eyes were still open, glassy and hazed. The color of her irises nearly gray and unrecognizable. Her nose was crooked, a probable result from the power of his fists. Her lips, previously thin and without volume, were swollen from his abuse. Rhys was ready to wash away his immoralities and hers too. It was time to make things right. He would let this part of himself go.

He stood from the bed, stripping himself free from his bloodied clothes. He walked atop the blood-splattered carpet to the adjoining bathroom. He bent down to turn on the water, testing it to ensure its temperature was just right. He was surprised when it was hot and allowed the heat to fill the small tub. He fetched a bar of soap, individually wrapped courtesy of the motel, and placed it on the side of the bathtub. Pale red littered the dirty white ceramic edge of the tub, washing away part of the blood from his hands.

Rhys popped his fingers and sighed, wishing he could talk to her. Find his peace. His absolution. She could redeem the bad man he had become. His naked feet were planted onto the soggy carpet, still wet from the girl’s blood, and he stared, confused as to how he had gotten to where he was at in life.
Oh, silly boy… didn’t you listen then? You were bad. Everything changed that day by the swing-set.
You may have been treading water, but it is just a matter of time before the devil grabs your legs and pulls you beneath the water, leaving you to suffocate and perish just like you deserve.

Rhys tried his best to dismiss the thoughts, recollections from that terrible day while telling his crazy subconscious to fuck off, but his mind was swirling about in the most horrendous, irrational manner. His eyes made their way to the dead girl. The feelings he almost grasped onto were gone as he went into auto-pilot mode. Rhys moved over to the girl like a ghost floating over a deep ravine and placed his arms under her lifeless body. He lifted slightly, it not taking much effort to move her. She couldn’t have weighed more than one-hundred pounds. Her pert breasts were still mounds over her chest, covered in blood while the rest of her skin was littered with bruises and cuts.

“Shhhh, my darling. Now is the time to see if heaven is for real. We will bathe one another free from our sins. Cast away the evil, and through eternal slumber you shall see if the God that you prayed to will save you, even in death.”

Rhys continued to whisper hymns from his favorite church songs to her, half-singing, half-humming. When he made his way into the bathroom with her, the water was flowing over the tub. He didn’t care, or maybe he was in such a trance that he didn’t notice. He simply ignored it and stepped over the ceramic edge of the tub. The girl’s dead body was like a feather, so weightless and like nothing, but make no mistake, the dissolutions from one’s past will always come back to haunt them, in the current life or the next.

Rhys huddled her around her breasts, her cooling skin making him get goosebumps over his arms. He welcomed the warmth of the water, and bent his knees to sit down with the girl between his legs. He reached forward slightly to turn the water off, the girl’s lax head slumping over like a useless ragdoll. The water, once clear, turned into a shade of pale pink and murky and you were unable to see to the bottom of the bathtub.

Rhys let his body meld with hers, the heat from his creating a cathartic environment with her cooling one. Together, through life and death, sins were bathed as hearts attempted to mend. Rhys whispered terms of endearment to her, even ones that he wasn’t sure of, but he went with it. It was different than the usual bible verse. That was all he had been good for most of his life, anyway. After rubbing pink suds over her body and washing them free, he washed himself free from the blood. Rhys sat there with his arms around her still body, lost in time.

When the water turned cold, Rhys flipped the drain with his toe and let the girl float on her back in the tub while he grabbed two towels, one for him and one for her. He dried himself off, then drug her from the tub, patting her dry until her pruned skin was free from most of the water, and scooped her up like a baby, placing her head over his heart. In the same bed covered in sins and shame, he pulled back the sheets, the blood now dried, and laid her head down on the pillow, ensuring that her eyes were closed. He kissed her on the head like someone would do to comfort a child, and slipped back in the bed next to her, spooning her naked body with his as he wrapped his arm around her tiny waist. Rhys didn’t believe in praying. He gave that up long ago, with the exception of waking up in sweat while quoting the Rosary, but at that second in time, he wished for peace and he knew that he wouldn’t find it alone.

He needed to get to Father Sullivan first. Father Sullivan knew where she was. With those thoughts, Rhys allowed his eyes to close while nuzzling his chin onto the top of the girl’s head and fell asleep for the first time without nightmares.

The angel tried so hard to find peace, but deep down, every time she saw the face of her lover, all she saw was him. Nightmares surged through her veins, for she would never change. He had a piece of her soul.

WREN SORENSON HAD
been attempting to pick up the pieces of her life for ten years. They say time heals all wounds, and she often found herself cursing those who believed that. If anything, the older she got, the harder it seemed to deal with. The feelings that bathed her all that time ago were unfamiliar, however, as time passed, she became privy to what they meant.

As much as she wanted to hate Rhys, she couldn’t. He owned part of her heart. Part of her soul. Part of her body. She had tried to deny it back then, and still to this day, but she couldn’t. Perhaps that is why she wouldn’t be able to move on.

She spent her days helping sexual abuse victims, holding their hands and wiping away their tears while providing them with advice that she, herself, couldn’t believe. She was alone, shuffled away to a convent with nuns as they told her to pray away her pain and sins. She was never to speak of the times that led her there. The death she saw. The life she gave. The blood that was spilled. The hate that was shared, and the things she saw from Rhys. She was silenced by the ignorance of her religion, the judgements from them. They were supposed to support and love her unconditionally, because that is what Jesus would have done, right?

Instead, she was treated like garbage. She wasn’t given much empathy, considering the circumstances that had occurred ten years prior. She was just a girl. A lost, fourteen-year-old girl who was trying to figure out the world. And just when she thought that Rhys wasn’t a bad boy, she was proven wrong again. She hated him, but she cared for him, a complete enigma of emotions. Those feelings never made sense to her, and they still didn’t.

Wren shuffled the papers on her desk, pushing her long, curly black locks off her shoulders. She was volunteering extra time at a women’s shelter during the evenings she wasn’t at school working towards her master’s degree. She had done well, obtaining her bachelor’s degree in social work. She was sure she had real dreams, but didn’t know what she would do if and when she ever got to them.

She had recently met a man, by fate, the month prior. Wren tried her best to dismiss him, because anytime she thought of him, Rhys came to mind. She wondered if Rhys was alive or dead. After all, how does a fourteen-year-old survive the harsh elements of the world? The man she had recently met was good. He was the opposite of Rhys. He was the type of man that would do anything to find a person like Rhys.

Wren hated when her beliefs struck against one another; it was like nails on a chalkboard. She wished she could take the advice she shelled out over and over, telling girls and women that they could not let their attackers have control over their thoughts for the rest of their lives. She hated to label him in such a way, because to her, he wasn’t. He was something more.
Fuck
, she thought. She couldn’t stand when she justified him, the back and forth with Rhys. He was not good, and she knew she would never be able to be a normal person if she continued to do that.

Wren pursed her lips, covered in a shimmering pink gloss, and looked at the clock. It was half-past eight in the evening and she had recently finished up with her last client. She tossed the papers she was shuffling to the side and fidgeted nervously in her chair. She gulped hard, anticipation for her evening ahead peaked.

She was due to go on a date with the man she had been seeing for a month. She never cared to try to get to know anyone, a man nor woman. Rhys had kept that part of her on the playground since she was a little girl. She remembers what it was like to be happy. To be vibrant. To smile and feel the flutters in your tummy from happiness. Rhys made her feel the butterflies out of fear. They came and went as time passed when she would spot something red, reminding her of the blood that covered him and the walls of their house. Anytime she would be shopping in a home goods store and would see a kitchen knife, her belly would turn and drop, flashing back again.

She belonged to him.

She couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t feel lost, but helping the victims was like an amends she always wished for. Wren hoped that she could wash away her sins and become lovable again, for someone. She was tainted. She never tried to think about the prospect of a man being interested in her. That would eventually mean opening up. Speaking in another language than what she was used to; hopes and likes. Dislikes and what makes you happy. Wren had conformed to a woman that slept, suffered from nightmares, and lost any interest in the world. She held onto the hurt and used that to help those that she could.