ASHFORD (Gray Wolf Security #5) (110 page)

“Smile for the camera.”

I was far away, in the place I went when I couldn’t be in the place I actually was. It sounded confusing, but I found it easier and easier to get there. Easier, and more necessary than not.

“Smile, Meagan.”

He didn’t like repeating himself. When I didn’t listen, or do as he said, or was too far gone in that faraway place to understand what he was saying, his voice changed a little — just a little bit — to remind me just what was at stake if I refused him.

I had to do what he said. I had to do everything he said. If I didn’t, my mother would die. He’d already proven he could make her sick just by mixing up her medications. She trusted him completely, didn’t suspect him at all.

And I suspected that even if I was able to somehow let her know just what kind of monster the man she loved was, it would probably kill her without any mixup of medications. He’d been a part of her life for so long. She relied on him to help her through her illness, to support her in ways that only a man could support a woman. I wished that I could be enough for my mother, but she needed Carl. Loved him. Thought she knew him so well.

He had everyone fooled. Everyone except me. He’d revealed the monster that wore his skin to me because I had something he wanted.

He wanted all of me.

“Meagan.”

I smiled as best I could, the corners of my mouth yanking upward, unnatural, but a smile by definition.

“Touch yourself.”

It had been hard the first time, but each time he demanded it of me, it got easier. At least there was that. It got easier and easier to comply with something I used to not be able to even comprehend, easier to perform.

Easier to find that place in my brain I could flee to.

And if I went away — really away — I could even convince myself that I liked it, that I liked the way the camera looked at me, the way Carl looked at me, the way I felt, my hand against myself.

And when I came, it would be all over. Carl would leave me alone until the next time he got the urge, and I could start trying to pretend it never happened, and would never happen again.

Which was ridiculous, of course. It happened all the time. It would happen tomorrow. It would happen the next day, and the next. I couldn’t stop it, because I had to protect my mother. Nothing was more important than her.

Time slowed down when terrible things happened. I didn’t know why. I would’ve thought that life would take pity on a person and speed them through it, just to go on and get it over with, whatever the terrible thing happened to be.

Perhaps life was just trying to give the person a chance to examine the terrible thing and decide either to run away from it or face it head on.

Levi and I stared at each other. Somehow, in some completely fucked up way, Carl Prentice, my abusive and toxic stepfather, knew that I was in New York City. More specifically, he knew I was spending time with or was in contact with Levi because he had threatened Levi.

I felt watched, claustrophobic, horrified, and sick overall. Why was this happening? How could it even be happening?

I stared at Levi until I couldn’t stomach it anymore, and then I went to the bathroom and emptied my stomach of its contents. It wasn't much, and I did more dry heaving than actually vomiting. I hadn’t had dinner after dropping in on the sex addiction group meeting. The only appetite I’d had after attending that was for sex, and I’d come home for Levi.

That hadn’t gone well at all. It was just another complication in this shitty knot of a day.

I groped blindly for a washcloth to wipe my mouth, my head still firmly held in the toilet bowl, and a damp one was pushed in my hand. I took it, ashamed. I hated when people witnessed my weaknesses. I hated my weaknesses even more than that.

For whatever reason, anytime I thought too hard or got too caught up inside the frightening maw that opened inside of me from time to time, I got sick to my stomach. It was ironic, really. Carl had controlled me by messing with my mother’s medication, giving her certain pills that would interfere with others, making her vomit horribly. There was probably a connection there, between her throwing up and mine, but I wasn’t willing to give it much thought.

It would probably make me vomit even more.

“I’ll send out for some medicine for your stomach,” Levi was saying as I mopped my face with the washcloth. “Maybe our chef can make something light, like a broth, to see if we can put something in there.”

“You fired all of your staff because of me,” I reminded him weakly — a fact I wasn’t proud of.

“Damn it.”

“Do you think they’ll come back?” I asked. “I hate that they had to be uprooted so suddenly.”

“I hope so,” Levi said. “Now that we know who the person is who made the threat, and his relation to you, we know that the threat didn’t come from anyone in here.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand how you could fire them in the first place. You’ve known all of them for longer than you have me.”

“I would do it again if I thought it would keep you safe,” he said, helping me to my feet. “I will protect you at all costs.”

“Why?” This wasn’t his problem anymore. It was mine. The threat hadn’t come from some random psychopath jealous of Levi, jealous of his wealth and success. It had come directly from my past, from my deepest and darkest secret. He should’ve simply shaken himself free of me and gone on with his life without having to worry about me.

God only knew what Carl was planning on doing. Even I didn’t know, and I probably knew him better than anyone.

“Because I love you.”

The declaration made me shudder. Levi had no idea what he was getting into. He didn’t understand that I was damaged beyond redemption.

“You shouldn’t love me,” I said. “You should be disgusted with me. You should tell me to fuck off, to leave, to get out of your life. Carl isn’t your problem. He’s my problem.”

We sat back down on the bed, the very same bed on which I’d forced myself upon Levi, forced him to fuck me because I wanted to feel good, to vanish my worries, for however temporarily, into a sweet climax.

Even now, I hated myself. Thinking about his cock inside of my body was turning me on, inexplicably, in spite of all the drama swirling around us. I felt like if we could just have sex very quickly, if I could just spend a few long moments cultivating an orgasm with Levi, I would be able to think more clearly.

Clearly, though, now wasn’t the time for sex. It was highly inappropriate.

I sat on my hands, eager to do anything but think about sex, squirming under Levi’s gaze.

“I know you don’t want to, but we need to discuss some things,” he said.

“You don’t know how badly I don’t want to.”

“But you were about to.”

I had been about to tell him everything. About every twisted thing Carl had subjected me to. But now that I knew Carl was out there again, threatening me through Levi, I shrank inside of myself.

“I don’t think I want to anymore.”

“I meant what I said, earlier,” Levi said. “No matter what you tell me, I love you. Do you trust me?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell me.” Levi took my hand and threaded his fingers through mine. “Let me in. If I can understand what happened with you and Carl before, then maybe I can try to figure out what we need to do now.”

There was one good thing about me mulling a full disclosure of what had happened with Carl. I was too nauseated to be horny. All of my sexual appetite had vanished.

The thought that pushed me over the edge, that made me open my mouth and start giving a voice to my horror, was that the worst thing that could happen would be that Levi would be so stunned that he’d kick me out, not want anything to do with me, would end our relationship on principle. That would be a good thing. He shouldn’t be with me, once I told my secret. We’d go our separate ways. I’d disappear somewhere else, somewhere Carl could never find me, and if Carl ever happened to confront Levi about me, Levi could shrug and say he didn’t know where I was.

It was the most ideal outcome. I had to make it happen with my truth. That’s why I decided to tell Levi everything.

To drive him away from me.

Once upon a time, there had been a happy family. Right off, just so we’re clear, that’s a lie. There are no happy families. Even the families who play nice in public, take perfect portraits together at Sears, volunteer at soup kitchens over the holidays — they’re not perfect. Out of the prying eyes of strangers, they snap at one another, aiming at the jugulars. They ignore one another, sequester themselves in their respective dens to avoid one another, choose others to spend time with. They get bored of one another, husbands fuck around on their wives, wives fuck around on their husbands, and everyone has secrets.

My family wasn’t a perfect family. It tried to be a happy family, but there were so many obstacles.

My parents’ relationship could best be described as rocky. I never knew the particulars of it, because most of that tumult had taken place prior to my conception. Matt didn’t remember a lot of it, and what little he did, he always preferred to keep to himself, choosing not to divulge the details he was privy to even when I asked.

I was conceived in the hopes that I would be the glue my parents needed to keep the family they’d tried to make intact, but the divorce was over and done with before my nine months inside my mother were up. I never knew my real father — that’s how acrimonious the eventual split was. I never so much as saw a photo of him, or knew what he looked like. I could only imagine, when I got old enough to think to do so, by contrasting certain features Matt and I had from our mother’s — our auburn hair, for example, or Matt’s height, or my propensity to sneak around.

Well, that last one was dubious. It was something my mother would say whenever I pissed her off or she figured out that I was hiding something from her.

“You get that sneaking around from your father, not me,” she’d rage. “I always tell the truth.”

But the three of us did have fun. Money was tight, so we rarely ate out or went to the movies or anything like that. We made happy memories together, cooking with our mother, telling one another stories, just cuddling on the couch, Matt and I doing our homework on either side of our mother, who contentedly read a romance novel, swatting me as I tried to read the pages of the tomes on the sly.

We would’ve made it, our little family, even with its ups and downs, if our mother hadn’t gotten sick. Her getting sick was a catalyst for everything that happened next, everything that tore us apart, that led to my personal horrors, to my mother dying, to Matt being killed.

Her getting sick was how she met Carl.

She came home from a doctor’s appointment one afternoon after Matt and I had just gotten dropped off at home from the bus. She was dazed, dropping down on the couch distractedly as we bickered about something. I don’t remember what it was my brother and I were arguing about anymore, just that we were going at each other over some superfluous something. My mother would usually nip our little fights in the bud right away, but she let it go on until I shoved my brother. I couldn’t have been much older than in junior high, putting him in the early years of high school.

“That’s enough,” she said, but even that command didn’t carry the impetus that it usually did. What it did carry was the sense that something was wrong — very wrong.

Matt and I stopped picking at each other and looked at my mother, who suddenly appeared very frail and very, very tired.

“I hope you two would learn to get along,” she continued, not making eye contact with either of us, staring into some distant place. “I’m not going to be around forever, you know, to stop your bickering.”

It was cancer, she later told us, and the treatments would upend everything. The things that were supposed to make her better instead made her so sick, and she’d spend entire days locked in the bathroom, made comfortable at her post in front of the toilet with thick comforters and pillows from her bed. We tiptoed around the house, cooked for ourselves, got food when the refrigerator was bare, went hungry when there was no money for food. We were small bodies in orbit around her illness, trying to tend to her, in vain, in the way children try to do things and fail because they just don’t understand how.

Then came Carl.

My mother came home from the hospital one day a little more buoyant than usual. She was always relieved to be home, but dreaded how sick she would become because of the treatments, but this day was different. She very nearly glowed.

“This weekend, we’re going to have a guest for dinner,” she gushed as we piled pillows around her in her bed. Her hair was in the process of thinning, and she’d lose it all, eventually.

“Who’s coming to dinner?” Matt asked.

“My dear friend Carl,” she said. “I met him at the hospital.”

“Is he having treatment, too?” I asked.

“No, no. He works there, at the hospital.”

“A doctor?” Matt asked, his voice hopeful.

“No.” She shook her head. “He works in one of the labs there at the hospital. We ran in to each other a few weeks ago — literally. He’s become a very good friend.”

And when we met him for the first time, we were none the wiser to what hid behind that friendly smile, the non-threatening bald spot gradually expanding at the back of his head. We all laughed at his joke that he was balding in solidarity with our mother.

He was such a talented liar.

Carl bought our trust with his sheer consistency, through all the times he’d bring home little treats or presents for Matt and me, through the way he treated my mother as if she were the most important person in the world. It was strange and wonderful to see her so happy even as she battled a dire threat to her health. I’d never witnessed her around an adult man. She laughed so often. She seemed younger than what she really was.

As Matt graduated high school and started looking for work to help pay down our mother’s mounting medical bills, it seemed only natural that Carl should move in with us. He had become a stabilizing presence in our household. He helped cook and clean, assigned regular chores for Matt and me, enforced rules — became everything a father might do. If there was a book on fatherhood, Carl was following it to the last detail, right down to instituting a family game night, a rule that we should all always sit down for dinner together, a favorite family movie that we liked to watch while sitting around the living room, limbs draped over each other.

It was only a matter of time before Carl asked my mother to marry him. We had a simple wedding right there at the house, with only a couple of people from the hospital and a judge in attendance at the ceremony. My mother was too weak to travel at that point, and her bills were so high that we couldn’t do anything fancier for her.

“That’s all right,” she said, smiling, tenuous because of her bald head, looking like a little girl in the bright lipstick she’d chosen, that I’d helped her apply. “I don’t need anything fancy. I have everything I could possibly need right here.”

Carl’s presence in our life should’ve been a story with a happy ending, a man my mother could rely on through her illness, a man who would raise her children right no matter what happened to her, a family who would be together forever.

But that wasn’t how the story went. Carl was a nightmare lying in wait, and began to unfurl his dread wings as soon after the wedding as possible.

I heard sounds one day coming from my brother’s room on an early Saturday morning.

I walked into Matt's typically messy space to find him angrily shoving clothes into a duffel bag.

"Where are you going?"

He paused, but didn't turn around, grabbing at the shirts piled in his drawer.

"I can't stay here anymore," he said, not slowing his packing down. "I'm sorry, Meagan. I just can't."

I stood there in the doorway, mute, struck dumb by disbelief. Matt had never acted like this before. We'd always been happy -- a family.

"Where are you going?" I spluttered. "Why? You can't go!"

"Carl's right," Matt said, packing faster. "I'm an extra mouth to feed, and I'm never going to find a job here. This town's too small."

"You'll find a job," I said, snagging a pair of shorts he was trying to fit in his bag and holding on. "It's just a matter of time. Mom said so."

"Mom says I should go." Matt was so obviously hurting that he had to have heard wrong.

"She would never tell you to go."

"She didn't tell me I should go," he amended. "She said that Carl thought it would be best, and that she agreed."

"But where?" That truth stung even me. When I was done with high school, like Matt, would she side with Carl and boot me out of the only home I'd ever known? It seemed so implausible that I wanted to laugh, but here it was, happening to my brother.

"New York City," he said, his voice grim.

"But that's so far away!" I'd never been away from Matt in my entire life.

"The city's big enough that I'll find something," he vowed. "I'll send home whatever I can to help with mom's bills."

"You should stay just a little longer," I urged him. "You'll find something. I know you will."

"It's just not going to happen for me here, Meagan. I have to leave."

It wasn't fair. I hated it. And yet there was nothing I could do to sway my mom's view. Carl had convinced her completely.

"Meagan, Matt wants to go to New York City," she told me finally, sighing as she eased back onto her pillows. She'd lost every hair on her body at that point, her head smooth and somehow soothing to stroke whenever she happened to take off whatever hat or scarf she chose to cover up with.

"No, he wants to stay here with us," I protested, not caring that my brother was already days gone, getting himself set up in a hostel, meeting new friends, moving on with his life away from us, away from me.

“You’re making your mother upset,” Carl observed from the doorway, but I didn’t care. I was sick of tiptoeing around, constantly on eggshells.

“I can’t believe you’d listen to Carl and kick your own son out of the house,” I spat, turning on my heel and running away. I didn’t heed my mother’s cry after me, didn’t so much as look at Carl as I rushed past, up the stairs and into my room, slamming the door.

I felt that, for the first time, there were different factions in this family and I was on the wrong one, the lonely one. Carl and my mother were on the other side, and things weren’t going to go well for me.

I withdrew a little bit, hunkering down in a shell of my own making, shutting myself in my room, staying away from my mother and Carl. It was the wrong thing to do. I should’ve been supporting my mother throughout her treatment, trying to keep life at home as easy as possible compared to how badly she was feeling, the toll the medications were taking on her. But I couldn’t fathom the loss of my brother from my life. There wasn’t a way to communicate with him.

Time heals all wounds, or at least that’s what they say. The sicker my mother became, the closer I drew back to her. My angry words were all but forgotten with her, but it seemed like they stuck with Carl — or perhaps just the fact that I’d tried to turn my mother against him. He acted the same, but things were clearly different. We’d never enjoyed a close relationship, but things grew chillier while getting stranger.

I felt as if I were constantly watched in my own house.

It was disconcerting and made being at school that much more preferable.

It wasn’t until just after my 18th birthday, near the beginning of my senior year of high school, when Carl made the first move, making contact with me, telling me what he wanted, showing just how much power he could wield over my mother’s health and, by extension, me.

Twisted up inside, completely confused and isolated from anyone who could be considered an ally, I started reshaping my own brain, my own beliefs, to fit with this horrible reality.

All Carl wanted to do was watch me touch myself. Sometimes, he liked to videotape it. That was fine. That could be fine. Everybody pleasured themselves at some point or another. It was completely natural. If Carl’s thing was that he wanted to watch me do it, then that could be fine, too.

It was a small price to pay to ensure my mother’s wellbeing.

It wasn’t, of course, but it was what I convinced myself in order to preserve what little of my sanity remained.

After I realized that Carl was serious about making my mother sick — or even killing her — to make me do whatever I wanted, I would’ve created any lie that my mind needed to hear in order to keep pleasing him.

I convinced myself that it was normal.

I convinced myself that Carl cared for me.

I convinced myself that I liked it.

I was so convincing in my own mind that I actually did start liking it — helplessly, physically, at least. My body somehow found it within itself to have real orgasms. I didn’t know if Carl would know or care if I faked it for his benefit, to get him away from me faster, but my body responded to itself just fine.

It was completely fucked up. I realized it, on some level, and ignored it on the rest. I had to make it work — for my sake, for my mother’s sake. I did everything Carl asked, in every pose and position he asked. I never once resisted him …

… until I did.