ASHFORD (Gray Wolf Security #5) (109 page)

              He didn’t want to do this, and I had forced myself upon him.

              I was a terrible human being. That was the identity of that shitty hole inside of me. It took and took and took and it never gave back. Levi had saved me from my hometown, and he was ready to sacrifice himself to try to save me from myself. He was letting me fuck him, and he didn’t want to do it. He had given me a place to live, clothes to wear, food to eat, money to spend, and I’d just decided that I could simply take sex from him, as well.

              I stopped my rocking immediately and began to keen, covering my face with my hands, horrified at myself, horrified that I’d become just as bad as my tragedy, horrified I’d become the very same monster who’d ruined my life. My keen rose to a wail, and Levi was speaking, dragging my hands down from my face, scooting up to a sitting position, but I couldn’t hear anything above my rock bottom.

              Because this was rock bottom. This was me using another human being like he was trash, like he was just something I could use and throw away, just like I’d been used and thrown away.

              I didn’t deserve to be alive.

              I hadn’t realized I’d started screaming until Levi clamped a hand over my mouth tightly, then loosened it. My throat was raw and my cheeks were wet, and I couldn’t stand to be in my own skin. How could Levi touch me? Why was he hugging me to his chest, even now, especially now, after what I’d done?

              “You have to let me in,” Levi said as I wept. “You have to let me help you.”

              “I don’t think anyone can help me,” I sobbed. “I don’t think it’s possible anymore.” My brother had tried to help me and ended up dead. Levi was trying to help me and just look at what I’d done to him. Look what I was doing to his life.

              “I am going to do whatever it takes,” he said, “and I don’t care what it takes. Take whatever you think you need from me. Whatever you need, Meagan. Anything.”

              I shook my head. “No. I can’t take that from you. I can’t take anything from you anymore. You still think you owe my brother. You don’t have to help me anymore. You’ve done enough.”

              “I want to help you. It doesn’t have anything to do with your brother anymore.”

              “Why?” I demanded. “Why would you want to help me? I’m not a good person. You’re not going to like what you see when you peel back the layers. It’s just shards of glass and shit and garbage.”

              “Meagan, I love you. I’ve fallen in love with you.”

              I twisted in his arms to stare at him, dumbfounded. “Why would you do something as stupid as that?”

              He shrugged and actually smiled at me. “I don’t know. I guess you can’t really plan for something like that.”

              Levi was in love with me? It couldn’t be possible. I was the worst possible person in the world for someone to be in love with. It would never work. He would be miserable, and I would be helplessly stupid, hopeless.

              “You have to tell me what’s going on so I can help you,” he said. “Okay?”

              “You can’t help me.” I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Everything that had happened was a tangle of barbed wire inside of me. I stayed away from it because every time I’d tried to unravel it, I’d gotten pricked. It was easier to leave it alone, ignore it, and tiptoe around it. I’d learned to do that, and I liked to think I’d gotten good at it.

              Except, of course, for the small matter of having just forced myself upon Levi, who loved me, like an idiot.

              “I’m messed up inside, Levi. Meetings aren’t going to help that, and I’m afraid what’ll happen to you if you keep trying. I just…I just forced you …”

              “Stop that,” he said, bringing my hands back down from trying to cover my face again. “If I had wanted to stop you, I would’ve.”

              “But you didn’t want to have sex.”

              “Maybe not, but I wanted to help you, and if you needed sex in that moment, then I was going to help you with that.”

              I shook my head. “That’s not fair. That’s not fair to you, and I can’t accept that. I have to go away. I have to get away from everyone. I just consume people. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve had sex with because I honestly don’t know. I’m not proud of it. I don't know that I ever was. It was just something to fill…something I had to do.”

              “Help me understand,” he said, his voice calm even as mine shook and broke. “I want to understand why you think you need to do this. If I can understand that, maybe we can figure out what needs to happen to help you let go. To move forward. To get better.”

              Would it be as easy as that? I wanted to believe Levi, was desperate to believe him, but I just wasn’t sure. I was too tangled up inside, a ball of ugly that refused to be solved. It sounded too good to be true, but I felt like I owed Levi. I owed him for getting me out of his hometown, and for putting up with my bad behavior in his own home.

              Still, it was hard. I’d kept everything inside of me for so long simply because there hadn’t been anyone to tell. I’d been alone. Now that someone was here, ready and willing to listen, I was frightened. What would happen once everything, every awful detail, was out in the air, hanging between us? I wouldn’t be able to shove everything back inside me, hiding it away from his gaze. It would be out there for the rest of my life, and maybe Levi would decide he didn’t want anything to do with a person as messed up as I was.

              I wouldn't blame him. Half the time, I wished I could climb outside of myself and be someone else, just for a little bit.

              “Meagan, just tell me. Nothing can be that bad.”

              He was wrong, of course. He didn’t know what he was asking for. The truth he was asking for wouldn’t be like anything he’d ever heard before, or could’ve imagined in his darkest nightmare. I wouldn’t be able to take it back, and he wouldn’t be able to pretend he didn’t hear it, didn’t understand just how horrific it was. It would color his understanding of me for the rest of our time together, which wouldn't be long. How would it last any longer than it had, once Levi knew what I was?

              “You can’t judge me,” I warned him, my voice sounding weak to my own ears. Weak and ugly. “Whatever I tell you, you can’t think differently of me. Keep loving me. Please.”

              “There’s not a single word you can say that will make me stop loving you,” Levi said, his blue eyes steady.

              I should’ve been reassured by him, comforted by his presence and his promise to listen and support me. But I wasn’t. I was terrified. I believed that once he knew my story, my secrets, he wouldn’t be able to stop judging me.

              No one wanted to love something that was broken. When something was broken, you threw it away. You got something else, something better. Something that was still pretty and new.

              No one should have to try to love something broken. It was just too hard.

              I knew that Levi would stop loving me after he knew the truth. There was no way to get around that. But I also knew that he deserved to know the truth. If he thought he understood me well enough to love me, he just didn’t know me well enough. He didn’t know what he was getting himself into, and he needed to.

              Even if I was about to lose the best thing that had ever happened to me, Levi had to know the truth.

              “Everything starts and ends with my mom remarrying. Her divorce to my real dad happened while she was still pregnant with me, and while Matt was still young. He doesn’t—didn’t have any memories of our father, and I never met him at all.”

              I looked at Levi. There was still time to revise my narrative. I could make something different up. I could omit certain details, lessen the blow of others. He didn’t know my story, so I could tell my story however I liked. I could make myself look better. I could make myself look blameless.

Instead, I knew that I was going to be as painfully honest as possible. I deserved whatever disgust Levi had for me at the end. He hadn’t known what he was trying to save when he was standing inside of that bar in my hometown. If he’d known, there would’ve been no way he’d use his resources to try to help me. Saving him from myself was the kindest thing I could think of—the best way to repay him for his aid.

              He deserved much better than me. I would inflict so much more pain on him than I already had if this relationship continued.

              So I continued with my truth, the parts where I was a victim, where I was complicit in the horror. I was prepared to tell him everything.

              “The guy my mom married—he seemed normal, at first,” I said, looking into Levi’s blue eyes, trying to get lost in them, to make this easier. “Carl was nice. We’d never really had a father figure in the house. He raised us….”

              Levi jerked, making me trail off.

              “What is it?”

              “What was your stepfather’s name?” he asked, his face and voice urgent.

              “Carl,” I said, confused. I hadn’t even told him what had happened yet. I hadn’t so much as scratched the surface. “Carl Prentice.”

              Levi’s face went ashen. “That’s a name I know.”

              “What? How?”

              He bit off each syllable of the next few words. “Carl Prentice is the man behind the threat against me. Against you. He knows you’re here.”

Carl had been acting weird lately. He was always kind of off, but in a lovable way, as my mother was so fond of saying. I thought it was just because of how sick she was. Maybe he was upset. The medical bills were mounting, and she wasn’t working, so I knew that had to be stressful. It was why Matt had dropped out of college and started looking for a job in New York City. It was why I was delaying going to college after my upcoming graduation, and instead combing through the limited job options of this backwater town for an 18-year-old.

              I’d begun finding my stepfather lurking outside of the bathroom after I was taking a shower.

              “Did you need something?” I asked him, touching the towel wrapped around my hair. “Is Mom sick in the bathroom downstairs? You could’ve knocked. I would’ve hurried up.”

              He didn’t say anything, just stepped aside far enough for me to have to brush by him as I walked to my room. I chalked it up to stress about my mother. She was getting sicker, the cancer taking a sudden turn for the worse after years of hope for remission.

              I was so distracted by the end of school and my mother’s health that I missed the signs that should’ve helped me understand what kind of person Carl was turning into. I would wake up suddenly in the night to see him leaving my room, the door swinging shut behind him, slicing into the wedge of light from the hallway. He’d been standing over me, watching me sleep, I’d realize later. I convinced myself that he was just checking on me, or trying to decide if it was worth waking me up to tell me that my mother needed to go to the hospital again.

              Maybe, if I’d been more vigilant about things back then, I could’ve stopped what was happening. I could’ve alerted my brother, tried to convince my mother that Carl wasn’t good for us anymore, or gotten myself out of the house. Hell, I could’ve even told the police that my stepfather was gradually shedding his human skin and revealing the monster that lived underneath.

              But things happened so slowly as to be almost imperceptible. I was rushing to finish coursework for my high school degree, preoccupied with my mother’s alarming decline, with no idea of the threat that was growing inside of my own home.

              When I did realize the extent of the threat, it was too late.

              I was in my room, poring over a sheaf of applications I’d picked up around town. They were building a new McDonald’s near the interstate access to draw in commuters to our area to spend some cash—all a part of some master plan city leaders were talking about to help boost the flagging economy. As much of a blow to my ego as it was to work at the fast food chain, I’d do anything to help my mother get better care. Our finances were taxed with her frequent hospital stays, not to mention the treatments the doctors told her she so desperately needed. Matt had been sending checks whenever he could afford to get a little behind rent, but it still wasn’t enough. I knew it wasn’t enough from the way the food in our refrigerator dwindled, how the lights around the house wouldn’t turn on sometimes.

              I had to help. If I was living here, I had to help. I didn’t think about moving away, even after I graduated high school. If I was paying rent of my own somewhere, that would be less money I could give to battling my mother’s disease. I wanted to stay here and shove as much cash as I could at the problem. It was the only thing I could do. If cancer had been something I could take with my hands and wrestle away from my mother, I would be doing that. But since it wasn’t, I had to have a job.

              I was filling in my personal information when the door to my bedroom creaked open. I glanced up to see Carl standing there, motionless, watching me.

              “What’s up, Carl?” I asked. I’d never gotten in the swing of calling him “Dad,” and it had never really been encouraged. My mother had been honest with Matt and me as we grew up about our biological father and about the reasons he wasn’t here for us, and how Carl was here for us, but my brain had never made that connection that Carl was my new father. It was easier to call him Carl, anyway, because that’s what my mother called him.

              Carl remained silent. He was silent more often than not these days—worried, I assumed, about my mother. I was worried about her, too, but I could open my mouth and speak to people, if I had to.

              “Is Mom okay?” I asked, trying again. I felt a sudden stab of fear that something dire had happened and Carl was maybe too shocked to tell me. I shoved all of the papers off of my lap and made a move to launch myself off the bed and down the stairs to check for myself, when he finally spoke.

              “Touch yourself.”

              It was so odd, so out of character, that I wasn’t sure what I’d heard. Carl was the opposite of sexual. He was balding and only about as tall as I was—and I was of decidedly average height for a woman. I could never be sure what my mother saw in him besides the fact that he was dependable, that he stuck around in the times when she needed someone the most.

              He’d been around for my entire childhood, friendly but always a little detached. We didn’t hug, really. If I was told to thank him for a Christmas or birthday present, he would lean down and I’d peck him on the cheek, or pat his hand awkwardly.

              So when I heard something overtly sexual drop out of his mouth, I didn’t even understand it in a sexual context. Confused, I lifted one finger and deliberately touched it to the back of my hand.

              “Like this?” I asked, frowning and cocking my head at him. “Carl, tell me what’s going on. What do you want?”

              “I want you to touch yourself,” he said patiently, “and I want to watch.”

              Like an idiot, I lifted my finger and touched the back of my hand again. And again.

              “I don’t really have the time to joke around with you,” I said, still too puzzled to understand what was really going on. I’d never joked around with Carl. He wasn’t that kind of person. I had no idea why he’d start now.

              “It’s not a joke,” he said. “You’re all grown up now, and I want to watch you touch yourself. Now.”

              It was the “all grown up” part that made me realize what was actually happening. My stepfather, the man who’d been around for just about my entire life, having a hand in raising me and watching me grow, was propositioning me.

              “You’re disgusting,” I sneered at him. “How dare you? My mom is just downstairs, sick with cancer, and all you can think of is getting off? What kind of person are you? Get out of here. Leave me alone.”

              “You’ll do as I say,” he said, unperturbed by my outburst.

              “No, I won’t,” I said. “I’m telling my mom just what kind of person you are. And then you’ll have to leave.”

              I made a move to walk by him, regretting what I was about to do even as I was horrified and appalled at him. My mother didn’t need this kind of stress right now. She was so sick. I hated to imagine what telling her this would do to her. I would hesitate to tell her, if she were healthy, that the man she’d slept beside for all these years had just propositioned her daughter. It might really harm her, but I had to do something. I couldn’t just ignore what was happening, not when it was Carl, standing right here in my room, being a creepy pervert. I had to protect my mother, absolutely, but I also had to protect myself. There was no one else here to do it.

              “If you don’t do exactly as I say, I’ll kill your mother.”

              It was a concept so bizarrely horrible that I almost laughed at him, but Carl’s face was too serious to allow for that, and it stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t know what to do, or what to say. All I could do was stare at him, my brain running through possible responses, possible solutions, examining and rejecting one after the other, each one more implausible than the next.

              Just as implausible as what was happening right now.

              “You don’t think I’m being serious.” I’d never dreaded the idea of Carl until this moment, never realized just how grating that overly calm voice was. How terrifying it was.

              “You wouldn’t hurt my mom because you love her,” I said, my voice sounding small, childish.

              “I would hurt her to get what I want.” It was so matter of fact—that statement. How could someone be so sure of the desire to hurt another human being, one that he’d professed his love for? Carl was helping take care of my mom, for God’s sake. How could he want to cause her harm?

              “I don’t believe you.” It felt selfish and horrible, but I was so horrified by what he wanted me to do that I was willing to, abstractly, put my own mother at risk for my pride.

              “Your mother was vomiting last night,” he said.

              “I remember.” She’d been terribly sick from the treatments. I’d heard her, late, and went to help her, even if she was beyond help. All I could do was keep her waning hair out of her face and mop her forehead with a cool cloth. The illusion of comfort was the only thing I could provide.

              “It didn’t have anything to do with the treatments. All I gave her was an extra little pill with the rest of them. She didn’t even notice. That’s how easy it is to sabotage her health. I have access to everything I need at the hospital.”

              “Why would you do something like that?” She had been so sick, heaving until there wasn’t anything else to purge, continuing to cough and spit over the toilet for what had seemed like ages. I’d done everything I could think of to make her stop. She couldn’t even manage to stomach the water I brought her to rinse her mouth out.

              “To prove to you that I was serious about what I’m prepared to do to make you cooperate.”

              I just couldn’t bring myself to believe the words that were coming out of his mouth. I considered myself to be pretty practical, well equipped to sniff out bullshit. It was true—my mom had been sick last night. Really sick. But it could’ve been any number of things. There might’ve been an interaction with another medication, or the last vestiges of the sickness her treatment caused. Maybe there was something we had at dinner that hadn’t agreed with her, or just a stray mote of a virus or bacteria that one of us had carried back from our last trip to the hospital that had landed on a random surface somewhere in the house that she had come in contact with.

              There were too many variables to know for certain that Carl was telling the awful truth.

              “You’re a bright girl, Meagan, as well as beautiful,” he said, seeming to have read my mind. “Let me prove it to you.”

              “I don’t want you to make my mom sick.” I recoiled even as I doubted him, afraid of the extent of his abilities, the depth of his blossoming madness.

              “And I won’t, starting tomorrow, as long as you do what I say.” Carl checked his watch as casually as if I’d asked him for the time. “It’s been an hour since she took her medication. I gave her another of the vomit-inducing pills, same as the night before. About an hour is all it takes.”

              I opened my mouth to say something, anything. I didn’t even know what was going to come out of my own mind, but then I stopped, dumbfounded. Sure enough, even from all the way downstairs, I could hear my mother in her bathroom, throwing up everything she’d eaten at dinner, including whatever proper medication remained in her belly. She was vomiting so violently that it sounded loud even up here.

              Horrified and hyperventilating, I made a mad dash out of my room, but Carl grabbed a hold of my arm, squeezing and stopping just short of bruising force.

              “Who do you think she’s going to believe?” he asked, his voice still so even, so calm. “Who do you think anyone would believe? You tell her, you tell anyone, you disappoint me…I’ll end her, Meagan. Don’t test me. If she dies, it’s all on you.”

              There wasn’t a choice. I didn’t have a choice. I had to protect my mother. And to protect her, I had to sacrifice myself to whatever whims Carl had in mind.

I nodded quickly, then pulled my arm free, rushing to help my mother.