Missing Hart (2 page)

Some things that are broken can’t be fixed, no matter how hard you try, or how much crazy glue you use.

Every day I’m a little more certain of the fact that I am one of the broken things that can’t be fixed.

Professionally, my life looks perfect from the outside. I became a landscape architect and now I have my own company. I’m in demand and make more money than I ever thought I would.

But personally, my life is empty. I’ve got Leah, and that’s all I’ve got.

There had been one moment in my life that I had known that I had something more, something deep and true. It defied logic and any kind of explanation, but the way I felt about Dominique was pure magic. It took away the pain and made me believe that a happily ever after was possible. Loving her is the only proof I have that I possess a capacity to love someone in the way that people write love songs about. I worshipped her; body and soul.

It was only once I was head over heels in love that I discovered that the girl I’d given my heart and soul to was a manipulative liar that could have ruined my life. I let my defenses down long enough for her to get inside and she broke me with her deceptions. I haven’t opened myself up again, and I know that I never will. She’s still in my heart and I’ve accepted that I will never been able to let her go, much to my dismay.

Lying in my bed waiting for sleep to claim me, I thought of Dominque, just as I always did. It was an exercise in torture, but I was powerless to stop it. I spent a lot of time thinking about her that night, not that that was unusual really. It had been four years but it wasn’t getting any easier. I still wanted her desperately, even though I knew that she had lied to me and hadn’t cared for me the way that I cared for her.

The next morning I got an email from her ‘brother’ Spencer asking me for a meeting to discuss me designing a landscape for the newest Hart International project. They had been reaching out to me for over two years and each and every time, I found a way out.

It was stupid to continue turning them down when I could probably have a meeting without seeing her. After all, she was my sisters best friend and that hadn’t led to us seeing each other aside from one time.

Deciding that it was well past time for me to stop avoiding what could be a great business contact, I wrote back and agreed to a meeting.

Our Past

Late one morning, in the spring of the year that I was nine, I got sent home from school with a fever. I didn’t have a normal family, but the nurse didn’t know that. She’d followed what the standard protocol for any other child would have been, and she called my father. I was shaking like a leaf when he showed up. The nurse assumed that it was because of my fever, but the truth was that I was terrified to be alone with him.

Before that day my reasons to be afraid of him mostly came from his foul mouth, bad attitude and a propensity to smack at the drop of a hat.

After that day, my reasons to be afraid of him were a lot darker than that.

He’d been like a kid in a candy store when he picked me up, putting on the performance of a lifetime in front of the nurse as he oohed and aahed over her suggestions about what might make me feel better. He didn’t care what would make me feel better at all, quite the opposite actually. It made me sick watching the nurse flirt with him. Women always talked about how handsome my father was, but to me, he was hideous. Beneath the face that people found so attractive was the mind of a monster, and I couldn’t believe that women were fooled for a moment. His evil was right there on the surface if you really looked. Most people never noticed.

I was only nine, but I’d seen and heard more than any child ever should. I had never been fooled by his face, but possibly that had a lot to do with the fact that he never tried to be nice to me. Because of that, I knew what he was and clearly saw the monster that he enjoyed being. He’d never loved me, nor had he loved any of my siblings. According to him we were “necessary baggage.” He’d always been harshest to my twin sister, Delilah, and me. For as long as I could remember, he had been calling us ‘the ugly little troll sisters.’

When he stopped calling us trolls and started commenting on the fact that we weren’t so ugly anymore; I got scared. I should never have gone to the nurse’s office that day, should never have let her call him.

I was shaking from fear by the time that we got home, and I tried to outrun him so that I could lock myself in my bedroom. I’ll never forget seeing that door in front of my face, knowing that I was right there. As my hand reached out for the doorknob, he grabbed a fist full of my hair and pulled me back against him.

Something hard was pressing into my back; something disgusting that terrified me. To this day I can hear the animalistic sound of fear that came out of my mouth as I begged him to let me go.

He didn’t listen.

Instead, he held me captive for hours and touched me wherever he wanted. At first I cried and screamed, but eventually I realized it wasn’t helping and there were no more tears left to cry. I stared at a spot on the ceiling as he rubbed himself on me again and again, telling me what a dirty little whore I was. “I’m a man and you asked for this Dominique. You love it, just like your whore mother. I see you little girl, and you’re a selfish, lying slut, just like her. You wrap those brothers of yours around your little finger to get them to do your bidding even now. Nine years old and already you’re a filthy fucking whore. When you grow up, you’ll fuck so many men you won’t be able to keep count.”

The sound of my name on his lips made me ill, the feeling of his hands on my body a level of hell that I’ll never forget.

I was sweaty and sticky all over when he was finished. With an unrestrained yell, he yanked me from the bed by my hair and threw me to the floor. “If it weren’t for those fucking brothers of yours, this wouldn’t be over yet. Next time, I’m not stopping until I’ve fucked you. You got off easy today, but next time, you’ll take it like a bitch in heat, just like her. Any cock will do. Go ahead and lie to yourself that you didn’t want this, but I see her in your eyes begging for it.”

I ran for the door, promising myself along the way that once I told Dante and Damien what our father had done, he’d never be able to touch me again.

Again, the door was right there, my escape so close I could taste it.

He came from out of nowhere, pushing me up against the door as he wrapped his meaty hands around my neck. Not tight enough to choke me entirely, but tight enough that I felt the threat.

“If you’re thinking of telling your little saviors, think again. What I did to you today was nothing, and I can make it a lot worse. If you open that mouth of yours, I’ll kill Damien. I know he’s your favorite you little bitch. Even if they manage to arrest me, I’ll pay someone to kill him, slowly and painfully. They’ll mail him back to you piece by piece. Do you understand me?”

I was nine years old, but even I knew that he was evil and crazy enough to do it. I nodded my head as a piece of me died inside. When he opened the door, I escaped from that bedroom like a bat out of hell, running straight to my bathroom where I showered for so long that the water turned cold. I didn’t come out until Delilah knocked on the door and asked if I was okay.

Although I said that I was, she wasn’t fooled. She sat next to me on my bed for hours, holding my hand and telling me that she could feel that something was wrong. I lied and told her that I didn’t feel good and that I had a terrible nightmare about what was going to happen when it was time for Dante to go to college. I wasn’t exactly lying-I had spent the afternoon trapped in the worst nightmare I had ever had.

I never said a word about what had really happened to my brothers, my sister or Spencer. I wanted to, but I knew I couldn’t risk Damien being hurt. Where Dante was like a father to me, Damien was my go to person. Dante watched out for us all and Spencer spent the most time with Delilah, so it fell to Damien to be my touchstone, a task he never asked for but had taken on without any complaint. If I didn’t have him, I wouldn’t survive. The idea that he could be hurt because of me made me sick, and I had nightmares for years about opening boxes that contained little pieces of him inside.

A few days after the incident in my father’s bedroom, Spencer noticed my father watching Delilah and me in a way that rang an alarm bell in his head. Spencer went to my brothers and together they banded around us to make sure that the worst never happened.

Even after my father was dead, I never had the heart to tell them that it already had.

He had been gone for years, dead and buried somewhere that I had never seen and never would, but the damage my father did to me all those years ago was always there. It clung, like an invisible cloak, hanging on me at all times.

I’d gotten adept at hiding the signs of all the things that were wrong with me from my family. They didn’t know that I hated being touched by anyone other than them, but it had eventually really started to affect my life. My sister definitely sensed that something was wrong, but she jumped to the wrong conclusion and assumed that I was gay. I screamed at her when she asked me if I was, furious at myself because I couldn’t tell her that I wasn’t gay, I was just too fucked up to be touched by guys. There was no way that she’d keep that to herself if I told her, and my entire family would crumble if they realized that they hadn’t been able to keep me as safe as they’d assumed they had.

I tried… God, how I tried… to fit in, to go with the flow, to learn to accept the touch of another human being without having a panic attack, but it didn’t work. I hated that I wasn’t like all of the other girls I knew. Unlike normal girls my age, when I saw hot guys I didn’t see potential boyfriends, instead I saw ticking time bombs who could hold me down and hurt me, and it terrified me.

I feared being held down against my will, trapped and unable to get free, just like what had happened that afternoon with my father. My bigger worry was that what he said to me that day might prove to be true; I could have some of my mother’s sexual tendencies inside of me, and if I opened Pandora’s box and learned to allow myself to be touched, I would become a slut. If that ever happened I knew that it would destroy my brothers, knew that they would hate me and resent that they had given up so much of their lives to keep me safe and yet, somehow, I turned out like the mother we all hated. The idea of my disappointing my brothers was terrifying to me. They were the only male figures I had that loved me, and I couldn’t lose them and continue to survive.

There was a lot of pressure to have the experiences that all of the other girls in school were having, and I hated that. The only thing that kept me calm was that my sister wasn’t doing what the rest of those girls were doing, either. Of course, her reason was because she was all about Spencer, as opposed to my anxiety issue, but at least she wasn’t out there experiencing things that I was too afraid to.

One night I figured out that when I drank, I was able to detach enough that I could be touched. After that, I threw myself into making out with guys, but I never felt anything other than uncomfortable. There’s nothing arousing about some drunken asshole attacking your mouth like they’re checking your tonsils with their tongue. I’ve run the gamut of bad kissers; the heavy breather, the biter, the thrusting tongue, several guys who were like running faucets, a few face eaters and one guy who just licked my lips. Nothing about any of that was a turn on.

It was when other people started to comment on my virginal status that I decided I’d just get it out of the way. One night I went to a party and ended up having sex with Jimmy, one of the guys I had previously categorized as a running faucet. I decided to do it with him because at least I knew he’d be gentle, and he was. It hurt but it wasn’t like I was being ripped in half, and since it only lasted for about a minute, I didn’t have to endure him drooling all over my face for very long.

My sister was flabbergasted that I’d given it up to someone I didn’t even like, but I just told her to keep her lip zipped and mind her own business. She could never know what my issues were, so it wasn’t like I was going to explain why I’d made the decision that I had.

I was focused on high school and my amazing job at the world’s coolest bookstore. Betty’s Books has long been one of my favorite places to go to escape, and I was excited when I was old enough to join the staff. The staff discount alone was worth working. My family liked to joke that keeping me in books was almost as difficult as calculating the national debit, so it felt good to be able to spend the same amount of money but walk away with more books than ever. I have always found peace and beauty in books, so working in the bookstore was like a dream come true for me. My co-workers were all amazing and working at Betty’s was a lot like working with family members.

My favorite co-worker was my friend, Marissa. I had been working with her since just before I turned sixteen, and I was closer to her than I had ever been to anyone outside of my family. She was a beautiful girl, long auburn hair with green eyes; she looked like she belonged on the cover of a magazine. Marissa was stunning, made even more beautiful by the fact that she never wore make up or tried to dress in a sexy way. She was the type of girl you wanted to protect, her sweet disposition calling out to something inside of me that made me want to take care of her. Although she was older than me, you couldn’t tell. She never put on any “I’m an adult and you’re a lowly teenager” vibes.

Although she was in her twenties, she looked like she could have been in high school herself-at least until you looked into her eyes. Her eyes were older and harder than anything else about her, and I sensed that she’d had a traumatic experience in her life at some point. It made me feel like she understood me, and I opened up to her. I felt so comfortable with her that I’d finally been able to confess to another human being what my father had done to me, and how hard it was for me to be touched.