One Way Or Another You Will Pay (30 page)

I
must hasten to add: I am stronger than I thought I was. I am capable of handling anything.

Even
on my own, I can do it. I am enough for me.

Bear
is just my bonus in life. A
beautiful
bonus, though.

As
I near him, I’m so happy, I could cartwheel across the tarmac to him. If I could remember how to cartwheel.

Suddenly,
I twirl.

A
huge, showgirl, Gone-with-the-Wind- fabulous twirl (Thanks, Kenya), my unmitigated joy bubbling in peals of laughter.

Bear
laughs. “What the …?”

I
collapse into his arms, laughter shaking my body.

“I
see you, my Care Bear. I see you.”

END

Dear Reader, I hope you enjoyed You Will Pay for Leaving me and One Way or Another, You Will Pay.

I’m
an author but my first love is reading. I become really excited when I find an author whose work I love and I shout it out to all my readers and friends.

I’m
currently reading John Grisham’s Sycamore Row (the sequence to A Time to Kill). I’m loving it. Then again, I love just about all Grisham’s books. Love his sense of humour.

But,
I absolutely loved Gone Girl with Gillian Flynn. (That Gillian, she’s badass, I tell you. Evil too. Just my kind of author.)

It’s
the best book I’ve ever read. Lyrical prose, more twists than a braid, and an ending that stumped me.

But
it’s about a story about revenge. Need I say more? 

I’ve
recommended it to my author friends and they thanked me for it.

Gone
Girl’s pricey, sure, but well worth it.

If
you get a chance, check it out before you buy. It’s not your usual romance novel.

Will
let you know what I thought about Sycamore Row on Facebook.

I’m
reading during Christmas preparations, so I have to fit in time to read.

Back
to One Way or Another, if you think other readers will enjoy it, please be kind enough to leave a review.

Watch
out for my new book called Wounded Hearts (working title) coming 2014.

It’s
done, I’m just editing.

I
plan to post an excerpt on my blog in three weeks’ time. Maybe sooner.

Please
follow my blog and friend me on Facebook to keep up with the latest news on my new books:

Everabi.wordpress.com
.

Facebook.com/eve.rabi
.

Warm
regards

Eve
Rabi

PS: If you have enjoyed You Will Pay and One Way or Another, you will probably enjoy Betrayed. It too is a story about revenge.

Here’s what one of my readers posted about Betrayed:

“This
book captured my attention immediately and kept me up late at night until it was finished. It was heartbreaking at times and packed with so many emotions. I found myself sometimes laughing and reaching for tissues at other times.”

EXCERPT FROM BOOK

BETRAYED

****

It all started with Harry Hargreaves, my stepfather.

How
do I describe him?

Let’s
see…smart and crafty. And mean. Very mean. That’s
my
description.

Now
if you asked Mocha, my best friend, her description would be slightly different – “Pussy ass, hairy mudderfucking Harry.”

Harry
swept into our lives when I was three-years-old. Ambitious and calculating (quietly at that), he was a divorcee with no kids and he had his eye on the White House.

My
late father, Senator John Waterhouse had been both popular and wealthy. So when Harry met my mother, the strikingly beautiful Amelia, who was also a wealthy senator’s daughter, he thought she’d look great in photographs and as arm candy, so he married her. After all, she was ten years younger than him and docile enough for him to push her around, which he did, all the time.

Most
importantly, it helped that my father had left both my mother and I financially well off.

Harry
pretended to be nice to me until the day he married my mother.

From
that day on, he did everything in his power to isolate me from her. I was too little to fight Harry, my mother was too meek to stand up to Harry, so he succeeded – my relationship with my mother changed for the worse.

Harry
had full access to my mother’s money, which he quickly squandered on cars, a yacht, extravagant holidays and by jut by just throwing money around at strip clubs and whatever else took his fancy. Throwing my
mother’s
money around.

I
was a quiet child, loved by everyone and was always told how pretty I was with my blonde tresses and blue eyes. A replica of my mother.

“She
looks like a porcelain doll,” I often heard.

But
Harry, for some reason hated me. Yes,
hated
me even thought I was just three-years-old and by no means a spoilt child. He always accused my mother of spoiling me and when she tried to defend me, Harry became pretty vicious towards my mother with his rants and accusations. I didn’t want my mother hurt or in tears so I kept out of Harry’s way to prevent them fighting.

Shortly
after they got married, my mother gave birth to twins, Ashley and Nicole who looked just liked my mother, which meant they looked like me.

Nicole
and Ashley adored me and I in turn adored them. Harry hated that they loved me and tried to isolate me from them as much as possible.

By
the time I was ten, I realized that Harry despised me.

He
never hit me or did anything tangible where I could cry abuse – he was smart about it – excluded me in indirect ways, making me feel unwanted and in the way, like I didn’t belong. Subtle things – buy a four-pack of cupcakes, muffins, picnic set, ice-cream. (I was a kid; those things hurt like hell.)

Then
when the mistake was pointed out to him, that we were a family of
five
and not four, he’d look at me as if he was seeing me for the first time and say, “Ah, yes, so I see. My …mistake.”

Or
he’d say, “Forgot that you lived here.” Comments that would cut deep, as I was a kind and sensitive child.

As
I got older, he’d say things like, “Didn’t expect to see you here. Thought you’d be out with your friends. Oh, I forgot, you don’t have any friends.”

I
was a shy child, so no; I didn’t have that many friends. I was also a bookworm and preferred to spend time with my books rather than hang out with dumb friends who wanted to live at the mall and flirt with boys.

Sometimes,
I’d hear Harry and my mom in their bedroom laughing and playing with the twins, with their bedroom door closed. I longed to be part of that laughter and wished he’d invite me in to romp with them, but nobody was allowed in their bedroom, unless Senator Harry invited them in.

To
drown out their laughter and to staunch the flow of negative thoughts – that I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t good enough, that my mother loved the twins more than me, that my mother didn’t care, I’d slap on headphones and bury myself in my books. If I couldn’t hear their laughter, maybe it wouldn’t hurt that much.

My
favorite game with Ashley and Nicole was playing school. I was the teacher and they were the students. They loved it cos I would dramatize their lessons.

My
teachers told me that I would make a great school teacher one day. They said I was nurturing by nature. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I liked how they said it.

Of
course, being the daughter of a Senator, I attended private schools and I managed to get great grades. Teachers waxed lyrical about me at parent-teacher meetings.

Unfortunately,
Nicole and Ashley were not so lucky. They struggled in school and had to have extra lessons to keep up – a mild form of ADHD.

This
didn’t sit well with Harry – he took it as a personal failure and became angry at
me
. Whenever I was reading, he’d call me to do something that didn’t need to be done, nag me about the state of my room, about my music being too loud, pick on me about my hair, my shoes, my clothes, my nails, the fact that I was too quiet at the dinner table, mock me when I
said
something at the dinner table.

I
lived in a state of stress when Harry was around and I particularly hated dinner times when we were in close proximity to each other.

He
had a voice that he used on the twins, an endearing one, and a separate one that he used on me, blunt, curt, irritable. He could reduce me to tears with just a few words and one look.

I
was a cry-baby – cried easily, cried buckets when Simba’s father died in
The Lion King.

As
I got older, to cope, I dressed my hurt and confusion in a coat of arrogance – a don’t-give-a-damn attitude. That made things worse as I gave him ammunition to use against me.

“You
are just arrogant and disrespectful,” he’d complain.

Where
was my mother in all of this?

She
was around but shit-scared of him. He’d have a serious go at her if she gave him lip. Threatened to divorce her and leave her destitute many times.

She
was especially scared of that, as she had no working skills and came from a family that never encouraged women to work. Also, she no longer had money and had to rely on Harry to support her.

“Mom,
he’s horrible to me,” I complained. “He’s mean to you too. Let’s leave him. Let’s take Nic and Ash and go live far away, Mom. We can do it. I will help with the twins. We’ll be happy, mom, I promise you.”

“Okay,
Kat,” she said as she wound strands of blonde locks around her fingers and tugged out clumps of hair, adding to the bald patches on her scalp. “Do you want some chamomile tea? It’ll calm you down.”

After
seeing that, I decided never to do bring that up again.

I
loved my mother, but quietly I resented the fact that she didn’t do enough to protect me from Harry.

But
my sisters were great – they hated it when Harry put me down, and being the feisty little things they were, they stood up for me. They never hesitated to tell Harry off. After an episode of Harry being mean to me, they’d bring me treats and give me hugs to cheer me up.

They
hated Harry more when he was mean to my mom, and often told him that they didn’t love him and that they wished that Uncle John, his kind friend, was their daddy.

He didn’t like that at all and accused my mother of having an affair with Uncle John, which was not true.

I
also think he was scared of losing the love of his daughters, but he was doing a good job of doing precisely that.

By
the time I was sixteen, I had had enough of Harry’s meanness and bullying ways and tried to find a way out of my house.

Most
of my school friends were from society homes, privileged girls that were as superficial and mean as the girl next to them.

I
felt trapped, alone and unwanted.

I
was an affectionate child by nature, but I seldom got hugs from my family. Untouched. That’s how I felt.

One
day, in the year 2002, on a chilly winter’s day, while crying at the bus stop over Harry’s nastiness – his insistence that I take the bus to school in future and not get my mother to drive me to school, I met Mocha.

For
a while she watched me cry silently from a distance, then she approached me.

“Gurl,
you got boyfrien’ trouble?”

I
shook my head.

“School?”

“Step-father,” I murmured.

She
nodded and gently tucked my hair behind my ears, a sympathetic look on her face.

“Okay,
okay, you can tell Mocha,” she said. “Go on.”

“Mocha?”
I said through my tears.

“Yeah,
ain’t too coffee, ain’t too hot-chocolaty,” she said, circling her thumb and her forefinger. “Jest right.”