7 #2
His footsteps slow for a moment. Then they catch up, but I don’t look back. A few feet from the bike, I scan the pastures, searching for a glimpse of my black beauty. I need to see her, feel her coat beneath my hand, and nuzzle her snout. Just for a minute. Then I’ll go.
“Where’s Ketchup?” I glance over my shoulder and flinch.
It’s not Jarret behind me. He returned to the porch.
An arm’s length away, Jake towers over me, barefoot and shirtless in jeans that hang low and unbuttoned on his trim hips.
A foot taller than my short frame, he’s so much wider and more defined than I remember.
The sculpted bricks of his chest twitch beneath sloping shoulders and narrow into a V -shaped ladder of corrugated abs.
He looks harder to the touch, but I’ll never know. I’ll never touch him again.
“Ketchup… She…” His scowl delivers the answer before the words pass his lips. “We lost her last winter. It was EIA. A virus—”
“Equine Infectious Anemia Virus.” I know what the fuck it is, and my hand flies to my mouth.
It hurts. Fucking goddammit, it hurts so damn much I bite down on my tongue, tasting blood.
Don’t cry. Don’t you dare unleash that shit here.
I whirl away, and the sharp movement engages bruised abdominal muscles. The agony steals my breath and staggers my steps.
He stays on me. “Are you limping?”
I snatch the helmet, and when he smacks it out of my hand, I jerk back in an explosion of swinging arms.
“Don’t touch me!” I spin toward the bike and grapple for the helmet as he breathes down my fucking back. “Get the fuck away from me!”
“Hey, hey, take it easy.” He grips me from behind and hooks an arm around my waist.
The vise of his hold presses against injuries, resurrecting last night’s beating in a barrage of blinding pain. With it comes flashbacks from the ravine—the weight on my back, the vicious hands, the breaths, the agony.
A scream wrenches from my throat, and I double over with a surge of nausea. My knees buckle, and his arm tightens, digging into the soreness with excruciating torture.
I flail and shriek until he spins me around. His eyes narrow on my hands, where they flatten against the contusions beneath my shirt.
Jarret runs to his side, his expression tight with concern. “What the hell happened to you?”
My letters never mentioned the man who used to be my father. I never wanted to burden them or my brother with my problems.
Jake glares at me with a look I recognize. A malicious look born in darkness, in the grisly tomb of the ravine, two years ago today. “Lift your shirt.”
“You can kiss my go to hell .”
“Lift it, or I’ll do it for you.”
My blood runs cold. He used to represent protection and security, but that was before he hurt me with betrayal. Nothing’s stopping him from hurting me with fists, and as his hands flex and his chest expands with seething anger, I’m scared.
My breath hitches as I direct my stare on the bike and yank up the shirt, baring a canvas of ruptured capillaries and yellow and purple bruises. Old ones. Fresh ones. The worst of it leaks beneath the skin, oozing from the decaying soul of a dead daughter.
I keep my gaze averted and lower the shirt.
“Who?” His murderous whisper defies reason.
Has he forgotten that he doesn’t care? That he let me go and stuck his dick in Sara Gilly?
He doesn’t deserve an answer, but I’ve been carrying this secret by myself for so long. I can finally unload it.
“Dalton Cassidy is a drunk who beats on his daughter.” Avoiding his eyes, I grab the helmet, shove it on, and straddle the bike. “It started the day he left here and ended last night.”
“Fucking fuck!” Jarret turns away, pacing through the lawn with fingers slicing through his hair.
The depths of Jake’s eyes catch fire. “Your dad—”
“Not my dad anymore.”
His rigid posture vibrates with the promise of brutality. “What did he—?”
“It’s over.” I put the key in the ignition.
“That’s why you came home.”
“No, Jake.” I fire up the engine, drowning out my whisper. “ You were.”
I punch the gas and burn rubber out of the lot. Off the property. Down the gravel road. As I speed away from the land that belonged to my mother, the floodgates open.
Tears drown my vision. Tremors shake my fingers against the handlebars. All the ugly inside me crawls from my throat and hits the air in a wreckage of sound.
When Lorne was hauled away, I lost a vital part of myself. When I was separated from the ranch, I became half a person. When I left Dad face down on the couch, more pieces of me tore loose. But I still had something left. I still had Jake.
Now I have no one, nothing, and nowhere to go. I’m completely carved out.
A few miles from the ranch, the vicious shaking in my body grows so unmanageable I pull off on a dirt path and park in a grove of trees.
Killing the engine, I slide off the bike and curl up on the ground, where things get abandoned, where trash is tossed, forgotten, and never collected.
There, I contemplate dying. Ending it all. I could hang myself, all alone, swinging by a rope around my neck. Wouldn’t that be symbolic? A tragedy that began and ended on a birthday with a passionately knotted rope.
Then I think about being found that way. Being remembered as the girl who killed herself because she loved a boy. Because the boy didn’t love her back. Boo hoo. So sad. How fucking pathetic.
I’m not that girl.
Nor am I the girl he wants.
I want to be her .
Sara Gilly.
I want to wear her skin and feel his touch.
I want to be her breath and fill his lungs.
I want to embody every part of her he wants.
Lying in the dirt on my side, I tuck my knees to my mouth and yearn for all the things I’m not.
I’m like that song by Little Big Town. Girl Crush. God, the lyrics have it exactly right. I think about it, crying as I try to sing it, warbling the words I remember, scraping every note from the corroded, dried-up bottom of my soul, and hating myself more.
I can never be Sara Gilly. But I am a person, and the pain that consumes me is more than I can withstand.
Everything rises to the surface. Everything I am.
Everything I feel. Every hurt, weakness, and break inside me drains from the darkest depths of my being.
The night in the ravine, the abuse in Chicago, the pain in Jake’s room—I let it all out, sobbing, trembling, screaming until my throat shreds, until a mess of snot and sweat covers my skin, until I’m utterly depleted.
I cry until all that remains is a loveless, empty, unfeeling core of nothingness. I become that hardened center and shed the tender, tear-soaked wrapper. It falls off like tattered clothes and litters the ground. Then I step away from the debris.
I leave the bruises, the soggy flesh, and the puddle of susceptible emotions.
I leave the girl who loved a boy with her whole heart.
I abandon her there on the side of the road. Let her rot in post mortem.
Feeling lighter, calmer, I embrace the void of nothing at all and walk away.
I leave Sandbank.