11. Sting Like a Bee – Aurora
11
STING LIKE A BEE
AURORA
T he fifteen minutes I’m giving Seven is not for them. It’s for me.
For the future I saw for me and Ellie, if I can just survive the next six months working for these strange men in this strange place.
Seven snatches my hand to tow me along behind him, back toward the little bee hives and the shed-like structure next to them.
“Um, Seven, I really don’t like bugs. Can we just?—”
“They’re not going to sting you. Just trust me.”
That’s exactly what I can’t do, but I let him lead me to the shed and pray that it’s a bee-free zone. It’s warm and dark inside and Ellie, who’s been following us up until now, sits just outside the door as if Seven has already told her this space is off limits.
“All right.” He lets me go, rubbing his hands together before heading for the short counter where one of those bee boxes rests, and all my hopes of having a bee-free conversation are dashed.
He said they aren’t going to sting me.
They aren’t going to sting you.
I force myself to drag in a calm breath through my nose and attempt to make my arms feel less like they’re in the early stages of rigor mortis.
“Fifteen minutes. Go.”
Right.
Um…
I rack my brain but can’t think of anything to ask as Seven scoops bees that have started to gather on the corner of the box with his hands. His fucking hands.
He brushes past me to deposit the bees outside and comes back to start prying a honeycomb-filled panel from the box. It still has a few bees on it and as they start to crawl onto his fingers, he seems to not even notice.
Maybe they really won’t sting me.
I start to relax and realize he’s still watching me expectantly, but now there’s an edge of amusement in his eyes. I cross my arms over my chest.
“Beekeeping?” I ask.
If he’d asked me to guess at a hobby before I saw this meadow, beekeeping wouldn’t even have made that list, and right now I can’t think of what else to ask to try to understand these men better.
Seven pulls out a long knife and I shoot back a step.
He deftly flips it in his fingers, holding it almost flippantly as he begins to speak. “What? Never seen a tatted beekeeper?”
He starts to scrape something that looks like wax off the honeycomb with the long blade and I see now that it’s more of a tool than the weapon meant for decapitation that I first pegged it as.
I give him a look. He said he’d answer my questions.
“All right, all right. I guess you could say it was inherited. The hives belonged to Eli’s dad, Julian. I’ve always had a knack for the work and the bees don’t mind me and I don’t mind them, so when Julian couldn’t care for them anymore, I told him I’d do it.”
“So, you and the others aren’t related then?”
I didn’t really think so, given how different they all look from each other, but I wasn’t really sure until he said Eli’s dad .
“We’re not blood,” Seven says, cutting away more wax. “But they’re my family.”
He really does seem to have a knack for it. He sees me watching him and holds out the knife. “Want to try?”
“Oh. No. I’d probably just mess it up.”
“I don’t think so.”
I hide my blush and clear my throat. “You said when Julian couldn’t anymore. Why couldn’t he?”
His lips press into a taut line.
“Not your story to tell?” I guess.
He doesn’t answer, finishing with the first panel and slipping it into a metal drum before prying out a second one.
“Okay, then.”
New question…
“Is Seven your real name?”
His lips twitch. “It is.”
“Really?”
He lifts his brows at me, challenging the doubt in my tone. “Really. I have six older siblings.”
“Do they all have numbers for names, too?”
Seems a little…impersonal.
“No.”
No? He had six older siblings with normal names, but his parents chose to name him Seven?
“Oh.”
“My story isn’t a pretty one, Aurora.”
Neither is mine.
A knot forms between his brows as he continues his work of scraping wax, not looking at me anymore.
“I’d like to hear it anyway, if you’ll tell me.”
I’m surprised at how much I mean it. I really do want to know.
Ellie lets out a little groan as she sinks onto her belly outside the door and perches her chin atop her paws, as if she, too, is very interested in this story.
“Sure you wouldn’t rather ask about the bodies buried in the backyard?”
I let out a huff of a laugh. “Let me guess, they all had it coming?”
He canters his head this way and that. “Yeah. More or less.”
I wait.
Seven nods to himself. “All right. Just remember you asked for it, and I don’t need your pity.”
My stomach twists.
“My mom’s husband wasn’t my bio dad,” he says. “That’s why they called me Seven. Her and my stepdad—if you could even call him that—had six kids together before she was unfaithful. I was the stain on an otherwise perfect family.”
My heart hurts already and I’m not sure if I want to tell him he doesn’t have to keep going or wait and listen to every word because I want to know if any of his scars match mine.
“My siblings and I went to the same school and lived in the same house, but that’s where our similarities ended. They all looked the same. Auburn hair. Brown eyes. They all had big bedrooms on the top floor of the house. Played board games together. Sat on the big sofa in the living room and watched family movies every Friday night. Sometimes, if they had the volume up loud enough, I could almost pretend I was sitting up there with them.”
Oh my god.
I’m almost afraid to ask, but the words leave my lips anyway as my fingers clutch the counter behind me. “Up there?”
He clears his throat. “Yeah, my bedroom was in the basement. Actually, the basement was where I lived, I guess. It was unfinished but it had a half bath and a little space where I slept. It was cold, but Annie’s old mattress wasn’t half bad and I had some blankets.”
My hand goes to my throat, fingers tangling with my necklace as I try to eject the image of a little dark-haired boy all alone in a cold cement room having to listen to his family laugh and play without him.
Seven’s expression tightens and I drop my hand.
He didn’t want my pity, but… how ?
I’d been through some horrible shit. With Jesse, yes, but long before him, before my parents signed off on the official adoption, there were lots of families whose idea of what a loving household should be massively deviated from what I imagined. But at least those assholes weren’t my family. Not my own blood.
But then again, my real parents left me at a shelter before I was even old enough to remember their faces, so…
“What about your real father?”
He shrugs. “Never met the guy. Don’t even know his name.”
“Your mom never told you?”
Another shrug.
“God, how could they treat you like that?”
“You get used to it,” he says as if it’s no big deal. “And when I was still little, they did let me go with them to events where it would’ve been weird for me to not be with them.
“For a long time I thought that if I was really good and behaved just…just fucking perfect at those parties, maybe they’d see I could be part of the family. A real son like Alex and Aaron were. After a couple years I realized it didn’t matter what I did and I stopped trying. Instead I found some pretty inventive ways to make them hate me even more. Really creative stuff, honestly. I don’t know where I came up with most of it.
“I was punished, of course, but my stepdad’s belt was no match for the pure joy of seeing the shock on their faces after I did something truly fucking horrifying.”
He laughs darkly, eyes gleaming as if he’s remembering something particularly inventive.
A part of me wants to ask what sort of things, but I’m not sure I want to know. If he asked me what sort of things I did to my most cruel foster parents and siblings…or imagined doing to Jesse a thousand times, I sure as hell wouldn’t tell him. I could barely admit the truth of them to myself.
“Anyway, I started sneaking out when I was about twelve or thirteen,” he continues. “Stole a bike and kept it hidden behind the shed out back. I met Eli for the first time by this pond I liked to hang out at in the woods. It was just down this little dirt path at the end of a no-exit road. Fuck, he was such a weird kid back then. All gangly and shit. Always with a pencil or a paintbrush in his hands.”
He looks sad now.
“Eli took me back to his place that very first day I met him. I remember looking at the house and thinking it was a castle. Some fairytale place that I made up in my head, and maybe I really went psycho like my brothers always said I would. Eli’s mom was—well, she took one look at me, dirty and scrawny like some sewer rat, and told Eli to go grab me some clean clothes and show me where the shower was while she made us something to eat. I went back almost every day after that.”
“She sounds like an amazing woman.”
“She was.”
An ache forms in my chest when his jaw twitches and his eyes leave mine.
Was.
Hadn’t he also said something like until Julian couldn’t care for the bees anymore ?
A pang of empathy rings in my chest for Elijah, making it even harder to be objective. Did he lose both his parents? Was that somehow connected to his trauma with the art studio?
“Having Eli’s place definitely made it easier when they left.”
My brows screw up in confusion, and I think I missed something. “Sorry, when who left?”
He swallows and whatever fleeting emotion I think I see flash over his stark features is gone before I can name it.
“My family. They left when I turned sixteen. I snuck out that morning to hang out with Eli and Atticus at Eli’s place. His dad made me birthday pancakes. I still remember how fucking burnt they were—he was a terrible cook—but it was the first time anyone had lit the candles for me and done the whole birthday song thing.”
My eyes burned.
“I went home after. My one sister, Annie, she would always sneak me some kind of treat on my birthday. She’d sit with me on the top step while I ate it. She wouldn’t say a lot, but I always looked forward to having that five minutes with her. She was definitely the most gracious one about me.”
He sighs, adding the next honey-clogged panel to the big metal drum. “But she wasn’t there. None of them were.
“Instead of Annie on the top step there was a note with a single word on it that I knew she left for me. Sorry, it said. That’s it. I found out later they’d had plans to move for months. They went to live somewhere in the UK to be closer to my stepdad’s family.”
“So, wait—” I blurt, a hot, heavy rage chasing the sadness from my chest. “They just…they just left you?”
It strikes a broken chord in me I thought I’d healed from and my hands ball into fists.
Seven nods gravely.
“What did you do after that?”
He lifts his shoulder in a noncommittal shrug that is anything but flippant. There is no way in hell talking about this doesn’t hurt him. Is there? I can’t talk about my biological family or much of my past without feeling like someone’s hollowing out my insides and filling the aching chasm with an echo of old hurts.
“For a while I stayed there in the empty house, in my basement. I don’t know why, but I didn’t want Eli or his parents to know. I knew they’d feel somehow obligated to take me in and I couldn’t stand the idea of that. It was a month before the moving trucks came and the new family who bought the place arrived. After that, I lived on the streets for probably about a year. Found work at a tattoo shop sweeping up and doing piercings for practically pennies.”
His lips pull up at the corner.
“Julian and Florence were so mad when they found out,” he tells me. “I should’ve told them sooner, but I was embarrassed, I guess. I still remember Julian’s face the day he and Eli showed up at the shop. He told me I was ‘coming home with them, goddammit’ and I was staying and he ‘didn’t want to fucking hear a word about it’—and he never swore. Not ever.”
Are his eyes glassy?
Fuck.
Fuck.
Seven finishes with the last panel and closes the metal drum with an ominous clang that rattles in my bones.
“The rest is pretty much history,” he says, turning around without any trace of the emotion I thought I saw a second before as he jumps up to sit on the metal counter next to me, rattling the honey jars atop it.
It takes a massive amount of restraint not to reach out to him.
He doesn’t want your pity .
But I just can’t imagine anyone ever looking into those eyes and wanting to hurt the bright soul I can feel roiling just below the stormy blue depths.
“What about you?” Seven crosses his arms, leaning back. “What’s your story?”
I blink, already feeling my head shake, but I don’t fall back to my default response of Trust me, you don’t want to hear it. Maybe it’s because he’s looking at me like he already understands. Like he’ll listen and not judge. Like he’ll hear me, but not pity me. And afterward he won’t clam up and come up with some excuse to run as far and as fast as he can.
“I…”
He waits.
It’s really only fair. He showed me his scars. I could at least offer a small glimpse of mine.
“Cliff Notes version?”
“I’ll take what I can get.”
I nod.
“Okay. Well, I was orphaned as a baby. Grew up in foster care until I was about sixteen and the family I was with at the time adopted me.”
Seven reaches up to gently push my hair away from the still healing cut on my cheek. “Was it them who hurt you like this?”
My face heats and I let out a hollow laugh. “No. God, no. They’re perfect. Too perfect. I never really fit in there with them, but I tried to, you know?”
When he nods, I believe him. He probably knows even better than me what it’s like to try to fit into a mold that was never made for the shape of you.
When Seven drops his hand, my own fingertips replace his, gingerly running along the perfect slice in my skin where Jesse ran his pocketknife along my cheekbone. “No, this…this was someone else.”
“I know.”
I search his eyes. They give me permission to say anything. Or to say nothing at all.
“May I?” he asks, indicating the cut on my cheek as he twists open a jar of honey.
I cock my head at him.
“Nature’s antibiotic,” he explains, dipping his little finger into the jar.
I must still look doubtful, because he lets out a small chuckle and then sets to dabbing a little of the honey onto the stitched gash in his forehead.
When he comes for me next, I turn my cheek for him to apply the honey over my cut in small, gentle pats.
This is so weird.
And yet, somehow, I’m smiling.
“So, what’s his name?” he asks after he’s finished. “The trash who carved that into your cheek?”
I swallow hard.
“H-his name is Jesse.”
Ellie lets out a soft growl from the ground outside and my stomach turns. I shouldn’t tell him. I’m not even sure I can say it out loud. And I can’t… I can’t say what he did to Ellie—how he kicked her so hard in the head that for a second I thought she might not get back up. It makes me sick just thinking about it.
It was my fault. If I’d left sooner. If I’d done something to stop him…
If.
There’s always a fucking if.
“You can tell me.”
Seven’s voice, strong and calm and somehow already completely understanding, breaks the feeble wall I tried to build and before I know it, my lips part and the whole disgusting story is coming up like vomit.
I purge Jesse in waves, telling Seven how we met. How I let him get in my head and assert himself over me like a black shadow. I tell him how Jesse changed me, crafting me into the image he wanted to see. The perfect girlfriend with every bolt and cog and thought and strand of hair meticulously chosen to create this “Aurora doll” I no longer recognized when I looked in the mirror.
“It all happened so fast that by the time I realized it, it was too late to get out. He’s in this sort of gang. They run drugs and weapons sometimes. When I tried to leave, he started threatening me. It wasn’t anything I wasn’t used to, honestly. I can handle myself. But I helped them this one time with an arms deal—Jesse didn’t really give me the option to say no—and he still has proof that could get me into trouble.”
When I get to the parts about his jealousy and his… appetites , I almost stop but the words keep coming out like Seven’s pulling them from my soul like a fucking trauma twister that’s too strong to not get swept up in.
I tell him about the times Jesse drugged me and then filmed me with him.
And with his friends.
And even though I’m horrified at the words coming out of my mouth, it’s like I can’t turn off the faucet he’s opened up inside of me.
“When his threats to turn me in to the cops stopped working, he started threatening to share the videos he had online and…and with my parents. He owned me, and he knew it. He reminded me all the time. ‘I own you, Aurora, I own you ’.”
I shudder and an angry growl clambers up my throat.
“And the amount of times I wanted to just fucking?—”
I cut myself off before I admit my one last visceral, dirty truth, my hands shaking as I try to control the snarl on my lips, swallowing my rage and the burning tears trying and failing to escape my eyes.
“Anyway, the important thing is that I left and I will never go back. Even if he does try to ruin my life, at least I’ll be free of him.”
Seven’s hooded eyes are dark as they fall from my face to my neck and drop lower to caress my curves like he can see the other bruises I’m hiding under my clothes.
He doesn’t say anything. Why isn’t he saying anything ?
Fuck. I just admitted to a crime. Full-on admitted I’m a criminal. I am so stupid.
The energy around him shifts as he slides from the counter, and I drop my head, a hot blush crawling up my neck.
I flinch when he places his hands on my arms, making me look back up. “You are so much more than that pathetic fucking excuse for a man could ever deserve. You know that, right?”
My jaw clenches.
What?
“You don’t even know me.”
“Not yet,” he agrees. “But I see you.”
His hard eyes hold me captive for long seconds until finally, mercifully, he releases me.
“If you stay, I can promise you that he won’t be able to hurt you anymore.”
“You can’t promise that.”
His eyes flash with cold fire.
“I can.”
Seven ducks his head as he steps past me to exit the honey shed and stoops to give Ellie a little scratch as he starts to walk away. She jumps up and the little traitor pads along behind him like a lovesick puppy, leaving me alone with the bees.
“Hey! Where are you going?” I call after Seven.
“To carve out a name.”
He turns to face me but continues walking backward. “Stay here as long as you want. And, Aurora?”
I bite my cheek.
“I really do hope you decide to stay.”