WITSEC

Chapter 14

Chapter Fourteen

“Shiloh?” my mom called before my closet door opened. She spotted me sitting all the way in the back, my knees tucked to my chest. “What are you doing in here?” she asked as she bent over to look at me, concern etched around her eyes.

“I feel like I can’t breathe,” I said.

“Oh, honey,” she said, kneeling down and grabbing my hand. “Come here.” She pulled me to her and wrapped her arms around me.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” I cried into her shoulder.

“Don’t say that.”

“I feel like he’s always watching me. Like I can’t get free. Why won’t he leave me alone?!”

Her arms squeezed so tight around me and I thought I heard her sniffle. Her chest shook as she exhaled. “Listen to me,” she said, grabbing my shoulders and making me look at her. She looked determined and fierce. Only the slight pink tint in her eyes showed she might have been crying. “If you give up, he wins. We can’t let him win. You are strong enough to withstand this.”

“I don’t think I am.”

She looked up at the ceiling as if trying to regain her composure. When she looked down at me again, that determined look returned. “I know you are because I made you. Life will constantly lay heavy shit on your shoulders in order to knock you down.”

I gaped at hearing her curse.

She gave me a tiny smile. “You will fall. You will fall many times. Sometimes the fall will hurt more than you ever thought possible and you will feel like you don’t want to get back up. Like right now, for example. But you will, and when you do, you will be stronger.”

“You make it sound so easy.” I wiped my face.

“I know it’s not,” she said, stroking the back of my head.

“Have you ever fallen and absolutely could not get back up?” I asked her.

She got a sad look in her eye and nodded.

“Then how did you get back up?”

“Your father helped me.”

“What am I supposed to do if I ever reach that point?”

She got to her feet and held out her hand. “Then I’ll help you, honey.”

I opened my eyes to the sound of Knox’s voice. “She reset the alarm. That means she’s in the house somewhere.”

“Is she in this room? The one that’s locked?” I heard Keelan say before I heard banging. “Shiloh!”

I didn’t move. I didn’t respond. I just lay there with my cheek resting on the cold wood floor. I was completely numb, inside and out.

“There’s blood on the floor in her bedroom,” I heard Knox say just before my closet door was ripped open and I saw his shoes. “I found her!” he shouted and rushed in. He knelt next to me. “Shiloh?”

“Go away,” I whispered.

He moved some of my hair away from my face and let out a curse. “What happened?”

“Please, go away,” I whispered again.

“Where are you?” Colt yelled from my bedroom before the closet door was opened wider. “Is she alright?”

I could hear his worry and it took away some of the numbness. Fresh tears filled my eyes.

“Colt, take Creed and go get the first aid kit from home,” Knox ordered.

“Why do we both have to go?” I heard Creed ask. “Is she alright? I want to see her.”

“Damnit!” Knox roared. “Do as I say and go.”

“Come on,” Colt said, and I heard footsteps retreating.

“What can I do?” I heard Keelan ask.

“Just keep them back.”

“She’s their girlfriend, Knox,” Keelan said.

“That doesn’t fucking matter right now,” Knox snapped and shifted to sit next to me. He brushed more of my hair away from my face. “Shiloh.” His voice took on a gentleness I couldn’t stand.

I closed my eyes. “Please, go.”

“You know I can’t do that. You’re pretty banged up.”

I don’t care .

“How did this happen?” he asked.

“I fell.”

“Did you lose consciousness?”

I opened my eyes and tears rolled out. “If it was more than just a cut, I think it would have killed me by now.”

Knox was quiet for a few breaths. “Were you hoping that would happen? Is that why you came in here instead of getting it looked at?”

I’d come in here because I needed to feel safe, but what did it matter?

“Shiloh,” he admonished.

“I don’t want to care anymore.” More tears leaked from my eyes. “So please, just go.”

“You’re giving up?”

“I’m wondering why I didn’t do it sooner,” I admitted. “Why did I fight so hard to escape him? He killed them. I had nothing left.”

“You wanted to live.”

“I didn’t know it would be this hard.” My voice broke as my pain rushed in, washing away the numbness completely.

“It will get easier,” he said. “If you give up, you’ll never see that.”

I didn’t believe him. “Prove it.”

He went quiet for a while. Just when I thought he was about to give up and leave, he said, “I was thirteen when my mom died from lung cancer. She never smoked a day in her life.”

I hadn’t expected him to say that. The guys never really talked about their mother. All I really knew about her was that she had passed away when Colt and Creed had been six and Knox and Keelan had her eyes.

“Months before she passed, she became bedridden and was hooked up to an oxygen concentrator that made this constant vibrating noise,” Knox continued and there was a slight strain to his voice. “It was so loud it could be heard everywhere in our old home. I couldn’t tune it out and when I went to school, the sound refused to leave my head. I hated it.” He paused. To compose himself, maybe? I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t see his face. “The sound was a constant reminder that my mother was going to die and my world was falling apart.” He scooted so he could lie down on his back and we were finally talking face-to-face. “I’m not telling you this so I can say I understand what you’re going through. But with my loss, I know what it’s like for every minute of every day to feel hard with no ending in sight.”

“How did you keep going?”

“I struggled. I avoided dealing with my grief in ways that hurt me, like you do. I was angry all the time. I got into fights a lot. My dad made me play football, hoping that it would be a better outlet. It helped, until it didn’t. I eventually got kicked off the team for excessive aggression. After that, I lived at the gym. I ran, lifted weights, I worked my body until I could barely stand. My sophomore year of high school, my dad brought home an old car that looked like it came from a junkyard. He told me he wasn’t going to pay for my gym membership, phone, or anything else anymore unless I helped him fix it up. I threatened to get a job to pay for my own shit and he threatened to kick me out of the house if I did. ‘Work on the damn car with me, Knox, and when we’re done you can have it,’ he said to me.” Knox’s eyes were sad. “I hadn’t realized at the time, but working on that car was how he got me to work through my grief. At first, he subtly brought up my mom, just a comment here or there. Then he brought her up more and more, sharing his memories of when they first met, when he knew he loved her. I couldn’t tell you when or how it became okay for me to talk about her, but I eventually let my grief out under the hood of that car.”

“He saved you,” I said.

“He saved me from myself,” he answered. “Then I lost him and all the progress I’d made felt like it was washed away in an instant. I wanted to give up. I wanted to do what you’re doing right now. I wanted to say ‘fuck it’ so badly, but then I remembered I had three people depending on me. It was the hardest thing I had ever done—refusing to succumb to my pain. What helped me a lot was knowing that it would get easier. My dad had showed me that.”

“I don’t have anyone depending on me.”

“You don’t, and the fact that you’ve made it this far is a testament to your strength.”

I sniffled. “I’m not strong. I’ve made it this long because I’ve been jumping from one crutch to another. Drowning myself in the bottom of a bottle. Smoking to calm my fear. Running until it hurt because that pain was better than what I was feeling.”

“If you’re aware that what you’re doing is wrong, why do you continue to do it to yourself? Why haven’t you tried to work on getting better?” There wasn’t judgment in his question. Just the need to understand.

My forehead scrunched up. “Because I’m scared.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“I—” A dam inside me broke and tears began to fall rapidly down my cheeks. “I don’t want to talk about what happened. I don’t want to remember how he hurt me and how he killed them.” My body shook as I cried uncontrollably.

His expression turned pained and he grabbed my hand. “Come here.” He tugged a little and I pushed myself up. He sat up and pulled me onto his lap. I swung my leg over his thighs, straddling him. I tucked my arms in and buried my face in his bulky chest like I did when Colt held me like this.

Knox held me tightly. “I know you don’t want to talk about it, but that night is catching up with you in your dreams. I told you before that we all have to face our pain. Maybe your subconscious is telling you it’s time whether you want to talk about that night or not. So you gotta ask yourself…would talking about it and trying to work through what you went through make things any worse than they already are?”

I shook my head. “I’m not brave enough to do it.”

“Look at me,” he said, putting his hand under my chin. I met his brown eyes. “You’re brave enough. You were brave enough to sleep today.”

“I was only brave enough because you were holding me.”

His hands cupped my cheeks. “Then I’ll hold you. We’ll all hold you, Shiloh. I said we would help you, but you have to want to help yourself.”

Could I do this? Alone, no. I was drowning alone—slowly sinking to the bottom of the ocean, because I had given up. The thought of their help was as if their hands were reaching into the water for me. “I need to go back to therapy.”

He went still. “I think that’s a good idea.”

I closed my eyes. “Can I ask you for two favors?”

“What?”

“Don’t go easy on me. Don’t let me slip up, because I don’t want to be back here. I don’t ever want to feel this way again.”

He dropped his hands from my face. “We can all help with that. What’s the second favor?”

“Today, even though I knew what I would face when I fell asleep, you made me feel like everything was going to be okay. Can you do that again?”

He nodded and pushed my hair behind my shoulder. Pointing at my temple, he said, “We should really take you to get this looked at.” Knox bound his arm around my lower back and climbed to his feet without letting me go. To help him hold me and because I was scared I was going to fall, I quickly wrapped my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist. He carried me out of the closet, and I saw Colt, Creed, and Keelan all waiting in my room. Creed was leaning against my dresser with his arms folded across his chest, Colt was sitting on the floor by the closet door, and Keelan was sitting on the foot of my bed. All of them wore somber expressions, but perked up as Knox carried me past them to my bathroom. With one arm under my butt to hold me up, he used his free hand to flick on the light before setting me on the counter.

I winced at the bright light. Knox gently brushed my hair back from my temple. “Yup. You’re going to need stitches.”

“I don’t want to go to the hospital,” I said.

“You need to go, baby girl,” Keelan said from where he stood by the bathroom door. The muscles in his jaw clenched as he stared at my temple.

“Alright, let’s get her some shoes and grab her purse,” Knox said to Keelan and the two of them walked out of the bathroom. As soon as they passed the threshold, Colt and Creed barreled their way in.

Colt got to me first. His hands wrapped around the back of my neck and he slammed his lips on mine. “You’re not allowed to do that again,” he said, pulling away. He took in the side of my face with a curse.

I nodded. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “Just don’t shut us out. You are not alone anymore. You suffer, we suffer.”

“Okay,” I said.

Keelan returned with a pair of sandals from my closet. As he handed them to Creed, his eyes met mine. “How would you feel about staying with us for a few days?”

“I think that’s a good idea,” Creed said and the three of them looked at me expectantly.

I had a knee-jerk reaction to say no. I had become so used to running away—not wanting them to see me continue to make poor decisions. “I’ll need to pack some stuff.”

“I can do that for you,” Keelan said, backing out of the bathroom.

“She’ll want her Batman pajamas. They’re her favorite,” Creed told Keelan before he could get too far. “She loves to wear dresses and she has a pile of new hair tie things on her dresser. You’ll need to pack all of them because she loses them left and right. I swear I found, like, six of them in my truck yesterday.”

Colt snorted. “She keeps a stash of them in my locker and I’ve lost count of how many I’ve found in my car.”

If it weren’t stupidly hot here all the time, I wouldn’t feel the need to constantly put my hair up. I almost smiled. Creed was right…about everything. I loved my Batman PJs. I’d worn them the morning I’d first made him breakfast. I thought that was why I favored them. Every time I saw them, I thought of him. And I did love to wear dresses. They made me feel pretty and they were a lot more comfortable to wear in the heat.

Keelan looked at Creed. “Do you want to help me pack?”

Creed handed my sandals to Colt and left with Keelan. Colt pushed my hair off my shoulder. His eyes followed the trail of dried blood down the side of my face to the top of my green shirt. “Let’s get you cleaned up a little before we go.”