Chapter 5
Chapter Five
When I pulled into the driveway of my house, I half-expected to find a row of police cars and worried parents waiting out in the front yard.
I might’ve even wanted to find a scene like that awaiting me.
What I found instead was my usual two-story, gray-bricked home quiet as ever.
Both of my parents’ cars were in the driveway.
Mom was probably somewhere in her office behind a stack of student papers.
Dad was most likely pouring himself into his work as well.
Sighing, I shut the front door behind me and took a moment to listen to the silence that surrounded me.
My house had always been a quiet place. With two parents who brought a lot of their work back home with them, my sister and I had always been encouraged to keep our activities low volume.
Over the years it had developed into an almost eerily quiet household.
There was a lot of love here, however, the measured silence of it all made our home less warm, a little intimidating.
That could’ve been just my way of looking at things, though.
When I was younger, I always promised myself that I would grow up and have a big, loud family.
The kind of family who would hear the front door shut and rush to the foyer to greet whoever had just returned.
For now, I was here—standing at the entry of my house after being gone all day and all of the previous night without so much as a ‘Welcome home’.
The staircase creaked from underneath my feet as I marched up to my bedroom. The sounds announced my presence, and almost immediately after I reached the top of the stairs Morgan poked her head from her room.
The expression on her face was a unique mixture of several different emotions that transitioned seamlessly. Relief. Happiness. Curiosity. Realization. Anger. Nothing came after the anger. She wore it on her face as though it were set in stone.
Wordlessly, she grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me into her bedroom.
“Lauren, where have you been?” she whispered harshly.
No yelling in the house. Old habits die hard.
I shrugged, looking down at the shirt that wasn’t mine.
It was only then that it seemed to register to Morgan that I was not dressed in the same clothes she saw me in last. This seemed to alarm her some and her angry expression slowly morphed into one of concern. “What happened to you?”
“Nothing really,” I mumbled back, not meeting her eyes. I could feel her staring at me and I tried to talk myself out from under her gaze. “I had a little too much to drink last night.”
“Lauren.”
“I fell asleep.”
“Lauren.”
“It was nothing really.”
“Lauren!” She shouted, prompting me to look up at her. “What happened to you? Where are your clothes? Why didn’t you call me at all? Where did you sleep?”
So many questions at once. I wasn’t sure which one I was supposed to respond to first.
“I’m okay!” I said first. In truth, I wasn’t sure if the forcefulness of my tone was to convince Morgan or to convince myself. “I slept at that house.”
Her eyes widened before she squinted in my direction curiously. “Are those…” She gasped. “Are those hickies on your neck?”
I looked away from her, feeling my eyes water a little before I brought my hands up to my neck to hide the bruises.
“Lauren! Talk to me!” She was shouting, outrage lining her features. She was outraged… Her! Like she had any right to be the angry one in this scenario.
“Why did you bring me to the Montgomery house and not tell me?” Her face fell. “Better yet – why did you think it was a good idea for either of us to be there?”
“Did one of them…” I cut her off.
“If you were going to walk us into the home of the most dangerous man in Miami... A man who wants our father dead, I have to remind you. Don’t you think you should have told me what I was walking into?”
Morgan raised a hand and motioned for me to keep my voice down.
“Worried the secret will get out, huh?” I got louder.
“I mean come on, Morgan. You take us to what is most likely the last place we should be on the planet, and then what do you do? You leave without me and tell no one that I’m missing!
I know you saw our car outside the Montgomery house whenever it is you left. I could’ve been dead!”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “I was going to tell Mom and Dad.”
“It is almost twenty-four hours later!”
“I didn’t know…” She fingered through her hair frustratedly, dragging her nails along her scalp. “I didn’t know how to tell them. I knew you were missing. I was so drunk. I wasn’t thinking clearly last night. I didn’t know how to tell them.”
“Why were we there?”
“Lauren…”
“Why were we there?” I laid more emphasis on each of my words.
Morgan exhaled shakily before she explained. “So you know the president of my sorority, Cierra, right?” I could kind of remember Kain mentioning the party was for one of his sisters who he called Cici.
“If you risked my life for some sorority bullshit, I swear to God…”
Morgan had the nerve to roll her eyes. “Well, her birthday is today and so she was throwing a party. All my other sorors were going. They were going to notice if I wasn’t there.
And it would be seen as disrespectful for me to just not show up.
Especially since it was the first Friday before Spring Break.
As far as anyone’s concerned, I had no reason not to come. ”
“And me? Does it break some stupid-ass sorority rule if you don’t bring your unsuspecting sister?”
“I felt like if anything happened to me during the party… if you were there—”
“Are you serious? So I was there to sound the whistle in case anything happened to you, but once something happened to me, you were ready to forget you even had a sister.”
“That’s not true! I was going to tell Mom and Dad!”
“When? Tomorrow? Do you know what can happen in the amount of time you wasted if I was actually in any real trouble?”
Morgan opened her mouth to say something, but abruptly stopped, finding new meaning in my words. “You mean… So you weren’t in danger?”
I could already see herself absolving herself of what little guilt she was feeling.
This angered me. I wanted her to know what happened, then.
Not for any reason than to wash that subtle look of relief off her face.
I wanted her to feel bad. I knew what happened to me had nothing to do with the Montgomerys, but I didn’t care.
It wouldn’t have happened if she didn’t bring me there.
“I was almost raped last night.”
I regretted the words as soon as they came out of my mouth. Saying them out loud made it real. It made the memories come back in vivid detail. I could almost feel Victor’s heat against my neck. It knocked the breath out of me, and I choked back the sob that threatened to come out.
“Shit,” was all Morgan managed to whisper, reaching for me as if her embrace would make it better. I cringed away, not wanting to be touched. “I’m so sorry.”
And her apology was genuine. I could hear it in her voice. I could see the tears forming in her eyes. She was blaming herself. Part of me wanted her to, but I felt a strange impulse to put some of the blame on myself as well.
“I was drinking. A lot, actually. I was so stupid, and I took a drink from a guy I didn’t even know and…”
“Stop. Don’t do that.” She stepped closer to me, resting both hands on my shoulders.
“You won’t do that shit, okay? This isn’t on you.
Do you know his name?” she asked the last question menacingly, like all I had to do was give her a name and she’d come back a few days later with his severed dick in a jewelry box for me soon.
“You don’t have to do anything,” I mumbled. “It was…handled.”
My sister raised a questioning eyebrow. “By who?”
For a moment, I hesitated to answer my sister’s question. Unlike the questions before this one, I didn’t feel like answering this one for a different reason.
I didn’t want to share him.
Even if it was just to explain his heroic efforts, there was a territorial feeling inside that made me want to keep Kain a secret.
I felt like if I talked about him, he’d be mine a little less.
The thought left me a little confused mainly because I didn’t know what gave me the right to think of him as mine in the first place.
I worked passed my initial apprehension and told my sister the small tidbits I was willing to share.
“Um… your soror has a… younger brother. He’s about our age. He intervened just in time. He saved me.”
“Is his name Kain?”
I sighed. Of course Morgan would know him. Morgan knows everyone. “You’ve met.”
“No. It’s just Cierra only has one brother, and she mentions him from time to time. I only remember because he’s so fine…”
I narrowed my eyes a little. Surprisingly, this was the most infuriating thing Morgan had said since I arrived home. Yes, I knew Kain was attractive, but I didn’t want my sister to talk about it. I didn’t want her to talk about him at all.
Before I could ask, Morgan was already answering my next question. “She posted a picture of him yesterday on Instagram before the party. That’s how I know.” My sister pulled out her phone and in a second, thrusted the screen in my face. “This him?”
The photo was a candid shot of Kain sitting at the kitchen counter on his phone. He didn’t even seem to realize the photo was being taken, yet it still came out wonderfully. God, he was so perfect… The photo was captioned, ‘Look who came down from Tallahassee this morning! #Kain’
“Yep,” I muttered. “That’s him.”
“Tallahassee? Does he go to school up there?” Morgan asked curiously. Her curiosity was annoying to me. Why did she want to know anyway? There were two major universities in Florida’s capital city—Florida A&M and Florida State. I didn’t feel like narrowing it down for her.
“How should I know?” I asked.