Summer
TWO
I’m free.
I’m free.
I’m free.
For the first time in over fifteen years, there will be true peace.
He’s going to jail.
Verbal abuse that one day expanded into physical. His torment. His hatred, for reasons I never unpacked. At this point, I almost don’t want to, even if I’m pretty certain it has to do with whoever my mother is.
The hand comes swinging towards my face, his sneer the precursor for the hit that throws me backwards into the fridge. The handle pushes into my shoulder, and it stings, but less than my burning cheek from his large hand. If I show any pain, he’ll do it again, but worse.
“Fucking useless girl. You think you’ll ever move out? You and I are for life. The real world will chew you up and spit you out. You’re nothing.”
For a long time, I believed those words. The real world is hard, and my part-time job on top of school, plus the full-ride scholarship I have no idea how I got, made it possible to move away from him.
I had to pack my bags in secret when he was at a friend’s house and then blocked his number, aware once he got home, his rage would be like nothing else. Levi drove us both to university and helped me move into the dorm when I turned down his offer of being roommates.
As I walk through my dorm room’s door, my hand floats up to my cheek, the ghostly memory of my father making my lungs compress.
This is why I didn’t want to be around Levi tonight. I anticipated the spiral, and being alone would be safer. While he wouldn’t judge me, revisiting my trauma isn’t something he’d love to know about either. He’d encourage me to think about the fact that my father is going away.
Levi’s like that. He’s perfect, not fucked up like me, and his family has none of the same drama mine does. He’s the heir to an empire, and I’m…me.
Since the moment we met, my betraying heart decided to have a crush, but I hated him because of his type.
He fell in with a certain crowd who never hid their dislike of me, so no matter his pretty boy looks, I was forced to accept he was one of them—a devil with a handsome face, my high school nemesis who never left me alone.
A pretentious asshole whose family ensured he didn’t need to work at all, so his only job was to piss me off.
His friends hated me since grade school, and it carried into high school.
All because I was the weird kid who didn’t come from the right side of the tracks and had virtually no friends.
I wasn’t like the girls they hung out with.
My nails didn’t get done every few weeks.
My clothing was cheap rather than expensive brands.
I didn’t drive at all, let alone own an overprice car.
Yet, my stupid teenage heart had a crush on Levi, the new kid at the time.
Something about his dark, unearthly eyes and flop of sun-kissed hair that matched his naturally tanned skin got to me.
He wore the best shoes, the expensive brands.
He was the epitome of the golden boy while I was shrouded in hatred and black clothing. We couldn’t have been more different.
Until it changed, and we became different people together. Except certain facts remain and will never change: there’s ‘other side of the tracks different’—then, there’s us.
He’s a Westwood. He’s the heir to an empire, completing a degree to have something to hang on his office wall one day. Once the degree gets hung, his parents will toss a wife his way with the expectation of creating the next generation.
While I’m the emotion-hiding, abused-by-her-father girl from the underprivileged side of town, who works to fund her life. His parents despise our friendship, believing I’m not good enough to be around him.
One day, I’ll be the person who doesn’t have a firm place in his world. Our friendship will fall apart with time until, eventually, we’re strangers occasionally passing in social media posts.
Until then, my desperation and attachment issues cling to him. Life has been very shitty, but Levi is my something good, and I’ll hold on to him until he forces me to let go.
Even now, I use Levi’s positivity in an attempt to make the fake pain in my cheek fade.
Dad isn’t here to harm me anymore.
When the throbbing continues, it clearly doesn’t work. Instead, another kind of pain slips in. The kind that initiated all of this.
“You texted?” I call, walking through my father’s front door.
There’s no plausible reason for me to be here.
When moving away for university, I promised myself and Levi I’d go no-contact with Dad, since it’d be easier and quicker than filing any charges against him—something Levi encouraged.
Chances are, the courts won’t believe me or care, so this saves the disappointment.
No-contact turned into semi-contact. I try to block his number but find myself unblocking it to check on him when the guilt that he’s living alone gets too much. It’s a toxic cycle I recognize and yet can’t get myself off of.
Hence, coming here after he asked for my help with something.
“Living room,” his voice grates from down the hallway. Great, he’s drunk. It’s something he spends most of his time being these days.
Drunk Dad is…weird. Creepy.
The prickle in the back of my neck demands I leave and return tomorrow, to not keep walking down the hallway, stepping over discarded clothing and the odd beer bottle that never made it to the kitchen.
A dent in the wall by the base of the stairs is in the exact shape of his body, so I can only assume he stumbled into it.
I turn into the living room but immediately stop. Where Dad is normally sprawled drunk in his chair, this time, it’s empty.
The itch returns, raising the fine hairs all over my body just as a thud comes from behind me.
I turn, catching the flash of his body before he stumbles into me and shoves me against the nearest wall, crowding me.
Stale beer and cigarettes fill my nose, making bile fill my throat.
Hands flat to the wall, I shove backwards while trying to jab an elbow into his gut.
“Dad, what the hell?”
My head is ripped backwards as his other hand slides beneath my shirt. “You fuckin’ owe me, girl.”
I scream.
And I scream now.
As the past rushes back for the millionth time this week, my legs give out. The wall meets my back, the floor my ass. My knees draw up as my head lowers into my lap, and I yell, trying to muffle the sound from reaching my neighbours.
I kick off my shoes and then yank off my dress, mussing my hair in the process. Tears of frustration fill my eyes as I rub my skin until it’s red and raw and mine again. Flashes of that evening bombard me until no amount of rubbing makes it fade.
Somehow, I’m back on my feet, stumbling through the doorway to the left of me, practically crawling into the shower.
Thanks to whatever in this world decided to give me a win for once, my room was upgraded at move-in to a private one with its own bathroom when there was an error with room assignments.
Tonight, I’m especially grateful.
The hot water crashes down on my head from where I remain kneeling on the cheap tile. My nails dig into my knees, then over the scars marked into my arms from over the years—anything to draw my pain to the forefront and crush the memories. New ones will distract me.
You promised, an inner voice reminds me. After hiding behind hoodies and long sleeves, Levi figured it out. He never judged me for self-harm but says it kills him a little bit each time. My cutting began back in high school, when I was sickened over Dad’s marks on me. So, I made my own.
This time, I scratch instead of finding something sharper.
It’s been months since Dad’s attack, yet no time passing has ever made his attempted assault less.
No soap has washed off his touch—though I try now, dumping a large amount of my coconut-scented soap into my hand.
No deep breathing has cooled the panic from that day, when I fought my hardest to get away from his drunk ass before anything actually happened, and then I ran.
Ran and ran until reaching Levi’s apartment.
The door barely opens before I shove myself into the strong arms of my best friend. He wraps me up immediately and without question, tugging me into his apartment so he can shut the door. Before we move away, I reach over and lock it in case my father catches up.
“Summer, what’s wrong? What happened? Did someone hurt you?”
It’s the last question I’m able to answer, nodding into his chest, the emotion tightening my throat is too thick to speak through.
“Who?” he demands, his hands a comforting band on my hips. He’s touching where Dad did, but the power of Levi temporarily replaces that hell. My body immediately recognizes safety in Levi’s hold.
“H-he tried… I ran…”
Levi stiffens. “Your father?”
My answer could change a lot. For years, I’ve been telling Levi it’s nothing, while lying about the bruises. He’s insisted on helping, but I’ve run from the subject every single time. The same urge has me wanting to lie again, except tonight proved Dad is irredeemable.
“Yes.”
Will I ever be free from the destruction ripping me apart now that Dad is out of my life?
I rub soap over me again for a second round, then a third.
Maybe I should have slept at Levi’s tonight. His soap smells like safety. His is the only shower that doesn’t result in a breakdown since the event.
Since I didn’t take him up on his offer, I’m stuck here, burning my skin until memories fade behind the judge’s decision. The ghostly recollection of Levi’s tight grip grounds me. He knew how close I was to bolting but kept me close.
When the water cools, I step out. Chilly air washes over my damp body, reminding me where I am and where I’m not.
I go through the motions of brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed before retrieving my phone from where I dropped it when first coming into the room. Two texts wait for me.
Levi
Night, darling. I wish you were safe with me so I can spoil you with popcorn and zombie movies, but since you’re not, I’m planning our trip.
God, the trip. I’d already forgotten about it. A trip to the coast, with the ocean and a cabana away from all of this, sounds way too amazing to be real.
I text him back so he doesn’t worry, reporting that I showered and am heading to bed. Once he replies, I switch to the other message, this one a better balm to my breakdown.
Because he gets me.
Even if they’re the same person.
Lunar_Warden
How did today go?
Me
It was hard. He’s going to prison, but it doesn’t seem real.
Lunar_Warden
He deserves much worse.
Me
I feel him, though. Still. It’s never gone away. I’ve lived with the feeling for months, anticipating today, figuring when he got punished, it’d fix me and this, but it isn’t.
Lunar_Warden
Can I call you?
Talking over the phone won’t conceal the truth for long, so I hesitate for the same reasons I avoided going to Levi’s apartment. He’ll try to protect me from my emotions, no matter the means.
Hunter would never judge me.
It was a couple years ago when we ended up in the same gaming campaign. And then again, and again. Eventually, I formed a strange online friendship with Lunar_Warden, whose name I later learned to be Hunter.
And then later, I realized that was another lie.
Given that online friendships are almost always a horrible idea, I kept firm boundaries.
But after a particularly hard day of listening to voicemails from Dad, instead of calling Levi with my issues—who, at the time, was running errands for his parents—I messaged my cell phone number to Hunter through the chat within the gaming platform.
He took the hint and texted me.
Between the many conversations and eventual phone calls—despite the attempt to alter his voice—I learned one very interesting thing about Hunter.
He’s Levi.
It wasn’t any one thing he said that tipped me off, but a deep-rooted sense in my gut, combined with an altered voice that occasionally slipped up.
Levi invented this second personality and got close to me.
Since ‘Hunter’ was told my legal name a while ago, he’s aware who he’s actually speaking to.
When I figured it out, I was so confused and shocked, I nearly confronted him, but since he clearly had his reasons, I let him continue the lie.
Plus, I’m curious. It became fun, and then something impossible to let go of.
There are two sides to Levi: what he presents, and Hunter—and I’m in love with both of them. But Levi is a Westwood, controlled by his parents, stuck in the best friend role neither of us can ever break. Hunter, however, is…mine.
He’s mine. He’s different. Hunter is how I get to be closer to Levi in ways well beyond our physical friendship.
His family would never approve of us dating, but in this secret life, they don’t have to know.
If anything did happen between me and Levi, and it didn’t work out, I wouldn’t survive losing him.
So, to protect both us and my heart, I’ve never disclosed knowing the truth. Instead, they’re two separate men in my mind, two separate people I reference by their individual names and experience differently.
My phone vibrates, reminding me of the still-waiting text—Hunter’s question about a phone call. As Hunter, he’s less likely to push, and I need that.
I type back a single word:
Yes.