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  “But I really do want it.”

  “You want it in order to ease and ache. You don’t want it for the right reasons.”

  “You don’t want it?” I asked.

  He picked his head up to look at me again and I immediately regretted my question. “I want it. I want it so bad—” he pressed his pelvis into my leg so I could feel just how bad he wanted it, “—but not like this. I know you’re scared of the outcome of all of this, but I have more to lose than you. I won’t allow more room for me to get hurt by doing something reckless.”

  I had to swallow the lump in my throat. His words had gotten to me. I knew he was right, but it didn’t make the throbbing ache between my legs go away. It made it worse. I needed him. I needed his touch and his lips on mine and his body over me. I needed it all. I had to have it and worry about the consequences later.

  I pushed up with my hips, rubbing my thigh into his impressive erection. I continued with that motion, back and forth with my hips, while kissing him forcefully. His breathing turned harder and deeper as he fisted my hair with one hand and grabbed my hip with the other, keeping the momentum going.

  “Be with me,” I whispered on his lips.

  Link pulled away so fast I could feel the air move against my skin. I worried I had spoken too soon, but then he was on his knees, hovering over me. He gripped the sides of my panties in his fists and yanked them down to my ankles in one swift movement. That moment alone made me grow wetter than I had previously been. I could feel the cool air hit my moistness and it made the yearning for his touch stronger.

  I moved my hips a little, hinting at him where I needed to be touched the most. I could see his silhouette in the dark, kneeling at my feet on the mattress. Then I felt his hands move up my bare legs until they were inches away from my pulsating nub. It throbbed like it had a heartbeat of its own, and it began to hurt. I was physically aching for him to keep moving his hands. He leaned over a bit, and that’s when I felt it. His hand adjusted so that his fingers were ever so slightly touching my most sensitive spot. I couldn’t hold in the half moan–half squeal as my hips bucked into his touch.

  My eyes closed immediately, so I wasn’t prepared for his mouth to be on mine. But my lips moved with his as if they had been anticipating it. As if they had touched his lips so many times they just knew what to do. He kissed me like he had kissed me his whole life. We were in sync with one another.

  His thumb on my clit grew more forceful as I felt his fingers sliding into me. That’s when I heard a moan come from him. He panted into my neck, as if I was the one touching him, but I wasn’t. One hand was holding the sheet beneath me so tightly I thought my fingers would be permanently fixed that way, and the other hand held onto his side, keeping him from moving too far away from me.

  His tongue was on my neck, his thumb was circling my clit, and his fingers were thrusting in and out of me. There were more sensations going through me than I could ever recall happening before. He then pushed my t-shirt up to my chin and I felt his mouth on my nipple. He teased it at first with his tongue, then with his teeth. It shot bolts of electricity to my sex and I could feel myself tightening around his fingers. That’s when he stopped moving them in an out of me. Instead, he pushed them in as far as they’d go and began curling them against the front wall of my canal.

  My body began to shake as the tightening in my lower abdomen grew. My fingers gripped his shirt so hard I worried I had taken skin with it. But I didn’t care at that point. He was bringing my body to heights it hadn’t been to in a very long time. Even though I had been finger fucked before by Billy, enough so that the mind blowing orgasms he gave me had left me lifeless for long spans of time, it still hadn’t felt like this. Maybe it was the pregnancy hormones that made it stronger. I didn’t care. It was intense and incredible and a high unlike any other.

  I felt it reach its peak before releasing its fury on my muscles and spreading through my body like an untamed wildfire. My entire body shook like an earthquake. And left my body burning like a heat wave in the desert in the dead middle of summer. He released a natural disaster in me, and I wanted it all the time. I’d let the rip tide take me under, the volcano desecrate me, and the tornado suck me in. I’d take it all from him.

  As soon as the quivers in my body had calmed, he was on his side next to me with his head buried in my neck. I could hear his desperate breaths; they sounded like my own. When Billy would touch me, he had gotten into it himself, but he never acted like this. Link was acting as if I had done something to him, instead of the other way around. I didn’t know how to take it, except to be pleased with the knowledge that my pleasure gave him pleasure.

  Link slowly removed himself from me and got off the bed. I watched silently as he opened a drawer and pulled something out before heading to the bathroom. From the light in the hallway when he opened back up the door, I could tell he had changed his shorts and he carried a washcloth.

  I thought he was just going to hand it to me, but he didn’t. Instead, he used it to clean me off, then he pulled my underwear back up and disposed of the washcloth in the basket next to the bed. I waited until he crawled back into his side before speaking.

  “Why did you change your shorts?” I already knew the answer, but asked anyway.

  He was on his back next to me, but he stared up at the ceiling instead of at me.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I could feel my lips curl, knowing what he had done.

  “Why don’t you want to talk about it?”

  “It’s embarrassing, okay?” he answered with irritation.

  I turned onto my side so that I was curled up next to him. I placed one arm over his chest and nestled my head on his shoulder so that my mouth was close to his ear. “It’s not embarrassing.”

  He let out a huff of air that could have been a laugh, but I wasn’t sure. “Yes it is. It’s what pre-teens do, not seventeen-year-olds.”

  Hearing him say his age out loud made me remember mine. I was living with him. We were in a house with no other grown-ups. Granted, it was a house on the same property as his parents’ and a few houses over from my own family, but it was still our own. He had graduated high school and I was pregnant. I didn’t feel seventeen. I wasn’t sure how old I felt, but it wasn’t seventeen.

  “I think it’s hot.”

  That time he did laugh. “Hot? How in the hell is me jizzing in my pants hot?”

  “Well, maybe not hot,” I said with a laugh that I’m sure he didn’t enjoy. So I continued to say what it was I wanted to before he pushed me off of him to never touch me again. I didn’t want that.

  “Doing that to me made you that excited?”

  He turned his head to look at me and kissed my forehead. “Yeah. I guess it did.”

  “That’s what’s hot.”

  “You do something to me, Kendall.”

  There was that name again. I didn’t know what to say to that. I knew I had fought tooth and nail in the beginning to be called by that name, but I didn’t want to anymore. I also didn’t want to be called Danielle yet either. So I just ignored it until I could figure out who I was and by what name I’d go by. I only had two choices since I was sure they’d all think I was certifiably insane if I made up a new one.

  Curled into Link’s arms, I felt myself drift off into unconsciousness.

  Billy was mad… again. It was happening more and more frequently. It didn’t matter what I did or didn’t do, he’d find a problem with it. It also didn’t help that I fought back. I didn’t give a shit. He had no right to treat me the way he had been.

  I was in the kitchen, making dinner, when he came home from work. He went straight to the bathroom to clean up, like he always did. He was a grease monkey. Spending all day under the hood of cars tended to make him very dirty by time his shift ended. So his usual routine was to come home, strip out of his coveralls, and wash off—usually just his arms and face and neck. But that time, I heard the shower running. I didn’t
mind. The timer of the oven still had about twenty minutes left on it.

  When he finally came out of the bathroom, he looked refreshed and relaxed. I was still a little leery of him since lately I could never tell when his mood would change. I decided to act as if all was fine and he hadn’t just blown up at me that morning before he left for work. I didn’t even remember what the fight had been about. Something stupid. That’s all it had been, fighting over stupid things for no reason, and then never apologizing for it. That’s what I hated most. He never seemed to apologize anymore.

  “Dinner will be ready soon,” I said to him when I noticed him sitting on the couch in front of the TV. I saw his eyes roll, so I kept on talking, to keep him from saying something rude. “Did you want to eat in here?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Wherever.”

  “Well, if you plan on watching TV, I can get out the trays and we can just eat in the living room. Unless you’re not planning on watching it, then I can set the table.”

  “Eat wherever the fuck you want to, Kendall. I don’t fucking care!”

  I was stunned, unable to move my feet or my tongue. I couldn’t come up with anything to say to him, nor could I walk away. The only thing I could do was bend down and pick up his work boot with the steel toe that he left in the middle of the room, again. I picked it up and threw it at him. It wasn’t like I had aimed for his face, but that’s where it landed. And I had expected him to at least block it, which he didn’t. Instead, it hit him on his cheek bone and immediately split the skin apart.

  His face turned red, matching the color of the blood oozing out of the slit near his eye. My eyes opened wide, immediately feeling horrible for what I had done. I never felt bad for my tantrums that quickly, unless I had done something so heinous that it warranted it. That did.

  He was up and out of his seat in seconds, flying through the air at me. I started to run, but he was faster, and had a head start since I had spent a second too long frozen in fear as I watched him bleed.

  A heavy weight hit my back hard, shoving me into the wall in front of me. I tried to hold my hands out to brace my fall, but he grabbed me by my arms and pulled them to my back, making my face break my fall against the drywall. My eyebrow bone connected first, then the rest of the left side of my face. I screamed in pain, not only from the blow to the head I had just taken, but from the force at which he was pulling my arms back.

  “What the fuck, Kendall!” he roared in my ear. I could barely hear him over the ear-piercing noise that rang out around me. “What the fuck!” He let me go and walked out the front door, leaving me in a heap on the floor.

  I didn’t cry. I was too angry to cry. I was seeing red and hearing what I could only describe as a high-pitched ringing in my ears. I sat in my crouched position for a few minutes, staring at the door, waiting to see if he’d come back. He didn’t. Finally, I got up and went back to the kitchen, catching my reflection in the mirror in the hallway. I wasn’t bleeding, but I knew I’d bruise. It didn’t look as bad as it felt, and knew there wasn’t any real damage caused. Except to my heart and ego.

  I mixed the salad together and pulled out his favorite dressing, Thousand Island. I turned off the burner that the green beans sat on and seasoned them, stirring them a few times. The oven beeped just after that. I had made dinner so many times I knew how to time it all perfectly so that it was all ready at the same time, so nothing would grow cold waiting for something else to finish.

  I made him a plate and put the rest of it away in the fridge, then I cleaned the kitchen. He had left the TV on, so I took out a folding table tray and set it up in front of his seat on the couch, putting his plate and a glass of milk on it. I was no longer hungry. The blow to the head made me lose my appetite.

  The next thing I did was something I had never done before, but had thought a lot about for weeks before that point. I wasn’t sure I’d have enough courage or strength to do it, but after being body-slammed into the wall, I suddenly found both courage and strength and more. I went into our bedroom and pulled a duffel bag from the top of the closet. It was dusty and hadn’t been used in a long time. It was about time to change that.

  I took my time and neatly folded my clothes before placing them inside the bag. I didn’t pack all of my clothes, but most of them. Then I went into the bathroom and grabbed all of my toiletries along with my makeup, hair, and face products and added those to the bag as well.

  I took my time for two reasons. One, I wanted to make sure I had everything. The last thing I wanted to do was forget something and have to come back for it. I didn’t have any of my own money so it wasn’t like I could just go out and buy anything I left behind. The other reason I took my time was because I wanted to see how long Billy would be gone.

  His behavior had become more and more erratic. I had wondered if maybe he was either cheating on me or had gotten into more than just the occasional party drugs. I knew it wouldn’t have been a stretch going from what we did on the weekends to him taking them during the week for whatever reason. I guess I thought how long he was gone for would have been a direct correlation to what he had been up to behind my back. I knew it had to have been something. His increasing temper and our decreasing sex life had to be connected. But to what?

  By the time I knew I had everything I had needed, I had grabbed my bag, threw it over my shoulder, and headed for the front door. I had spent long enough getting my shit together, I wasn’t going to wait any longer. Plus, I had called a friend of ours just before packing and told her to be expecting me. She knew why. So did her boyfriend. They saw me just a week earlier sporting a nice bruise on my arm and had suspected Billy. That time it wasn’t him, but they didn’t believe me. They had seen his temper before and ordered me to stay with them. I declined their offer, since, at that point in time, he hadn’t hurt me, yet. But they made me promise to call them if I ever needed to.

  I wasn’t the kind of girl to take shit from anyone, and Billy was no different. I refused to be the weak person that would allow her boyfriend to lay a hand on her. In Billy’s circle of friends, I had seen it more times than I’d like to admit. But that wasn’t going to be me. I was smart enough to know if you let a man lay his hands on you once, it’d happen again, and again.

  Just as I turned the handle to open the door, it swung in on me. I was able to jump back in time to avoid getting hit with it. Billy stood in the doorway, shock and horror etched on his blotchy face. I couldn’t speak. All I could do was stare at his grief-stricken expression and try to control my own. His eyes moved to the bag strapped across my shoulder. Once it clicked that I had my things packed and was heading out the front door, I saw his weakened composure crumble. His posture fell and his head hung on his shoulders.

  “Your dinner is on the tray and the rest is in the fridge for tomorrow. You should have enough to last you till the weekend. There’s meat in the freezer, I’m sure you still remember how to cook for yourself.” My words came out monotone as I tried desperately to keep my own emotions in check.

  He looked back up at me and took a step, closing the gap between us. He fingered the strap over my shoulder until he had pulled it off, letting the bag drop to the ground at my feet. “You can’t leave, Kendall. Please don’t leave me.”

  It wasn’t an order, more of a desperate plea. He was closer this time, and the light from the living room lit up his face. I could see pain in his eyes, along with the fact that he wasn’t high. There was no scent of alcohol on his breath either. I took in a deep breath and noticed no traces of perfume on his clothes or skin, at least none that I could smell. If he wasn’t with another woman or doing drugs, where had he gone? I asked him as much, and he just heaved a sigh as he closed the door behind him.

  “I went for a walk. I needed to cool down.”

  I picked up my bag and began to move around him to the front door. “Well, I need to cool down, too. I don’t know when I’ll be back—if ever.”

  He grabbed the bag again, but instead of dropping it
to the floor, he carried it back to the bedroom. I followed him, calling his name, but he didn’t stop until the bag was opened on the bed and he was pulling everything out, desperately trying to put everything back in its place.

  “Billy, stop!” I yelled. That got his attention. He turned around to face me and I saw the tears in his eyes. “What the hell is going on with you? You’ve been Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for weeks now. And it’s only getting worse. Today you turned into the Incredible Hulk. I can’t stay here and continue to worry about your next outburst, scared for the next time you throw me into a wall.”

  “I know. A lot has been going on.”

  “Then you should’ve talked to me about it!”

  He nodded, agreeing with me.

  “It’s too late now,” I said, practically in a whisper. “I won’t stay and be like Jess. I won’t be her. She goes back to Don every time, and every time he beats the shit out of her worse than the last. I won’t be that person. I won’t be your human punching bag.”

  “That’d never happen!” he yelled, but it wasn’t an angry outburst. It was full of fear and sincerity. I knew I sounded weak to myself, feeling sorry for him before I ever left the damn house. But it was in his eyes, in his tone—his regret was evident in his every action since walking back inside. “Things have happened and it’s made me realize something very important. Important and scary. And I don’t know what to do about it.”

  I was about to yell back, until he finished what he was saying. His words caught me off guard, I wasn’t expecting to hear him sound so lost and sad. “What happened?” I asked. It was the only thing I could think of to ask. I lost my desire to yell as soon as I saw the devastation in his eyes.

  “Chick’s wife was in an accident a couple weeks ago. She just died today.” He was talking about a man he worked with. I had met Chick and his wife quite a few times. They were very nice people. The news made my heart break in two. It was a horrible thing.