Touching Scars (5 page)

Just before we drove out of sight of the couple, Holt asked, “Should we stop and intervene?”

“Nah, keep driving,” Rooster told him from the passenger seat.

I continued to watch them, and just before we rounded the corner, the woman glanced up… warm hazel eyes.

What the hell? That’s not how I remembered them. Her eyes were almost completely black, always. I know these eyes.

I shot up to a seated position on the couch. Dragging a hand through my damp and sweaty hair, I got up and walked to the kitchen to get a glass of water. My mouth was so dry it hurt for the liquid to go down. I chugged the lukewarm water and filled the glass a second time. While I drank it down, my thoughts were all over the place. My dreams had never changed. Every night they were the same. Why would her eyes change color? My gut was tugging at me to dig deeper, think harder. Where do I know those eyes from?

While the glass was tilted up, my lips on the edge of the rim, it hit me. The thought was so startling that I dropped the glass. It fell into the sink, breaking into several large pieces. I didn’t care, I remembered those eyes.

“Fuck… Katherine.” I growled.

A
CCORDING
TO
THE
DICTIONARY
, asphyxiation is a condition in which one is deprived of oxygen. Have you ever been deprived of oxygen before? Having your airway completely cut off and incapable of taking in the air that your lungs so desperately needed? I have.

High school for me was bad. Very bad! And not in the way that most nerdy kids had it. They were all either computer geeks or played in the marching band. Some of us played sports, but we still didn’t fit in with the popular crowd. It was like that for me during my freshman year. I had a few friends that ran track with me, but I was usually a loner. At the end of ninth grade, one of the popular junior guys decided that I would be his target of choice. I couldn’t understand why he paid so much attention to me. It wasn’t until my sophomore year when things started getting really bad.

His name was Adam. I did everything I could to stay clear of him because I just wanted to be left alone. During the year his teasing had progressively worsened and I couldn’t escape him. He would say perverted things to me, dump drinks on me, and leave threatening notes in my locker. One day he took it a step further.

It was in the middle of May, just before graduation, and I was trying out for next year’s track team. It was in the upper nineties that day so I had been really hot and sweaty. At the end of tryouts I had taken an extra long time in the girl’s locker room and stood underneath the steaming shower water. I remember hearing a noise behind me. When I turned around to look around the presumed empty space, I found I hadn’t been alone. Adam marched towards me and covered my mouth with his hand. I didn’t stand a chance.

Never in my life did I think I’d become a victim. But I also never thought I’d be the girl that didn’t fight back if ever faced with that situation. However, there I was, doing the very thing I said
I wouldn’t do. I was completely frozen. I stood there motionless, as Adam unbuckled his belt, and slid down the zipper of his expensive designer jeans. His muddy brown eyes, I knew, would haunt me until the day that I died. I would never be able to wipe the memory of him penetrating me and taking the one thing that I could never get back. My innocence. I had stood there, held captive by my own fear, while he defiled me. When I felt the initial pinch that everyone says you feel when you lose your virginity, my mind began to protect itself. My senses completely shut down.

I don’t remember his hands being on my hips as he ground into me, leaving behind purple bruises. I don’t remember his large hand coming up to my neck and squeezing, slowly cutting off the only thing that was keeping me alive in that moment. Those long fingers that I had watched throw winning touchdown passes or make a basket in the last seconds before the buzzer were now killing me. I
do
remember the sudden burning in my lungs as my body began to struggle on its own accord to live. I
do
remember Adam’s grip growing tighter and I knew he was getting off on my sudden effort to breathe. And I
do
remember his final thrust before he pulled out of me, and I felt his semen coating my leg.

He had let go of me and I collapsed on the ground in a heap, totally naked. I was coughing over and over again, gulping air, and blinking back tears. Adam tucked himself back into his pants and left me there. I couldn’t tell you how long I sat on the tiled floor of the locker room. I just know that it was long enough to watch the water turn from red to clear, and hot to cold.

I never spoke about that afternoon with anyone. He told me he’d be watching me, and he’d know where I was. Adam graduated that year and went off to college. However, he still made sure to let me know he wasn’t gone. I’d get the occasional text message from him describing what he wanted to do to me when he saw me again. I lived my last two years of high school in a constant state of fear.

When I was done with school, my life didn’t return to normal. I never went to college to ‘further my education’ as my grandpa liked to say. I just wanted to leave Bay City and get away from the memories that followed me at every turn. My Uncle Roger, my mom’s brother, worked at an oil field in Port O’Connor and invited me to come down and stay with him while I sorted out the mess that I called my life.

I think my family thought I’d take a break for maybe a year and then come back and go to school at Sam Houston University. They had no idea what had been done to me — they just thought I was going through a horrid moody teenager phase and that I would eventually snap out of. That was never in the cards for me. I wanted to find a small corner of the world and work until I couldn’t anymore. I crossed my fingers, hoping that my worst nightmare had stopped following me. Even after changing my number, he still found me.

Two months into my stay with Uncle Roger, I ended up finding a bartending job at The Hole. At first they didn’t want to hire me because I was underage and legally couldn’t serve. Lucky for me, my uncle was best friends with the whole Port O’Connor Police Department (all four of them.) It didn’t take much convincing for them to overlook my being eighteen. They understood that when I came to work I didn’t consume any alcohol and did the job that was required of me. I hardly ever drank. It held too many bad memories. I was certain that I had smelled liquor on Adam’s breath that day.

I worked six days a week. Sundays, of course, the bar was closed. I cherished Sundays. I liked to go out to the beach and sunbathe while reading a good romance novel. Well, more like read and reread the same book. It was called
Emerge
by author S.E. Hall. I was fascinated by the love triangle that the main character, Laney Walker, was in. She was a simple hometown girl with two great options — the bad boy that she loved at first sight, and the sweet, gentle boy she’d known her entire life. Just thinking about it made me happy and sad at the same time. Not long ago I dreamed of being a Laney
. I
wanted
to have love. Shit, I would have been over the moon if I had eve
two
options. Now I was cynical when it came to love, and I considered myself damaged goods. My new love was the sun, water, and reading. I was aware that I’d never be the person I once was and I’d come to terms with it. My life was the bar and my beloved Sundays. Oh, and Ed.

Ed was the owner of The Hole. He was an older man whose wife, Rose, had passed away a few years before I showed up. I think he was lonely and I was just the company he was looking for. I liked talking with him every night as we closed up. He talked about Rose and what it was like being in love in the old days. They had one of those once in a lifetime love stories. He’d seen her from his Navy boat in New York City when they were tying up in port. He said he got off the boat as fast as he could and tracked her down. He insisted that he was in love with her from one glance. He said at first she thought he was crazy, but after he’d gotten down on his knees in front of his entire crew she let him take her to dinner. They were inseparable from then on. Even my cold heart swooned a bit at his story.

It was a few weeks after I’d started working that Ed told me that he’d been doing some repairs on the upstairs apartment and he wanted me to move in. He said he’d give it to me at a discounted rate. Honestly, I was barely paying a dime to live there. Our agreement was one hundred dollars a month and I helped him paint the small space, as well as some of the walls in the bar where the paint was chipping. He said if I told him no, he’d fire me, old bastard. But I loved him. He wanted me to be able to live on my own and put money away. Much like my grandfather, he wanted me to go to school someday. If I ever did, I’d do it for Ed. He loved me like the daughter he never had. He made me feel safe. He shared so much of his life with me. I knew he wouldn’t hurt me.

The few friends that I had in my young twenty-one years I could count on one hand — Uncle Roger, Slim, Ed, Beaver, and Melanie. The last two were only recent developments. Melanie was already a waitress at The Hole before I started. She was in her early thirties and been divorced once. She was one of those people that possessed enough energy to take over an entire room. When she introduced herself to me, she pulled me into a hug, then grabbed my cheeks and said in the most southern accent I’d ever heard, “Well aren’t you a pretty lil’ thing!” From then on, we’d been friends.

Beaver was hired a couple of months after I started working at The Hole. There had been a customer that was frequently coming in during my shifts. One night he got a little too grabby, and Ed had to come at him with a bat. The next night Beaver showed up, and since then he’s been here every night I worked. Fine with me. Beaver was a big boy. Nobody messed with him.

Well, not unless you included Mel. She has had a thing for him since he first stepped foot in the bar. I swear her accent would get thicker and she would bat those blonde lashes when she saw him. She didn’t have to do much — Beaver definitely noticed. The thing I didn’t get, though, was that she didn’t think she could have him. He was closer to my age and Mel thought he wouldn’t want a divorced, ‘used’ woman. I told her she was full of shit and he would be hers if she just said the word. There would be no intervening for a set-up by me, though. I had too many of my own issues to get in the middle of theirs, and I don’t want to get close enough for them to start asking unwanted questions. I told them just enough to know about me and left it at that. For the time being, it seemed to have pacified them.

My life was constant. Sunday through Saturday it never changed. I was content. Not happy, but content.

There was buzz about The Hole having a small celebration for my twenty-first birthday. I didn’t want the unnecessary attention, but if Ed insisted we honor the fact that I was now legally allowed to work for him, then I’d placate him.

I was busy putting away a shipment of beer when Mel came skipping towards me.

“Oh, birthday girl!” she said in a sing song voice. “Your uncle is here and wants to see you.”

I looked over my shoulder from inside the walk-in refrigerator and smiled. “Thanks, tell him I’ll be out in just a minute.”

“Okay.”

 She stood there a second longer, her face serious. “You need something else?” I asked.

 “Do you think Beaver would give me your birthday spankings if I asked?”

I snorted. “If he tries to give me any sort of spankings, I’ll take Ed’s bat to his head.”

She looked dreamy and sighed. “I bet he has a nice firm palm. Have you seen the size of his hands?”

I could do nothing but stare at her.

“What?” she asked me.

“You need to get laid, girl.” I threw a towel over my shoulder and made my way to the front of the bar.

When I walked out I saw Uncle Roger and Slim standing next to Beaver, and greeted them both with hugs. We spoke for a few minutes, laughing at the things Beaver said, when Slim gestured toward a guy that was standing behind me that I hadn’t noticed before. I turned to acknowledge him and got the shock of a lifetime. All of the synapses in my brain stopped firing as I stood there, blinking rapidly, trying to see if my eyes were playing a trick on me. Surely the man in front of me wasn’t who I thought it was. Timber Nelson. Timber… Timber… Timber… Timber Nelson. What the fuck?

It occurred to me that he was speaking. Why couldn’t I hear him?

I felt like my body had been transported back six years ago. My hand rose to push my glasses up the bridge of my nose before I stopped myself. I don’t wear glasses anymore. Why was he here? I was pretty sure Slim just told me, but I wasn’t listening.

My ears felt like they were stuffed with cotton. My heart was pounding so hard that the only thing I could hear was the sound of my blood whooshing. Needing to get away, I said a quick hello, acted as if I had no idea who he was and raced to the back. Stepping into the fridge, I leaned my back against the cold metal wall and slid down until my butt hit the even colder ground. My knees were drawn up and I put my head between them.
Deep breaths, Kat.