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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
REN
* * * * * *
2005
I WANTED TO do something special for her.
I had no clue when her birthday was, or mine for that matter, but they fell sometime around summer. So far, we’d had a couple of weeks of perfect su
This time of year was the hardest for me.
Winter kept me grateful for the farmhouse we’d borrowed for the past few years, but summer made me hate it.
All I wanted to do was burn it to the ground and run away from its ashes.
The packed and ready-to-leave backpack mocked me for not having the guts to grab it and return to the life that lived and breathed in my soul.
If it was just me, I would have vanished the moment the nights turned shorter and the days became warmer, but it wasn’t just me.
It hadn’t just been me for four long years.
And although I felt trapped some days, although life would’ve been easier and simpler alone, I would never trade the little girl who trailed beside me as I guided her into town.
She blinked up at me, her blue ribbon tied in her hair today, keeping blonde curls from her eyes. Summer always made the blonde turn almost white, and her blue sparkling eyes seemed to grow in wisdom every day.
“Why we here, Ren?” she asked in her soft, childish voice. She glanced fugitively at the shoppers around us, some with supermarket bags and others with gift shop junk in their arms.
I hadn’t taken her into town in almost a year.
We had no need to, and I preferred to stay as far away from these people as possible to avoid any disruption to our invisible world on their fringes.
But today was special.
And I wanted to do something special. If that meant something out of the ordinary and something we’d never done before, then I was prepared to do whatever it took to make this day stand out.
“It’s our birthday.” I squeezed her small hand in mine. “I think we deserve to eat something that we don’t have to skin and scrub first, don’t you?”
She slammed to a stop. “It’s my birthday?”
Pulling her into the shadows of a bookstore—the same store where I’d stolen the books we’d studied and learned from—I nodded. “Yours and mine. Or at least…we’ll pretend it is.” I shrugged. “I don’t know the exact dates but figured we should at least celebrate something.”
A giant smile cracked her face. “We’ll have cake like that TV show did when it was their birthday?”
“If you want.”
“With candles and balloons?”
“Probably not.”
Her face fell, then instantly brightened. “I don’t care. This is the best day ever.” She danced on the spot, her hair and ribbon bouncing. “Oh, wait…” She studied me, deadly serious. “How old are we?”
I fought the urge to tug her golden curls and pulled her back into walking. “Not sure but I was ten when I ran, and you were about one or something, according to the news reporter in the town I left you.”
She scowled a perfect imitation of my scowl. “Yeah, don’t do that again.”
I chuckled. “I promised I never would, didn’t I?”
“Huh. You might if I a
I chuckled harder. “You a
Her eyes widened with worry. “I do? I a
“Yep.” I spread my arms to incorporate a huge amount. “This much. Constantly.”
Her lower lip wobbled. “But…you won’t leave me…right?”
The barb of her sadness caught me right in the heart, and my joke no longer seemed fu
Crouching to her level, I pressed my palm against her rosy cheek. “Della Ribbon, don’t you get upset over something silly like that. You know I’m joking. I’d never—”
She shot off, squealing in laughter. “I win. You lied. I don’t a
Wild little heathen.
I ought to have been stricter on the rules, but somehow, I’d failed at creating uncrossable boundaries. I did my best to yell and bluster, but for some reason, my temper seemed to amuse and soothe her rather than scare the living daylights out of her.
Keeping her glued to my side with tight fingers, I muttered, “When you act like this, I second-guess that promise.”
She blew raspberries at me, and for a second, two images slid over one another.
An image of a little girl with blonde hair and distraught eyes limping painfully from Mclary’s farmhouse and crying herself to sleep, and then Della with her vibrant soul and fearless confidence.
Mclary lived to tear children apart.
I lived purely to ensure Della became everything she ever wanted.
It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I’d figured out what Mclary was actually doing with his ‘special tasks.’ That form of education came from a tatty, well-read magazine I’d salvaged from a dumpster.
I’d never seen so much nakedness in one place before and never naked adults.
And the things they were doing?
It made me sick. At least…the first couple of times I sneaked a peek. The first time I’d cracked open the glossy sun-bleached pages, I’d slammed them shut again, disgusted.
The second time, I’d been curious and looked at every graphic image cover to cover.
The third…well, by the third time, my body felt different—tighter, harder, strange.
After that, the sickness turned into more of a sick fascination, and my body burned with heat and need, swelling uncomfortably between my legs.
Over the past few years, my voice had dropped, I had hair growing in places that embarrassed me, and now an undercurrent of hunger and searching for something I didn’t understand lived deep in my belly.
It didn’t happen overnight.
The familiarity of a boy’s body slowly faded into foreign lands of a man.
Even though it took a few years to fully understand what the heavy ache in my groin was or why my heart beat faster when a pretty girl came on TV, it didn’t mean I accepted it.
I hated not having control of my own body.
I hated having dreams of skin and touching and things that the magazine portrayed in explicit detail.
When I was younger, I’d woken to wet dreams with pleasure coursing through my body and not understood what happened. These days, I understood enough thanks to memories of helping Mclary breed his stock and watching bulls with cows and stallions with mares.
I’d come of age to reproduce, and I got the principal of why I hardened.
But I despised it.
I despised the complications it brought with it. I hated the random rage filling my blood and loathed the nasty demands, desperate for ways of releasing the pleasure lurking inside.
I didn’t like lying frozen beside Della as she slept unaware. I didn’t like having to hide my rapidly growing needs or lie to the one girl I promised never to lie to about why she wasn’t allowed on my lap at certain times.
The body I once knew was now hijacked with desires I didn’t.
For a couple of weeks, I’d watched Della to see if she felt different like me, but when I asked if parts of her were acting strange, she’d laughed and patted me on the head, saying if I was sick, she’d look after me.
But that was the thing…I wasn’t sick. Unless, I was mentally sick because looking at that dirty magazine did things to my body that I kept hidden from Della at all costs.