Page 123 of At Her Pleasure

Mick stayed silent, like the forest around them. Maybe that was why he liked places like this. No judgment, no words. Just the peace and detachment nature had.

“She changed her mind about that when I was three. The trafficker had a buyer interested in someone my age. I don’t remember it clearly, but Cissy told me I bit him when he came to look at me, hard enough to draw blood. Cissy also threw a fit, which she almost never did. She was so gentle. So docile.”

Cyn paused. Her nails were biting into her palms.

“Cyn.”

She shook her head and continued. “Cissy doubled her efforts to teach me how to be useful. Things like cleaning the house, brushing my mother’s hair, doing her toenails. If you’ve ever been pregnant, you know what a bitch that is.”

A ghastly attempt at sarcasm. Goddamn it, hold it together. “Me and Cissy ran the household, let her sit on her ass and be pregnant. We would care for the babies together when they came, until they weren’t there.”

“You had one arrest on your record. The baby formula.”

“Yeah. We didn’t have friends. No one from the outside came into our crap apartment. When I first went to school—she didn’t let Cissy do that, since special needs kids require too much parent interaction—Mom had figured out how to keep me from drawing attention. She said if I brought the school to our door, they’d put me in a dark hole. After I got too old for boogeyman stories, she said social services would take me and Cissy away from each other and I’d never see her again. Classic prisoner conditioning. Once you get bars and locks embedded in the mind, you can leave the cell doors open wide. Monsters seem to be born with the skillset. Like there’s a class on it.”

“Yeah.” His voice was tight.

“She’d disguise her pregnancies so nobody in the building knew. She just looked fat. A midwife who got a cut would deliver the babies, until Cissy was old enough to learn how to do it. Saved Mom the extra money.”

Cyn had taken off her boots and socks, and adjusted one foot so it pressed against the heated concrete around the firepit. It was way too hot, but she wanted to hold it there, feel the burn reach the bone.

Mick slid out of the chair to kneel in front of her, gripping her ankle and drawing her foot away. He put it on his thigh, his hands on the arms of her chair, bracketing her. “No,” he said.

“You aren’t the only one who craves pain.”

“I know. But that’s why you have me. To channel yours so you don’t take it too far.”

What was in her chest grew so uncomfortable she thought she might stop breathing. But she needed to get this out. So she closed her eyes and sat back, her arms folded over herself. She put both feet on his thighs, curling her toes into denim. He’d worn jeans today. The man looked really good in them.

“I grew up with the looks Cissy didn’t have. When I was twelve, Mom said she wouldn’t send me away, but I had to earn my keep. Cissy begged, pleaded.” Cyn paused. “I told her it was okay. That she didn’t need to protect me. That it was inevitable, and at least we could stay together.”

She pressed her lips together. “She asked me what inevitable meant. I told her that something couldn’t be changed, no matter how much we wished otherwise.”

She thought of that picture on her landing, the blonde dancing with the street musicians. Whenever memories of Cissy were too painful, that was where she went in her mind. She held that picture now, to keep the other from coming into her head. It wouldn’t work when she had to say it, but it helped her get out what had happened before then.

“The man my mom whored me out to did take my virginity, but he wasn’t brutal about it. When Mom was pleased and got a good payday, she’d give Cissy an extra share, and we could get some things for ourselves. I thought about that, during. Forty-eight hours later, I did something I’ve wished all my life I’d done forty-eight hours earlier.”

* * *

Mick had heard it all before, same kinds of stories, all different kinds of people. But hearing it come from her lips, he thought the rage he contained might break the universe.

He’d known her life was rough. He’d remembered the gang tattoo, her wild animal fear, and lack of trust. He hadn’t imagined this.

When he’d first reached for her, that recoil, the genuine fear he might try to give her physical comfort, had nearly torn him from the frame.

Whatever she'd done to be who she was now, whatever clay she’d come from that had made her bite a pedophile at age three, hard enough to make him look elsewhere, couldn't accept comfort in such a way. So he did it in a way she could. He stayed on his knees in front of her, listening. Keeping between her and the fire pit. He had his hand over the foot she’d tried to burn. A light touch, but there.

Tentatively, she put her palm on his shoulder. Her fingers curled in to grip his shirt, an anchor he thought.

“When I got home, I was excited,” she said.

“He’d paid me a $100 tip, telling me my mother didn’t need to know about it. Gave me a wink, our secret, and said he hoped to spend time with me again. I didn’t think about any of that. All I could think as I took the bus home was that Cissy and I could go shopping. Mom was off somewhere. Don’t know where.”

Her gaze moved past his shoulder to stare into the fire. “I ran up the stairs. Cissy was in the bathroom, and I banged on the door. ‘Let’s go shopping.’ She didn’t answer.”

Her grip was so tight the fabric pulled at the collar. Her nails dug into the scar she’d put upon him. He didn’t move. He took her pain, just as he said he would.

“She’d run herself a bath, sat down in it in all her clothes, and killed herself. She was done. She wrote ‘Sorry’ on the mirror. ‘I can’t fix it.’”