Club 91

Chapter 5

Kiana POV

I was laying in bed the next day in some PJs, feeling the pressure of the quietness. It felt like a noise was ringing in my ear when in reality it was a deafening silence that vibrated through the room. I think my biggest fear was being alone. Even though I was an only child, I was always attached to someone. First it was my mom, then it became my step dad, and when they both died, it was my grandmother, but now it was Dre.

Growing up as a kid, I didn't hate my step father, I didn't even start to call him step dad until after he'd murdered my mom. He was the only dad I'd really known, so when I lost my mom it felt like I'd lost both of my parents.

Him and my mom met when I was 8 years old. Like every relationship my mom got into she fell in love fast and hard. Its like she never understood getting to know a person first before planing her whole life around them. Not long after they'd started dating, we moved in with him, it was 6th time I ever remembered moving, and like every other time we changed houses, it was with another man.

See my mom wasn't a bad mom, she just struggled to be a good women to herself and in more ways than one, it effected me as well. Looking back, I sometime thank my stepfather for some of the things he did for me. He kept food on the table every night, I always had a bed to lay my head at and I never went without all my wants and needs, he spoiled me rotten, because I was his baby girl, I was a daddies girl.

I had the best education our town had to offer, I performed dance year round on his dime, private instructors, dance camps, meet and greets from the best formers globally, whatever I wanted, I got. My mom on the other hand never worked since the first year of them dating, and it's not because she couldn't, but because she never wanted to and it was one of the things they would always argue about. She'd be home all day and all he expected was to come home to a clean house and a cooked meal, she felt like he was treating her like a slave, so just to spite him she never did it.

The first time he hit her, I was 13. They were suppose to be celebrating their 3rd year wedding anniversary. That night they had plans to go out for the night, but our house had just gotten broken into while we were asleep the night before, so my stepdad didn't wanna leave the house unattended. My mom begged him that I would be fine left home alone, and he wasn't comfortable with it, scared that the person didn't get what they came for because nothing was stolen, so he canceled their plans. My mom flipped out and started an argument. The argument went on for about 30 minutes of constant yelling that out of anger and a few too many shots of tequila, she admitted to him how she had cheated on him with two of his coworkers.

I remember her going into detail on the sex acts she'd committed with these men, feeling disgusted with myself because I myself was just really learning about sex, so to hear her go into detail on how she "sucked this" and "licked that" ultimately mortified me.

I remember my step dad staying silent long enough for her to spill every detail, calm as a winter night. After she finished her spill, he began pounding on her like a punching bag. I can see myself right now in that moment, I was crying, not because he hit her, not because she begged him to stop and not because blood seeped out of her mouth like a running faucet, but because I knew that her words ruined our family. Her deceit, betrayal and affairs didn't exist until she told us that they had. After his rage passed, he stood up from her crying body on the floor and walked directly towards me. At first fear shook through my heart, thinking for a moment that I was next, he walked directly towards me and I could feel the urine building in my bladder wanting yo release out of fear the he was going to swing on me,... but it never came. He pulled me in close, sitting me on the stairs and whispered apologies in my ear saying how sorry he was, and how much he loved me. We both cried for a duration of time I'm unable to account for but at some point I fell asleep, wishing like hell this was all a dream.