Escaping the Void

Chapter Two

"Oh, err, we're good. Everything is good," I try to say cheerfully. Mariah sighs deeply into the phone.

"He hit you again, didn't he?" 

"It's not that bad this time. It's only a black eye," I say touching my swollen eye.

"Not that bad? Drew, listen to yourself! He's beating the sense out of you," she yells through the phone.

"It's not his fault."

"Why are you defending him? He's not defending you, is he? The only thing he's doing is making you bloody," she tells me.

"But he loves me, Mariah. I know he does. He just...has a weird way of showing it," I say pitifully. 

"No he doesn't. If he did, he wouldn't be hurting you like this," she states. I stare down at the floor, my toes rubbing against the carpet that is in need of vacuuming. "Please, Drew. Let me bring you to Bingley."

Mariah has tried on countless occasions to convince me to move to Bingley to live with her and Eden. I can think of a billion different reasons why I shouldn't, and every last one of them includes Trevor.

"I can't," I answer.

"You know damn well you can, but you won't," she argues.

"I don't have the money," I retort back.

"I'll buy a ticket for you," Mariah says.

"Since when have you become so financially secure?"

"I have a good bit saved back, and I can get Eden---"

"No. I don't want you bringing him into this."

"Get your pride out of this, Drew!" she yells into the phone. The line goes quiet for a while until I hear her sigh. "I can't make you do anything you don't want to, but you can always count on me to get you away if you ever decide to."

"I know...and thank you. But you're making a big deal out of nothing," I say back.

"No, you're making it sound like nothing. You're only twenty-two years old. Do you really want this for yourself? Do you really love him enough to stay and give Trevor your entire life? You're worth so much more than that."

I was listening to what Mariah was saying, and I completely agreed with her. I know in my heart that my life is supposed to be much more than kneeling down to a man who makes me serve him to his pleasing and then beat me when my work is anything less that exceptional. Life is more than spending all my passing days inside of an apartment doing chores and sitting in fear of being hit again, wondering when the next time will be. I might be alive, but I'm certainly not living.

Although I internally express my hatred for Trevor and everything that he's done to me, there's still this little strand that has me connect to him by the heart. There is this underlying current in the back of my mind that tells me from time to time that I still love Trevor. And I think that because he has me so attached to him, because he had intertwined his heart with mine so tightly, I can never really leave him...

"Look, can we just change the subject?" I blurt out. She doesn't say so, but I know that Mariah is disappointed in me. But like she once told me, it's more complicated than she thinks.

I talk to Mariah for about an hour more about how she's almost an official citizen of the UK. She's only a year away from official citizenship. "Becoming a citizen is so stressful. Now I know how immigrants from other countries who move to the United States feel," she had said at one point on the matter. After getting off of the phone with her, I fold Trevor's work clothes straight out of the dryer and put them in his drawer for him. I clean the bathroom like he asks me to, washing out the bathtub, the sink, the toilet, and moping the floor. Then I go to cook dinner so that it's ready for him when he gets home. Trevor hates it when he comes home to no cooked food to eat right away.