~Emmalyn~
I was going through way too many emotions in one day. I was sure it couldn't be healthy.
First there was the horrible trepidation of facing everyone at school after what I had done. News traveled fast within an institution of gossip-hungry teenagers. It didn't help that it was such a small town.
But what did help? Having Rhys with me. Having him on my side as an ally instead of a foe. That was helpful.
I would be the first to admit I wasn't taking the sudden absence of pills as well I as I could have. After always having them handy it was a shock. There was no gentle waning, just an abrupt halt to that part of my life, the part that should remain forgotten and locked away. But it was always there in the back of my mind. I knew it would be, too, no matter what. It was a scar on my memory. Permanent. Never forgotten; always there.
I was trying to cope and be okay with that.
So the other insane emotions gripping me didn't aid at all in the coping process. Being with Rhys alone in that janitor's closet?
A big no-no.
The stupid move of crossing some fine line somewhere and practically feeling him up through his shirt?
Huge no-no.
But what I couldn't get over was that part of me that had liked it. That was hopping and skipping and begging for more. This was Rhys Richardson we were talking about. I couldn't go there. I didn't think I could with anybody, least of all him.
And then that prick had burst in on us, and the situation snowballed.
Now, now I was just pissed. At Rhys and Jax. And a little bit at myself. But mostly Rhys. He had no right going and doing such a stupid thing and no doubt getting himself suspended in the process. That was my ready excuse as to why I ran out of the school like a crazy person to see him. Not because I wanted to make sure he was okay. Of course not. I just had to give him an earful.
"Goodness, Miss Hall. Where's the fire?"
The sound of Mr. Matthew's voice stopped me, but I bobbed anxiously up and down, eager to arrive at my next destination. "Hello, Mr. Matthews."
He was smiling, bag slung over his shoulder. "I heard about what happened with Mr. Richardson today."
I winced. "Yeah. I'll try not to let it impede on the progress of our project." Whatever progress can be recorded for it, that is.
The quirky teacher shrugged. "Do what you must, Miss Hall. I assume you're going over to see him?"
I nodded.
He smiled. "Then give him my best regards. I'll see you tomorrow."
I nodded and sped off, jumping into my car and throwing my backpack into the passenger seat, not even bothering to put on my seatbelt before I was peeling out. I took a moment to calm down, making sure to secure the belt in place.
The last thing I needed was to start acting like Rhys.
I arrived at his house in record timing. I had never really been inside, just on his porch with transient images of the interior. I knocked rapidly on the door. A pretty woman answered it, cherry red lips pulling up in a smile. "Well, hello," she greeted. "Are you Emma?"
My eyebrows drew together in confusion. "Yes. How do you know?"
She winked. "I've heard of you. Please come in!" She opened the door wider and I entered, kicking off my shoes.
"So where is that pathetic idiot?" I asked, breathing in the aroma of spices. "I have a bone to pick with him."
The woman laughed. "Oh, you're simply delightful. Rhys has definitely found a keeper in you."
I frowned. "No, we're not-"
"I know," she interjected, but she was smiling like she knew some secret I didn't.
"Judy? Who was at the door? Do I hear another voice?"
Footsteps sounded out along the hall, preceding the older version of a very familiar face as it appeared. He must have been the infamous Mr. Richardson.
"Emma?" he gasped. "What are you doing here?"
"Checking on my moron of a partner," I muttered. "Do you know where he might be found?"
I didn't like the way Mr. Richardson was looking at me. It reminded me of the nurses and doctors at the hospital, and Dr. Simmons when I had to go see him for therapy. I knew that look all too well.
It never forewarned of good things.
"If you don't mind," he said instead, "could I have a word with you?"
Alright, that I had not been expecting. "About what?"
He beckoned me toward a cracked door. "Would you mind?"
I shrugged. "I guess not." Judy floated back into the kitchen where I heard humming and the sounds of slamming oven doors. I joined Mr. Richardson in what appeared to be his office.
"Have a seat," he offered. I lowered down into the leather chair, feeling nervous for a reason I knew not.
He folded his hands, pinning me with a deep and intense gaze. It was uncomfortable, but not as surprising as the words he said next.
"It's so good to see you again."
I blinked. Excuse me? Again? I was pretty sure I had never met him a day in my life. "I'm not sure what you mean."
He smiled, though it held an undertone of sadness. "You wouldn't remember me. Not from such a hectic and changing time. But your parents would." He stared at a spot on his desk. "They know me extremely well."
Now I was just creeped out. "Uh, why?"
"You look good," he said, redirection the topic. "Healthy. That's always good."
Right, yeah, now that I wasn't popping pills left and right or admitted to the crazy center, I was doing well. "Thanks, I think."
He just kept smiling.
I moved to stand up. "I really should check on Rhys-"
"I helped with your case, back up in Philadelphia."
That froze me, icy shivers trickling down my spine. Slowly I lowered back down. "What?"
"The case involving you and Mike Packer, among the other two minors included."
I swallowed hard. "I don't remember you."
"I saw you only once. It was mainly your parents who I worked with."
"Why?"
"To overturn the original charges," he explained. "To lock-up Mike Packer with the time he deserved for what he did to you."
My breaths shortened, air-way closing to the size of a straw.
"Even without the tapes or anything else as evidence, I believed you," he continued, voice somewhat quieter, holding conviction.
"Please," I tried, but my voice was broken, barely audible.
"I wanted to get him locked up for something more severe than misuse of the internet or harassment charges. I tired as hard as I could, Emma."
I gripped the arms of the chair in a ferocious hold. Why was he telling me this? And now, of all times?
"I know he's been released," he said, as if he heard my inner question. "And I know it's been hard on you. But I want you to know if you ever need help, I'm here."
I licked my chapped lips, trying to keep from rocking back and forth and displaying the crazy lunatic crying for release on the inside.
"I believe Mike Packer really raped you, Emmalyn, and I think he should be rightly convicted."
At the sound of that wretched word I jumped to my feet. "Thank you, Mr. Richardson, but I don't think that will be possible. He is quite off the radar and the case was two years ago." I didn't mention that if I ever saw him again I would probably have a nervous breakdown.
"Cases are reopened all the time," he continued, oblivious to my plea to end the conversation. "We could-"
"I appreciate the help," I cut him off. "But I don't need it. I'm fine. I'm healing. But thank you."
He studied me. I steadfastly refused to meet his eyes. "Okay, then. Rhys's room is the third one down. You might have to knock; he likes to play extremely loud music when he's angry."
I nodded, relief washing through me at the decision to drop the conversation. I scurried out of his office before he could make any last comments and up to Rhys's room. I tried to find the anger from before to replace the fear and panic filling every vacant hole in my body, but it was useless.
I stopped outside his door, hearing the blaring of guitars and screaming leaking through. I tried the knob, but it was locked. I knocked loudly.
It took four times before he would answer the door.
"Dad, I freaking-Emma?"
My heart was pounded as I looked at him, only in checkered pajama pants, slung tantalizingly low on his hips.
Stop it! I snapped at myself. Those are the last thoughts you need to be having.
I trailed my eyes up to his face, replacing the abrupt onset of girly lust with that familiar anger. It was so much easier to handle.
His jaw was smarting and red and no doubt hurting to high heaven, and there was a fine shiner around his right eye. I growled in frustration and stormed passed him.
"No, please, come in," he muttered, letting the door fall closed. "Can I ask why you're here?"
"Because you're an idiot!" I cried, throwing my hands up.
He stared blankly at me. "You are here because I am an idiot?"
"A huge one!"
He scratched at his chin. "I guess I'm insulted."
"You should be." I raked a hand roughly through my hair, gazing absentmindedly around his room. It was surprisingly clean, something I didn't expect from him. The bed was small and shoved in a corner. He was currently standing at the stereo system, turning down the volume so we could be heard without shouting our heads off. He had a guitar in another corner beside a desk, his backpack leaning against it. It wasn't my ideal way to fill the space but for him it just worked.
"Have you iced those yet?" I asked, pointing to his injuries. He rolled his eyes.
"God, you sound like Judy," he grumbled, flopping down on the bed.
"So I take it you haven't?"
"Take it however you want to take it."
I shook my head, spotting a bag of frozen peas on his desk. I walked over to it and picked it up. It was still frozen. "You even have a stupid bag of peas up here. Are you just lazy?"
"They're not even that bad; they'll heal."
An exasperated sigh escaped my lips. "You are so intolerable," I muttered indignantly, stomping over and sitting cross-legged beside him on the bed. I set the bag of peas over his jaw first. He winced but I could tell by his eyes that it felt good.
"And yet here you are," he replied, closing his eyes.
"Here I am," I agreed. "There must be something wrong with me."
He smirked. "Must be."
"I mean, only a masochist would keep coming back to suffer through another moment with you, right?"
"Right."
"I'm crazy."
He snorted. "You said it, not me."
I thwacked him on the chest with my free hand. "Not helping." I chewed on my lip thoughtfully for a moment. "Thanks, by the way."
He shifted on the bed, tucking an arm back behind his head. "For what?"
"Defending my honor." I smiled. "At least, that's how I'll take it. I'd like to think you beat him up because he called me a bitch but I'm sure whatever hostility is between you runs deeper."
He shrugged. "I won't lie to you, Emma. It was partially because he called you a bitch."
My smile grew. "Really?"
His eyes narrowed. "Do not let this go to your head."
"Too late," I replied happily. "But you could be suspended. That's the last thing you need."
He sighed. "Quit worrying about my welfare. Everybody else has."
I moved the bag of peas away from his face so I could really look at him. Somewhere beneath that hard exterior was a lonely and vulnerable boy. I was sure of it, because we all had something similar. "Not me," I stated softly.
"Emma-"
"You can push me away and throw a fit or whatever the hell it is you do," I started, "but I'm not giving up that easily. Believe it or not, Rhys Richardson, but I think you need me."
His lips curled in amusement. "I need you?"
I nodded.
"Really, now?"
"Sure do. You just might not realize it yet."
He didn't look convinced.
"Here, sit up," I ordered, tugging on his arm. He did so with shocking willingness. I crawled around so I was kneeling in front of him. I pressed the peas gently to his face, where the grotesquely purplish skin was worst. "You scared me," I admitted, partially without meaning to.
"Did I?"
"Yeah." I picked at his comforter.
"You knew who I was before all this English project crap," he quipped, voice venomous. It stung a little bit. "It's who I am, Emma. I'm sorry if you were under the delusion you could turn me into a fucking saint."
"That's not what I think," I responded, fairly confused at his outburst.
His brows knitted, but he said nothing. Traces of anger were still visible on his face, but I wasn't sure if they were for me or him.
I dropped the peas to his bed. "You got hurt," I managed, tracing the bruise along his jaw with my fingertips. My heart started off on another pounding staccato rhythm. I knew I had just overstepped my line again. But I was feeling that same crazy need and impulsiveness that I had felt in the janitor's closet. With him so close it was basically impossible to deny it.
"I've been hurt before," he said simply.
"I don't like that," I whispered.
"But so have you," he continued, grabbing my hand and moving it from his skin. I fell back onto my bottom on the bed. One of his legs was stretched out beside me, the other hanging over the edge, foot planted on the floor. His body was angled toward mine and while I should have suffocated and felt intimidated and small beside his enormous presence, it didn't faze me. Not really.
"It was two years ago."
"You can't put a time on that kind of thing."
I wanted to scream. Could I never escape this? "Can we not talk about it, Rhys?"
"We were always going to talk about it. Why not now?"
"I told you everything in the hospital."
"Not everything."
"What more do you want to know?"
"What more is there?"
Why was he so worked up about this all of a sudden? "Rhys . . ."
He grabbed my wrists and held them between us. "Emma," he murmured, the gentleness in his voice flooring me. I had never heard him take on that kind of tone before. "He raped you. I know you hate thinking about it but it happened and no matter how bad it seems you can't run from it. It'll always be there."
A tear slipped out and took its sweet time rolling down my cheek. Rhys's eyes watched it the entire way down, until it splashed onto my leg. "Are you trying to make things worse?"
"No." his hold tightened. "What he did was not okay. It never was and never will be okay. He doesn't deserve to be a free man right now for what he did to you."
I had mixed feelings then about choosing Rhys as my ally. I slid my wrists free from his hold and stood from the bed. "I should go."
"That's it, then?" he called out indifferently. "You're just going to run away, like you always do?"
I paused. "Stop pretending like you know what I'm going through."
"I will when you stop thinking the world is out planning your downfall."
"I don't-"
"Yes you do," he snapped, cutting me off. His bed creaked as he stood up. My vision was blurry with tears. I was waiting for the day I cried myself dry, which I was sure if my current rate continued would be soon. "So here's some news that might startle you: the whole fucking world doesn't actually want you gone."
I curled my fists at my sides. "You don't know anything about this Rhys, so shut up."
He scoffed. "Really? I know nothing? Let me give you a little insight into my life, then. When I was two the mother who didn't love me and only wanted my father's money took off without a care or worry. I've had about thirty different baby-sitters and nannies who have all tried and failed to fill that maternal position. My father didn't care about me at all during my childhood and preteen years so I became best friends with Jack Daniels and his buddy Dope and while it took a good year to finally wane myself off the weed, I still have an unhealthy addiction to the bottle."
Sadness pulled at my heart, louder than the hurt and pain he had previously caused me.
"So, sorry the whole fucking universe doesn't revolve around you, Emma."
I whirled on him, tears flying. "I'm sorry for what you went through, Rhys, but what do you want me to say? I was freaking raped, okay? I was barely sixteen. And those stupid assholes taped it. They . . ." my voice broke off as a sob wracked through me. I hated fighting and confrontations but getting all of this out with Rhys . . . It was weirdly liberating, in a sense.
Everything inside of me was kept bottled up constantly, always tucked away, and for once . . . God, for once, I just wanted to let it out.
"They planned it!" I screamed, fear and sorrow lacerating my heart all over again. "It wasn't even a spur of the moment thing! They planned to rape me and they planned to only publicize the tapes without them in it. The planned to humiliate me and steal everything from me, and I couldn't do anything about it!"
Suddenly, in a blur of heat and confusion and movement, he pushed me up against his door, hands braced on either side of my head. The pain tore at my insides, pulling more tears from my eyes and whimpers from my throat. Rhys stared intensely down at me, searching for something I wish I knew so I could show it to him. And then maybe he would walk away so I could breathe again and my knees wouldn't feel like jelly.
"Why did it have to happen?" I whispered, not asking him in particular. It was more rhetorical; why did it have to happen to me, why did it have to happen to so many girls across the world. "Rhys."
"I don't know," he finally ground out, voice strained and hopeless and lost. "I don't know what you want from me. I don't know what you want me to do."
I stared into his penetrating brown eyes, wishing I could tell him. I wished I had a set plan, but the truth was, I didn't. I never had. Life tossed me around like a boat in the ocean, and I held no say in where I would end up. "Me either."
His thumb skirted across my chin, flickering lightly beneath the underside of my jaw. I barely felt the touch. "I can't," he said. "I can't fix you."
"I didn't ask you to."
"But Mr. Matthews, your mom, everybody else . . . They want me to put you back together. I can't even put myself back together."
His hand was big and rough and calloused, and then warm and gentle and comforting. In front of me, with my eyes opened, he was a delinquent with an earring and a tattoo. He was a miscreant who probably got himself suspended because he couldn't control his temper. He was a a boy who did not give me one good reason to be right there, with him, in his room, pressing peas against his eye.
But when I closed my eyes, and felt his palm coast down the side of my face, he was a friend who understood loss, and who knew what it was like to be cornered at a dead-end. He was support. He was there, for me.
He was somebody.
"Before, when I took you to my buddy's apartment all those weeks ago . . ."
I stiffened, fighting hard agaisnt those memories that burst their way in, anyway. "Yeah."
"You were going through serious shit."
"Mm."
"I was an asshole. I'm sorry."
I smiled, not wanting to open my eyes. I wanted to preserve the soft image behind my closed lids of the boy before me. "I thought you would eat glass and shoot your foot before you apologized to me."
"I guess circumstances change."
"Yeah."
"People change, too."
At that I couldn't help it; my eyes popped open and I sank further into the wall at the proximity of his face. "Rhys," I whispered.
Two inches.
Two inches, and I could feel those full lips against mine. I could run my fingers through his growing hair and the shadow of stubble covering his cheeks. I could trace the tattoo on his neck and run my fingers down his body, feeling his sweat and his heat and his desperation, and I could pair it with my own. I could let him taste my sorrow and plead for him to fix me.
The alarm lay in the fact that I thought this; that my mind would even consider such a route of action. Since Mike, I could barely look a guy in the eye without imagining them tying me up and ripping my clothes off, and stealing everything from me all over again.
Staring at Rhys, I wanted him to heal me--to fix me--and that was something he didn't deserve. Something nobody deserved, and something I wasn't convinced was possible.
Desperation wreaked havoc through my body. In the end, maybe I was just like what Rhys thought. Because before anything could happen, I yanked his door open and without an apology or a single word on the matter, I ran out of his room and out of his house as fast as I could.
But the point?
I ran.
Just like he said I would.
And I never looked back.
I crashed into my house with the tears still falling full-force. There weren't any cars in the driveway so I thought I would have time alone to mope and feel sorry for myself, but no such luck.
"Emma? Honey, what's wrong?"
My mother. How did moms always know when to be home at the right time?
I let her pull me into her arms and I cried against her chest. Her heartbeat, the sound I had been familiar with since I was a baby, calmed me in the way only a mother's can. And I remembered what Rhys had said. He had gone his life without that kind of relationship and interaction. I didn't know what I would do without my mother.
Somehow we made it to the couch. I stopped crying and just sat, content to be held by her. After a good five minutes at least had passed she spoke.
"Do you want to tell me what that was about?"
"No," I admitted. "It's stupid."
"Nothing as a teenager is ever stupid. Especially if it makes you cry."
I sighed heavily. "I never thought I would ever have this talk," I muttered. "I just didn't think it would happen."
She pulled away and smiled strangely. "What?"
I couldn't look at her. I ducked my face and picked at the sleeve of her sweater. "When did you know you were in love with Dad?"
"Ah," she murmured. "That talk. Do I want to know why you are suddenly curious?"
"No," I said. "But can you answer the question?"
She stretched her legs out in front of her, pursing her lips in thought. "Well . . . I guess it was always there. They say that about love, that it starts the moment you see the person, it just takes time for you to realize it." She bit her lip. "I suppose when I realized he was my only escape, the only person I could trust to handle me at my most unpredictable." She looked me in the eye, smiling softly. "That's when I knew I loved him."
"Oh." I wasn't sure how I felt about the prospect, as the fact that I could ever actually fall in love never crossed my mind. That some people could be beyond loving, could be beyond the capacity to love, was always my view of the world.
Maybe I was jaded and wrong.
"And you're sure there isn't something you want to tell me?" my mother goaded.
I nodded. "Quite sure."
"Okay, then."
I stood, intent on travelling up to my room and doing a crap-load of soul-searching and sleeping.
"Hey, Emma?"
"Yes?" I questioned as I made my way up the stairs. I could hear the smile in my mother's voice when she replied:
"I think Rhys is a lovely boy."