Everleigh…

Four days later I stood under the warm shower spray, aching and exhausted. We’d just finished cleaning out the loft the day before, and I’d spent the first bit of the morning dusting and sweeping it out. I’d felt gritty and covered in dust, so while Narcos was bumping and throwing things from the pile in the back yard into the back of the old truck, to make a final scrap run, I was trying to clean up myself instead of the old cabin.

We’d worked hard the last several days, making one trip into town to the second-hand store to donate what we could. The little shop had been full of treasures for me, and Narcos had let me splurge on his dime, buying me two dresses, a blouse, and three different skirts without a single word of complaint. He’d even bought me the big, floppy straw hat with the dusty fake flowers that I had been eyeing, telling the clerk to bring it down and add it to the pile.

I hadn’t wanted it to wear, but rather, I had a vision for it, one I set to work on while we did our washing at Nora and Mitch’s house. I’d given Nora her gift of honey and Narcos had gone out to help Mitch with a project. I was at ease enough with Nora that I told her my plans for the hat, and she’d beamed and said she had just the thing. She’d given me the materials out of her sewing stash and wouldn’t hear of taking payment.

It was a project I worked on in the evenings until I was too tired to keep my eyes open and Narcos pulled me away from it gently, into his arms so I could fall asleep against his chest.

That was, honestly, becoming the best part of my day, and I was stressed that his brothers would be here soon, and I would have to do without that comfort.

I stuck my face into the spray and thought for a second that I heard something, but figured that it was just Narcos, coming in to use the bathroom. When I heard a stream of water hitting water, I smiled to myself and thought, Couples achievement unlocked. It was a milestone, albeit one that, once you’d had sex with another person, was kind of silly.

He knew not to flush when the shower was running; I’d accidentally found it out the hard way when I’d used the toilet while he was in the shower. I thought it’d been a myth, but apparently, old plumbing –

He flushed and I shrieked and cried out “Hot!”

The shower curtain whisked back along the rod and I was faced by one stern and angry-looking prosecutor.

“You can talk?”

I screamed and grabbed for the curtain, trying to hide behind it‒

But he wasn’t looking at my body. His dark eyes were drilling into mine‒

And my throat was seizing shut, tighter than a Venus fly trap, trapping my words inside‒

All that was coming out when I tried to speak were frightened screams.

He reached out and took my wrist in a firm grip and kept going on about me talking and I just kept screaming, not knowing what to do, the panic taking over, sucking me under, I was drowning in fear and adrenaline ‒

And suddenly he was just… gone…

And in his place was Narcos, and I burst into tears.

“Hey, hey, hey; it’s okay, I’ve got you, babe. Shh, shh, shh.”

I held onto him, rattled to the point I couldn’t even get words out to him if I tried. I bit my bottom lip until I could taste the slightest bit of copper, and then eased off with my teeth. Sometimes, a little bit of pain helped ground me, helped bring me out of the frenzied loop of panic that shuts me down, but this time – it wasn’t working.

What was working was the solidness of Narcos’ arms around me, the softness of his tee beneath my cheek, the hardness of his body covering mine as voices rose, out in the rest of the cabin. He reached over and shut off the water, and lowered me to kneel in the tub, while the voices outside grew louder before ceasing altogether.

I swallowed hard, and held myself tight to Narcos’ chest as he reached up and pulled the beach towel off the rack and wrapped it around my shoulders.

“Easy, babe. You’re okay. You’re solid. I don’t know what the fuck Yale’s problem is.”

I swallowed again and looked up at him, my eyes wide, and he looked down at me. “Yale would be the guy that busted in on you.”

I frowned and then it clicked: The prosecutor is part of his real MC?

“You got clothes in here?” he asked, as I knelt in the bottom of the tub in just a beach towel, my hair sopping wet and his tee turning from light to dark grey as it soaked up water.

My brain finally caught up to what was happening as it broke free from my fright, and I shook my head violently, as much to say ‘no, I didn’t have any clothes in here’ as it was to try and clear it.

“Okay, wait here, I’ll get something for you.”

It would be easy, I’d laid everything out on the bed. He smoothed his hands over the towel, along my back, arms, and shoulders, drying me as much as soothing me, and stood up from where he sat on the edge of the tub. He helped me to my feet and shut the seat and lid of the john and had me sit, wrapped like a child in the oversized towel.

“Be right back with some things, you hang tight.” He squeezed out the gap he cracked in the bathroom door in a bid to preserve my modesty, but I saw no less than two unfamiliar faces look my direction, the third belonging to Driller.

I hated the looks of pity; I hated being pitied, even though I could agree I had my moments where I was pitiful. I felt my cheeks burn with humiliation as their voices, too muffled to understand, came through the door. I knew they were talking about me, of course they were talking about me. How could they not?

They probably thought I was nuts. Too damn nuts to testify… Oh, God… what if I’d just ruined everything? What if I screwed everything up so badly just then that they wouldn’t let me help, they wouldn’t let me say what I knew, and everything fell apart, and King and the rest of the Knights got away with killing that man, with trying to kill me?

What if…

The door opened back up and I jumped, but it was just Narcos. He set my clothes on the edge of the sink and knelt in front of me, looking up at me, heaving a sigh.

“What can I do?” he asked.

I shook my head. Nothing, he couldn’t do anything.

I couldn’t either. I just needed to ride it out, to feel the awful feelings and wait until I was a bit calmer.

“Okay, you take your time. You get dressed, and you come out, but only when you’re ready. Okay?” I nodded and he thought about it a second and said, “If you need me to come back in here for anything, you knock three times on the door, okay?”

I nodded emphatically and grasped onto the kindness with both hands, holding it to my chest.

“I mean it. Take your time, take as long as you need,” he said, and knelt up, kissing my forehead gently before he stood. I closed my eyes, the press of his lips against my skin doing wonders to calm me, but at the same time, all too brief. He stood up completely and went to the door. I made like I was knocking three times in the air, my expression solemn and he nodded.

“Knock three times if you need me,” he said, and I nodded, and then I was alone.

I closed my eyes, let myself have a brief, quiet cry, and then got up to fix myself and get my shit together, feeling a bit stronger, a helpless anger replacing the anxiety.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

Other than being a touch pale from the encounter ‒ and looking like a complete drowned rat ‒ I didn’t look much different on the outside.

I hated that. I felt like my anxiety had completely changed my landscape on the inside and that there should be some sort of reflection of something so jarring on the outside, but there wasn’t. There never was.

I set my clothes aside on the john, dried myself, wrapped my hair in the towel and washed my face.

I stared for a long time at myself, looking scrubbed and clean, and had to sigh. Sometimes, I really wished my outside matched my inside. If it did, then people might understand.

Sometimes, I really hated my life, my existence. I felt like a magnet for abuse and I was so fucking tired of it. So tired. I stared at my hands, at the shiny pink scars, front and back, through the palms and out the backs of my hands, and closed my eyes.

I was tired of it, and it was time for me to stop doing the same thing over and over again, which was live passively through it, bouncing from one bit of bad to another like a pinball in a machine, going from bad to worse and back again.

The worst had pretty much already been done to me, hadn’t it? There wasn’t much worse to go to from here, except maybe death, and I wasn’t keen on dying. I was a live-er, not a die-er and I wasn’t about to go down without a fight. I just needed to convince the men out there that I had some fight in me and that I wouldn’t crumble.

Good luck with that, Everleigh.