Chapter Two
The sun was rising and peeking through the window, warming my tanned skin. My mother was full blooded Native American and I was lucky enough to retain most of her genetics. My hair was long and black as raven’s feathers. I rarely brushed it and just left it wavy or pulled back into a pony tail. Men loved my hair. They always wanted to touch it (or pull it, depending on the situation), and they had a tendency to get lost in my eyes. They were as green as spring grass and with a flutter of my eyelashes I almost always got what I wanted.
I wasn’t alone in the bed. I never was. Just like my mother, I’d turned to selling myself for the basic necessities in life. By the time I joined the biker gang I was seventeen and considered an adult by most of the men, and as an adult I was expected to earn my keep. The convinced me that the only thing of value that I possessed was my body. I was scared at first. The first few times I cried, but soon enough I became numb to the physical and emotional pain and I just sucked it up.
The leader of the gang, Fang, took a particular interest in me. Since he was the highest man on the totem pole, he got his pick of women. Mom and I weren’t the only women they kept around for pleasure. There were a good ten to fifteen women who regularly came around to look for cheap or free drugs. Well, the drugs were never free, but for most of them sex was a small price to pay for crank.
I was the only one who wasn’t after drugs. I think it was one of the reasons I was in “high demand” as Fang put it. My skin wasn’t ruined and my teeth weren’t falling out of my head. That was more than most of the other women could claim. I didn’t blame them, though. Many of them had been born into situations like this. Many of them survived in utter poverty for so long that the drug induced haze they lived in was more of a defense mechanism than anything else.
I didn’t think of myself as better than them, but the men did. I was strong and “feisty”. I hated when they called me that. It made me sound like some sort of animal they were just poking with a stick. It made my skin crawl.
My eyes finally fluttered open and I sat up, running my hand through my hair. I turned and put my feet flat on the ground, looking around. Fang was naked in the bed beside me, his hairy chest rising and falling in a slow rhythm. Maybe it was wrong of me, but sometimes I just wished he would stop breathing. This man made me feel trapped and I hated it. I wanted to run but I had nowhere to go. At least here I had a roof over my head and food in my stomach. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than being homeless.
I walked over to the bathroom and hopped in the shower, wanting to wash Fang’s smell off me. I hated the way he smelled. It was an awful mixture of sweat and desperation. Despite the fact that we lived in a trailer with a shower Fang still didn’t shower nearly as often as he should.
The bathroom had always been my sanctuary and even now I found the warm water cascading along my shoulders comforting. It was like a warm embrace that I’d never been granted as a child. My mother never wrapped her arms around me or kissed my forehead. Somewhere along the line, water had replaced my mother’s affections.
I took far too long, allowing the hot water to run out; it wasn’t like Fang was going to care. Just as I reached to turn the shower off there was a banging at the door.
“Hurry it up. I have to take a shit!” Fang snapped.
I rolled my eyes and made a disgusted face at his vulgarity, but ignored him, deciding to let the water run a little longer just because I could. He wasn’t asking me to get out because he had a shred of decency and didn’t want to use the bathroom while I was in the shower. The only reason he didn’t barge in was because I’d learned to lock the door.
When I couldn’t stand the cold water anymore, I finally got out of the shower and pushed the door open, wrapped in nothing but a towel. I could feel Fang’s eyes on me as he reached out and grabbed my wrist.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m going to run to the store.” It was a lie, but it didn’t really matter. I always lied to him about where I was going.
“Who told you to run to the store?”
I rolled my eyes and yanked my arm out of his hand. “Don’t act like you can tell me what I can and can’t do.”
I saw his eyes narrow and before I could escape his hand snapped out and he gripped my jaw between his finger and thumb, staring down at me with a serious look on his face.
“Are you challenging me, girl?”
I took a step back and frowned. “I just don’t like when you’re constantly over my shoulder. I’m just going to go to the store to get stuff to make dinner.”
He pushed me forward, forcing me to back up until the back of my knees hit the bed and I sat, staring up at him, trying not to let the fear show on my face. I didn’t want him to know he was getting to me. He leaned over me and forced me into the mattress, pressing his hand against my mouth so hard I was suddenly struggling to breathe.
“You’re going to shut up and listen really close, girly,” he hissed. “This isn’t a fucking game. You better realize that really quick. You think you don’t belong to me, but you do. All I’d have to do is give the order and no one in this camp would give you food or water. You’d sleep outside until I was tired of playing with you and then I’d have a bullet put in the back of your head.”
My eyes were wide now and I could feel the wetness in my eyes that I was trying so desperately to ignore and force back. He just continued staring at me. “Who do you think would miss you? Your mom? She doesn’t care about you. No one would miss you. We’d throw your body in a ditch and no one would even know you were gone.”
He finally pulled away and I turned, trying to hide the tears and the way my lips trembled. “Now, get out of here,” he snapped.
I scrambled to my feet and put as much distanced between us as possible. I pressed myself against the wall on the far side and just closed my eyes, waiting for him to go away. When I heard the bathroom door close, I took a breath and scrambled to get dressed.
I had to get out of this trailer before I broke.