Chapter Ten
Cal
I walk in the house after getting Axe from school. He was currently ignoring me because I didn’t drive the Lambo. "Axe I told you already. I had to get groceries and a few things from the music store. We can take the Lambo tomorrow." I signed as I spoke but he was being a brat so I let him and stopped trying to get him to reason. He was four and a stubborn shit when he felt like it.
So, I left him be while he pouted.
"What's wrong with the boy?" Jen asks when she comes down the stairs and sees him sitting at the window that faces the pool, arms folded and studiously ignoring me.
"He's pitching a fit because I didn’t pick him up from Pre-School in the Lambo." I say and put the fresh vegetables in the fridge and look for my Jeep keys to get the gear from the back.
"What is a Lambo?" She asks, and it's almost cute. I walk to her slow and invade her space before looking over my shoulder to see if he is still ignoring us; he is so I drop a quick kiss to her lips.
She was shocked by my affection but, I ignore it and grab the keys to the Lamborghini Estoque. "Come see." I say and press the alert button on my intercom to get Axe's attention. "I am going to show mom the Lamborghini if you want to quit pouting?" I sign to him and he swiftly turns back around.
"Sticking to it huh?" I say to no one in particular and make my way to the garage. "Way to commit."
She follows me to the garage and stops short at the deep charcoal car shimmering under the LED lights in my garage.
"Holy shit!" She exclaims and starts looking in the windows. "This is a Lambo? Lamborghini?"
I laugh and nod. "Yeah. Step back red." I say and unarm the alarm and hit the FOB to lift the suicide Countach doors and laugh when she squeals.
"Oh my God, it is gorgeous Cal." She says and is grinning ear from ear. "No wonder the kids pissed." She laughs and I shrug it off.
"Watch this." I say and get inside and rev the engine and we both watch the door waiting for Axe to come running out. I que ‘Hail to the King’ and blast it from the system and lay on the horn. "This should work!" I yell.
We watch as hid head peaks from the side of the door and once he confirms he is hearing it I lay off the horn and the revving and wait for him to hop in his booster and turn down the music.
I turn to face him and smile as he head-bangs in his seat, so I dad whistle to get his attention. "Should we take momma for a drive?" I sign and speak though he could care less if I spoke he just nods enthusiastically.
Half way around the block he starts clapping to get our attention and Jen turns to read what he needs and looks to me. "He wants to feel music."
I turn up the tunes as he laughs hysterically from the vibration. I grab the protectors from the glove compartment and ask Jen to put them on his ears. They protect the negative noise from damaging his ears anymore and he can jam with his mom and dad.
By the time we get home Axe is content to go play with toys now that his desires were fulfilled and I ask Jen to help me get the gear out of my Jeep.
"What is all this shit?" She asks as I hand her a brand-new fluorescent red Fender Strat and the new case as well as cords, pedals and smaller amps.
"I need different pedals for the new sound, always need cords. Smaller amps for Noah's studio as a gift and the Fender is for Lexington."
We head to the studio and leave everything on the production side as I start putting the chords away. "Why did you buy her a guitar?"
I turn to look at her and see the glint of jealousy and it ignites me. "Because she got her guitar out of a dumpster and fixed it as best she could and didn’t have a case for it either. I figured she needed the right guitar for what we were doing and she deserves it." I make my way to her as she fidgets with one of the handles on the bag. "There is nothing to fear with Lex. I promise you, she is the one thing we never need to hash out. It is my way of saying thank you for attempting this."
She nods and lets me kiss her. "Speaking of hashing it out. I have something for you on your bed."
"Will it be you naked?" I ask and kiss along her jaw and hope she lets me go pervert on her later.
"Maybe, if it helps you understand my fear."
I nod and smack her ass as we head up the stairs. "And this thing will help me understand?" I ask, watching her ass in front of me step by step.
"They’re a clearer picture than I can try to paint or explain because shit has been skewed these last few years. They are journals, my perception of us over the years. I want you to read them and see what I saw. Right or wrong they are what I felt and saw and experienced. Some of it is awful and humiliating, but this for me is what I need hashed out Cal."
Cal
I settled Axe with Jen and ate a quick dinner with them before turning to go start the reading process. I grabbed the brown gift bag on my bed with me to the studio and set the lock.
I don’t really know what to think as I sit on the couch and pull the five notebooks out. I don’t know which is better to start with, but decide it is always best to go from the beginning. Within minutes, I was able to remember so much more. So many little things I had forgotten. Even that first hand job. I forgot she had asked to touch it, or that I asked her to lick the tip where it was glistening. Even at fifteen and fourteen we were sexual deviants.
What I don’t remember were the conversations or the non-sexual shit we did. Concerts, fairs, the boardwalk. I never knew where her trailer was, but she talks about the creepy men that live there or putting her drunk mom to bed most nights. There was little to no quality of life for Jenny Pope outside of school and friends. She talks about the girls in school and how they make fun of her for being poor and on a special permit to attend school in Harbor Heights and that they used her to get to me and the guys.
I throw the book down when I hate that I was so blind to not know the real hell she lived in. Or the fact that every time she touched me she felt clean and special and important and how I made her feel like the trailer park was miles and miles away when we hung out.
I ponder the journal on the last page and try to picture her in my memory and see her fire red hair and her sun kissed skin on the beach. She had auburn hair back then, a little darker than it is now. Her green eyes were always so big and sweet and a smile like a fairy. I recall the first time I really paid attention to her and it was seven minutes in heaven at my birthday party.
I can only recall the one time ever seeing Jenny so weak and sad when we were young and it was when her mom left her. I never knew how guarded she was. Noah's words telling me her issues go way back and will gut me... he was right. I feel for Red and all she missed out on.
I am on the Senior year journal and in it she talks of me not asking her to prom in eleventh grade and how the Senior prom would be our year. She talks about how her mom finally came back that year after Jen was left with no option other than the trailer court to avoid being caught at fifteen living on her own.
She talks about how she would die if I ever saw the old rusty blue trailer and that her roots were metal and garbage, not strong oak and bountiful leaves. I read that line again and again because it kills me to know her pain, her deepest secrets and thoughts that she hid from me.
She finishes with a quote in the twelfth-grade journals last page. 'He will be a star one day and I hope he will remember me and send me letters from time to time while I wait by the mailbox barefoot and pregnant, desperate to be in his sky once more.'
I cannot see what made her think I didn’t care for her. I did, even then I remember that. I am not a complete douchebag. I want to read more but my heart breaks for the girl who loved me more than any other woman ever has and how I never knew it. I knew she didn’t like when I dated, but I hated when she did. We were always fire and gasoline, even then. Anytime anyone else had her... drove me crazy. Where she tells of her sorrow, I never did.
I read through them all, pausing trying to pinpoint the memory and as the years pass, I am fighting to read about the things I did to her. I have always known that I had a part in Jenny falling into our lifestyle, I hand fed it to her for fucks sake. I want to say that if I knew how she felt I would have stopped and begged for forgiveness and tell her to marry me. But that is because now, I see through the door that was always closed. I see her high and crying as I pass the bathroom, one I didn’t acknowledge back then for shit. I see it now, remember it with sickening clarity as I learn it was because I brushed her off to go fuck someone else.
She writes about the call from the fuel point in Idaho where Seth Venus left her. I told her she deserved it. I meant it to, I was hurt and pissed. I was wrong. I was skewed back then, I sent the money to save her and to me it was a lesson to stop fucking my friends and learn her lesson.
In some fucked up and totally ignorant way, I was jealous. I remember even then seeing her as my first serious crush, puppy love shit and I wasn’t the guy to share. But I fucked with her every chance I got and tested her loyalties. I said to go, fuck them all and I will join if I feel like it, sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t.
The times I did, made the sex more intense because I was greedy to please her and it made me go mad seeing someone else please her. It was sadistic and masochistic, to both of us.
She talks of sucking Shame off while I took her from behind and how I asked her to do it, that turning her on made me hot... Fuck me that was the night I should have stopped the whole fucking charade and changed my way of thinking. My words were clear as day after the drugs wore off and we were spent on the floor. I asked her to please not fuck my friends. She agreed and she never did again, but I didn’t tell her it was killing me. That is was making me resent her and I needed her to contain my innocence, even at the cost of hers.
I toss the book and lean back on the couch trying to shut my eyes when all too many of my mistakes rush to the surface without my consent or need.
I had just told Jen, my sweet firefly to leave because I was busy. I wasn’t fucking busy, I was just sick of the in and out we were doing these last four years. Once high school ended we both changed and I longed for my firefly. I spent the night with two chicks I don’t know doing everything they could to get my attention as I watched Jen with Noah. Laughing and flirting and the shit was making me crazy.
Shame and Cassa were off fucking at his place, Candey and Carrie weren’t here this weekend so Chad was playing with some fangirls of his own like usual because he was too chicken shit to tell Carrie he was into her. Noah like usual was doing himself and everyone could eat shit if they didn’t like it. he and Candey were only exclusive when she was home on the weekends and so he was free tonight. Watching them, I was sick at the sight.
Jen caught my glare and flinched before walking over to me. "Hey you okay Caly?"
the fucking sound of that nickname coming from her both pissed me off and got me turned on. I wasn’t Caly anymore than she was Jen Pope from back in the day.
"Working on it Red." I say coldly and motion to the cheap thrills with double D tits on each of my arms. "Go play with Noah on the beach Jenny. He looks lonely and I am clearly not."
I didn’t pause to see her reaction or listen if she said anything to my back, I lead the two chicks to the room and fucked them senseless until I was spent and told them to leave. After about forty minutes of torturing myself with my thoughts I decided to suck it up and fins Red and apologize. Come clean and tell her I wanted her.
I followed the scent of weed the closer I got until I was at the edge of the reeds and watched as Noah fucked my girl from behind. The sound, their pleas, the panting and the finish. I watched and listened to it all...
I wipe the tears from my eyes feeling like a pussy for the memory of the one time she fought back to hurt me.
I didn’t deserve her then and I don’t now. I reach for the last journal and read the two-year span of it and it hits harder than anything. This is the journal she needed me to read the most. She starts with the nauseating truth of the night I got her pregnant and I suffer through her details of how badly I hurt her that night... the condom still inside her... my brush off. She didn’t know I fucked two chicks a few hours later on the other bus before finally passing out or that I bragged like always to the guys of how good fucking Jenny Pope had been.
I humiliated her too many times to count, but I think that was my lowest point in any of it. I couldn’t read anymore, not tonight. I skimmed through the pages getting the drift. Her struggle here in Gig as a pregnant stripper turned cocktail waitress. How she used the last of her inheritance to get her and Axe her apartment and a car seat. She worked nonstop, leaving Axe with the neighbor who neglected him, but always happily took her money until it was all gone.
She recalls her rape, in complete detail and I suffer every single word and every gory detail.
I am trying to focus and find a way out of this. I don’t know why I do the stupid shit I do, but I hate myself right now more than ever. I feel the first guy slam into me again and I cry out from the pain, the unwanted intrusion. I want to fight but they slipped something in my beer and I can’t think clear. My heart and my brain are both screaming at me to beg them to stop, but my words are garbled.
I scream when I hear Axe cry beside the bed, still in his car seat. He is upset and crying and I wonder if he knows what a piece of shit his mom is to have put him in a drug infested home while four men gang raped her on the bed. The very bed he is on the side of.
“Shut that fuckin kid up bitch or I will!” The second guy said, gripping my jaw hard and spatting the words in my face.
“Shhh Axe, baby. Mommy is right here.” I tried to soothe him, but my voice was weak from crying. All I wanted in this hellish moment was to save him.
“I’m almost finished.” The guy inside of me says and his friend laughs. “I am cumming in this dirty pussy bitch then my buddies here will when I am done.”
They came in me the first time as well. Now he was back for more and my body was on fire from the pain. I didn’t have the right to cry about it though. I came here, with my son looking for a high. I knew that the price would be sexual so maybe it isn’t rape, but it is horrifying that something this grotesque proves I am the last thing Axe needs in his life.
I swear to God that I will walk away and leave him with his dad if God gets him out of here safely.
My prayers are answered when the guy finishes inside of me, I gag knowing that he could give me an STD or even another unwanted pregnancy. I would go to the clinic after this was over and Axe was safe. I just wanted him safe.
He is screaming now and refusing to stop no matter my attempts to soothe him. The guy who just got off of me buttoned his jeans and grabbed his jacket while his friend stood to the side of me groping my breasts roughly. “I wish I took another round with you darlin, but I am too fuckin high to go again.” He leans down close to my face and speaks toward my ear. “I’ll find you again though gorgeous and I will get that second round.”
I feel the vomit coming, a mixture of fear, pain and being high coming full circle as I roll to my side in enough time to puke off the opposite side of the bed from Axe. The guy who was getting ready to take his second turn with me jumped back in enough time to avoid my vomit hitting him.
Offended by this he backhands me across the face and splits my skin just under my eye. I try to sit up, the pain unbearable. I just want to get to my baby and get him out of here safely. I feel my hair in his meaty fist and cry out from the pain as he pulls me off the bed by my hair, landing me by Axe. The putrid feeling of their cum sliding down my legs terrifies me and proves how low I have fallen.
“Take care of that fuckin kid bitch…” He says and drops a few baggies on the bed before following his friend's out. I don’t know what made them leave or why, most likely my vomit or Axe's crying. But they leave and now I can save him.
On my hands and knees, I crawl to Axe and pull him from the car seat and hold him against my chest trying to soothe him. I try to stand, but the pain is unimaginable. I look down and see blood dripping down my legs and know my cheek is bleeding as well. I can feel the various bruises on my jaw, arms, legs and breasts from their abuse… But nothing, fucking nothing hurts me more than knowing how worthless I really am.
I look to the bed and see a gram of coke and two rocks and more blood than I thought. One-hundred buck’s worth of drugs and I paid more than I could imagine.
I didn’t want the fuckin drugs. I left them on the bed. with the evidence of my price paid in full.
“Come on baby…” I say through my sobs as I stand and reach for his car seat. “Momma is going to save you Axe… I’m so sorry baby, so sorry. I am going to take you to your daddy, so I can’t hurt you anymore.”
And I did. I went home to shower and bathe Axe before I took him right to Cal’s parents’ house and said goodbye to him for good.
It was the only good thing I had left to give him.
I have tears flowing from my eyes and there is no way to stop them. I see her fighting, Axe crying... her blood and their cum on my girl and I want to scream. That is what I delivered her too? I don’t fucking deserve her love, not even an ounce. The proof is in this book that we both fucked her life up... but I left her to clean her own mess up and kept myself ten feet higher than her at all times, while keeping her on her knees begging for scraps.
I might have changed to please Tayla, but I see now that Jenny Pope changed me through every course of my life. I was never the better one... here and now I see I am the worse one.
I sat in the chair in my sound room while Jen and Axe slept side by side in my bed. I watched them on the monitor wondering what I could do next. She didn’t want to talk, she wanted me to read them. Either way, she was here and that was a win.
I start playing Hallelujah... singing the tune I know from years and years of respecting it. It is a cold and broken hallelujah, but it is one. I look up as I toy with some rifts, lost in the song and not paying attention to the monitor, I see the red-light flash as Jen enters the code to come in. I am in the sound booth and she is on the other side watching me finish the song. So close but still unable to hear one another.
She starts talking and I laugh and press the green button on my mic. "Green button in front of you there, by the microphone. Gotta press that." I watch as she keeps the knitted grey blanket wrapped around her when she finds the button.
"I said you sound amazing."
I shrug, and I don’t know why, but her thinking I sound good makes me want to sing to her. "How about this one..."
I start playing everything changes by Staind. So sick and tired of covers, but every song Thick as Thieves has done that could tell her what I feel, all were inspired or created for one of the girls.
I sound nothing like Aaron Lewis and even as I play it is on my electric. It speaks to me now, in a way that it wouldn’t have if I hadn’t read all my failures earlier. I close my eyes and play. I play for her to hear the words. I play for myself, that young kid that was biter than the dick I became. I play and hope like fuck she knows how sorry I am.
By the time I finish the song I open my eyes to see her nodding as tears hers. "Come here Red." I say and set my guitar aside as she enters the room. I pull her between my legs and hold her. I don’t know if the tears are for the song and the intent behind it, or the fact I know everything now.
"I am so sorry firefly." I say and kiss her on the temple and hope that we aren’t ruined forever.
Jen
I lay awake beside Cal in my bed down the hall from he and Axe. Axe fell asleep in Cal's bed earlier and after the silence in the studio we came up here. No kissing, no touching... he got in the bed and looked at me while lifting the bedding beside him.
"Stay with me Jen, just lay here." He said and I didn’t argue or fight him. I wanted to know what he was thinking. Had he read them all? Was he getting ready to argue his side? Did he remember how pure we were back then? Fear over took any sensible conversation though. I didn’t know what he thought or he thought anything, and for now I didn’t want to know.
I curled my back into his chest and he held me for hours until sleep claimed us both. Now I lay here wide awake and just want answers, to anything. I slip from the bed and grab my grey blanket and make my way to his studio.
I curl up on the blanket and reach for the journal the closest to where he had played. It is split and laying facedown and I see the last entry he read and tears shed when I drop the book and cover my mouth.
I hadn’t thought as I packed the journals that this one would matter. I