If You Fall

Four

tw/ talk of molestation/abuse 

We ate our eggs, with toast and coffee, and he was looking drowsy. Morphine'll do that to you. "Are they gonna give you a break to recover or are you back on the job like, tonight?"

He grinned wryly, yawning. "I get a break. Not sure how long."

"You'd better get to the couch before you fall off that bar stool." I took his plate and put them both in the sink. We moved to the couch, he limping, and he lay down, gesturing languidly for me to be his pillow. I sat and he rested his head in my lap, so I stroked his hair. Platonic though we were, a craving for safe affection was something we both shared.

My phone alerted me of a text. Bella had sent me a link to a newspaper article. The headline said "Mayoral Candidate Jonathan Spicer Arrested in Child Sex Trafficking Ring Bust".

"What?" Reed asked, and I realized he was looking up at me. I let him read the headline.

He snorted. "Only took them seven effing years," he said in disgust. "Mon Dieu. After it was practically handed to them. In pretty paper. With a bow."

I was reading the article and only half heard what he said. Jonathan Spicer had been the leering father at my last foster home seven years before. 

Foster care. You hear plenty of horror stories. They're all true, and those are just the ones that come into the public eye.

I mean, duh. They give a defenseless kid to basically just about anyone, so they're at the stranger's mercy. Not to mention unsupervised but for once or twice a year when someone might remember to check if they're dead so the money can be rerouted. Because yeah, there's money, too; they pay these strangers who go through little to no screening to keep these innocent kids.

Works out really well for the kids, sure. All day long.

I turned thirteen in the hospital three days after Reed turned fifteen, happy birthday to me, and from thirteen to fifteen and a half, I was in twelve different foster homes. The best was a Cinderella situation. The worst was . . . well, worse.

I didn't make it better. I was consumed with depression and anxiety, scarred and ugly, unwanted, frightened, withdrawn, you name it. I don't know how I survived it. I saw Reed once a month at least, but most of my homes made it difficult for us to meet and I didn't have the energy to fight it.

I met Bella at one of the last places. She'd been in foster care since the age of three, a fetal alcohol syndrome baby with ADHD, health problems, sensory issues, and as she cried almost all the time as a child, no one had wanted her either.

The last place was the worse, and I was there for three weeks, which sounds like a short enough period of time unless you are living it. The mother was a sociopath and delighted in physical punishment. The father was absent most of the time except for his leers and lip-licking long stares complete with crotch adjusting.

But those things I had grown used to from all the other places, and it was their seventeen year old son who was the predator I feared. I'd somehow gotten that far in the system unmolested by males, and I was afraid he was determined to change that.

The first night I woke up in the laundry room, where the army cot was set up for me, and he was standing with his shorts around his ankles, playing with himself. I sat up in shock and in doing so knocked over a large bottle of laundry detergent, which brought his mother.

She simply eyed him as he fixed his hastily pulled up shorts, and snorted. "Just be glad he's not making you do it," she said to me flatly. I realized what she meant and my horror increased. She laughed at me cruelly. "Honey, no one else is going to want you with your face like that."

Her son snorted with laughter, sounding just like her. She turned her attention to him and pointed a finger. "You try to keep your hands to yourself. At least don't leave any marks or do anything depraved, unless you want to lose another one." She looked back at me. "And I'd advise you to take what you can get. And you'll take it quietly, if you know what's best for you."

"This one'll be easier to stay out of trouble with, Ma, 'cause I don't really want to touch her," he said, and they both laughed.

She left and shut the door and he dropped trou and went back to what he was doing while I tried not to see. He did keep his hands to himself though, for which I was grateful, though I could tell the restraint wasn't going to last long.

On my twenty-second day there, I failed to clean the bathroom tiles according to the mother's standards, and she beat me soundly in return. She didn't worry about hitting my face. Should a social worker turn up, which they wouldn't, she had any number of lazy excuses ready, which they were happy to believe.

It didn't matter. I didn't even care anymore. The son had taken my hand the night before and crushed my fingers until I'd finally touched him and I could think of nothing else, a sickening ball of fear and dread roiling in my stomach about the upcoming long night.

He was at school and the father gone, and she had washed my blood off her hands and left me with instructions to redo the bathroom, though it was perfectly fine. Five minutes after she was gone, I was holding ice to my poor face, and heard Reed's knock on the back door. He often waited until the parents left before visiting me in places.

I hesitated to answer, knowing he would freak out. He had seen damage done to me before, but nothing like this. Even my teeth felt loose in my jaw on the left side.

But like I said, I just didn't care, and so I opened the door, not bothering to attempt a smile. I look back and realize I was mostly thinking about how to kill myself but it wasn't even a conscious thought so much as a plotting of my entire being to just make myself stop somehow.

He didn't smile either, but looked grim, as I'd known he would, and somehow grown, which was something new. He put his left hand on my undamaged right cheek, his thumb touching my bleeding lower lip so lightly I didn't feel it. "Non, non, non," he said, with sorrow and also determination. "Non, no more of this." He took his hand away, straightened up. "Okay, chérie. Get your things. It is why I'm here. Be quick and pack lightly."

This last was a joke with us because of course we had so little that there was essentially nothing to pack.

I just stared at him, not comprehending. My head was throbbing, and I kept feeling that hand crushing mine relentlessly.

He shook his head, though not at me, and took my hand to pull me back inside, effectively washing away the tainted memory of that other hand. "D'accord, I've got you." I followed him numbly while he went to the laundry room and got my few things, and then we just . . . walked out.

He took me to his apartment and I slept, and the next day he left for several hours and then took me two hours away, to the little cabin I still inhabited.

I owed him my life, though he'd never taken advantage of it in any way. If he had made any move on me it would have been welcomed because I knew him. I knew how he was true, and who he was, and I'd always loved him.

Now I read more of the article. "Wait, this says his son disappeared back then."

Reed laughed. "He sure did," he said, then put his hand over his mouth. "Oops."

I stopped reading the article. "Wait, what?" I was slow, maybe, but it was like trying to assemble a puzzle without half the pieces.

"I may have had too much morphine," he mused, not that concerned. "I seem to be talking too much."

"Nope," I said in a threatening tone. "Explain. All of it. Go."