Page 18 of Bought For Us

This man isn’t my dad, he’s a monster. Has he always been like this and I’ve never noticed?

I don’t agree, I don’t speak, I just cry because that's all I can do right now.

“Grab your fucking bags and bring them down to the car.”

He turns around and leaves me standing there, feeling broken and lost. Everything happened too fast, in the blink of an eye.

Grabbing my bags, I pull them down the stairs and out to the car. Dad tosses them into the trunk. “Get in,” he barks.

I scramble to get into the back seat, not wanting to be close to him by sitting in the front.

He revs the engine and pulls out of the driveway.

I watch through blurry, tear filled eyes as we pull away from the house. The further we get, the more I feel like I’m leaving behind more than just my belongings and car.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do, and how I’m going to recover from this. I’m not sure that's even possible.

Because I’m leaving behind my best friends, my mom. My heart and whole damn world.

Chapter 5

Cora

Ten Years Later

“Damn it, Dad!” I shout, tossing the bill in my hand onto the pile with all the others. I close my eyes and let out a sigh. I’m tired, down right exhausted.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been having to deal with the shitstorm my dad left behind after his death in the form of a million dollars in debt.

Do you know how embarrassing it is to find out that your credit is so bad that you can’t even buy a cell phone?

That's how I found out that for years my father has been opening up multiple credit cards in my name, not paying them, and fucking me over hard.

It was nearly impossible to get an apartment after I was forced to move out of the house I’d lived in with him for the past ten years.

His divorce with Rose left him next to nothing. I don’t blame her for taking everything. After what he did to her, he deserved it.

But, it didn’t only affect him, it affected me too. Thankfully, he was able to buy a house before he was fired from his job and forced to find one that paid way less.

Every time he lost something in his life, he became more and more angry. And who did he like to take it out on? Me.

Somehow, I was to blame for all his mistakes and bad choices. He’d yell at me, told me I was a mistake, that I was just another mouth to feed.

So, I got a job right away. I did my best to go to school and work. Of course, because I was living under his roof, he forced me to pay. And not just part of the rent, or bills, he wanted everything. Every single dime of my check.

I managed to just barely graduate high school. Knowing I needed to move out, I got another job waitressing. It was a blessing because they paid me cash tips, so when my dad took my checks, I hid the cash.

It took me almost a year to save up enough money to get away from him and make a fresh start. Of course, it wasn’t that easy, nothing good ever happens in my life because when I came home from work one day, ready to put that night's tips into my hiding place, I found it empty.

Thousands of dollars gone. My father came into my room and lost it on me. He got in my face, calling me a liar and a thief. And then for the first time in my life, at the age of twenty-one, he hit me.

He backhanded me across the face and said that if I did something like this again, he would kill me.

Over time, I started to change. The sweet, caring blushing Cora was gone, replaced by a woman who had to break her back to stay alive.

I never had time to live, to go out and enjoy my twenties. The idea of college was laughable. He shut that idea down fast.

His words were. “How can you work enough hours to pay for everything if you're in college? Unless you plan on selling your body, it’s not going to happen.”

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