Page 50 of Deadly Obsession
I had no idea if I’d said his name out loud or in my mind. The world seemed to be spinning as I threw his mask across the room, keeping my eyes locked on the spineless excuse for a man who’d been haunting me with the mere knowledge of his existence. There were so many nights I went to sleep wondering if I’d wake up while wishing I wouldn’t because I didn’t know what I would be waking up to.
Would I wake to my husband drunkenly hovering over me with his flaccid cock in his hand? Tapping me on the face with it till he became enraged with his own impotence?
That was when the beatings usually started. The only silver-lining I could find was that a fist to the side of the head seemed to sometimes work better than melatonin.
The stinging in my palms brought me out of the onslaught of flashbacks threatening to take over. I looked up and my hand was raised. My palm open and ready to slam down onto Micheal’s now very red and swollen face as the realization of where I was slowly crept into my consciousness. I was straddling the chest of my now-dead ex-husband, the father to my son, abuser or not. And I felt every ounce of my stomach twist up.
Like a spring-loaded trap, I leaped off Micheal and, lacking any balance, staggered towards the kitchen sink. Making the mistake of looking off into the living room. My eyes instantly fell on the gruesome remains of Danielle lying on Brian’s stomach, both of their heads unrecognizable. Hers was a mess of bone and minced meat, the shotgun having painted the wall behind her with red-and-pink chunks of flesh. Brian’s head, on the other hand, was mostly intact. More so resembling what I remembered Humpty-Dumpty looking like after he’d fallen off the wall.
Oh, fuck!
I threw myself over the kitchen sink, my arms framing the sides of the rectangular basin. I slapped the faucet handle up just in time to begin dry-heaving and then succeeded,to my dismay and pleasure,in getting sick. Every bit of what I’d had and didn’t have in my belly violently came up.
In just a few days’ time, I’d finally ridden myself of my boogeyman. Lost practically every friend I’d made in the last year and the man who I had fallen in love with, the one I saw a future with. But I wasn’t going to cry. I refused to cry.
THIRTY-TWO
SERA
YEARS AGO
I fucking hated crying in front of people. Ever since I was a child, I hated it. So much so that when I was in trouble, got hurt, or my kitten got run over by the neighbor’s vehicle, I bit my lip. I never allowed myself to cry, 'cause Daddy said not to.
“What the bloody hell are you crying about, Sera Doll?” he’d said from as early as I could remember.
I’d been so excited to ride my bicycle without the training wheels for the first time. Daddy stood at the bottom of the hill we’d decided on together for my first big ride. He had his massive VHS recorder on his shoulder like one of those green toy soldiers my big brother had when he was alive. I never met him or anything, but I’d sneaked into his room a few times.
Brother had been on the 1988 Pan Am Flight that blew up over Scotland on its way to the United States of America. He’d gone with our nan to audition for a Broadway show. Daddy had never approved of John’s theatrical flair or nan’s and mum’s insistence he pursue a life in the arts. He’d wanted John to follow in his footsteps and become a Royal Marine, aSergeant, not aModern Major General. Brother was not the sort for rugby or football, though, it seemed.
When John died, and I was born a few years later, my mum might have named me Sera. But in his mind, my dad must have named me Samuel. Nan had been on that flight with him, and when mum lost them both in one bang, her heart couldn’t take it. Or at least that’s what I believed, because she died giving birth to me. My daddy, though, there wasn’t a day he didn’t treat me like a boy. And by age fourteen, he was beating me like a man, telling me if it wasn’t for my birth, mum would still be alive.
But the day my breasts were too developed for him to ignore anymore was the same day he’d staggered into my bedroom drunk. Holding his quail gun in one hand and personal bottle of brandy in the other, he’d paused to glare at me.
It wasn’t his actual personal brand. He just liked feeling important.
“You sorry excuse for a son! Daddy’s Sera Doll,” he cursed, throwing the bottle at me. Only to miss and smash the bottle against the wall. The explosion of glass and its aftermath raining down on me had me shooting up in bed. I’d not slept with a shirt on that night. So when I sat up, bare to the world, I was horrified to see my father, bleary-eyed and stewed, wobbling in the doorway with his gun.
I’d never forget the scream. No, thecrythat led up to that shot. The one that painted my fourteen-year-old face with her drunken daddy’s brains.
He was so horrified, so against admitting he’d lost his actual son and produced a daughter in his place that he’d taken his own life.
That was what I called toxic masculinity, ladies.
It wasn’t the men who wanted to open doors or chop firewood for you. It was the men so obsessed with their own cocks that they’d convinced themselves that what mattered most was their last name. But I still needed—stillwanted—a daddy, andI’d lost the only one I had. Worst of all, part of me felt like it was my fault.
My adoptive parents were great, of course. They treated me like their own and loved Alex from the moment he was born. But it would never erase the trauma I’d suffered or the feeling that I was never good enough for my birth father.
I’d only told that to one person in my life. My late husband, Micheal, during a night of intimacy and vulnerability. The first time he and I got into a serious fight, however, he’d called me his “Sera Doll.”
It was an intentional slap to the face. Micheal knew that and exploited it. Eventually, it became his whip.
THIRTY-THREE
SERA
PRESENT
A splash of the cold water on my face brought me back to the here and now. I grabbed the dish towel hanging on the front of the stove and used it to dry my face, watching intermittently as my sickness vanished down the drain. I stood upright and closed my eyes as I tried to focus on the noise of the world around me.
