Page 41 of The Jester and His Outlaw: Part One

Broken bones were the most painful. Excruciating, really, because by this point, shock had stopped kicking in, and I experienced everything.

Adrenaline helped some, but not much anymore.

I knew he was going to grab me as soon as I started heading toward the kitchen. Daddy was fast for a drunk man. I reckoned it was because being drunk was almost like normal life to him.

My arm shouldn’t have snapped, not from a grab like that, but I’d imagined I already fractured it from when he’d pushed me down the stairs in the garage and this was the final straw.

He tossed me down on the floor like I was a sack of potatoes, albeit a small, thin, frail sack of potatoes, which now that I think of it was a terrible comparison, but a sack of potatoes, nonetheless.

I crashed to the floor in a heap of wretched, agonizing pain. I knew I had a broken bone when it happened. The fury my body always let out was like nothing else. This one, though… a big bone like that hurt like nothing I’d felt before. Daddy was always careful to make sure it was the little bones, but this one wasn’t little. It was the biggest bone in my body, or at least that’s what it felt like.

I heard the snap, felt the snap all the way to my toes.

I fell back on the carpet, which was clean as a whistle because Daddy made sure Mommy vacuumed everything daily.

Before I managed a few calming breaths in, Daddy was on me, bending down to yell in my face. I heard him but couldn’t focus on what he was saying because my pulse thudded in my ears, ramming the blood through my system and radiating the anguish I felt tenfold. Sweat was coating my body without my permission. I never liked to show that he scared me, never, but this hurt so badly.

I just wanted to curl up in my Mommy’s arms so she could kiss the pain away. But that wouldn’t happen. Not for a good while. Or at least not until he passed out from being so drunk.

I’d needed to go to the hospital, but Daddy would make me wait a couple of days until the bruising and swelling in my arm was so bad that it didn’t look like fingers around my arm anymore.

When I didn’t open my eyes to look at him because his order was somewhere far off in the distance of my mind that I wasn’t capable of comprehending what he was telling me to do, Daddy delivered a swift kick to my ribs.

My eyes spring open as pain lances through my ribs, ricocheting throughout my body. My arm is throbbing and I realize it’s because I’m laying on it wrong, not that it’s broken again. Every time I lay this way, it triggers that dream. The dream where I’d found my revenge on that prick but also the day that I’d killed my Mother as well.

There is an aching in my chest from the brutal beating that my heart is giving it, and I can’t catch my breath, thankful that I woke up before I found the gun I’d stashed under the chest of drawers in the living room.

To this day, I still can’t believe they never found it. Or maybe my mom did and left it there because she wanted me to use it or she could use it if needed. That was always a thought that took root in my mind. I think she wanted me to have that protection, to kill him.

She wanted him gone just as much as I did.

Why wouldn’t she? I can’t remember how many times I pondered shooting him in his sleep, but I was always so afraid they’d take me from my mother if I did or somehow that would predispose me to becoming a cold-blooded killer when I got older.

It was stupid, though. If he’d ever found it, I can’t imagine what hell fire he would have rained down on her. It was risky, even for me to put it there, but it’d help. I always knew it was there if things were to get too bad and that day, over a beer, things had gotten too bad. So bad that in my delirium, I’d killed my mother as well.

My stomach squeezes, and I jolt out of bed, rushing to the bathroom in the hallway. Movement that is way too fast for my early morning state of near unconsciousness, but I’m not puking in my bed.

I drop to my knees before the toilet, making it in time as I dry heave over and over, my guts wrenching so hard I taste blood.

When my stomach decides it’s done, I drop back, pressing my bare shoulders against the cool shower door. I wasn’t able to eat much last night despite having had a great afternoon. Even work wasn’t that bad.

I’m not sure why I was in such a good mood last night. Good moods are scarce for me, especially as of late.

Bullshit, you know why. Because you saw Charley.

I force that idea from my mind because it’s utter crap. That girl, sexy as she may be, gets on my last fucking nerve. She’s always fucking there and, of course, she was the dingbat I’d been texting all week.

Never had I had a deal become so complicated, and I expectedMandynot to show.

No, it’s not bullshit. You know, deep down, that girl is not who she was last year. She is not the person who hurt Sam or the person who would fall in love with someone like Jonas.

I can’t like her, can’t go there. I won’t. Even if she isn’t the person she was last year, even if she has changed, I don’t have room in my life for someone.

Don’t have room for someone or refuse to let someone in?My mind taunts me.

I can’t let anyone in because I’m equipped with too much baggage. What is that saying? Love yourself before you can love anyone else? Yeah, I doubt I will ever love myself. I’m a walking barrel of guilt and darkness, day in and day out. Everyone I love dies.

Even Jensen I kept pushing away, avoiding until one day he cornered me outside of my apartment and reamed me a new asshole until I gave in and told him what the fuck was wrong with me. He understood it, even understood why I wouldn’t let him in, but the motherfucker never stopped until he forced me to declare him my friend.

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