Although I’d promised myself that I’d never wear one of those torture devices again since that was all I was allowed to wear while in prison, I couldn’t think of anything more comfortable to wear right at that moment.
Especially with the way that even the slightest of water hitting the tips caused a little sting of pain.
I cataloged the rest of my injuries.
Bruises in the shape of fingers ringed each wrist. Hand print bruises spanned each hip. Hickies on my chest.
I looked like I’d been through four rounds…not that I was complaining.
Last night had been just what I needed…all the way up until the retelling of what had happened that horrible night.
I forgot…and I felt again.
Something I’d been needing for going on eight years.
“I set some clothes out on the bed,” I heard Silas rumble from the open doorway.
I looked over at him to see him looking straight at me.
“Thanks,” I said. “But I can put my old ones back on.”
He laughed. “We left them outside, and they’re soaked. It rained last night.”
“It did?” I asked in surprise.
He nodded. “Hard.”
“Okay,” I said, smiling at him through the glass.
He stared at me for long moments, and I let him, pressing my chest up against the slick surface as I leaned my forehead against the glass.
His eyes seemed to darken, but I heard the doorbell, and he growled.
“Hurry, we need to leave in ten,” he ordered before slipping away just as silently as he’d come.
I turned off the water, happy that I would now smell like him, and pulled a towel off the rack beside the shower.
It was as I was drying my sore breasts that I heard it.
A sound that you never, ever want to hear when you’re naked in a man’s house that you barely even know.
“Hey, Silas. I was wondering if you could spare another beer. I’m making a roast today,” my mother, Reba Berry, asked sweetly from the other room.
I froze mid nipple drying, and stared in horror at the wall.
I hadn’t realized that my mother and Silas knew each other.
And well enough for her to ask him for a beer, at that?
Why wouldn’t Silas have said something last night?
I wasn’t a secret.
He had to know I was related to her.
I mean, if she was comfortable enough to come over here like that, than he had to have seen the resemblance between the two of us.
I mean, I looked just like her.
Long black hair, the same birth mark on our necks, in nearly the same place.
Same body type.
She was me, and I was her.
Only thirty years separated our ages.
So I sat on the bed and listened as my mother spoke with Silas about her roast and my father, all the while being livid.
It went on so long, in fact, that I got bored.
And started to look around.
Then I started to clean because, seriously, what was the deal with not throwing the clothes into the hamper?
So while I listened to my mother talk about her rose bushes that were lining the edge of her property, and the way my dad cooked steak last night for dinner, I started to launder Silas’ clothes.
I started with the ones on his floor, picking them up and shoving them into the basket that had all of two things in it. A single sock, and a pair of his underwear.
By the time I was done, the entire thing was filled to the brim.
“Silas, my son tells me you called him the other night when you saw my girl on the side of the road…at the scene of that crash. I wanted to thank you. She really needs all the help she can get,” my mother said, making me freeze in place.
I couldn’t hear Silas’ reply, but I didn’t need to.
Mostly because my mom repeated his answer verbatim.
“Oh, I know you don’t think you did anything, but you did. Dallas said he caught her crying, but decided to leave her alone. He also says there’s been a lot of drinking going on. He finds all of her bottles in the trash the next morning,” my mother said.
He’d been going through my trash?
What the fuck?
And I knew he had to be going through them.
I was the one who’d walked the fucking bags out to the trash can.
He’d have had to physically pull out the bag to know there were bottles in there.
Not like there were a lot of bottles.
Granted, there were some, but not enough to count as excessive.
This time I heard Silas’ reply.
“She’s allowed to drink, Reba. She spent eight years having her life dictated to her. Let her live her life without you all second guessing every single thing she does,” Silas reprimanded her gently.
Then I heard the distinct sound of Silas’ screen door opening.
Last night I’d remembered the grating screech, and I wondered how I’d not heard it when my mother had entered.
I heard the two of them talking more from the front porch and decided to go ahead and get dressed in the clothes he’d left me.
They looked new.
And in style.
All of my clothes were still what I wore in high school. Which meant I had a lot of things that probably wouldn’t ever be acceptable on a twenty nine year old.
I wore them anyway, though.
Not like I had much choice.
Maybe I should make a stop by the Goodwill later.