I lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, stuck in my ponderings of the great mystery known as Quarry Page, when I decided sleep was a lost cause. The sun was still well below the horizon, and only the soft, white rays of a nightlight illuminated the room.
Quarry had purchased it for his room a few weeks earlier. I hadn’t asked him to buy it. Nor had I asked him to buy and sync a secondary iPod just to keep on a docking station on his nightstand. He’d done it though. Because he’d worried I might be scared. Of course, he hadn’t come right out and told me that. But I knew.
I was a twenty-three-year-old woman who still slept with music and a nightlight. It wasn’t exactly my most redeeming quality, but Quarry had never made me feel like it was a flaw, either. He knew all about my past. He’d once used it against me. But, most recently, he’d used his knowledge to make me feel safer than ever before.
An odd feeling slid over me—it wasn’t exactly a chill, but it still made me shiver.
If I really thought about it, over the years, Quarry had always taken care of me.
Even while he had been with Mia, he’d still made me a priority in his life. Sure, he had done the mandatory job of taking care of his girlfriend’s best friend when the three of us had hung out. But it had always been more than that. He had been my friend just as much as Mia had. I hadn’t been the third wheel or the annoying girl who wouldn’t give them time alone. He’d gone out of his way to spend time with me. Maybe not alone, out of respect for Mia, but he’d made sure I was never left out. He’d bought me the required birthday and Christmas gifts, but he’d also changed my tire when I got a flat and taken me to the dentist when I had to have my wisdom teeth removed, and as a newly (practically) widowed twenty-year-old, he had opened his spare bedroom to me because I’d been too scared to go home.
He’d been handling me with care my entire life.
As hard as it was to admit, I had to let go of the past with Quarry. His actions the day he’d locked me in the closet had been those of a shattered child.
Unfortunately, it had still changed us though.
But not all change had to be bad.
Maybe we needed to change.
Maybe I needed to change.
I just didn’t know how. I hadn’t exactly been born into a life where I could afford to trust blindly. My mother had been a druggy, and her boyfriends, pimps, dealers—whatever they were—had been cruel. None of them had hit me, leaving scars for the world to see. No, their weapons of choice had been much subtler: words.
Eighteen years later, I could still hear the detailed threats of what would happen to me if I came out of my room at night.
Those were the scars my childish body had never had to bear. Yet they had been so deeply etched into my subconscious that my adult mind still couldn’t process the fear I’d felt back then.
I’d told everyone that I was afraid of the silence because of the night my mother had died.
It hadn’t been a lie.
It hadn’t been the complete truth though, either.
I was terrified of being alone.
Scary things had happened while I’d been alone in that bedroom.
Her drug-induced, manic laughter.
Her screams—some in pain, some in pleasure.
The worst had been when the sounds would disappear though.
Was it over or just beginning?
The silence.
The only defense mechanism I’d had at that age was to spend as much time as possible at our neighbor’s house. She wasn’t particularly a kind old woman, but she adored reading to me from her Bible. Her lessons were usually only good to inform me of the terrible sins my mother committed each day. I could overlook that though. I just liked the company. The interaction. The safety.
She quickly took it upon herself to teach me how to read from her Bible. I hated it, but for those hours, I’d sit next to her in a chair, forcing myself to sound out words I didn’t understand, just so I didn’t have to go home.
After my mother died, my struggle to trust only amplified. So much so that even a relationship with my father was difficult at first. He was so nice to me, but I feared the moment that would change. I did the only thing I could think of: I showed him a little girl who was easy to love, not the troubled tomboy that existed below the surface.
When Quarry entered my life, he wasn’t a man. And I immediately opened myself up to him. In hindsight, my heart had been too fragile to give to an equally troubled ten-year-old boy. But maybe that’s exactly why I’d given it to him in the first place. The quiet storm brewing in those hazel eyes had been so familiar that I’d instantly felt a connection.
And there I was, lying in his bed, staring at his ceiling, after he had spent years trying to put me back together, most recently by offering me the few remaining shards of his own heart to fill in the lost pieces of my own.
In many ways, I was still that lost little girl—too scared to trust but too terrified of being alone.
I closed my eyes and allowed the countless memories of our past to filter through me.
All the times he’d been there for me, even when he, himself, had been barely breathing.