mouth to that burn scar. Her hand trembled. “You’ve never acted like you’re afraid of going into the cellar at my mom’s house. Or Thomas and Marcus’s.”
“They’re different spaces. A whole different feeling. And they have lights.”
Another silence ensued before she spoke again.
“I didn’t know giving up was an option.”
He saw her gaze was fully caught in memories, not her surroundings, though her fingers curled over his hold, a lifeline to the present.
“I wasn’t that…self-aware, and maybe that was good. But I do remember something broke inside me that day. Something that really, truly hurt. I couldn’t…I didn’t get out of bed for days, it seemed. Except to do the chores and whatever they told me to. I didn’t take the shower I was allowed every two days.”
A faint, grim smile touched her lips. “I guess it worried them. Uncle Burton brought me home one new magazine and a Hershey bar. For a whole week, they didn’t make me take care of their…physical needs. He said if I’d start behaving again, he’d take me to a movie. The first I’d ever been to. It was too big and loud, the kind they liked, with explosions. My uncle got angry because the sound frightened me.”
She shifted. “I tried to focus on other things, like the people in the theater. There had been this lady at the popcorn stand who was kind, who had a quiet voice. It was a world different from mine, and I think some way down deep part of my soul took it as a sign of hope. Hope that my life could be something different. It was enough to snap me out of it.”
Her gaze turned to him. “At least, that’s what I think now. At the time, I didn’t really know why going to that movie helped bring me back to myself. Your mother told me that God shines a light in the darkest corners. Even if we’ve never seen that light before, the soul inside us, that was made by His hands, recognizes it.”
He smiled a smile that hurt him all the way to the core of that soul, and gripped her hand. “It’s funny,” he said thickly. “I don’t believe as she believes, but her belief is so strong, I think it gives me my faith, by proxy.”
“You experience it vicariously,” she said, pronouncing the word carefully.
He loved her so much. “Good word.”
She rose, her hand slipping from his as she went down the back steps. She stood there another couple minutes, staring out at the meadow. Her shoulders twitched and then she turned toward him. The pain was so stark in her face, so raw, it startled him.
"I want," she said in a strangled voice.
“What, baby? What do you want?” He wanted her back on the porch, within touching distance.
A smile, brilliantly painful, lit her face, made her eyes flash like lightning. “You.”
Then her gaze shifted so she stared past him, at the house. "I want my life to be full of the choices I make. Me.”
She jerked into motion, coming up the stairs to sink down at his feet, her hands gripping his knees. She stared up at him with such a hunger he thought it could consume every bit of his heart and soul.
"I want you," she said again. Now her voice was trembling, and her eyes filled with tears. "Please. Right now. And forever after that."
"Okay," he said. "Come up here."
She did, and he pulled her forward, helping her straddle him. The way she kissed him was savage, so uncontrolled, it ignited the Master in him. He wrapped his hand in her hair, held her tight. She could be as out of control as she wished; he held the control for them both.
She drew back. His beautiful girl, his submissive, his heart, the center of his soul, wasn’t done detailing her wants. He was happy to let her roll them out, and hoped she had a list longer than anything ever sent to St. Nick.
“I want this house,” she said. “I want to make it ours. I don’t know how, but I want to do that. I want to change it, so all the bad memories are driven out and every memory we make here crowds out all the bad ones. I’ll pull up the carpet, paint it, inside and out. I’m going to put chimes in the cellar, a bunch of them, and a fan that will run, make them sing all the time, until every bad thing is