CBWR? Chapter 22

No time to chat! Let the angst begin!

"Are you still my Master?"

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Chapter 22

"Only a dream," Bella said softly. She looked away from me, and I reached over and placed my hand on her side, on top of the t-shirt she was still wearing. She jumped a little at my touch, so I pulled my hand back. She glanced at me again, and then started rubbing her fingers together as she spoke. "Master Aro told me to…to, um…service him…with my mouth. I had been trying to be better, but when he…um…in my dream…"

Her breath caught, and she was completely still for a moment. She seemed to get herself together and take a deep breath so she could continue. I wasn't breathing at all.

"Master Aro kept pushing so hard and fast…and Master James was yelling at me not to cry…but when he finished and I couldn't breathe, he saw I had tears, and Master James hit me with the taser."

"Taser?" The word dropped out of my mouth and onto the bed, just kind of lying there like a dead frog in the road. She cried, and he tased her? TASED her?

She only nodded.

"Master Aro told Master James to make sure it didn't happen again," she said. "So Master James told me I had to practice more. He would…hold it…"

Again she stopped to collect herself. When she spoke again, I could barely hear her.

"He held it in my throat, and I couldn't breathe, and my eyes would tear up. Then he would hold the taser on my…um…between my legs…and then he'd do it again until I could do it without any tears."

I heard a hitch in her breath again, and when I looked to her face I could see her teeth biting hard into her lip. I reached out my hand again, this time making sure she was the movement before I touched her, and touched her cheek with the backs of my fingers. She looked at me.

"I won't cry," she said quickly.

"They aren't here, Bella," I reminded her. "You can cry if you want."

"You don't like it when they cry," she said quietly, then quickly looked away.

Oh fuck.

Realizations and rationalizations rolled over me like a fucking Hum-Vee driven by a five-foot-nothing suburban housewife through the parking lot at Target. I couldn't bring myself to even say the words, even in my mind, but I did understand what had been done to her, and whose request made it a necessity.

"You can cry, Bella," I told her. "I don't care if you cry. I want you to cry, if you need to."

Her eyes stared up at me for the longest moment of silence I had ever endured. Her chin began to quiver, and she sucked in a long breath before wailing out the most gut-wrenching sound I had ever heard.

I held her tightly against me as her body shook with sobs, and my chest was coated with her tears. I could not pretend that I was not the cause of this, not this time. Whatever lines I had tried to blur between fantasy and reality were deadlocked in place now, in dark, bold sharpie. My whole body felt cold, even though the temperature in the room was warm. Moving and breathing were difficult, and my eyes wouldn't even close.

What else had they done, and would she ever tell me any more of it? How much of what she had been through was directly because of the specifications I had outlined in the application?

Sometime later, Bella had cried herself to sleep on my chest while I continued to stare at the ceiling. At some point, I must have drifted off as I tried to empty my mind of the horrors bouncing around inside of it.

Strangely enough, I had my own dream pulled from the dark recesses of my childhood memories.

I was dragging Eric – the boy a couple of years younger than me and the only other child in the small trailer complex – up the rocky hill, across the railroad tracks and down again – into the city landfill. It wasn't really a landfill, like they called it, but just a trash heap. No one ever covered anything up.

We were looking for bicycles, because the rich people threw away all kinds of good stuff and all we had to do was find it under the nasty stuff. A lot of my toys had been found in that place. We didn't find any bikes that day, but I did find a small, plastic, tinny sounding toy piano. It was in the shape of a snail, with the keys kind of lodged into the front of the spiraled shell. I hauled it back home, and tried to make it sound like a real piano.

I asked my mom if I could have lessons so I could learn to play it. I only asked once.

Eventually, I figured out how to play some songs – Mary Had a Little Lamb and Heart and Soul. It didn't sound right, but I still really liked it, and I would pretend I had a real piano and I was in a concert hall where everyone could hear me play. They would all cheer when I was done, and I would bow.

In the dream, I remembered playing the piano next to the driveway. There was a little concrete patio underneath the torn green awning jutting out from the window of the trailer. I heard the roar of the car engine, looked up, and saw my mom heading straight for me. I had to roll out of the way to avoid the tires, but the piano was smashed. My mom was holding one of her funny smelling bottles in her hand when she got out of the car and yelled at me for leaving my toys in the way.

My eyes flew open. I hadn't had a dream about where I grew up in years, nor had I thought of the little toy piano in all that time. I remembered crying when I realized it wouldn't play at all any more, no matter how I tried to fit the plastic pieces back together.

I never touched another instrument after that day.

Bella woke shortly after I did. After her initial disorientation, she looked up at me. Her expression was confused.

"What are you thinking?" I asked.

"You aren't angry about me crying?" Her words seemed to be both a question and a statement.

"No," I replied. "You can cry whenever you want to."

"Are you still my Master?"

"Not…really," I said. "I'm not going to make you do anything. I think you should stay with me for now, though. Once Aro is out of the picture, you can go what you want."

"Out of the picture?"

"I'm going to kill him," I said. "I know you didn't like the idea yesterday, but there is no way I'm going to let him live. Not him, and not anyone else who hurt you."

Her eyes sparkled with tears again.

"There are so many of them," she said quietly. "If he kills you first…"

"If he kills me, I know – you go back to him. I'm not going to let that happen. I'm going to do this, and I'm going to win."

I get what I want, right?

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Chapter End Notes:

Yeah, he's gonna do it.

You got a little glance into both her recent past and his distant past.

The moral - let your kids take piano lessons! If you don't, there's just no telling what they'll do later in life. -this is a joke about the content of my story. It is not meant to influence you as a parent, insult piano teachers, or the makers of those little snail-shaped plastic keyboards.