He sighed and nodded, finally leaning back into me, letting his shoulders fall against my own, his head leaning back against my chest, my arms wrapped around him. With a word of encouragement, he toed off his shoes and put his feet up on the couch. We lay there for a long time in the darkness, his head leaning back against my chest, his hands playing with mine.
“Now, talk to me,” I demanded after a few minutes.
He was silent for a while longer. I could feel the strain zinging through his body, so obvious I could almost feel him forcing the words out of his mouth.
“I-I was abused and assaulted multiple times beginning at age eleven,” he began, his voice low. “…s-sexually,” he added, almost in a whisper. I saw his eyes reflected in the brass around the fireplace, suspiciously bright. I could feel the tension in his body and I knew he was just barely holding it together. I ground my teeth in anger. Though I guessed part of his story, I'd never known details.
“My mom died when I was a kid. My uncle, Ricky, and his friend, Dreyven, began molesting me the same day CPS dropped me off at his apartment.”
He took a deep breath and exhaled shakily, his eyes darting up to mine, and a weak smile played at the corner of his mouth. “That’s… that’s the first time I’ve ever said that out loud,” he admitted. “Maybe therapy was good for something.”
I tightened my arms around him. I'd figured it was something like this, but to hear him say it so matter-of-fact-like, just drove the pain straight through my heart. It broke me that this hadn’t been unusual to him because he had lived it. It was the only reality he’d known.
“He pimped me out to anyone that would pay. I begged them for help, the adults, but no one cared. No one would do anything. It… took me a long time to realize that no one was going to help me—there were no superheroes coming to save me. I was a damn stubborn kid though. I figured I had to save myself,” he continued, his hands again picking at the strings on his ripped jeans.
“The first time I ran, he caught me within an hour…” he swallowed hard, continuing. “…he beat me so bad I couldn’t walk for two days. I just lay in the bed. I couldn’t even…” I could see the humiliation washing over him, and I could guess at the reason.
“The second time I ran, his friend-partner-whatever, Dreyven, found me at a homeless shelter. They’d left me with this older woman to watch me. She had been one of his stable in years past, but she was getting older, and wasn’t making much money for Ricky anymore. So, she did other kinds of odd jobs for him – she kept the apartmentclean, cooked, washed our clothes, that kind of thing. She was nice enough, I guess. She never hit me, or anything, and would sometimes sneak me candy when Ricky wasn’t looking.”
He swallowed convulsively, and I could see the pulse pounding in his throat.
“Dreyven and Ricky made me watch as they beat her to death with this belt Dreyven always wore that had this huge ass buckle on the end. There was so much blood…” His voice trailed off, and we sat there several moments until his breathing slowed down, and his pounding heart calmed.
“He made me wear that belt for a week afterward and wouldn’t let me wash it. I-I didn’t try to run again until I was eighteen,” he whispered. “I was too afraid of what he’d do to me… or anyone I left behind.”
“I’m so sorry, baby,” I said, wrapping him even closer to me. I looked down at Mason, his eyes bright in the firelight and felt so bad for this man, who had endured things that would have destroyed people far older and wiser. To have had to deal with that monster…I had to force my fingers to relax as I held him. I really wished I'd been faster getting back to that hotel room that day.
His eyes faraway, Mason didn’t seem to notice as he continued his story.
“I finally got up the courage to run again right around the time I think I turned eighteen. I was smart this time. I stole and hid some money and— and other things. It only took him three days to find me this time, but he still found me.”
A sigh escaped his lips, almost, but not quite, a gasp. I waited to see if he mentioned the little girl he had saved. She must have been the “other things” he mentioned he’d stolen, but he continued his story without stopping. “When he found me—he videotaped when he—” a sob caught in his throat, and again had to pause while he collected himself. “He recorded my ‘punishment’. He said he was going to use it as a warning to any other whore that tried to run.”
My eyesight ran red as I listened to him casually refer to himself as a whore. The tears were streaming down his face now, but it was likehe couldn’t feel them and now that he had started, he couldn’t stop talking. “He and Dreyven raped and beat me, broke my arm and then Dreyven told Ricky to get rid of me.” Mason’s voice choked up finally as he told his gruesome tale.
I still remembered how he had looked that night: pale as a ghost from blood loss, his hair matted with blood and other bodily fluids, his skin an angry purple just about everywhere I could see. It had been his eyes that had captured and captivated me, the same gorgeous eyes that stared up at me now.
He searched my face for a moment, watching the emotions race across. I was so angry on his behalf. Hearing him talk about how Ricky had treated him, I silently wished the men in hell. If they had done any permanent damage to Mason’s arm, the world could have been deprived of Mason’s art. Not for the first time, I regretted my wounds from Afghanistan, but this time for a whole different reason. Had I been just a few minutes faster, or even just carried my sidearm with me that night, I might have had the chance to kill Dreyven, too.
“They raped me and would have killed me, but someone… someone intervened,” he paused a moment.
“You’ve read my book, right?” he asked, looking up at me from where he now lay snuggled against my chest, our hands still together. I nodded at the non-sequitur and used my thumb to smooth the skin along the back of his hand.
“The ending… the ending to the first book, that really happened. He… Ricky… was getting ready to kill me and my… my very own Dark Angel saved me.”
I tightened my hold on him and it seemed to comfort him. He relaxed even more against me.
“Dreyven had left before my Angel got there. To this day, I don’t know what happened to him. He could be in jail. He could be dead. I just don’t know,” he shrugged. “But my rescuer shot and killed Ricky, then got me to a hospital...
“He saved my life.” I felt a tremble run through him. As he turned his face, I saw his cheeks were wet with tears. “Not a euphemism. Not an exaggeration. He treated the worst of my wounds as best he could.He called the cops, got an ambulance to the hotel, then he disappeared…
“Sounds magical, huh?” He said, looking up at me. “I never saw him again. Sometimes… sometimes I hope to meet him again, to thank him. Other times…” he sighed. “Other times when I’m afraid to leave my apartment to get groceries and run in terror from a handful of people at the mall, I wonder why he bothered.”
“Hey now…” I whispered, pressing soft kisses gently into his hair. “None of that. That’s bullshit.”
Mason shook his head and didn’t say anything for a while but eventually seemed to gather himself.
“I never really found anyone… any guy… that I felt… comfortable, enough, with to share my history, or explain myspecialtype of crazy.” The corner of his mouth twitched as he tried to grin self-deprecatingly.
