I’m living with Walkernow.
Lex
BABE!
Me
It didn’t exactly happen how you might think. Dean did some horrible things. Don’t worry, I’m okay. Just two broken ribs and some very ugly bruises.
Lex
I’m going to kill that fucking man.
Me
Get in line. Walker wants to do the same.
Lex
Fuck that dickhead (Dean, not Walker). Are you okay? Like, REALLY okay? I’m sick over this news.
Me
Walker is taking incredible care of me. The night I showed up at his doorstep, he had his doctor come right over to check me out, and then he escorted us to the hospital so we could get in and out without waiting. And because I’d left all my things at Dean’s, by the next morning, he had an entire closet filled for me and obviously a new phone. I’ve taken a few days off work, and he hasn’t left my side. I’m okay, babe.
Lex
I love him.
Me
Me too.
Lex
And I love you.
Me
I’ll call you in a few days. xo
TWENTY-SEVEN
Walker
Alivia was resilient. In ways I’d never seen. Where some—if not most—would emotionally collapse after a night like she’d had, the broken bones and bruises a constant reminder of what that motherfucker had done to her, she used it as fuel to open up. She especially could have gone to a dark place when she called her mom a few days later, telling her what had happened, and her mom’s response was that all Dean wanted was money and that what he’d done wasn’t a big deal at all. But rather than let that reaction eat at her, she used it to acknowledge all the other fucked-up shit her mother had done in the past. And as she unraveled those moments, taking me through the years—the men her mother had been with, the homes where they’d lived, the nights they’d slept in a car—she pulled back the curtain and showed me the murkiness that lived inside those memories.
She wanted me to know who I was falling in love with.
Each story, each admission, only made that feeling grow.
Her history was full of words she had once been afraid to utter. That fear was now gone. Words that, once spoken, she would have previously wanted to take back. That wasn’t the case anymore.
Because I accepted every single second of her life.
A life that had included twenty-three years of being tipped upside down, her happiness slowly draining out.
Like mine.
