Her muscles harden to stone beside me, and I side-eye her. She’s not breathing now. But I expected that. It’s the same way I felt when I walked in on them that night.
“What do you mean you saw it happen, Colten?” She chokes out my name.
Fuck.
Somehow, she pulls the truth out of me despite my internal quarrel to keep it in the depths of my soul where it’s festered and rotted. “It’s exactly what it sounds like. The sight of my mother’s blood is burned into my brain like a fucking cattle brand, Taryn!”
She sits up hastily, clutching the blanket to her chest. “You saw your father murder your mother?” she utters disbelievingly.
“Yes,” I answer firmly.
“That’s a big accusat—”
“It’s not a fucking accusation!” Emotion clogs my throat. “I was there. I saw the shattered dresser mirror and her blood dripping on the floor. I saw—”
My eyes burn, the tip of my nose tingling.
She reaches up, cupping my face as her thumb moves in gentle, circular motions on my cheek. “It’s okay,” she murmurs.
I swallow, rolling my shoulders back to alleviate some of the strain. “When I walked into the room, he was holding a bloody shard of glass in one hand and a bottle of scotch in the other. When she saw me, she ran and told me she would be back. It’s been five years, Taryn— Five years!”
We sit silently, her fingernails gliding over the ink on my bicep. “Jessica said you disappeared for three days after that.”
The air I draw into my lungs hangs heavy, swirling and expanding until I can barely breathe.
My brothers and I rode our bikes for miles in the summers. We always passed this dirt road, and we decided to explore it one day. The two-mile, unkempt path passed through a thick forest of Douglas firs and other vegetation, but what was at the end of the road was something we never expected.
High on the cliffs overlooking a small canyon where a creek flowed into the Columbia stood a cabin. The abandoned, weathered wooden structure, with broken windows and a stone chimney, had succumbed to years of exposure, yet it remained magnificent. It was our refuge, a place we retreated to when our parents began to argue more frequently. There were times we nearly threw parties out there, where we could drink underage and hook up, but something about it felt sacred. It seemed like it would lose all its meaning if we brought anyone else there.
No one else knew about it. That was until a year later, after we discovered it.
We were stunned to see a young girl standing dangerously close to the edge. At first, we thought she was a ghost. Withbright blonde hair and milky skin, she appeared almost silver against her black dress and the dusky sky, staring down at the creek below. It was eerie. But we soon realized she wasn’t a figment of our imagination or a soul trapped in a second dimension haunting the cabin. She was seeking a safe place to escape the thoughts tormenting her mind, and like us, the cabin became her sanctuary.
Taryn sits up, analyzing my expression with warm eyes.
“There’s this abandoned cabin on the Altair Bluff Cliffs,” I begin. “My brothers and I discovered it long ago, and it became one of our favorite places that nobody else knew about. That next morning, when my father returned home with dried blood on his hands and shirt, and my mom didn’t, that’s where I went. I packed a backpack, took my bike, and camped there for three days while I tried to process everything—”
To this day, I still haven’t processed that night. As I’ve gotten older, the memories from that night are cloudy, but all the significant elements remain vivid and unchanged.
The blood.
The sickly-sweet scent of scotch on my father’s breath.
The shards of reflective glass littering the carpet.
“Then I went home because I had five siblings who needed me more than I needed to be alone. From that point on, I swore I would never leave them again, and I would do whatever I could to protect them since I was more focused on myself during those three days than on the people I should have been concerned about around my father.”
Her brows pull together. “Is that why you don’t drink?” I hold her eyes. “I’ve never seen you with a beer, only with glasses of scotch. And I’ve never actually seen you drink them. I drank your glass that one night…”
My cock twitches at the thought. Yes, I painfully remember that. “The scotch on your tongue when I kissed you was the first time I had tasted liquor in five years.”
“You’ve been sober for five years?”
“Alcohol controlled my father, and I promised I would never give it dominance to control me.”
“So, you always make yourself a glass but never drink it?”
It sounds ridiculous when she says it like that.
