Ten(7)

I spent a lot of my time with my uncles, but they were no better. It’s like they didn’t have a parenting gene to share between them. Once I reached eleven, I was classed as a man in their eyes.

My uncles and cousins didn’t mind using drugs and fucking whores in front of me, and encouraging me to do the same. I lost my virginity by being tied to a chair by my cousins, and a whore sucking my dick without permission until it grew, and then getting one of her whore friends to sit on it. She was easily in her thirties and it was my fourteenth birthday. I’d been living with my uncle for eleven months, six days. They clapped and toasted to my manhood, and any guy friend of theirs they told thought it was the best thing ever, but I cried that night once I was alone. For the first time since watching my mother die and my father go to prison with a life sentence, I just cried.

I would have disappeared into the darkness, letting the dark side of my blood swallow me into its hue, but soft, nimble fingers stroked over my shoulder and Alex’s warm, small body buffed up behind me and she held me while I cried in my bed. That was the first night she managed to climb the big tree up to my window on her own. I’d been coaxing her to climb it for almost a year but I’d always have to help her until now. She always smelled like home- my idea of an ideal home, anyway. The ones you see on TV in those Christmas commercials.





TEN YEARS AGO



My bedroom door crashing open drew my attention. Alex stood in the doorframe, her hair messy and sticking up all over the place. Her shirt was ripped from the collar down to beneath her tits, exposing a lilac bra. My eyes scanned over her in slow motion, trying to grab on to reality because this couldn’t be it. Her legs were shaking, pulling my attention to the red welts on her inner thigh. Her skirt was higher around her waist than it should have been. My fists clenched, panic rioting inside my chest. I needed to go to her but I couldn’t move.

I managed to choke out, “Alex? What the hell happened?”

Her gaze was unfocused and my feet carried me to her. I snatched her body up into mine, my hands holding her so tight I wasn’t sure if either of us were breathing.

“Jonah’s in trouble,” she said. I pulled back and scanned her face but she couldn’t look me in the eye. “Please help him, Dalton. Please do something. I don’t recognize him. He needs help. You have to help him for me… please.”

I pulled back from her, needing the distance.

“Do you know what you’re asking of me?” I spat, angry that she asked. She knew how hard I’d worked to stay away from that life.

“I’m frightened.” She quivered.

“What happened, Alex? Tell me what the hell happened.”

The phone rang and our eyes darted to the receiver. I knew it was him, and no matter what I did to better my life I was dragged into the Moore’s world either way. I glanced back at Alex and picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“It’s Jonah.”

“Okay.”

I heard the release of the breath he must have been holding. He’d gotten himself mixed up with my Uncle Keith, dealing for him and sampling way too much of the product and not selling enough. He owed money and was drowning in debt. He needed me to take his stash and offload it, or talk to my uncle about taking it back and leaving Jonah the hell alone. They were playing with fire using him like this with his Dad being the sheriff and all, but it didn’t appear to faze them in the slightest. They thought they were above the law and most of my family had done a stretch at one time or another; it just meant they were committed to the family way. I fucking hated their fucked up way of thinking. They needed to stop breeding and let the virus of our blood end. Jonah was my best friend and Alex was my life; how could I not help them? I ended the call and made my way back to Alex.

“Come and lay down, Alex. Let me get you something to change in to and then you’re going to tell me what the fuck happened to you.”

HAD SHE GOTTEN INTO A FIGHT? HAD SOMEONE ATTACKED HER?

I left her to change in my room and went to open the door Jonah said he was on his way over now before I ended the call with him. He looked like shit. His eyes were bright red, and his hair looked like he’d been pulling it out from the roots; it lay in clumps over his scalp. I hated seeing what he’d become. He handed me a package right there, like he was delivering a cake. I looked around the street, paranoid someone might see him looking shifty as fuck.

“Come in,” I growled, but he didn’t move.

“Take it,” he pleaded, holding it out to me. I grabbed it from him and widened the door for him to come in, but again, he didn’t move. “I know Alex is in there. I know what you did to her,” he said in a deep, calm tone, but the shifting of his feet told me he was anything but calm, and I prepared myself for his attack. I always knew the risk to our friendship for loving her, but she was worth every risk.

His blow didn’t come. Instead he stared at me with a chilling, vacant look in his eyes. Dark silence surrounded us before he eventually turned around and left. I had mixed feelings inside me. I was glad it was out in the open finally, but the damage to our friendship may never be fixable. He needed help. He needed my friendship. He was slipping down the rabbit hole and he’d be too far gone soon, and I’d never be able to pull him out.

I placed the package in my wardrobe in a shoebox. Pissed was an understatement of how I felt about the amount of product he had given me. What the fuck was my uncle thinking letting an eighteen-year-old kid move this much coke in the first place?

There was no way I was risking trying to shift that much product. It would be taken back to my uncle’s today, but first I needed to find out what the hell was going on with Alex.

I lay beside her on my bed. She’d fallen asleep wrapped in my hoody. I pulled her body against mine and curled my tall frame around her dainty one. I didn’t know how long I was out, but I was woken by a loud crash and a flurry of stomping coming up the stairs. My door was kicked open, and armed police flooded into my room, screaming at me to get on the floor. I faintly remember hearing Alex screaming, but it was muffled by the humming in my own ears. I was held down by a knee in my back as my room was turned over, and when the cold pressure of the cable ties tightened over my wrists, I knew. Jonah set me up. Alex set me up. Life as I knew it was over.

An arrest for possession with intent to sell a Class A-II is a felony punishable by three to ten years in prison. Jonah had been caught with the entire stash, and they used his fear and his father’s influence to play the knock-on effect. If he gave up someone then he would only serve a year. That meant, with his father pulling every string he had, it was in a cozy detention center. They had recorded our phone call and had photo evidence of me accepting the drugs - bastards. They kept me for fucking weeks, trying to get me to give up my uncle. Offered me the same deal as Jonah, only I wouldn’t have anyone to pull strings for me so I’d end up in the same place as my uncle anyway, and known as a rat. I’d have lasted a day, tops. Either way, my life was over and so was Jonah’s, no matter where his Dad got him sent. Ratting on a Moore is unforgiveable, and if you’re a Moore, you take the time.

So they used me as an example, and because I wouldn’t give up my uncle, I got the full ten-year sentence. I was eighteen and tried as an adult, which meant I was being sent to the same federal prison where all the sickest and dirtiest criminals were placed, including my father.

My whole being crumbled into dust when the judge read out my sentence, the life I saw for myself dissipated, and if I wasn’t so numb I may have cried like a fucking baby. The words of support from my family as I was carted away were what I’d expected from them.

“Don’t let them break you, boy! See you on the other side.”

Yeah, thanks a fucking lot. Bye hockey scholarship, and the love that once beat so strong for a girl I couldn’t see myself living without turned to stone inside my, cold, frozen chest.





Present day

Every muscle aches. I feel like I’ve been thrown from a rollercoaster and then trampled by a stampede of elephants. The twin mattress of my old bed didn’t help. Pushing back the covers, I assess the scrapes decorating my knees. I didn’t even make it into the shower last night. Instead, I shed the spoiled clothes and crawled, naked and fragile, straight under the sheets. Dreams of him haunted me and I kept waking myself with my own sobs.

Wrapping the sheet around myself, I make it to the bathroom to shower, and for the first time, I see myself in the mirror. My hands tighten around the towel and I have to look away.

My hair is matted with dried blood from the cut that occurred on the fall inside the bar. My eyes are swollen and blotchy from crying, and the right side of my face is purple. I can’t believe this happened to me. I need to erase this whole trip. I need to erase my love, my feelings. I need to erase what we were to cope with what we are now. Nothing.

After scrubbing away the thoughts of last night, I drag myself from the warm heat of the shower and dress in jeans and a tee. I need to focus on the reason I’m home, and that’s to pack up Dad’s house and make arrangements for his funeral. I didn’t tell Mom I was coming, she doesn’t even know he’s died, but she’s on holiday in Rome with her new husband, Rick. She spent years single and pining for Dad, but eventually her heart healed and she moved on. Maybe that will happen for me too.