Touching Scars(10)
I glanced down at my watch. It read nineteen hundred hours, time for our last patrol of the night. I stood up and stretched my achy muscles. “Let’s go, last round.”
Thirty minutes later I was in the MRAP, which was a crazy looking hummer but build better, and sitting in the back seat with my eyes glued outside. I was trained to scan my surroundings. What people are walking around? What are they wearing? What are they doing? Have I seen them before? Do they take special interest in us when we come through? These were the assessments that I made and catalogued them all in my head. It had saved my life and my men’s lives more times than I could count.
As we turned the corner of the last block we patrolled, I noticed a man was yelling at a woman. She was cowering, her eyes cast downward. Women here were not supposed to be the dominant ones in this country. They were subservient to the male population. I scoffed quietly to myself. I preferred a woman with some fight in her. This woman was only doing what she had been trained to do since birth. The man reached out, roughly grabbed her arm, and shook her. She was nodding her head vigorously, but still her head remained down. He shoved her up against a wall, and I could she winced from the pain. It was making my blood boil. I’d like to introduce that guy’s face to the wall.
Just before we drove out of sight of the couple, Holt asked, “Should we stop and intervene?”
“Nah, keep driving,” Rooster told him from the passenger seat.
I continued to watch them, and just before we rounded the corner, the woman glanced up… warm hazel eyes.
What the hell? That’s not how I remembered them. Her eyes were almost completely black, always. I know these eyes.
I shot up to a seated position on the couch. Dragging a hand through my damp and sweaty hair, I got up and walked to the kitchen to get a glass of water. My mouth was so dry it hurt for the liquid to go down. I chugged the lukewarm water and filled the glass a second time. While I drank it down, my thoughts were all over the place. My dreams had never changed. Every night they were the same. Why would her eyes change color? My gut was tugging at me to dig deeper, think harder. Where do I know those eyes from?
While the glass was tilted up, my lips on the edge of the rim, it hit me. The thought was so startling that I dropped the glass. It fell into the sink, breaking into several large pieces. I didn’t care, I remembered those eyes.
“Fuck… Katherine.” I growled.
ACCORDING TO THE DICTIONARY, asphyxiation is a condition in which one is deprived of oxygen. Have you ever been deprived of oxygen before? Having your airway completely cut off and incapable of taking in the air that your lungs so desperately needed? I have.
High school for me was bad. Very bad! And not in the way that most nerdy kids had it. They were all either computer geeks or played in the marching band. Some of us played sports, but we still didn’t fit in with the popular crowd. It was like that for me during my freshman year. I had a few friends that ran track with me, but I was usually a loner. At the end of ninth grade, one of the popular junior guys decided that I would be his target of choice. I couldn’t understand why he paid so much attention to me. It wasn’t until my sophomore year when things started getting really bad.
His name was Adam. I did everything I could to stay clear of him because I just wanted to be left alone. During the year his teasing had progressively worsened and I couldn’t escape him. He would say perverted things to me, dump drinks on me, and leave threatening notes in my locker. One day he took it a step further.
It was in the middle of May, just before graduation, and I was trying out for next year’s track team. It was in the upper nineties that day so I had been really hot and sweaty. At the end of tryouts I had taken an extra long time in the girl’s locker room and stood underneath the steaming shower water. I remember hearing a noise behind me. When I turned around to look around the presumed empty space, I found I hadn’t been alone. Adam marched towards me and covered my mouth with his hand. I didn’t stand a chance.
Never in my life did I think I’d become a victim. But I also never thought I’d be the girl that didn’t fight back if ever faced with that situation. However, there I was, doing the very thing I said I wouldn’t do. I was completely frozen. I stood there motionless, as Adam unbuckled his belt, and slid down the zipper of his expensive designer jeans. His muddy brown eyes, I knew, would haunt me until the day that I died. I would never be able to wipe the memory of him penetrating me and taking the one thing that I could never get back. My innocence. I had stood there, held captive by my own fear, while he defiled me. When I felt the initial pinch that everyone says you feel when you lose your virginity, my mind began to protect itself. My senses completely shut down.