The Filthy Series: The Complete Dark Erotic Serial Novel (32 page)

And now I was here. Just as lost as I was then. More so.

“I just want what’s best for Faye, Rhett.”

I glanced up at Sarah. She stood precisely where she had been standing moments before. Across the table. Paper and debris scattered around her. The light of the kitchen at her back.

“What’s best for Faye?” I shook my head, a cruel smirk covering my lips. “You stopped wanting that a long time ago.”

Her eyes widened. “We’re on the same team Rhett, you and I.”

I turned away. I couldn’t look at her. I didn’t want to see what her eyes reflected. They reflected the truth. Maybe that’s why I didn’t like looking at her. Maybe I was afraid she could see my love for Faye. Maybe I was afraid of losing Sarah too. Because I
would
lose Faye. No matter how any of this played out. If he went prison forever or if he didn’t. Faye would never be mine.

“Just go to bed, Sarah.”

For once I thought she might stay and push me and the issue. She had argued with me more than she ever had before, before running off in tears. But she didn’t surprise me. I heard the door to our bedroom close several seconds later and the tell tale sound of her quiet sobs on the other side. The familiar noise calmed me. It should have hurt me that she was upset, but it didn’t. It didn’t piss me off either, like it often did now. Instead I was comforted.

Things could change for a moment, but in the next everything could be the same. Normal. Normal was comfortable.

I took several deep breaths and began collecting the hundreds of scattered papers. All the while glancing at Faye’s closed bedroom door every couple of minutes. I wondered if she heard everything we said, or she was already asleep. A glance at the digital clock on the microwave revealed it was just after midnight.

It took me a good thirty minutes to clean everything up, though it would take much longer to reorganize all of the paper work by date again.

Should I do it? Or should I just say fuck it and forget about it?

They didn’t do Faye or the case any good, so what was the point? I stared down at the neat piles trying to decide, when I heard it. Faye crying out. I rushed to her door and paused just before opening it.

Maybe I was just hearing things. Maybe it was all in my head.

“Fuck!”

I rushed inside to the bed. I usually stayed by the door. I didn’t get this close, not anymore. Not after I fucking came all over her that one night. But now was different.

She was barely illuminated by the small night light next to the bed, her body tossing and turning, little mewling sounds coming from parted lips.

I touched her shoulder. “Faye, wake up, you’re dreaming.”

She gasped and sat up, glancing around frantically.

“Faye, it’s okay. It’s me. It’s Rhett.”

She took a deep breath and nodded. “Just a dream.”

I sat down next to her, my leg pressing against the side of hers covered by a sheet. My hand still perched on her shoulder. “What happened?”

I’d asked her this many times. I’d listened to her recount the things that my father still did to her in her mind. Sometimes he cut her and made her bleed. Other times she was snorting coke off his fingers, desperate for the high. Sometimes she was running and he was chasing. Other times her mother was watching, drinking wine while Faye begged for her help. The reality of that. The way Faye acted at the funeral. The things I had said. That guilt weighed heavy on my heart. I’d loved Jessica like my own mother, especially at the end. It explained a lot, why Jessica was so guilt-ridden and broken up over Faye running away. Why she was relieved when I told her the lies about Faye being married and happy somewhere else.
“I’m s-so glad she got away.”
I could still see her face. Her body withered from the cancer.

I had hated Faye so much in those moments. And I never knew, Jessica never told. She never spoke a word about the things that had happened to Faye. She took them to her grave. And that did something to me. It made me want to fucking lose it. She could have saved Faye, but instead she watched him hurt her.

Instead of answering Faye shook her head and stared down at her lap.

“What’s the matter?” She was usually forthcoming, telling me the horrors, as if saying them out loud would change their reality and make them easier to stomach.

“I…” She glanced up at me, “shouldn’t.”

I frowned. “Why?”

“There are things you don’t know.” She ran a shaky hand through her hair.

“What do you mean?” I started to pull my hand away from her shoulder, but she stopped me, covering it with hers.

“I mean…nothing.” She sighed. “Just nothing. Just go.”

“No, don’t do that. Don’t shut me out.”
What more could there be?

My gut twisted in on itself.

“I loved him.” She looked me straight in the eyes when she spoke.

“What?”

“I loved Taylor, Rhett. I used to. I used to believe he hung the moon.” She pulled my hand away from her shoulder and clasped it in her lap.

“Of course, before—”

“Yes, before and during.” She let out a shaky breath. “I loved him for years.”

My heart clenched. We hadn’t talked about the way she felt about Taylor. I didn’t think it was important. She hated him. He had destroyed her, ruined her life with all the horrible things he’d done to her. “There were days when I would wake up and couldn’t wait to see him.” She squeezed my hand hard. “Days when I couldn’t wait to have him inside me.”

I recoiled at her words like a physical slap. “No. You were a kid. You were just misguided.”

“Call it whatever you want, but that’s my truth. Misguided or not—I believed it. I believed I loved him. This was all before the torture and things he did at the end.”

I shook my head hard. “He raped you, Faye. You were a child.”

“He never forced me. Not until the end.”

“You were nine years old. Of course he fucking forced you.”

“No.” Her voice was lethal, her eyes hard. “He didn’t. And I won’t let you victimize me anymore.” She took a deep breath. “I wanted him for all those years. I wanted him inside me. I wanted his cock.”

The words rattled at my ears, scraping at me like bloodied glass. “Stop.” I held up my free hand, the other still clasped in hers. “Why are you saying all this?” I hated the plea in my voice. I hated how this was hurting me, how it was killing me from the inside out.

“Because it’s the truth. No one asked if I wanted him. If I loved him.”

“But—”

“My dream tonight was about one of those times. I haven’t actually dreamed about them at all in a long time. I try not to think about when things were good, because I know they weren’t actually good. You’re right, I was misguided in my love for him, but it was the most real thing I’ve ever experienced. I was just a child so that love consumed me. It was more apart of me than anything else.” She paused, staring down at our intertwined fingers. “We went to a play with mom. I was thirteen. The play was boring to me. Some Shakespeare play that was confusing as hell. Daddy sat between me and mom. He held my hand the whole time. One of the actors got completely naked on stage. A man. I’d never seen another man naked before. Only daddy.”

Her gaze was far away, as if she was back there. The fact that she called him daddy festered underneath my skin, but I didn’t correct her.

“The man on stage was around the same age as him. But stage guy was hairier and his dick was smaller. We were close. Sitting practically on the front row. I couldn’t stop staring at it. At how different it was from Daddy’s. Daddy hadn’t fucked me in almost a week. He’d been gone on business. And suddenly I couldn’t stop thinking about his dick and how I wanted to have sex that night. It was the first time I remember craving it. Wanting him. Wanting sex. I squeezed his hand and he looked down at me. His face was inquisitive, normal like any father looking at his daughter. And then I whispered in his ear.” She paused looking up at me for the first time since she started her story. She was squeezing the hell out of my hand. Her eyes looked lost, far away as if she was somewhere she would never be found. “I told him that I wanted him in my mouth.”

It took everything I had to keep from jerking away. From running from the room like the scared little boy I was. I expected her to continue talking, but she didn’t. Instead she just sat there, saying nothing.

“What happened next?” Though that question scared the hell out of me.

“We went home. The ride was nice. Mom talked about the play. I stared out the window and thought of what would happen when we got home. When he came to my room. The things we would do. The sky was so dark. It was late. A little cold out. I thought he would wait until mom went to bed. That’s when he usually came to me. But he didn’t. We got out of the car and he took me upstairs…”

My heart pounded in my chest. Fueled by all the hate in my veins. I didn’t want her to say it. I didn’t want to hear about how he put his cock in her mouth and how she loved it.

“Oh my God.” She covered her mouth with her free hand.

“What, what is it?” She glanced at me and shook her head. “He…”

“He what?”

“Holy shit. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.”

“Think of what?”

Her face turned white, whiter than a ghost.

“Faye, are you okay? What is it?” I touched my hand to her cheek.

“There’s proof.” Her voice trembled.

“Proof of what?”

“Of the things he did to me. The sex. There’s proof.”

“But—”

“Videos, Rhett. He took videos of me. Of us. Of the sex. I forgot. But he did. They’re real. They’re somewhere in the house.”

I stared at her in disbelief. Something inside me said I should be happy. That I should be rejoicing at the news. It was proof. If the videos were in the house then there was cause to put Taylor away for years. Maybe even the rest of his life. It was the kind of evidence I had been looking for, for almost a year. But I couldn’t be happy. I couldn’t even find words to speak. All I could do was stare at Faye. See the fear in her eyes at what the reality of those videos meant for her.

And I couldn’t help but be scared too.

TEN

Three weeks later.

Today was the day. The day I would have to face Taylor. The trial had been going on for two days. The plan had never been for me to grace the seat of the stand and tell my story. Before three weeks ago all the prosecution had was my word against his. And my word meant nothing—I was a prostitute. A drug addict. A woman who had tried to kill herself over and over. I wasn’t credible.

For once the reality of those things didn’t hurt my feelings. I’d been happy to avoid sitting in that seat and facing Taylor. But the videos, the pictures. They changed things. They changed everything.

They found them. In the house. In his room. VHS tapes, then DVDs for the later ones. There was more than I ever imagined they would find. More than forty hours of footage. Almost two full days of Taylor fucking me.

I didn’t watch any of it. I didn’t want or need to relive those things. I didn’t want to see the minute things, to remember the little things that I had forgotten. Footage of me undressing, footage of me showering. There was footage of me doing everything apparently. Damning fucking footage. Literally.

I didn’t know if Rhett had watched them. He was there when we found them. The special shelf in the back of Taylor’s closet of movies just of him and I. Rhett had avoided me, working late and endlessly since then.

“Now when I call you up, just go up there and tell your story, okay? The jury will want to hear it, just as we talked about it. Okay? Don’t be nervous.”

But I
was
nervous, and Jim telling me not to be, didn’t really help at all.

“You’ll be fine, kiddo,” Roger said just after Jim walked off. I had forgotten he was there. I tried to muster up a smile, but it was futile. My nerves jittered beneath my skin. “After today it will be all over and you can leave everything behind. All of it.”

I wanted to tell him how wrong he was. That I would never be able to leave any of it behind. That I would never ever be able to forget the way Taylor felt when he was inside me. That I would never forget the way he fucked me while I bled out after they’d butchered my baby. There was no leaving anything behind because it was all a part of me. Attached to me like festering wound that would never heal. I would always carry that ache, that sore. Even if Taylor never got out of prison again, the wound would never heal.

“Yeah,” I said, instead of the truth.

I took a deep breath, letting the air seep out of my lungs. Where was Rhett? I hadn’t seen much of him lately, but I knew he would be here. That he would be with me before I had to face Taylor.

“You’re a smart woman, you know that, right? You’re going to do great in there. Just tell your story. That’s all the jury needs to hear.”

I nodded, but couldn’t even muster up a weak smile for Roger.

“Oh my goodness, I’m so glad I made it in time.” I glanced up to see Sarah pushing her way through the door. I tried not to let the disappointment eat away at me that it was her and not Rhett. “Are you ready?” Sarah’s soft eyes implored mine, searching me for an answer.