Seven

"Willow! God damn it!

My neck snapped up, and I ran my fingers along the table top edge. His screams matched the melody of the song blaring in my ears. His huge figure filled the door frame, his shoulders heaving and his eyes livid. I smiled, and looked up at him finally giving him the gratification of the glance. He stepped forward, as he ran a hand over his balding head. I knew it hurt him, I knew he didn't want to say it. He looked down at me, with his cold gray eyes. They were pleading for a moment, before they turned hostel. "Did you smoke my last again?" And his voice didn't match his dark stature. He didn't want it to be true, he wanted me to stand up and call him daddy again, wrap my arms around his neck and pretend like this hadn't happened to our family. Pretend like it wasn't so broken.

I inhaled deeply, noticing the way his hands didn't match my memory. The way they seemed to be so engraved with the past, a symbol of what once was, and never would be again. "Willow!" He screamed again, and I looked up, tearing myself from the passed and diving head first into the present. I yanked my ear buds from my ears, and smiled at him again. He didn't appeciate the rapture I was expirencing.

He bent down, and grabbed the sides of my jaw. The pressure from his husky hand was crippling. He brought his nose as close to my mouth as he possibly could without contact. He dropped my mouth, with an audibly pop, and I worked the muscle in a clock work motion, trying to ease the ache away. "God fucking damn it! Why Willow? WHY!?" He boomed, loudly. I licked my lips, tasting the fresh scent of smoke that lingered there. I couldn't lie.

He turned as if he was going to leave, but he paused in the doorway. "Out..." His voice was a whisper of what it once had been. All the years of torture had worn him down, he was invisable now, but I could still see him.

I stood up, and left the kitchen. My bag sat by the door and I threw it over my shoulder. It was light, and it was an exact echo of the life I lived. Never hanging on to anything, because nothing was worth remembering.

I turned from the door, for one last glance, and I knew I would regret it later. She sat on the couch, her eyes glazed to a pure shine. She smiled at me, while wrapped in the featherless bindings of her own high. She refused to come down, and I could never reach her. The words got caught in my throat, all those repressed emotions and the words on my lips I had almost forgotten how to say. "Mommy" I wanted to plead with her, I wanted to press her hands to my lips and remember what it felt like to be loved. But she never knew how to love me. Her features turned back to be bathed in the blue of the television screen.

"Sissy!" Noah's words cut like daggers, deeper than any worthless expression of wound my mother never tended. This was so much worse. He launched himself off the ratty carpet where a train laid on its side, all but one of wheels missing. He stood in front of me, his eyes holding the soul of someone much older then his five year old frame would allow. He raised a hand to my cheek, and I fought the tears I knew were moments away.

He never deserved any of this. I swallowed hard, and looked down into his stunning ice blue eyes, and the resemblance was astonishing. It took my breath away, every single time. It was like looking into a mirror. "Please..." His voice drifted off, as if he was ashamed to beg me to stay. "I'll be back. I always do, don't I?" I let the words leave my lips, like a false pretense but I knew he saw through them. "Promise?" He asked, and I nodded. He shivered, and I pulled my jacket off my shoulders and wrapped it around him. Why had I done this to him? Why had I given him all the nothings I had? He sat in this house, torn of all the things a child should really have, and yet he never complained. He deserved to complain, he deserved to cry and scream and demand better. Why hadn't I given him better?

I never had the answers to my own questions, and that was what hurt the most.

And I turned toward the door, and away from the mistakes I knew were my own. The icy air hit me, and my eyes watered but I didn't wipe them away.

His lips stuttered my name, but it wasn't what he should have called me. "Mommy," were the words I had been begging to hear for five long years. I know I had been young, I know 13 isn't and won't ever be an age in which anyone could raise a baby, but who said they had done a better job? It had been so much easier to just lie, pretend like he was my parents late child. But these lies were told at his own expense.

He was living the life I had, he was handed all the broken promises, and he was the one who was pulled under the wave of oppression, starved of the love he needed, and deprived the humanity his soul needed.

And all of this was played on on my own hands. It was my mistake.

But the biggest mistake of all, was that it was her arms that held him at night when he cried, not mine.
Her arms, the ones bathed in mistakes, coated in track marks, and she could never love him, because she had never truly learned to love herself.

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I sat in the leather chair, leaned back with my t-shirt hiked up against my rib cage revealing a stretch of smooth pale skin down my torso, his canvas.

He dipped his weapon of choice into a well of blank ink and then smiled at me. "Willow, right?" He asked, and I nodded, bracing for the pain. He moved one hand over to the place right above where my jeans ended. "You want the word, 'Lust' here right?" I nodded again. "Wow, eighteen already?" He chuckled to himself, as if he had known me for forever, when in all actuallity I had never met him. But this was what his job was all about. "What's the story behind this one?" He asked me, as he leaned down, making contact for the first time. The needle bit into the skin, and I almost gasped. The flesh there was so tender.

"I-I-Um, well. I just.." I stuttered, unable to convey the story to him. I could tell him all about my middle school years. Drinking booze with kids twice my age, meeting Danny. I could have told him about all the girls he brought to their knees, begging not only for his connections to the purest drugs but other things. I could tell him about how he had chosen me, from all the other girls to smother with love. I could tell him about the seven year age gab between us, when he had taken me into that closet in his apartment during a seven minutes in heaven dare. I could tell the tattoo artist about the virtue he had stolen from me, and the pain I could still remember to this day. I could elaborate on the fact that I didn't stop him, and that I wanted it almost as much as he did. I could have told him about the nine months that followed, and the baby that had been born with no name. I could have told him about how after that, I had never seen him again.

But instead the words that left my lips were simple. "Lets just say I know how deadly this sin is..."

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