Many hours later, Kate woke up with a start. She thought that she heard a noise in the apartment and she sat up so suddenly that she knocked her cat, Boo, off the bed accidentally. Boo was an older, fat cat that she had rescued many years ago and had brought her great comfort, especially in the last two weeks with all the commotion she had experienced. Kate looked around her room, but didn’t see anything unusual. Every shadow looked scary to her but she reminded herself that she had put locks on every single door and window, she was safe.
The bed shifted and she jumped again, looking over to realize that Derrick was in bed next to her. She had known he was there but somehow in her groggy state, she had forgotten. He had spent the night to just cuddle and hold her which she absolutely loved. Kate was sitting up in the bed staring at him and couldn’t help but let her mind wander. He was sleeping soundly, looking very peaceful, as his head lay turned to the side on his pillow. She loved that he wasn’t pushing her to go faster or do anything she wasn’t ready for, even though she could see that look of desire in his eyes every time he looked at her.
The blanket came midway up his waist, still showing most of his chiseled abs and superior chest muscles. His broad shoulders led down to his bulky upper arms, swollen with rippling muscles down to his big, strong hands. His one hand was resting on his waist and the other was laying flat across the bed behind her, where she must have been lying on it.
Kate couldn’t help but think about their conversation earlier that night. She wondered what it would take for her to be able to trust Derrick again. Would she ever be able to open up to him? They had been dating for almost seven months now, but there were still some things about her that she hadn’t told him. She had a dark and painful past that only her sister knew about. She hadn’t even told Derrick anything about it and she wondered now if she ever could.
Kate’s father had been an alcoholic and died over a decade ago and her mother had abandoned their family when she was still in elementary school. Kate had grown up taking care of her little sister, Annie, and they had bounced between different friends’ houses and even foster houses for a several years. All of those struggles were hard enough to admit, but the real reason that she kept those sad memories private is because it was all her fault.
She had kept quiet for several months about what her elementary school principal was doing to her in the janitor’s closet between classes. The sexual abuse was bad enough but the fear he instilled in her was much worse. He threatened her to never say a word and she was six years old so she believed him. It took awhile but she finally summoned the courage to tell her parents what had happened.
That is when everything fell apart.
Her father called her a liar and her mother was more concerned with how it would make her look. Nobody cared about her or how she was doing. Her parents fought constantly over what to do with the matter. Her father wanted to keep it quiet and her mother wanted to complain to everyone they knew, craving the attention that their pity brought her.
At first Kate had thought that her mother was defending her against her father, but as she witnessed more interactions between the two, she realized that her mother was more concerned about herself. Her mother had seen Kate’s abuse as an opportunity for attention from everyone around her, even if the attention was only pity. Her father immediately attempted to squash the publicity, desperately trying to hide what he considered to be an embarrassment. Kate’s mother always resented it when her father took the spotlight off her.
Her mother lived under the assumption that any attention was like currency, a necessity that she worked hard to stockpile. Even bad attention still carried it’s weight in gold to her. Eventually her mother had had enough of her father and the situation and left. She needed a stage and no longer was interested in playing the role of mother and wife. The last thing that she said to Kate before she left was that Kate should have kept her mouth shut.
So, that left her and her sister without a mother, but since that absence also made their dad start drinking, they were also left without a father. His drinking left them to fend for themselves and Kate became the main caretaker of her little sister Annie, working odd jobs to try to keep food on the table. It wasn’t ideal but it became all the girls knew and so they cherished their relationship with one another and the bond that they were able to grow.