Jace took a beat and then said, “It all changed about a month before I turned seventeen. I came home from school and found my uncle hitting Maggie. She’d spilled some paint on the couch. I pulled him off her and he turned on me. I don’t know what made that time so different, but it was. I could see it in his eyes. He began beating the shit out of me. At some point, my grandmother and aunt arrived home – my aunt had taken my grandmother to a doctor’s appointment and she was joining us for dinner that night. Anyway, I didn’t even know they were there. I guess that they were screaming at him to stop, but he wouldn’t. His hands were on my throat. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see because of the blood pouring into my eyes from where he’d split my head open. I started to lose consciousness and I knew I was going to die. My grandmother tried to grab him to pull him off me, but he pushed her away. She fell and hit her arm on the edge of the fireplace. She was screaming in agony because the fall had broken her wrist.”
I could feel Jace trembling behind me as he spoke, so I began rubbing my fingers over his where they were resting on my chest.
“I lost it. I don’t know how, but I found the strength to fight back. I managed to reach the fire poker and I hit him with it. He let me go. He was on his hands and knees, yelling at me that he was going to kill me. My grandmother was crying, Maggie was in her arms, her lip bloodied and her face covered in bruises. My aunt was just screaming at the top of her lungs. All that and he still kept saying he was going to kill me… us.”
Jace’s voice began to crack. I pulled his fingers up to my lips and pressed a kiss against them. “It’s okay, Jace. You’re safe now,” I reminded him.
He sucked in several deep breaths. When he’d calmed, he continued. “I just started hitting him with the fire poker over and over again. Even after he stopped moving, I kept hitting him with it. His blood went everywhere. On me, my grandmother and Maggie, the walls, the floor. And I just kept going. Even when I fell to my knees because I couldn’t stand any longer, I still kept hitting him. When the cops showed up and took the poker from me, I kept swinging my arms like I still had it. I only stopped when they put me in cuffs.”
“You were arrested?” I asked, completely sickened by what he’d been forced to endure… and do.
“No charges were pressed. It was a clear case of self-defense. Maggie and I went to live with my grandmother. My aunt left the state – we never saw her again.”
Thank God for small favors.
“All three of us – me, my sister, and my grandmother – went to counseling, but it wasn’t like any of us could unsee that night.”
“You really think your grandmother and sister were afraid of you after that?” I asked.
“Not all the time. But if I lost my temper or raised my voice, I could see it in their eyes. Just this brief flash and then it was gone. But I knew in that moment they were remembering that night. I couldn’t blame them. Before the fight, I wouldn’t have thought it possible that I could do something like that to another human being.”
“You had no choice,” I said. “He would have killed you.”
“Yes, he would have,” Jace agreed.
“I’m sorry, Jace. You shouldn’t have been put in that position, but I’m glad you’re still here.”
Jace’s lips pressed against the top of my head. It was another move I was becoming far too dependent on.
“Me too,” he murmured.
We fell silent for a while as I tried to work up the courage to be even half as brave as he’d been in telling me his story. Shame curled through me as I sucked in the oxygen I would need to say the words that I’d never spoken to another living soul.
“My father let Richard Jennings have sex with me.”
Chapter 11
Jace
I’d tried to prepare myself for whatever Caleb had to tell me, but truthfully, I hadn’t been ready for the admission.
I wasn’t sure there was any way to be ready to hear something like that.
I found myself holding him tighter and dropping my face to the back of his neck as I squeezed my eyes shut. I managed to quell the sob that was bubbling up from my throat.
Caleb had said “have sex with” but I knew what that really meant.
“It happened on a camping trip. It was me, my dad, Mr. Jennings, and this guy who worked with my dad. He called him Rush, but I’m not sure if that was his real name or not.”