Reece (Stud Ranch 4)

I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d been planning the first day I threw up the pills after drinking just enough water to swallow them past my uvula and get them lodged in my throat. Well, the first time had been accident, but the day after it had been on purpose.

Before that, I hadn’t felt much of anything at all for… years. I mean I still felt the pain when Jeff hit me. A slap was a slap and a broken bone was a broken bone, and it hurt. He never let me get numb enough not to feel the pain. What fun would that have been?

But the pills let me drift, pull apart from my body. It let the weeks drift into one another, and then become months, and then years were passing.

I was the broken, cowed thing Jeff had wanted from the beginning, and he reigned over me as Lord of the Manor.

And then one day, I stood at the kitchen doing dishes from breakfast and looking out the window, and there was a hummingbird buzzing around the tree that had just flowered outside.

I stopped, hands in the soapy water, and I watched it. It was beautiful, glorious, with wings flapping so fast I couldn’t see anything but a blur as it moved from flower to flower. It had this amazing, iridescent breast of feathers. I was absolutely mesmerized.

I don’t know how long I watched it… Before, all of the sudden, it zoomed straight into the window I was watching through with a loud thump.

I jumped and let out a little screech, horrified. And then I ran outside when I didn’t see it fly back off again.

Only to find the back end of the bird sticking out the mouth of a neighborhood cat at the foot of my kitchen window.

“No!” I’d cried uselessly as the cat ran away with its catch.

I’d felt sick, and hurried back into the house, and I’d thrown up my breakfast.

And seen the pills I’d swallowed not fifteen minutes before. Some were half-digested, others were still in their bright capsule casings.

And it all felt so horrifying. What had happened to the bright bird. How quickly it went from flying free and glorious to becoming prey.

Jeff liked to talk about prey. He had a theory he liked to espouse that the world was full of predators and prey. He was a lawyer, a defense attorney, and he liked to think of himself as a predator who conquered the foolish and weak.

That he considered me one of the foolish and weak prey was a fact we both took for granted in this metaphor. He often talked about women as the weaker sex. When he was in a generous mood, he’d tell me patronizingly that it was good I had someone like him on my side, or else the world would eat me alive.

As if he hadn’t been that cat waiting to devour me whole the moment I was vulnerable and stumbled across his path all those years ago.

The next morning, I’d shoved my fingers down my throat the moment he’d left for work, and every morning since.

Hurrying from the bathroom into the bedroom, I donned my gardening clothes and then I went into the backyard, grabbing my best hoe from the shed as I went.

It was raining and I was quickly soaked but I didn’t care. I was operating on autopilot. If I thought too much about what I was doing, I might not have the nerve. And nerve was the only thing that was going to get me through this.

I’d almost gone twice last week. It had been sunny. There was no reason I shouldn’t have done it then.

Except for the fact that I wimped out. Jeff had been in a good mood and I… I don’t know what the hell I thought. But then one day, he came home and found me scrubbing the floorboards.

No wife of his should ever be on her knees. Except when he put me there, apparently, because the next thing he’d done was give me a swift kick in the back of my ribs.

Like I was a dog.

It hadn’t escalated.

But I’d decided that was the last time he would ever kick me.

I was done.

So I dug into the wet, loamy soil. I dug and dug, one foot down, then another several inches. Until I came to the hard metal cash box. I pulled it up by its handle.

The rain continued to fall, making a mess of the mud and dirt. The box was waterproof, and everything inside double-bagged in ziplock bags, so I ran over to the hose off the side of the house and washed it clean of the clinging wet dirt.

My clothes and shoes were a mess by the time I ran to the back porch and rather than trying to clean them, I just kicked off my shoes and disrobed down to my underwear before stepping back into the house.