This Cruel Love

“You can leave the smart mouth behind.”

“But then our twelve weeks will be so boring.”

I turned around to leave his office, not sure if I had the upper hand or not. Jackson Caine put me all out of sorts whenever I went toe-to-toe with him. Truth be told, I quite enjoyed it actually, but I wasn’t ever going to admit that to anyone. Especially him.

Twenty-One years ago…

“Why do I have to take her everywhere I go? She’s so annoying.”

Travis was always whining about his little sister, Ryley. But I didn’t get it. To me, she was the cutest thing I’d ever seen.

“You’re lucky you’ve got a sister. I’ve got no one,” I replied, hoping he’d wake up and realise he was lucky to have someone else relying on him. No one even cared I existed most of the time. Well, that was until I came here, to the Emerson’s. Then I went from a total nobody to somebody. I was Ryley’s favourite somebody.

Looking down at the little two-year-old holding my hand, I felt a burning sensation in my chest. I felt more protective over her than her own brother. What was up with that?

Her chubby knees were covered in bruises, and she wore pink dungarees which were already caked in mud. Her blonde ringlets were tied up with a yellow ribbon, but stray curls had escaped and framed her pretty little face. She was bobbing her head from side to side and singing nursery rhymes, totally ignorant to Travis’s utter disdain for her.

The adults called her a Tomboy, but she wasn’t, really. She loved listening to me read fairy stories to her, and acting them out with her teddies. Me? It was my favourite thing to do, to sit and watch her. She mesmerised me; or at least that’s what I’d heard the adults say about it all. She was curious about everything and always so full of life. Being around her made me feel good about myself, which was something I usually struggled with. Travis was one of my best friends, but it was Ryley I really looked forward to seeing when we visited here.

We were at the bottom of their garden, heading to the place Travis called his den. It was a wooded area with a small stream and tons of cool hiding places. Travis and his Dad had built a treehouse, and there were stepping stones over the stream close by, that we used to hop onto whenever we pretended that the stream was molten lava. Having Ryley with us today was slowing us down, and we wouldn’t be able to play some of the more deadly games we liked to play, but our parents trusted us to take care of her. I’d never want to let them down, or her.

“I figured you’d be coming here today, so I’ve put some snacks and bottles of coke in the treehouse. We can have a feast and read some of my new comics.”

Travis obviously hadn’t factored Ryley into our day’s play.

“How’s Ryley supposed to climb the ladder with her little legs?” I looked down at her, as she glanced back up at me. Her doe eyes shone with innocence as she listened to us.

“Me no like it treehouse,” she said in her sing-song voice, pointing up to the trees we were walking through. “Me no like it. Scary.”

“You’re too little to climb the ladder, Ryley. We won’t go up there today.” I squeezed her tiny hand to reassure her, but Travis was having none of it.

“She can play at the bottom of the tree. She’s not spoiling my fun today.”

I shrugged, not feeling a shred of confidence in his plan. The ground would be safer for her, but was it really safe to leave a two-year-old unsupervised in the woods? As if he was reading my mind, Travis continued.

“She’ll be fine. It’s not like I haven’t left her there before. She just finds her own games to play. She’s not a baby anymore.”

But she was a baby, she was to me anyway. She needed help getting a drink and she couldn’t reach the snack drawer in the kitchen. Her bedroom had a guard fitted at the door so she couldn’t wander out in the night. When the adults were around, one of them always shadowed her, making sure she didn’t touch anything harmful or hurt herself. So why, when she was in our care, were we leaving her on her own?

I didn’t want to argue anymore, though. I guessed Travis would just call me out on it; accuse me of being a wimp and a spoilsport. So I bit my tongue and went along with his plan. It was a decision that’d haunt me for weeks and months to come.

“You. Stay here.” Travis pointed at the ground as Ryley pushed out her bottom lip and started to tear up. “We have boys’ stuff to do up there. It’s a boys’ only treehouse, do you understand? No girls, Ryley, okay? You’re a girl, aren’t you?”

Ryley nodded her cute curly head and sucked in her cheeks, giving us both a show of her independent side. She had a wicked, adventurous side to her, but when it came to her big brother Travis, she always did as she was told.

“No following us up there, okay? We’re too busy to be messing about with babies like you. I’ll throw you some cookies and a drink down, but you stay out of our way, got it?”

“Uh huh,” she sniffed out, and sat herself down at the bottom of the tree, running her hands through the leaves that surrounded her, and ignoring us as she looked over to the little stream.

“And no paddling either. Mum grounded me for a week after you ruined that summer dress with the ladybirds on it. Sit there and stay out of trouble.”

“Okay, Tavis.” She still struggled to pronounce the ‘r’ in his name, like she struggled with the ‘s’ in mine. I thought it was cute. Travis thought it was beyond annoying.

“My name’s Travis, you dummy. Now shut up and let us get on with our stuff.”

Twenty minutes into our game of battleships, and I was starting to get nervous. I couldn’t concentrate. It was eerily quiet outside. Shouldn’t she be singing or saying something? Ryley was always chattering away.

“Is your sister okay?”