CHAPTER ONE
Dale
I knew from the time I was seventeen that I couldn’t be with a normal man.
The revelation came to me in the backseat of my boyfriend’s car.
The windows getting steamy.
The hormones raging.
You know the story.
Two kids thinking they were grown and were ready for something neither of them had any frame of reference for.
But you couldn’t have told us anything.
Though, in the aftermath, I’d wish someone had. I would have given anything to have parents who had drilled abstinence into me. Who had used sin and hell and all that stuff to terrify me into never even attempting to “do the deed.”
Sure, I probably would have needed years of therapy to overcome the negative effects of purity culture.
But at least it wouldn’t have led to an ambulance ride, screaming pain from the boy I thought I loved, and metal cuffs around my wrists.
According to the hospital, while he’d been on top of me, while I’d been trying to adjust to the discomfort of the new experience, I’d pressed my hands into his sides.
Hard enough to break four of his ribs at the same time.
At the time, I’d been too horrified at the damage I’d done and humiliated that everyone knew what we’d been doing to think about it logically.
It wasn’t until my parents came rushing in with wide, worried eyes, and started to insist that the cops take off the cuffs that I managed to think straight.
“You’re out of your mind, officer,” my father had insisted, raking a hand through his hair that seemed to be getting more and more gray with each passing day.
See all these gray hairs, Dale? This is what you’re doing to me.
He was only half joking.
I’d been a headstrong child. And after learning that if I overstepped the boundaries enough times, they would give up and let me get away with it, would tire of trying to drag me back, to remind me of the danger on the other side of it, deciding to let me learn the hard way, I’d turned into an independent and rebellious teenager.
Mostly, they indulged me.
My father, for all his many comments on my behavior, was too laid-back to really care. My mother, well, she seemed to take some sort of pride in my behavior. I often wondered if it was because she’d married and settled down so young, never really having a chance to set the world on fire herself, so she was enjoying basking in the warmth of the flames I stoked daily.
“I’m afraid not, sir. Your daughter broke four of her boyfriend’s ribs,” the stone-faced cop had told him, lifting his chin.
“Don’t be absurd. Look at her. She’s a little girl. She couldn’t break one rib without a weapon, let alone four of them.”
I couldn’t look at my father right then. Some part of me was too embarrassed to, knowing damn well that he knew what we’d been doing when the “event” happened.
My gaze slid to my mother instead.
We always got comments when we were out together about how we looked more like sisters than mother and daughter. For once, it wasn’t just ego-stroking of people trying to be nice. It was true. My mom hardly looked old enough to have a kid in elementary school, let alone high school, almost ready to head off to college. She, like me, was slight and almost dainty-looking. We had the same blonde hair—though she kept hers in a long bob while mine was free down my back—the same big green eyes, and the soft, rounded faces.
As soon as I looked at her, though, I could just feel that something was off. There was something odd in the hard way she was looking at me. Not with disapproval or even worry about my fate, the possibility of her little girl going to jail for assault.
No.
It was different.
It was almost, I don’t know, probing.
Or knowing.
As it would turn out, it was both.
My father—and my absolutely stellar but humiliated boyfriend (soon to be ex, as in the next morning)—managed to talk the cops out of charges, insisting it was an accident.
The three of us had driven home in stony silence, the swooshing of the air through the open windows the only sound in the car.
At home, I was sent up to my room where I leaned against my door and listened to the muffled, but raised, voices of my parents. I couldn’t make any of the words out, but my father’s initial anger seemed to turn to resignation, then defeat.
It was my mother’s footsteps that came up the stairs, then slowed to a stop in front of my door.
“Move out of the way, kid, we have some talking we need to do,” she’d said, somehow knowing I was sitting there.
On a sigh, I got to my feet and moved over to drop down on my bed, in no mood for a lecture from my mother.