35

6. Broken Glass

   Walnut lay comfortably across Brandon's lap, purring his little heart away as the house guest continued to sip on his soda. He'd scarfed down quite a few of those Sprite's already, and it was clear that the rest of the whiskey from earlier was long washed out of his system.

   Knowing he had to drive that night, he only had a glass at the Rosemary. If he really wanted to, he could've willingly destroyed himself, but being caught up on all of this made him decide to reconsider.

   "He sure loves people, doesn't he?" Brandon lay his eyes on the cat as it continued rubbing its fluffy kitty scent all over him. The purring eased him.

"Yeah," she answered, shyly. "He's a cuddler."

   After a few more sips of her soda, Cynthia rested her back against the love seat. "Is it bad that I can't remember anything from the last ten years?" She kicked one of her legs up onto the dirty wooden coffee table, though seeming unphased while asking.

   At first, he truly thought she was joking about her memory, or at the very least over exaggerating what she was saying to him. He was wrong. He was wrong rather often, he noticed.

"What do you mean?" He asked her, hoping that he could understand her just a little better.

   "I have nothing to remember, really, except the bad things." Her body began to curl again, just as it had done all night. At this point, what she was doing was a trauma response. That was clear.

Brandon lay down his empty can onto the coffee table, next to her resting foot.

"Cynthia," he began. "Were you abused?"

   He found it hard to choke up the words with the fear of upsetting her, but she didn't react negatively. She did, however, pause for a moment, conjuring what to say to his question. How she could word it.

"I could have been," answered the frail woman. "Honestly, I don't know."

   "You don't have to answer any of my questions, Cindy," Brandon responded, "but just know that what you went through wasn't deserved."

   "You don't know that," she snapped, though calmly, and firmly. "I could've been a rotten bitch, or a whore. I could've done drugs. I could've killed somebody. I didn't even tell you my story yet, and you're already making conclusions."

She looked at the spinning fan above their heads. No eye contact.

   Brandon sighed in a bit of defeat. "Well, you can only be capable of so much as a kid. You don't understand a majority of what's actually going on in your life when you're that little. What makes you think anything you'd ever done was malicious? You were a kid, weren't you?"

   Another sip of her soda was gulped down. She didn't know how to respond, and so she had just outright ignored the question altogether. Grabbing the TV remote, she switched onto the TV channel that played a Cops marathon, and looked at the man up and down again that sat across from her.

   "You know, I never got to clarify what happened that day, when my dad found out about the broken glass in my window".

Beginning to understand what she was implying, Brandon was afraid to know. 

   "When I got home that night, he grabbed me by the hair and dragged me to the bedroom to make me look at the mess. There were shards of glass everywhere on the floor. I didn't know what happened, or how it happened. I found out it was my old friend, the bitch. She was the one who knew where I lived. She smashed the glass in, and tried pretending it was someone else."

Her body noticeably curled more and more as her story went on.

   "He told me to take off my socks and my shoes. He said that if I didn't clean up the shards of glass in time before he counted down to 20 seconds, I would have to stand in the bucket of glass I cleaned up."

"Cindy..."

   "Do you know what happened? I didn't pick up all the pieces in time," her voice lowered. "I had tiny shards of glass stuck in my feet for weeks. The pain was unbearable."

   Brandon wasn't sure how to respond, but he mustered what words he could think of, to ease the soreness they were both feeling.

"Your father was an evil man," He added. "Nobody deserves that. Not you. Not anybody."

   Her can of soda was emptied. She'd chugged the can by the time her story was over, and left it on the coffee table, without a care in a world left to give.

   She was compelled to keep talking. Once it had already poured from her mouth, it wouldn't stop pouring. She wanted to tell him everything.

   "I found out that my friend threw the rock when one of her asshole friends told me. They ratted her out. She did it because she wanted to look cool. It was nothing against me," she said.

   "I still never forgave her for it. I'd like to see her chew on the glass that was stuck in my feet, but we can't have everything we want." Her anger was genuine now. Her frustrations were valid, and they were very real.

   Brandon wasn't sure where to begin. He just let her vent about what had been harassing her throughout the night. He was okay with that, even if it did hurt them both.

   "I don't blame you for the frustration," Brandon lifted his voice. "I've dealt with a few shitty people in my life too. Nothing to that extent, but I did." He shared.

   With the rock of grief slowly dissipating from her stomach, she was more than happy to listen to the man across from him, if he had anything to tell. Walnut, satisfied from his short nap, hopped off of the house guest's lap and scurried off into the kitchen. You could hear the soft chomping noises that followed as the big guy shoveled the standing bowl of Farm Favorites into his mouth.

   "When I was, shit, I think 16 years old, I had one of my guy friends come to my house and we hung out for a while. Parents weren't home so we caused all sorts of trouble, but we knew how to clean up after ourselves. Late in the night this guy, his name was Billy, wanted to peek through our next door neighbor's window because there was a girl he liked in there. He didn't wanna do it by himself, and I was a dumbass kid, you know? I went on with him."

"Peeping Tom type shit?" She questioned him.

   He nodded. "There was a girl and a guy up there, we figured they were gonna have sex, but I don't think they did. We didn't see much, a few things, but we did get busted.”

"Really?" She added on. "What happened then?"

   "Billy told them it was all my idea to the cops. He said I was the one that made him go. Said I brought the camera too and everything. We both got in pretty big trouble. I was pissed at the time, but I look at it now and think it was funny, really. Stupid kids doing stupid things."

   Cindy's smile grew just a bit, despite the hard conversation they were having. "Want another Sprite?" She asked him, picking herself up off of the loveseat, and slowly making her way to the kitchen.

"Yeah, sure." He answered.

   He looked at the woman's figure as she'd wandered off, switching the light in the kitchen to a bright gold. She truly did look frail. 'There wasn't much to her at all', he thought. It wasn't as if she wasn't attractive; if she wasn't, he probably would've never taken up the courage to approach her at the Rosemary to begin with, or maybe he was just that desperate.

He couldn't bother to think about it enough to make the conclusion.

   She returned back to the loveseat with three more cans. An extra to keep her from having to get up again. "My soda is almost gone, you know," she laughed under her breath, setting down every can she held onto the creaky, wooden coffee table. One of the legs of the table was being held up by some thick books that were fairly neglected, aged; you couldn't read the front cover.

   "You didn't have to give me any more if you were running low. I can live being parched for a little while," he responded with an amused grin.

"Well, I still have some stories to tell, if you don't mind," she explained.