Secrets Cause Silence ✓ [Secrets Book 2]

[Chapter Five]

                  Look what he's done to you
                         It isn't fair
                      Your light was bright and new
                                   But he didn't care
                     He took the heart of a little girl
                    And made it grow up too fast

                              Now words like "innocence"
                                  Don't mean a thing
                          You hear the music play
                             But you can't sing
                      Those pictures in your mind
                 Keep you locked up inside your past

                     This is a song for the broken girl
        The one pushed aside by the cold, cold world
                     You are
                   Hear me when I say
        You're not the worthless they made you feel

                     Broken Girl: Matthew West

Chapter Five

When I started school again was when things got bad. I was going into my senior year and that took a lot of time away from the house duties I was told to do and I took the abuse because I deserved it. I didn't get it done and I knew the consequences but I chose those over the consequences of not doing the school work because if my grades dropped I would get in trouble at school, a beating from my father, and hit from Than. Taking Than's abuse was so much easier than all of that. I'd rather just take it then get it three times worse.

For over a year the abuse had been going on and I went from wondering why the hell he had hit me to thinking I deserved every single hit he had delivered. I didn't have dinner plated right and he would slap me and tell me I was useless.

I had left a cup out I was still using and I got a blow to the stomach as he told me I was lazy.

My homework wasn't completed enough ahead of time and he would grab my hair and tell me I was stupid.

Maybe if I could have just gotten things done faster or made less of a mess then everything would have been okay. If I was too slow to do what was needed of me then maybe I deserved to be hit so it wouldn't happen again; but it always happened again.

I tried so hard to please him I even stopped crying after we had slept together and just let myself feel numb but even that wasn't good enough for him and he would tell me I was boring and disgusting afterwards.

He would tell me that no other man would be able to stand to be with me and that I was lucky that he put up with it, but he did because he loved me.

For months I actually believed I was the only girl.

It was the middle of February when I finally knew that I truly needed out, when I knew he didn't love me, that he never did. It was the middle of February when I stopped making excuses for him and I stopped trying to figure out what I had done wrong.

It was the middle of February when I had realized how stupid I had been.

It was the first nightmare that haunted my unconscious.

Than came home stumbling in drunk with two guys from work that he had gone out with and I could smell the perfume on him, he didn't bother to hide that he had just been with another woman.