DRASTIC (Book 4 of the Soundcrush Series)

Chapter 29: Smart Girls Hate Their Jobs

The song...Patience by Guns N Roses. Because Bodie and Marley exercise it so well with Darius, but struggle so hard for patience with each other...especially Bodie, who needs Marley in all the ways she refuses...

Marley

I sit at the bottom step of the basement, watching Darius in headphones making a rhythm with a bass drum and another smaller one. I'm not sure what it's called. A snare, maybe?

As far as I know, Darius has never sat a drum kit, but the beat he's making sounds pretty good to me.

He shoots me a look and loses his pattern.

He pulls off his headphones in irritation.

"I know Daemon is a piece of shit, okay? I know what he did to you is one of the worst things a guy can do to a girl. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I...I'm sorry that happened to you."

"Darius, I'm not—"

He shoves his headphones back on.

He fiddles with his phone propped up on another drum.  He pumps and taps, ignoring me.

I let him play as I try to keep my shit together.

I can't.

I'm devastated.

The last thing I would ever have wanted was for Darius to think that he was the product of an abusive situation.

The knowledge that I was the child of rape changed my life forever. It broke me loose from who I was. It turned everything I believed about myself upside down. Within two weeks of learning that truth, I was drinking and smoking weed. I had a new name, and I didn't recognize myself in the mirror. In that haze of confusion and alcohol and marijuana, I lost my virginity to a man that I had just met.

I can't even remember the days that followed. In my memory it seems like weeks that I was drunk and either being dressed up by Daemon and paraded around an unfamiliar neighborhood of strangers or being undressed by him in a dark room with loud music blaring.

I think it was months before I adjusted to functioning decently on the alcohol and marijuana. Months before I had a clear thought that Daemon didn't place in my head. But by that time, I could hardly tell the difference in my thoughts and his.

I have spent the last decade climbing back out of that black hole of identity I was plunged into by one devastating piece of knowledge.

I grip onto the edge of the step, knowing that my own son is plummeting into his own pain.

I could take it away. Or at least stop the fall and give him a place to land. A safe place, in Bodie.

I could tell him the truth—that I am almost certain that Daemon is not his father. I could bring Bodie down here and together we could explain what we were to each other, and how we shared one sweet and good and special moment, and how it got eclipsed by our fear of Daemon, and how we lost contact because we were both in jail, and how we never knew the truth because of a series of mistakes.

I could drive down to the damn pharmacy and get one of those at home paternity kits that you can purchase now as easily as you pick up a pregnancy test. We could show him the truth in a few days' time. We could give him a certainty where now he's feeling anchorless.

I could do all that.

Except I can't.

Because Daemon can not know the truth right now, and I can't ask Darius to lie to him. I can't risk Darius like that.

So I have to make this better in some other way for him. I have to show him that he doesn't have to fall into the kind of pit of self-pity and confusion that I did. I have to help him build a healthy identity from the bricks of the one that is now crumbling around him.