Archive of Our Own

A Tale of Plane and Scout; Like Touch, Like Fire and Ache.

I acted like it wasn’t a

big deal, when really it

was breaking my

heart …

 

it’s been so long since

this loneliness began

that I don’t remember

what it’s like to not feel

broken …

Alex

Somewhere, in the constant disappointment that was Jumanji, I’d lost all semblance of hope. Days became weeks … weeks became months … months – years …

But I never knew the full extent of the duration.

I’d come to the conclusion, soon after I’d landed in the thick of those sweeping jungles, with conglomerated underbrush and countless enemies, that I’d most likely die there.

Befall a similar fate to that of Alan Parrish, the man …? Boy …? That had built the jungle fort I’d called home.

Certain death.

That is, until a long window of time transpired and my reflection in the watery stream hadn’t aged. Not so much as a day.

I’d realized then, I wouldn’t die of old age … I wouldn’t die if I were trapped for a million years …

I’d just exist. In a body that wasn’t mine, in a time that was trapped forever in a state of unrest – in a video game.

Hope once again had been stolen from me.

The nights were countless, endless.

I remember the way I’d ached deep in my belly for the touch of a female’s delicate fingers. How I’d ached for any touch, come to that … physical contact that I’d taken for granted for sixteen years of my life, before I was sucked into that video game.

I’d missed even the simplest touch from my mom’s gentle hand. Or my dad’s claps on my shoulder or back.

I’d just missed feeling like I belonged, like I was alive.

I lost track of how many nights I pushed my hand down the waistband of my khaki pants and squeezed the base of my prick. Stroked and massaged the needy skin until it’d throbbed and leaked down my hand. Burst with an empty sensation into the crotch of my boxers and pants.

I’d cried out my mourning for a warm, feminine touch.

Anything … anyone … to subside the ache in my heart and soul – literally anyone.

So, when I’d come face to face with other players, I’d gone along with it. Followed their lead and finished the game.

Thanks to the girl named Bethany for saving my meager life, who’s friends had assured me that I’d want her in real life …

I’d not told them, but the truth had been, that I’d wanted her in the game.

Even if she was an overweight, middle-aged man – my heart had been inclined toward hers. Desperate as I was, from my inescapable loneliness spanning years and years with just the cusp of my hand to alleviate my ache, my heart’s inclinations had been out of the realm of my control.

I’d promised myself – it wasn’t my fault.

But that I’d also fallen in love with her.

I’d decided there and then that I’d always be in love with her, so long as I lived.

Even though, when the game spat me back out, I was four years away from Bethany even being born. She hadn’t even existed in my reality, yet.

And that might have been the most painful truth I’d had to face.

I’d spent my time returned from Jumanji, like a rebellious ghost.

I’d snorted cocaine, drank copious amounts of alcohol, and kissed and fucked my way through countless female’s at parties. They’d been nameless to me, then.

Faceless.

They’d been the closest thing I could find to Bethany and I’d been so ashamed.

Ashamed because it was her touch, I craved … her deep warmth I wanted to be plunged into – not theirs.

My parents had asked me what was wrong. Why I’d become so troubled, practically overnight. Because to them – it had been overnight. But for me … it’d been endlessly long, since I’d seen them last. Twenty-one years was longer than I’d even been alive at that time.

 I could never divulge the truth to them and I’d known that – I still do.

So, instead, I’d lied – said I was fine – and taken more girls my own age, to bed.

Bethany had told me she was blond … and I wasn’t proud of it, but I’d primarily singled out gorgeous blonds to kiss and tear the clothes off of.

Before I’d been sealed into the video game, I’d always existed as a type A geek within school walls.

I’d primarily fit in with the outcast crowd, or probably not even been noticed at all, but with my return, I’d been far more athletically inclined.

Jumanji had forced me to hone my physical abilities – or die. So, in order to feed the surge of emotional turmoil I was spiraling in, I’d joined the football team.

My junior year I became popular virtually overnight. Suddenly, the eye of every girl and guy was trained on me – and even my parents had been impressed – despite my other troubling behaviors.

I’d reveled in the physicality of football. The contact I’d missed for so long in Jumanji, was finally available again – and I’d taken advantage.

I remember how good it felt to be piled on by other rowdy boys on the field.

And off of it I’d sought out all those gorgeous cheerleader blonds, with a fervor.

Anything, so I didn’t have to think about Bethany’s lack of existence in my present.

I continued on that swirly path until high school ended and college began.

The drugs continued to be what allowed my guilt to ebb away (while I fucked my way through every party imaginable, at college, same as I had in high school) and also kept me present on the football field.

I remember how unfulfilled I felt, even when we won.

There was nothing worse than the sensation of loathing my own skin.

I woke up more mornings than I could have counted with pills and booze coming back up from the night before, and the want for Bethany strong inside of me.

I graduated college without a career goal in mind.

Four years and I had no idea what I planned to be for the remainder of my life.

I had returned to Brantford with the singular goal of staying in my parents’ house, hanging my certificate on the wall – and fucking around on their dime.

It’d been six years since Jumanji and I still hadn’t been able to forget about her – about Bethany.

But I’d looked up her parents in the phone book – the Walkers’.

She was two years old at the time and I remember standing outside her house, half-hidden behind a tree, observing them playing with the sprightly two-year-old that was all smiles in their front yard.

In the back of my mind, I had known she was the girl that would save my life.

I had known who she would become … and I’d also known that she’d have no knowledge of me.

It was that moment when I knew I had to change.

When I saw her smiling and happy in her parents’ arms, while I was miserable and alone – starved for touch.

I’d sworn off the drugs that night. Let my body adjust to the withdrawals and after days of sweating it out, I’d woken up to find that it was time to be something other than the man I currently was.

I’d been twenty-two years old and incomprehensively alone.

I had my parents but nothing else. No one else.

So, I’d gone on the prowl for a job. I’d started out as a financial advisor. The hours were shit, but the pay wasn’t half bad and I’d always been good with my numbers.

My brain was analytical and I was just the person they’d been searching for at the time.

Years passed and I still couldn’t forget Bethany, still couldn’t put the blond bombshell from my mind. I’d pushed aside the wants I harbored that told me to seek her out.

At the time she would have been ten years old.

I’d spent years as an advisor and worked my way up to a full-scale manager. The pay was outrageous and the hours were long, so I didn’t have to think about how alone I was … but it still came up sometimes.

And some nights (despite giving up the drugs) I drank a little too much whiskey in order to fall asleep.

And most shameful of all, I’d closed my eyes and tugged on myself until I spilled seed to the thoughts of Bethany.

Those nights … I always tried to forget by doubling my alcohol intake – it never worked.

I’d still remember come morning when I poured myself extra caffeinated coffee and slinked off to work.

Everything changed one day, when I met Tiffany.

I don’t know what possessed me to ask the blond beauty with striking blue eyes out to dinner. I don’t even know why I jotted down her number and kept it.

I’d always had one-night-stands that were meaningless, prior to meeting her, but in that moment, perhaps I’d been inclined to find something more permanent, that didn’t bring me so much shame.

Or, maybe it was because my parents were on my case about providing them grand-kids one day … before they died … either way, I’d kept the date.

I’d gone out with her, despite deep down, knowing I would always be striving to be with a girl that didn’t know me yet, possibly never would.

I didn’t know how Jumanji worked. I’d pondered if she’d know me when she was old enough, or if everything had reset and spat me out where I came from, while completely erasing what happened to them.

There was no telling … and twenty-one years was a long time to wait to find out …

I’d have waited for Bethany, though … had I known for certain that she’d know me.

But fate had a different course planned out.

I didn’t climb into bed with Tiffany after our first date. She’d been quick and witty – smart even. And I’d drank enough to charm her with my tenacity and remarks … and maybe I’d been too gentlemanly by insisting that I couldn’t come in when she’d asked, because the next date, she’d jumped my bones and I’d been drunk and careless with her body.

I’d thought about ending it after I’d slept with her. Same as I always had before, I’d even gone weeks without calling her, but one of her phone calls had changed my life.

I’d gotten her pregnant.

My heart had sunk at the news. It was meant to be happy but it wasn’t …

Not expressly.

Because, I had known what was expected of me, then.

Not just from my over-the-moon parents, but from her – Tiffany.

I’d gotten down on one knee soon after that and the rest was history.

I think I might have loved her … for a time. Perhaps I’d even allowed her to claim a few pieces of my soul, but Bethany was always there, between us like a festering wound that refused to heal. I’d even whispered to Tiffany one night that I’d been saved once, by a girl named Bethany.

I don’t know what possessed me to tell that small iota of truth.

I couldn’t reveal that I was really twenty-one years older than she believes I am, but I told her enough of the truth for her to understand that Bethany is important.

Enough for her to allow me to name our daughter after her.

It was painful to say Bethany’s name everyday at first. So painful, because I’d wished my children would be hers … that we’d wind up together in the end.

Somewhere along the way, I’d lost hope that Bethany would remember me. At one point, around when Tiffany had our second child (another little girl, this one named Sarah) that I’d finally managed to think about her a little less.

I hadn’t forgotten her entirely, but it was enough to not think about her every night before I’d take my wife to bed.

Despite all of that, we’d fallen into a dull routine. I’d head to work, come home late and consume enough alcohol to staunch any remaining thoughts of Bethany, before I sought out my wife.

I would come home and be met with the same disapproving look in Tiffany’s eyes, every time I popped open a bottle.

She’d accuse me of being too old to continue on this way and I’d try to block her out while I guzzled down another glass.

I couldn’t tell her it was the only way I could fathom performing in our bedroom. I didn’t tell her that I never wanted to marry her in the first place … and I most definitely never told her that the little blond-haired four-year-old of ours, named Bethany with her perfectly blond strands of hair and oceanic blue eyes, made me think of the real Bethany I’d seen from afar as a toddler.

Because it wasn’t fair.

None of what I’d endured through these past twenty-one years had been fair.

I don’t know when the fights started, but they had been little at first. Just comments from her lips about tasting the whiskey on my breath. They’d escalated to shouts whenever my parents had the girls and it was just us, predominantly.

And sometimes, those fights would turn to her smashing things near my head, and end with her pushed into the couch and me driving into her with full force, because I wanted her to hurt at least half as bad as I had been.

And I’m not proud of those fights, I’m not proud of the marriage I’ve sealed myself into.

For the first time, one of those nights, after we’d fallen asleep in a pile of limbs and parts on our couch, I’d realized that I was as much a prisoner in my life, as I’d been in the game – in Jumanji.

I’d fallen to sleep with tears stained on my cheeks.

That was the night, before it all came apart at the head.

I’d driven over to my parents’ house early on Saturday, I’d wanted to spend the day with them and my two daughters. Most of all, I’d wanted to be away from Tiffany.

We spent a couple hours at the park. The toddler had passed between our laps, while little Bethany had clamored all over the play escape.

I’d not spoken much during the trip, because I didn’t want the truth to come out to my parents. The truth being that I could never be truly happy with Tiffany. I’d always known it, but I stay for our children. Our daughters deserve to have two parents.

It wasn’t until the ride home when I saw them … the four of them.

Trekking down the street in a candid line, that I’d known … twenty-one years was that Saturday … that day.

And I remember how I rushed to greet them, still with my infant daughter tucked in her car-seat, in hand … and I’d felt my heart nearly compress in the concave of my chest.

Bethany had been before me, for the first time since she was two years old, as herself.

As the her, that had saved me … that had brought me back to life by giving me one of her own.

She’d been more beautiful than I ever could have imagined. Strikingly gorgeous with her long, thin body, pert breasts, perfectly styled blond hair, and spritely blue eyes.

She was a far cry from the toddler I’d spied on all those years, before.

Her friends had been right … she was hot.

It had taken every ounce of my willpower not to draw her into my arms and steal a kiss right there. My body has hungered for her, for over twenty-one years by this point and I’d not known how to compose myself, in that moment.

I’d been so stunned by her sudden appearance – and the fact that she’d known me after-all, that I’d remained in a state of intrinsic shock.

She’d looked at me with an almost awkward smile, trying to contain the emotions she harbored for me, and taken our reality in stride.

I’d told her of the daughter I named for her and I’d seen the tears rimmed in her eyes.

Her reality was not what she’d hoped it would be (same as mine has always been) and I’d very much felt my age in her eyes.

Twenty-five years difference.

I’m old enough to be her father with how time has passed for me.

I’d realized that – in the moment. And I’d felt shame and guilt broil inside of me with a forceful magnitude that I cannot quite forget.

I realized, that I’ve waited for her, for over half of my life (and more than all of hers) and now that she’d been standing right in front of me, I could never have her.

I think something broke in me, then.

Reality had cracked in my mind and the weight of that truth had threatened to have me on my knees under the pressure of it.

Why hadn’t that occurred to me, even once, in all of these years?

Now, as I sit, four days later in the dark allure of a local bar, taking down my fifth dram of whiskey in the corner, I keep going over my life in my head.

I keep replaying the one-night-stands, the drugs, the booze, the parties, the loneliness, my unwanted marriage … my two beautiful daughters …

And I take another drink.

I want nothing more than to be able to erase it all. I want the guilt to go away … my guilt, for wanting a seventeen-year-old girl in my bed.

No one would have understood even had I waited for Bethany, without children, without a wife … It wouldn’t have mattered.

No one would ever understand if I left my wife and took up with Bethany. Perhaps my wife would find the coincidence in her name, but she wouldn’t be able to logically put the pieces together, since I’d told her Bethany saved my life over the summer vacation when I was sixteen years old.

Bethany hadn’t been born yet.

No, no one would ever come to the conclusion that Bethany of the past – and Bethany of the present – were one in the same.

I’d seen how she dismissed herself from my presence (they all had) the awkwardness had been too much for them. Too much for me – and it’d shown.

Bethany is all I’ve been able to think about. She’d been on my mind the remainder of the weekend and all of yesterday and today at work.

It’s why I’m here …

In this seedy, fucking bar, with only my thoughts for company.

It’s after eleven and I’m usually home by now, but I don’t want to go home and fuck my wife. That’s all it can be now; I can’t call it love … because I can’t believe I ever actually loved Tiffany, anymore.

Bethany is the one that stole my heart – and she’ll have it until I die. Even if it makes no logical sense … Even if I’ve never understood it myself … And even though I can never have her, she’ll always have me … always.

Bethany

I can’t stop thinking about him.

Alex.

I saved him, selflessly. It’s the first unselfish thing I’ve done since I can remember and yet, I can’t help but think about how much I wish he’d been born in my time.

When he’d been in Jumanji with me, he’d been sixteen years old. I’d been older than he was in there … but Jumanji was cruel, it’d spat him back out where he came from which meant he’s lived a whole life without me in it.

I’d seen that in his eyes the other day.

I’d seen his maturity, but also the deflection in his gaze.

That’s what made me leave so soon after we met in the now. I keep thinking about how his eyes had scanned over my face, my body … my physique …

He’d taken me in with his eyes, but he’d kept me at arm-length.

He’d hugged everyone else, but when it came to me, he’d barely pulled me in before he was backing away. His brief touch had been electric and I’d wanted to kiss him … but I hadn’t.

I’d let him pull away and not spoken a word about it.

But it had hurt.

It had hurt more than I could ever hope to translate into words. It was just this deep punch in my chest … in my gut … and it has lodged a lump inside of me, that I can’t seem to make go away.

I’ve spent the past three nights wanting to call him. His cell number has burned a hole in my pocket ever since.

These past few days I’ve poured over his social media accounts. I have spied on his beautiful wife Tiffany Vreeke and their two daughters in pictures, that span the last six years or so.

I’ve seen his wedding day, his family vacations, his forced, lifeless smiles in all of them. I even noted that he works as a financial advisor, one of the hardest imaginable jobs.

I have selfishly laid here every night and wished that he didn’t have a family. That he had waited for me … that what I saw in his eyes wasn’t encroaching on disappointment and realization of how young I am, but actual love … and joy at seeing me again.

It’s pathetic.

I know it is, because I could be with any guy my own age that I want, but I don’t want any of those guys. Especially not guys like Brian Lewis that cheated on me with multiple girls.

I want Alex.

Sweet, kind, charismatic, Alex, who was so vulnerable in Jumanji, but also strong and intelligent, like he must have always been outside of the game.

I know he’s pushing forty … and I know he could have been my father in another life, but I don’t care about any of that. I just want him to admit that none of that matters. That it shouldn’t matter, because love is love … and I saw a deep sadness in his eyes.

He’s not happy.

Not in any of his countless pictures online, and not when I saw him outside of his parents’ house.

That’s what has finally made me brave enough to push the call button next to Alex’s name.

I listen to it ring and ring and I wonder if he’ll answer …

I wonder if he’ll even want to speak to me …

Alex

I regret my entire life.

It’s what I think when Bethany’s name suddenly appears on my iPhone screen.

The picture of her smiling up at me, punctures my heart and I blink a couple of times, trying to steel myself against answering.

All I’ve wanted for years is to talk to Bethany … but now that I can, I just can’t … No, I can … I just … I shouldn’t.

I take a glance around the bar, then take a final swig, downing the rest of my whiskey and make a split-second decision to hit the answer button on my phone.

“You shouldn’t be calling me …” I realize I’m drunk because the words are slurred out in a ramble and I wonder if she can even understand me.

There is a long silence on the other end and I have to check to see if she’s hung up, before I press the phone back to my ear and she finally answers.

“I want to come and see you Alex …” she whispers and my stomach squeezes with yearning.

“Bethany—”

“Where are you right now?” she cuts me off.

I flitter my eyes around, my mind racing as I imagine that everyone in this bar is spying on me, waiting to report what I’m doing back to my wife. It’s absurd, but that’s how guilty I feel.

Guilty of wanting a teenage girl. Guilty of loving a teenage girl.

I release a raspy breath of air.

“Meet me at Brighton Park. Ten minutes …” I relent, then hang up, not waiting for her answer.

I throw down three twenties on the table and peel off from the bar. My car keys weigh down my pocket, but I know I’m too drunk to use them. So, I head to the park on foot.

For the entire walk my mind is racing. What am I doing? I know I can’t be anything more than a creepy dad-like figure to Bethany. I’m too old – she’s too young … It’s basic math.

And I’m not meant to be happy in this life.

Jumanji made sure that I’d never be happy, again.

I wish I never picked up that controller. I wish I never met Bethany … if I hadn’t then I wouldn’t be where I am right now. I wouldn’t be messed up and physically ruined.

I stop and linger near the edge of the bridge, where a stream of water is flowing underfoot. I ponder the stream rushing over the rocks below, while I wait for her.

She’s there minutes after me, and through the bleary haze of my drunk vision, I make out the pure beauty that simply is, Bethany.

She has no make-up on to speak of, and I realize how big of a deal that must be for someone like her. I didn’t understand when we were in Jumanji, but I do understand now, the references to her smart phone, the addiction to the internet that almost every American has now, but couldn’t have when I was a teenager.

The world has changed in the past twenty-one years. I have changed …

But not so much as to not still have an unbearable hankering for Bethany.

That will always be inside of me.

And I’m so ashamed …

“What do you want from me, Bethany?” I slur, wanting to embrace her, but knowing better of it.

I see her eyes shift down to her feet. I watch as she proceeds to shift from foot to foot and pushes her hands into her skirt pockets, standing there with a softness to her that almost has her glowing. When she looks back up at me, I notice for the first time that she’s been crying.

There’s almost a red puffiness to her eyes and she’s not tried to conceal it with make-up … she’s not tried to hide anything from me.

And I feel my heart cinch. I feel like such an asshole, because I wonder if she’s been crying over me.

“I …” her voice trails off and she shakes her head, gives me one last glance, then rushes out the words, “This was a mistake, I shouldn’t have asked you here, I’m sorry …” and turns to walk away.

I waver for a moment. I should let her run. I should pretend this hasn’t happened and add it to the unending list of regrets that I have, but I can’t let her go. I won’t spend the night knowing that I made Bethany cry herself to sleep, because of me.

So, I reach out and grip her bare upper-arm, turning her back to face me.

“You didn’t ask me here, I asked you here,” I correct, truthfully, trying to erase the curbed edge in my tone, but can’t quite do it.

I’m still so damned drunk, after all.

She stops and glances up at me, the frown still dominant on her lips.

She reaches up to wipe off a few of her tears, then moves away from my touch, as though I’ve burned her. And I lower my hand to my side as I try not to think about how touching her has burned me, too.

“You’re not happy, Alex … are you?”

After a long winding silence between us, where neither of us say anything, those words threaten to shred me.

I wasn’t expecting such a bold choice of words. I wasn’t expecting her to notice the great unhappiness that is inside of me. Especially since everyone else has taken note of my fake smiles and believed them. It seems Bethany, hasn’t.

“What?” I breathe, still reeling from my shock.

Bethany shrugged then stared down at her feet, clearly uncomfortable, but still driven to continue.

“Your marriage … your life … you’ve never looked happy … not in any of your pictures.”

She calls me out on it. The lying. The pretensions.

And I still don’t know what to say.

“Bethany …” I trail off because how can I possibly answer that?

“You’re not,” she states it like a fact this time and comes closer to where I’m standing a few feet away, “are you?”

She is looking up at me with those hauntingly blue eyes and I see her through a layer of alcohol and regrets that I can’t ever seem to escape from. I want to kiss her … I want to take her back to my house and make her my own … I want so many things that I just can’t fucking have and it is making me insane.

I feel crazy.

She reaches up and her thumb grazes my cheek, while her other fingers plunge down across my jaw, over the coarse skin of my neck. I shudder under the feel of her touch. And I try not to react to it, but I shiver down my spine and feel the rousing of my manhood in the crotch of my trousers.

When I don’t respond verbally, she continues to talk instead. “I thought we had a connection in Jumanji … I fell in love with you, you know …” she admits, and I feel my heart still in my chest for a whole beat.

I’m frozen. Rigid. And I don’t know how to speak to her.

“Bethany … don’t …” I raise my hand and lower hers away.

This time, I’m the one that tries to walk away. But she stops me, with a hand to my shoulder that practically burns through my shirt and jacket.

She comes in close, close enough to whisper in my ear from behind.

“You don’t want me then …?” she whispers it like a statement, but it could have been a question.

All I know is that it makes me seethe with lust. It makes my belly broil into dangerous and vibrant emotion and the past twenty-one years of my life feel like a crushing weight that has become insurmountable to anything Bethany can fix in me …

I spin around and cup her cheek, before I push my mouth into hers. It isn’t graceful – and it’s not the way I imagined our first kiss would ever be, when I reappeared in 1996, twenty-one years ago, but its what I have. It’s what I’ve taken and claimed for my own.

I feel her lips soft and pliant against mine that are coarse and rough, like the rest of me. She’s so delicate, like a flower and I’m afraid I’ll break her. She’s half my size, I practically dwarf her and if I wanted to, I could have snapped her bones with just a forceful grip. It’s sick that I want her so deeply … so completely …

It’s not fair that Jumanji made me this way – made me want her.

When we finally break apart, I don’t know who was the one to pull back, but it should have been me. Maybe its her though, I really can’t tell.

I keep my grasp hold of her cheek, because I need to be sure that she’s real. I need to know that she isn’t a drunken figment of my imagination … that after twenty-one years she’s finally here with me … knows me …

And I can feel her.

She’s warm and flushed with scarlet coloring across her cheeks. Her lips are swollen and red from the force of my kiss and the brush of my tongue. Her lips have been mine … I’ve claimed them.

I run my thumb across them to feel the wetness I’ve left behind. To know I’ve slaked at least a portion of my hunger for her lips on mine …

I’ve actually crossed the line now … I’ve cheated on my wife. But Tiffany is the last thing on my mind right now. She’s hardly even a blip on my sonar.

“Want you …?” I breathe inches away from her lips, still disbelieving that she actually said that to me. I can’t believe she actually thinks all of my actions (or lack thereof) come down to not wanting her … not desiring her … I want to rage at her and let her open up my chest and see the goddamn scar she’s imprinted with her initials on my heart.

“You think I don’t want you?!” I’m talking louder than I mean … it must be the whiskey. It’s making me sloppier … less in control of my facilities, the longer its allowed to sink in.

“I spent twenty-one years in a fucking video game, alone … wanting every day for a touch that wasn’t my own … yearning … pleading for it … just a single iota of human contact … then you came along and you saved me! You saved me and I felt something for the first time in all those years … because of you!” I hissed through my teeth, pleading with my eyes for her to grasp the depths of my want, my need!

“Then, I come home from the game to find that you’re not even born yet …” I brush my hands through her hair, across her cheek, touch along her side … I’m touching her everywhere listening to her keen and whimper in her throat, “… you saved me … you made me love you … but I couldn’t have you when I came home … so I mourned you … I found a slake of my need with every imaginable blond there was … I did drugs … I drank until I passed out … I suffered … I still suffer … through every day of my life, waiting for you to come back to me …”

I hear her gasp as one of my hands graze up to cup one of her pert, underdeveloped breasts, fingering the nipple with the pad of my thumb.

“And now that you have … now that you’re back … I’ve mourned the memory of you for longer than you’ve lived on this Earth … I’ve aged and grown to over twice your age … I was twenty when you were born … I could be your father … I’ve fathered children … I have a wife …” I groan at the thought of Tiffany, “She’d have me locked away if she ever finds out about what I’ve done … what I want with you, Bethany …”

Bethany is warm and real in my arms. It’s a shock to my system and I encase her in my embrace. I draw in close until she’s speared to my front and I make sure she can feel the press of me. Thick and bulged in my trousers against her belly. I want her to understand what just a kiss has done to me. Just her presence, actually …

She’s my singular wet dream.

She’s been my wet dream for twenty-one years and I’ve suffered with the proof of it, every single day of my life.

I want to be with her – that will always be true.

There are tears in her eyes now, I can fell them when they begin to fall against my chest. They soak into my shirt and make me hot, all over. I keep my hold on her, but I wonder about the tears. Have I upset her? I shouldn’t have told her the truth, but I couldn’t help myself.

In that moment … when I’d heard her say I didn’t want her … something in me just broke apart … the monster in my belly had reared its ugly head and forced me out of control.

I reach up one of my hands and stroke the back of her hair. Fingering her slightly styled strands, subtly. I’m trying to soothe her. I realize its my parental instincts that have kicked in and I’m trying to calm her the same way I would little Bethany when she comes to me in tears.

I feel a stab of guilt pierce my stomach again and I try not to feel the full magnitude of it … but I do.

My soothing seems to help, though, because she draws back slightly, wiping a few of her tears away with her hands, smearing the liquid across her cheeks. I hiss because her movement dislodges her front from my tented-out erection and It feels sensitive.

“Oh, Alex … I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through …” she breathes and I realize that’s something we can both agree on.

She can’t. My pain is immeasurable to anything else. My thorough guilt is unmentionable.

“And neither one of us can turn back the clock …” she whisks away a few additional tears from her angelic cheeks, “but I don’t see why we can’t try and be together … why we can’t have this … this love that we both want … that you’ve ached twenty-one years for …”

She creeps closer and I resist the urge to draw back, when she presses her slightly chilled hand over my chest. She has to peer up at me, I’m so much taller than her, in order to look me in the eye.

“Because I have a wife … and I’m too old now … you deserve someone younger … someone that won’t go to jail if he touches you …” I admit with the largest ache in my chest that I’ve ever known.

I don’t want to keep pushing her away. I think it would kill me to watch her with another man, but this isn’t entirely about me. It needs to be about her, too. And I don’t want to imagine how bad things would be for her, if we publicly dated.

If I ended my marriage and went out with Bethany in this tiny little town …

Bethany chocked back a sob and avoids my eyes. She shivers noticeably, her hands going up to rub along her arms. She only has on a short-sleeved shirt and the Fall air is starting to become chilly most days, in preparation for the coming Winter.

I hardly feel the cold anymore. I’ve spent so long as a hollowed-out shell, that I have decided the cold doesn’t bother me.

“Here …” I shed my jacket and drape it over her shoulders.

She gives me a thankful nod, while pushing her arms through the holes. I imagine it must be warm, from my body heat. I have a long-sleeved shirt on and I hardly notice the nippy cold that seeps through the fabric. I can only think about her.

She stands there, warming herself with the black leather for a few moments, not saying anything at first, but she’s still crying and its breaking my heart.

“So, that’s it then?” she finally asks, “you’ll never be with me?”

I feel the stab in my chest and it crushes me, but I force myself to nod. I have to shut this down … now … before I do more than simply steal a kiss …

“It’s going to hurt … but I don’t see that either of us have any other choice, Beth,” I shorten her name, without asking her. But I see how it has this affect on her when I do. It makes her shiver again, but this time its not from the cold.

“I promise, I won’t be with anyone else, Alex. If you do this … if you make me live the way you did for the last twenty-one years, then I want you to understand what it means … You’re hurting me the way you were hurt … the way I never would have hurt you …” her words send fire through my insides. I can feel the span of it radiating inside of me.

I know what she means … If I never let my heart be claimed then she won’t either … And I want to retract what I’ve said, but there isn’t a way for me to do it now.

More tears fall freely down her cheeks, she’s not even bothering to try to rid herself of them anymore. I’ve exhausted her will, I can tell. And I’m not proud of it … not even remotely.

“You don’t love your wife; I know you don’t … why else would you be drunk at a bar instead of at home in her bed right now?” she accused and I know there isn’t any suitable answer to that question.

So, its my turn to look away … my turn to fall quiet.

“I’ve been hurt, Alex. Too many times for me to tell you about. I know … I must appear shallow and ditzy to a man like you, but I … I’ve used that persona as a way to manage what I’ve been through.”

I can see something in her eyes … something almost dark and glossed over with tears and shadows … but it is gone quickly and I press with my eyes, but can find no sign of it, again.

“I shouldn’t have come here, Alex …” She glances as me with this frightful look as though she realizes I’ve caught on to the glazed over expression from a moment ago and peered into something I shouldn’t have and seems to decide she has to leave in a hurry, “… You were right … I’m just going to go. I won’t call again … I’m sorry I tempted you … I’m sorry for all of it …”

I want to pull her back. I want to kiss her again and tell her that even though everyday without her has hurt, I never would have given it up for the world. I want to tell her a lot of things, but I wind up standing with my mouth agape, as I watch her jaunt away.

Bethany

So, this is what it feels like to have your heart ripped from its home.

I’ve never had my heart broken so brutally before.

I suppose when Brian Lewis cheated on me last year, that I’d probably never known what that felt like at all. I hadn’t loved Brian. I had never actually felt anything even close for Brian to what I feel for Alex.

I find myself storming away so resolutely that I don’t even realize his jacket is still hugging my freezing skin. Not even when I make it to my car and peel out of the parking lot … It’s not until I am home and settled on my bed, looking in my full-length mirror, right this instant, that I realize I still have the warm attire on.

I lower my head to the collar and realize it smells strongly of Alex.

Like sweat, alcohol, cologne, and male musk … and something else that is uniquely, Alex.

I feel the patter of my heartbeats and I sob until I can’t hear anything but the sound of my own self-hatred.

If I were older, he’d want me. He’d leave his wife in a second to be with me. He’d have done more than kiss me outside tonight … and he wouldn’t have looked so broken.

So, filled with despair – because of me.

I take a moment to realize I’m doing it again. I’ve pushed my nails down hard into my upper-thighs and I can feel myself drawing blood with half-mooned crescents that now line the skin.

I have a great deal of scars on my upper-thighs. Some are made by my own hands and some aren’t. I’ve never told anyone about the ones that aren’t from me. I realize in this moment that I almost told Alex … I almost made such a mistake …

And it would have been … a mistake.

Because Alex can only see torment when he looks at me.

I torture this man … this man that I love, that I know loves me.

Age is just a number. It doesn’t speak to the soul that lives inside of me … of him. Because if it did, then it would be able to bridge the gap between us and society would accept what we feel as uncontrollable.

We were both sucked into a game, forced to play as avatars that weren’t our age, but our souls had been inside of those hollow shells. I’d seen into his soul, straight through ‘Seaplane’s’ eyes, and he’d seen into mine, straight through, ‘Oberon’s.’

If anything, being in Jumanji had proved that our bodies do not always reflect the souls that lay inside. My soul is not reflected in a blond-haired, blue-eyed female, but in my actions.

So why can’t I make him see me, now?

Now that we’re here … together?

He can’t understand how unhappy I’ve been … and for so long. I really don’t want him to understand, because I’d have to open myself up to him.

More than I already have.

I make my way under the covers and draw up my knees until I’m bunched in the fetal position.

I’ve always felt safest when I’m in this position. And I’ve always wanted someone to hold me … but just like always, there isn’t anyone here.

It’s just me.

And it always will be, just me.

I hear the fluttery chirp of birds in the air. Their twitters and trills have a smile curling onto my lips, despite my soured mood.

I know it’s pathetic, but I have yet to remove the coveted protection of Alex’s leather jacket.

I don’t want to lose the smell of him. It lingers on my skin almost like a promise and I want to keep him close to me for as long as I physically can.

If he will never allow for us to have each other, then I will cling to what I can have, for comfort.

I could use it as an excuse to see him, and that has crossed my mind, but then I’d have to return it … and I’d rather have this piece of him, than nothing at all.

Seeing him once, doesn’t compare to having him warm and against me, like a second skin.

If I close my eyes and imagine it, I can almost picture him, here with me. His lanky body tucked against mine, a lazy arm draped around my shoulder, and his musk and cologne thick in the fresh air, all around me.

Just the thought makes the space between my thighs tingly and wet.

I imagine Alex, the way he was last week. Passionate. Drunk. And practically bursting out of his slacks from wanting me.

I squeeze my thighs subtly as I walk, trying not to want him so badly, but knowing its no use. I’ve spent the morning with my newfound friends and they were oblivious to the fact that I wasn’t as talkative as I usually am. They were even more oblivious to the fact that I’ve got a man’s jacket covering my upper-half.

Honestly, Spencer spends most of his time, when he’s gathered with the rest of us, forcing his tongue down Martha’s throat, and Fridge is primarily so grossed out by their antics, that none of them really notice what I contribute.

Or my lack of contribution for the last week, actually.

I’ve worn his jacket for a week … and none of them have noticed.

I’ve been surprised that Alex hasn’t returned for his jacket, and I’m beginning to think he doesn’t remember our conversation. He was fairly drunk that night. I suppose it would serve me right for what I tried to make him do.

Split up his family …

For me …

I sigh and step into my house, giving a general sweep in the living room and that’s when I lay eyes on him … HIM …

My worst nightmare.

I can smell the rank stench of cigarettes in the living room air, when I walk from the foyer across the threshold into the living area.

My skin crawls with realization and my heart races a mile a minute, eyes blotting with tears.

“What are you doing here …?” I half-shriek out at him, a terrified look must be reflected in my blue eyes.

“Is that anyway to greet your old man?! Huh?” He’s unarguably drunk … at two in the afternoon, possibly high too, and has a cigarette balanced between two fingers, lazily.

I haven’t seen my Dad in close to nine years. The last time, he’d stolen the family television, hawked it for drug money and Mom had kicked him out.

Mom doesn’t know our history; she just thinks he’s a deadbeat that we’re both better off without.

I inch back away, when he stands up. I want to cry – I want to throw things … but I’m too startled to do more than gape.

“It is, considering all that you’ve done!” I snap, trying to sound less terrified than I actually am, and I don’t know how well it’s working.

I want to call Alex. He’s the first person I think about, then I remember that I don’t belong to Alex … He isn’t here to protect me …

My dad laughs at that … as if I’ve said something amusing. What happened wasn’t amusing … none of it was.

“You always were an ungrateful little bitch, weren’t you? I suppose you get it from your, Ma,” his voice turns low and gravely as he gets up real close so that he can whisper in my ear, and my stomach tightens in knots.

I take a step away from him. He makes me feel like a little girl again … I’m not a little girl anymore …

“Oh! There you are, Sweetheart!” My mom rounds the corner just in time to see my dad taking a step back, to offer her his most charming smile, behind another cigarette drag. She hasn’t however, witnessed the threatening way he spoke to me and it feels like old times.

Too much like old times.

“Mom, what is he doing here?!” I step away from him, in order to outright address her, and she whisks my concerned tone away with a bat of her hand.

“He’s just going to be staying with us for a few days. He’s been down on his luck, but he promises that this time he isn’t going to steal anything. He doesn’t need to, since I make more than enough to cover his debts and help him get back on his feet,” she sounded like a brainwashed imbecile. It’s been nine years, but even I can still remember the horror of living with him. I can feel it in my bones … and I can almost feel the residual ache from down between my thighs. All traces of arousal have dissipated.

“Mom, please tell me you don’t mean that! Please tell me this is just a joke … a prank …” but the odor of my dad is too foul to be a prank, and I can tell by his half-sinister smile that he has every intention of staying here.

With us.

“Don’t be so obstinate, Bethany. I know that having all this money like we do, that you’ve gotten a bit spoiled, but surely you can find it in your heart to welcome your own father back into your life, he’s still a good man, he’s just made some mistakes,” I can’t believe she is defending him!

This monster!

I want to scream at her … I want to shout about what he’s done, but that would make it so much more real.

Realer than the crawling, scaly feeling of my skin.

I can feel his eyes on me and its such an unpleasant feeling. A feeling I haven’t known in nine years …

“I … I’m going to my room …” I whisper to her and turn on my heel, before either of them can utter another word to me.

I take shelter behind my closed door and wish that I had a lock on it, desperately.

I’m trembling head to toe and I fumble in my pocket for my iPhone.

When I finally manage to yank it out, I’m dialing for Alex before I can stop myself. I hear the rings on the other end. I am frantic with the wondering about whether or not he is going to answer and then he does.

On what would probably have been the last ring, I hear his voice.

“I thought I made it clear the other night, Bethany, we can’t do this. Okay?” He sounds mad. There’s a curbed edge to his voice and I can’t fight back the tears that clench my heart.

“Alex … Alex, Please …”

“I mean it, Bethany. I have to think of my daughters. I have to think about what this would do to them. It would destroy them. And I’m too old for you. Just don’t call here … don’t call me again …”

I try again to get a word in edgewise, but then he’s hung up and the ache in my chest tightens.

The phone drops from my ear and lands on the sheets of my bed.

He was the only thing I wanted. The only man I’ve ever loved … and my age disgusts him … my skin … my body … I’m too young … I’m not good enough.

I want to scream and I want to throw things … but I don’t. I slide off the jacket he gave me and I drape it over the back of my desk chair.

I’m sobbing and shaking … and I honestly don’t know what to do. I can’t call my friends, because I don’t want them to know what has been done to me in the past. I don’t want them to know what my mom has just let back into my life, with open arms.

And maybe she’s right – I’m selfish – because I don’t matter … to anyone. I’m never gonna matter at all.

I start to dig my nails into my thighs, because it’s the only thing that helps. It’s the only thing that can make the pain that’s splintering deep inside, even remotely abate.

I want the noise to stop. I want it to stop.

When my dad is around, I’m different. That’s always been true.

It was true nine years ago when I was eight years old and made my first crescent-moon shapes into my thighs. It is true now, when I realize my promise to Alex can never stand.

Because I won’t stay here … not while my dad is here … and Alex won’t help me.

He made it clear he wants no part of me. I understand … I do. I’ve caused him nothing but pain and detriment for twenty-one years – and it’s not fair. It’s not fair to ask him to give up his life for me. I’m not worth that.

I’m never gonna be worth all that.

I jump almost out of my skin, when I hear the door to my room open.

My dad’s dark-blue eyes that match my own, pair-off with mine.

I shrink back against the wall, when he steps into my bedroom, (which is supposed to be my sanctuary) letting the door slam behind him.

I’ve left my phone on my bed, even if I wanted to call for help, he would be on me, before I could so much as grab it.

“What are you doing in here?! Get out of my room!” I shout at him, ready to scream for Mom, if I have to.

I can imagine my eyes are wild and I’m running out of options.

“Now, Bethany … I don’t think that tone is appropriate. You used to like it when I was in your room … don’t you remember? Hm?” he insinuated such unspeakable things and I am genuinely speechless, because of what he’s said.

I swallow a thickness that has built in my throat and I count in my head as I try to imagine a way out of this mess. When I open them again, he’s right on top of me. His body is practically crushing mine to the wall.

“I’ll scream for Mom …” my voice is meek and mild.

I want to sound brave and unafraid, but I can’t. I’m crippled by fear. By emotion …

“Scream all you want, Darling, your mom had to head back to the office, it’s just us … and you have no idea how long I’ve wanted it to be just us … How many times I envisioned myself coming back … just for you … You’re such a vision now … so pretty with your blond hair and gorgeous eyes …” he smiled a twisted and sinister thing and I want to claw off my face.

Knowing that to him, I’m beautiful … desirable … It makes me sick.

Truly.

I know he is telling the truth about Mom, because she often leaves for the office. Day and night. It’s how she was able to afford this expensive house. All of my expensive material possessions … She works for a prestigious law firm in the city. The downside being I rarely ever see her.

“Please … Dad …” I force myself to squeak out the word, “Let me go …” I feel his hands on me. I feel his grip, can practically taste his breath and I want to vomit.

I want to be sick.

But instead I am made defenseless by him and I can’t force my body to move.

It’s like I’m that eight-year-old little girl again and I don’t know how to defend myself … I don’t know how to be anything but a victim to this man and his deviant acts.

I feel the grossness of my own skin and somewhere deep down I wonder if Alex could see this brokenness in me. Was it a factor into why he won’t have me? Can he see the sins painted like a portrait inside of me? On my skin? Over my heart?

Is that what makes me not good enough? Not incentive enough?

Not preferable to a loveless marriage?

“You always were cute when you begged …” he comments and I close my mouth. I won’t suffer the indignity of groveling to him.

Not this time.

Before I can so much as flinch, he has me lifted off the floor and thrown down onto my bedsheets. I scramble for my phone, but he sees what I’m doing and gets there first, lifting my phone from my bed he throws it across the room and it lands, uselessly in the corner with a dull thud.

I can’t utilize it all the way over there. I can’t use Siri with my dad on top of me.

And even if I could, who would I call to come help? The cops? My friends? Alex?

I shudder when I think about Alex … his cold tone of voice just now. His words telling me to never contact him again …

Tears well up in my eyes and I sob as my dad slaps me across the face. It stings and I clutch my cheek. He seems to revel in my simpers of fear, because he draws me up and tears my shirt off my upper-half.

I sob and try to cover my breasts, but it’s no use. He’s shredded my bra and tattered my shirt.

And I’m tremoring so much underneath him, that my breasts are jiggling this way and that. He doesn’t linger on my breasts, he feasts his eyes on my skirt and shreds that, next.

I’m not little anymore, even though I feel like I am.

And I hear my father’s next words, shot down at me, pointedly.

“Your rack is small, I expected better from my daughter, come puberty …” he taunts me and I feel my belly wrench sickened by his words.

At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if I disappointed Alex … I remember how he’d touched my breast that night. How he’d fingered my nipple and kissed me like I mattered. Like I hung his moon. Was it all lies? Did he say those things to make me feel better about being rejected? Is every man just a liar?

My father used to compliment me. He used to hurt me while he complimented me.

Now … now he isn’t complimenting me … he’s just hurting me … hurting to hurt …

I want my brain to turn off. I want this trauma to leave me alone.

Why won’t it go away?! Why won’t he go away?!

I screech when I feel him ripping away my panties. I want to cover myself, but I can’t hide my breasts and my sex at the same time … I’m useless.

He never undressed me all the way before. It used to be touches … fingers where I didn’t want them. Hands … lips … teeth … where I didn’t want them …

Cuts … bruises … aches … where I didn’t want them …

I realize far too late, what he has planned this time.

“NO! Please Daddy! I’m a virgin! Please don’t …” I’m starting to beg when one of his fingers starts plodding around down there. I draw my legs closed and try to fight. My instincts to keep myself pure … to keep any man from ever having me this way … kick in.

I promised, Alex that I’d never be with anyone else … If I couldn’t have him … there would be no one else …

What kind of whore loses it to her own Daddy?

I’d never wanted to find that out.

Not since I was eight years old, had I ever wanted to find that out …

“Daddy! Daddy! Please!” I scratch at him, claw and kick out at him, desperately trying to dislodge him. But he is thick, pure muscle. And he’s heavy. He’s probably as tall as Alex, definitely as strong. And I never stood a chance. Not then … and not now.

He wrestles me down, punches and beats me until I can taste blood in my mouth and bruises have started to form on my face … across my bared skin … he drags me down into the filth and shit with him, the way he always has.

If Alex didn’t want me before … he’d never want me now …

I can feel so much pain under my skin … I feel so much ache in my heart …

And I want to die, when I feel the throbbing length of him tear inside of me.

He doesn’t let me adjust, he just makes me bleed and hurt. He makes me cry out for him and I know he’s done damage, and probably so does he, but he doesn’t care.

“You’re my whore, now. Do you hear me? That’s all you’ve ever been good for … God you feel so tight baby … so fucking tight … saving yourself for me … to be my whore …” he rambles and I tune him out.

I shut my eyes and imagine Alex.

I imagine how gentle he might have been if he’d been my first. I imagine how his hot kisses would feel on my skin. I even think of his little girl – his Bethany … and how he’d never hurt her this way. My namesake will live happily, with the man I love. She’ll be loved and cherished by Alex … but I am not good enough to be. Especially not now …

Alex would despise me if he could see me for what I am.

I’ve portrayed myself as this innocent, ditzy, flower … but I’m not that … I was never that.

Daddy made sure of it …

“Daddy …” I whine out, reverting back to what I was before. The little girl that just wanted her father to love her properly. To not make her hurt when he touched her. To not make her want to scar her skin and make it ugly so he wouldn’t touch it.

I’m her … I’m me … and my soul is still in this shell.

Even if my body isn’t proper … my mind is the same. My soul is the same …

Why couldn’t Alex see my soul? Why couldn’t he latch on to it?

Did he really wait twenty-one years for me? Or does he just want me to believe that he has?

I cry out in pain, when Daddy pumps his hips, harder, drawing more blood and marking my skin as his. He kisses hickeys into my shoulders, makes artwork out of every bit of me he can … and I lay here and I take it, because I can’t fight anymore.

He’s beaten that out of me.

I just can’t do it anymore …

Mom let him do this to me. She let him in …

I make a sound in my throat when I hear him grunt and I feel his seed pulsing into me. And its all I can do to lay there and let him take his pleasure. I don’t think about the consequences, because there aren’t going to be any.

He killed whatever was left of me.

Alex did first, when he threw me away like I was garbage … and Daddy just killed what Alex hadn’t, by stealing away the one thing I was proud to have … my purity.

I feel him pull off of me and wet my previously clean sheets with his disgusting seed. The same seed that created me … I try not to think about that … because everyone would just be better off if I hadn’t existed.

Alex wouldn’t have hurt all these years (if he really was hurting) and Daddy wouldn’t have broken me. Mom wouldn’t have felt obligated to choose me over work and lose clients sometimes, because of it, and I wouldn’t feel like this.

I wouldn’t have to feel anything at all.

I can feel his eyes on me, but its not like it matters. I have no reason left to defend myself. I wince when I see him pluck out his pocketknife.

I know what he intends to do with it – and I let him – same as I always did.

He carves little slits into my thighs, takes sick pleasure in it. I can hear him chuckling and I shudder as I feel myself bleed. He carves into my belly, my abdomen, little teensy cuts. Not enough to kill, but enough to let me be clear about what he’s capable of – enough to maim.

He speaks up now, and kisses my cheek, “Don’t you go forgetting who you belong to, you hear? And give my best to your, Ma … turns out I don’t need to stay after all … I got what I came for,” he taunts and I let the tracks of my tears run down my cheeks.

I lay for an indiscernible amount of time on my bed-sheets. I listen to the dying down of the chirping birds outside, the same ones that game me hope just over an hour ago. The outside light dims slightly, by the time I finally can bring myself to move.

It’s so painful.

I’m hurting so much …

I clench my eyes shut and try to breathe through my mouth. I feel the way my air clogs in my throat and I cough and choke on the taste of my own blood from cuts in my mouth, caused by his fists.

I stare over at my own reflection in the mirror and I blanch. My ivory skin is littered in bruises and scabbed-over cuts. I’m hideous. My eye is bruised black and my jaw, too.

I stand up and feel the struggle of it in every muscle and bone in my body. Especially between my thighs … I stick my hand down there and find I’m coated in blood.

I barely make it to the bathroom before I’m sick into the toilet bowl. And I heave and heave until I have nothing left inside of me to give.

Wiping my mouth, I flush the toilet and go stand in front of the sink. I can’t believe the sight of me up close … I can’t believe that I look like something out of my worst nightmare.

I just know that in my heart, I want to never feel again.

I want this to be the last bad thing to ever happen to me. And I need to say goodbye … Alex deserves to know why I couldn’t keep my promise. My promise to live and never be with anyone else. I owe him that much …

I lower my aching, decrepit bundle of bruises onto the bed. I can’t think of myself as having skin, nor a body … not anymore.

That luxury was taken from me. My heart … my soul feels detached from this disgusting husk.

I compose a letter. It isn’t fancy … I don’t even know if its legible, I cried my way through it, but I seal it into an envelope and I scrawl his name on the front. Simple. Easy.

It’s the only easy part of this whole day.

I head over to my closet with all the strength I can muster and I struggle into a pair of jeans. I almost hit the roof when the denim touches my swollen cunt, but I don’t have a choice … My father damaged me too severely to head out, uncovered.

I pull on a long-sleeved shirt and lastly, I don Alex’s leather jacket, before I decide to tackle my facial bruises with cover-up.

I do the best I can to cover up the forming bruises on my left eye and across my jaw. I decide it’s not perfect, but it’s enough to not have anyone ask me questions and I prepare myself, because I know it’s going to be difficult to make it there.

But I am determined to make sure he receives this letter. Even if he doesn’t care to hear from me again. Even if he probably wouldn’t accept my call, I can at least give him this. It’s something he can have … it’s what is left of my soul.

He can tear it up or keep it and I’ve told him as much within the contents.

Perhaps a small part of me wishes that he’ll choose to keep it. That he’ll carry me in his heart … but I’m making this easy. Because he deserves easy. He would never contemplate leaving his wife for anyone else.

He basically told me that, last week. So, I owe him this.

I owe him his freedom. Freedom from the burden of choosing between me and his daughters. Because I want him to know he doesn’t owe me a life. I have no life. Not anymore. My father made sure of that.

I manage somehow to walk all the way to his house. It takes twenty minutes, which is longer than it should be and when I finally make it to his sidewalk, I see his mailbox at the end of his sidewalk. And I head over to it. I start to open it with a creak and halt in my tracks.

I see my namesake, peering at me from just up the driveway. Her wide, blue eyes are trained curiously on me. She’s beautiful … healthy … and she looks happy … she’s everything that I can never be.

I want to talk to her. I want to tell her that she’s named for me, but I don’t. I slip my letter into the mailbox and I put a finger to my lips, to tell her to keep this between us.

She cranes her head to the side and I smile at her. I don’t feel much like smiling, but I do, for her.

And I walk away, leaving her staring after me, with a cant to her head.

I made it home somehow, and I’ve stripped myself of every bit of scratchy clothing, except for Alex’s jacket. I want it with me.

I want to feel like his arms are around me when I finally succumb.

I don’t know how long it will take … I imagine it won’t take long.

When I made it home, I raided Mom’s medicine cabinet. She has sleeping pills left over from when she used to take them. She’s probably forgotten they exist, but I haven’t. I took one, once. When I was most desperate to sleep, because my dreams had been of the past – of father.

The pill had worked like a charm and I’d fallen into a dreamless slumber.

This time, I drank them all down, one by one, I can feel the mixture of pills and water, settling in my stomach.

I close my eyes because I want it to happen faster. I want to be numb, so I don’t have to feel all of this excruciating pain my father left me with.

Vile, monstrous, evil … that’s what I should call him.

He’s not like, my Alex would be. Except Alex isn’t mine. He doesn’t want to be and I don’t want him to choose me.

I don’t.

It’s too selfish to choose me when he has little Bethany and her sister.

I feel the numbness starting … in my toes … in my head … all over …

I’m fuzzy and my thoughts are fleeting. I take a whiff of Alex on his jacket and I let out a moan and start to cry.

I cry silent tears that roll down my cheeks and fill me with sadness, as I mourn the fact that my soul wasn’t born quick enough, to be Alex’s. I wish I’d been there to keep him from misery. I wish that more than anything …

And I mourn the life we might have known, if my father hadn’t made me untouchable.

Alex

There was a week of radio silence from Bethany. An entire week of me wondering about her, drinking myself into oblivion, and hating my thoughts for wandering to her.

Last night, my mind wandered when I was on top of my wife. Inside of her … and for a nanosecond, I’d seen Bethany under me. So young … with translucent skin, and a radiant smile.

I’d wanted to go to her … I’d wanted to kiss her and take her … the same way that I’d wanted last week …

It’s the most selfish want in the whole world. To be with this teenage girl that I can never have …

I’ve decided that if I have broken her heart … that if I’ve broken both of our hearts to smithereens than I have to stick by that decision.

I can’t waver and I can never see her again.

Because if I see her, day after day, then I will crack and fracture until I’m bound to her like a leech to a leg. And I will wind up taking her to bed … and there is no going back from that.

Kisses can be explained away … I can convince myself that they can … but never a night with her.

If I give her that, then I must devote the rest of me to Bethany in totality.

I’ve spent the past week with my children and Tiffany, I’ve really taken a look at the life that I’ve stumbled into by carelessness and stupidity. But despite this never being what I wanted, I’ve looked into the eyes of my children and I’ve seen how happy they are. Especially, little Bethany, and I’ve wondered what kind of father I’d be … what they’d think of me … if I walked out on them and their Mom.

If I just up and shacked up with a seventeen-year-old girl.

None of them would ever be able to understand. Even if I waited until Bethany is legal, it would still be certifiably asinine to my wife and daughters, because they could never understand my love for Bethany.

They can’t understand how long I’ve burned for her.

So, I’ve made up my mind …

That’s that …

So, when she had called out of the blue, after my mind was made up, I’d done the best thing I could think to do in the moment, I’d told her not to call me again and hung up.

I can’t have her dependent on me, no matter the situation.

I just can’t.

Because if she believes she can call me when she needs protecting, or just wants someone to be there, then it will venture into far more dangerous territory and once in a while, will turn into every day … and eventually I’ll cave.

Because I know my willpower and it isn’t very strong.

Not when I’ve spent over half my life, wanting her.

However, after I hung up – up until now – I can’t stop thinking about why she’d been upset.

I can still hear the chill of terror in her voice … and I wonder if I should have hung up after all.

What was the emergency? What had made her call after a solid week of not calling?

I thought it might have been about my leather jacket at first.

The jacket is one I’ve had – ironically – since high school. My senior year to be exact. It was something I purchased for myself, with my babysitting money. I had wanted something that was just mine – something that I earned – and I didn’t tell Bethany (like I should have) when I draped it over her shoulders, but I bought it back then, because one day I’d planned on giving it to her.

When we met again, I’d always planned for it to be under friendlier circumstances. And I’d wanted her to have the first thing I ever bought myself, from when I was her age.

It was silly – stupid even – but I found myself relieved when she didn’t call to bring it back. Because that means my jacket is with her, where I’d always meant it to be.

But she hadn’t even mentioned the jacket … not that I let her get a word in edgewise, so I can’t help but wonder, what she’d been calling about.

I don’t have much time to ponder, however, because little Bethany has wandered in from the outside and she has a frown written on her face.

It’s rare when my daughter frowns, she’s always been such a happy little girl. I open my arms, and she runs at a sprint into my lap, sitting up on my knee, with that same sordid look on her face.

“What’s the matter, Pumpkin?” I ask her, gently.

Tiffany is down in the basement, doing her afternoon workout and it’s my job to keep an eye on the girls right now. Sarah is down for her nap and Bethany was playing just outside where I was supposed to be keeping an eye on her, but I admit … I’ve been distracted …

“Not suppos’d ta say …” she says, candidly and I crop up one of my eyebrows.

“Oh? And why aren’t you supposed to say, Sweetheart?” I coax, rubbing my hand along her back.

She shrugs at this, and crinkles up the corner of her mouth.

“I dunno, Daddy … it’s a secwet,” she says in a hushed tone, then peeks around as though she expects someone to be watching us.

I feel chills starting now, and I wonder if someone hurt her while she was out there … if someone laid hands on her and I didn’t notice, Tiffany would never forgive me … I’d never forgive myself …

“Did someone hurt you, Honey?” I croon.

She immediately shakes her head ‘no’ then stares out the front window.

“There wus a gurl …” she finally admits to me and I proceed to rub her back, in soothing circles.

“A girl? And what was this girl doing?” I ask, hesitantly.

“Stuck sumfin in the mailbox …” she responded in a sing-song voice, “then di’ this …” she lifted her finger to her lips and made a ‘shh’ noise, “an’ she wus hur’t real bad, Daddy … walkin’ funny …”

I felt my stomach plunge with dread and I stood up, and lowered her down to the floor.

“I’ll be right back, okay Honey? Don’t move, just stay here, can you do that?” I ask her, though I’m already half out the door.

She shrugs again, then gives me a nod of her head. I sprint to the mailbox, gather the mail and charge back into the house. I recognize my name scrawled onto an envelope without a postage stamp … no return address and I know who left it.

Even though I’ve never seen her handwriting – I just know.

I tear open the top and discard the rest of the stack onto the kitchen table, as I hurry to read what she’s written:

Alex,

You can either throw this away or keep it, I don’t care either way.

I just think you deserve to know why I can’t keep the promises I made you.

I promised you that I’d live, and that even if it hurt, I’d keep living and that I

wouldn’t ever be with anyone else. Well, I’m afraid I have to break those

two promises, that I made, because I can’t do this anymore, Alex. I

can’t pretend I’m okay this time. But it’s not you, I want you to know

that. You didn’t cause this. You deserve to be free. Free to live your

 life without regrets and me lingering over your head. You deserve to

 be able to raise little Bethany and Sarah with their mother. And I want

 that. I want you to do that, okay? I don’t want you to be sad for me.

Because you can’t kill what’s already dead. You don’t owe me a life,

Alex. Because I don’t have one to save, not anymore. I wished I was

born sooner, Alex. I wished I was born when you were born and that

we could have met and loved normally. I know in Jumanji that you

saw my soul, even when I was inside of an avatar, because I saw

and felt yours. I had just wished that I had been old enough for you,

 and that you could still see my soul hadn’t changed, just as I saw that

yours hadn’t. But I don’t wish Alex, not anymore. Now all I can think

about is making the pain stop. And that’s all there is now, Alex, pain.

It’s like I’m in an avatar … like the one in Jumanji and I want to go

back home. I want to be in my home … maybe when you join me,

someday, when little Bethany is grown with kids and you’re a

Grandpa, content and ready, you’ll follow behind me. Maybe in

that place it won’t be sinful for you to love me. No one will have to

understand, because it will just be our souls. It will just be our

essences. I’m sorry I’ve made this letter longer than I intended. I

meant to make it simple and easy. I know you said never to

contact you again, but I had to break that rule, too. Because

I thought you’d want me to. I’m sorry if you’d rather I hadn’t.

I’m just sorry, Alex. For everything I’ve done to you. And for the

pain I’ve caused you. I’m just so sorry.

Bethany

My heart stops halfway through and as I power-read through the rest, I can hear the blood in my head, pounding in my ears to make up for it.

The words are smudged with her tears, but I manage to read it all. And by the end I’m openly crying down my face.

What happened to her? What happened that was so bad … why didn’t I just stay on the phone? She’d begged me … she’d pleaded with me and I’d been cold … and so cruel …

I can’t think about that right now, because I don’t know how long its been since Bethany left this.

How long did it take my daughter to come in the house and tell me, after she left?

I feel panic rising in my chest and I stash the letter in my pocket, hurry to the door, and grab my keys from the hanger next to it along with my coat from the closet.

I remember through my panic, that my daughter is still standing in the living room. Right where I told her to wait for me, with a curious expression on her face.

“Go downstairs, and tell your mom that I had a work emergency and that I don’t know when I will be home, okay? Can you do that for me?” I ask her.

She appears worried but nods, scampering off to do as I’ve told her.

I don’t stay to find out what my wife’s reaction will be. I’ve never abandoned her in the middle of the day before. Not especially under the guise of work, when I’m supposed to be off.

But I couldn’t come up with a better lie under the circumstances.

I fumble for my keys at my car, opening the door, in order to finally climb in and speed away. I rip down streets like a man possessed. Straight through stop signs and narrowly miss a collision or two.

I need to get to her. I don’t care if I make it there in one piece, at this point, I don’t really deserve to.

I mentally scream at myself for my own stupidity. I’ve waited so long for Bethany … what was I thinking, casting her aside?

I see myself for the asshole I was to her now, and I don’t feel good about it.

If anything has happened to her … if I’m too late … I’m never going to forgive myself for it.

I barely remember to pull my keys from the ignition when I climb out of my car, and storm up her front sidewalk. I try the front door and find it isn’t locked.

I thank God for whatever mercy he shows me and I slam the door and charge up the stairs. I’ve never been in her house, but I know all the bedrooms in this neighborhood are built upstairs.

It’s a given.

I search each room frantically, until I find her, curled up in the fetal position on what must be her own mattress in her bedroom, and my heart drops into my stomach with what I’ve found.

I don’t think, I just stumble over my own feet to make it over to her bedside, kneeling down on top, I pull her head into my lap. My mind it trying to process what I’m seeing.

I’m trying to understand who could have done this to her … what kind of perverse monster did this to her?

Bethany isn’t wearing any clothes, except for my jacket. It’s all she has on … Her legs are bruised, I can see from the new angle I’ve positioned her in that she’s got bruises all across her middle, neck, chest, face … She’s covered those on her face with make-up, but her tears have washed some of that make-up away …

And my stomach lurches. I want to be sick, but I don’t have that luxury.

She’s unconscious … but she’s breathing.

I search for what she’s done to herself … and I find an empty pill bottle right next to her pillow.

I scan over it and realize what I have to do.

An ambulance might not be able to make it on time, and I won’t let them take her away from me … I am never going to let anyone take her away from me, again. And if I call them, they’ll commit her, for sure.

I hoist her into my arms and carry her all the way to the bathroom, planting her down in front of the toilet I shove my fingers down her throat. She immediately begins to gag and eventually, the pills come up and out of her system. I keep repeating the motion, forcing her to throw up the pills, repeatedly, until nothing more comes up.

She’s awake by this point, sobbing and choking for minutes after I am finished, but she’s alive … she’s conscious again and alive … I’m not too late ...

I can feel the letter she wrote me burning a hole in my pocket and I remember that she wrote that I don’t owe her a debt, but I do. I owe her my life. I owe her everything. And I should have come when she called me. I should have listened instead of telling her to leave me alone. Because if I’d have listened, I might have spared her this.

So, she lied when she told me this … whatever this is … isn’t my fault.

It is my fault.

It’s entirely my fault … and whatever happened to her after I hung up – is my responsibility.

She leans into me and sobs against my chest. She starts to speak, and its muffled but I can make some of it out.

“I t-told you n-not to c-come … w-why did you come …? W-Why did y-you s-save me?”

I pat her back and run my fingers through her hair.

Under any other circumstances the nakedness of her body might have excited me … I might have been unable to handle it, but right now, my mind is so charged with panicky fear that I can only think about what happened to her.

Who has beaten her? Who has made her want to die so badly? Who ruined her?

My next mission is going to be to kill them.

I don’t care who it was, I’ll make them suffer for it.

“I know … I know you did,” I whisper into her ear, “but I can’t let you die … Bethany … It’s selfish but I can’t lose you again … I was wrong to yell at you … wrong to hang up … forgive me Beth … forgive me … even though I don’t deserve it …”

I stroke her hair, rub her back and she trembles and shakes in my arms.

I hear her teeth chatter and her heart pound. I kiss at the nape of her neck and I brush my nose against her ear.

Anything to comfort her. Anything to take the pain she feels and make it better.

“D-Don’t leave me, A-Alex … p-please … don’t l-leave me again …” she pleads into my neck and I know she probably isn’t all there, still.

I know, because a minute ago she was chiding me for coming …

“Shh, Baby … I’m here … I won’t leave you, again … I promise … I’m right here …” I know she needs her rest. What’s been done to her … it must have taken its toll. And she must be exhausted.

Somehow, that registers in all of my fucked-up thoughts.

“Alex … S-Stay …” she whines, “h-he’ll c-come back ... and h-hurt me a-again … y-you shouldn’t have s-saved me …” her voice is meager, but I hear her every word.

I feel a surge of hatred in my belly at the thought of some man with his hands on her skin. Some man killing the spark that lived in her innocent eyes.

I need to clean her up.

I need to make this better, somehow.

I also need to know the extent of her wounds; I need to know what exactly transpired before she left me that note …

“Shh, I’m not gonna go anywhere, Beth. You’re safe … I won’t let anyone hurt you … never again …” I promise her, instantly, even if I don’t know who I’m up against, that doesn’t matter. I will break every single one of that man’s fingers if he so much as breathes near my Bethany, again.

Teenage boy … man … I’ll kill whomever he is …

I hoist her up from the bathroom floor and carry her into the shower.

“Can you stand?” I whisper with a coo into her ear.

She makes a simpering noise in her throat and does as I’ve asked. She stands on wobbly legs that barely keep her upright, so I lean her against the wall.

She’s clutching my jacket to her chest, covering her decency like her life absolutely depends upon it and I have to ready myself for what I have to ask her next.

“I need to clean you up … and the jacket needs to come off …” I see her eyes widen, frightful like I’d asked her to grant me the unthinkable and her head shakes, potently.

“P-Please … I d-don’t want you to s-see …”

My heart stabs with another ache and I don’t state the obvious that I’ve already seen at least a portion of what lays concealed under my jacket. I let her believe her decency has been spared – at least in front of me – for now.

I answer instead, “I have to, the leather will ruin under the water stream, I’ll let you put it back on, once I’ve finished,” I reassure her.

She eyes me apprehensively, then finally concedes.

I sigh my relief and help rid her of the jacket. Once it’s fully removed, I try not to gag at the explicit extent of her injuries.

I toss my jacket away, letting it land on the floor, near the toilet and turn back to face her, with a wounded expression in my eyes.

She immediately covers her breasts and clenches her jaw. I can see the muscle working, steeling her against saying anything, for now.

“Beth … Who did this to you?” I ask in a forcibly restrained tone, praying she will answer me.

She turns her eyes away and staunches her tears.

I sigh and begin to undress myself. First my shirt, then the rest of my articles of clothing. I want her to know that I’m not ashamed to let her see me. Things will never go back to the way they were last week … in the park.

I’m going to take care of her now, that way I should have, then. I want her to see that – understand it.

She closes her eyes and flinches away when I reach for her.

It’s a bodily reaction, almost rudimentary, but it still hurts to see her so damaged that even my touch is one she fears.

I suppose I’m a stranger to her, in many ways. We met in Jumanji – we connected on a level that only the pair of us can attest to – and I don’t even understand it myself, but I feel like I’ve always known her.

I realize, though, that she hasn’t had years to yearn for me, the way I have for her. And if the note she’s written is anything to go off of, someone has completely decimated her psyche. In her mind someone has ripped apart her body and left her soul to cling to her broken skin.

How am I going to fix that?

I can try to help bridge the gap between her body and the damage inflicted, but I don’t know if I can restore her mind to its rightful state.

I realize a shower is going to be too much for her to handle, so instead, I lean down and plug the drain, turning on the water, letting it pour into the tub and rise at our feet.

She stands, trembling and whimpering, keeping herself covered while spaced away from me as widely as the tub will allow.

I try not to look at her below the neck, but I find I can’t help myself. I survey her skin with my eyes and see so many brutal cuts. Marks that were clearly carved into her by the blade of a knife. I can’t trace the bruises – there are far too many of them.

I understand why she wrote that she only feels pain – it’s so apparently written into her pale skin.

“I’m not going to hurt you, okay?” I feel I need to ask her, even though I hope she knows that I’d never cause her physical harm.

Bethany trains her eyes on me, but doesn’t say anything. She just gives me this haunted stare that creeps and sinks down into my bones.

I reach out and hoist her, bridal style, into my arms and lower the both of us into the hot bath water. She shivers against my chest and curls her head down into it.

With easing touches, I spread her legs and let them fall on either side of my waist, so that she is now straddling me. Her breath catches in tiny hitches that make my heart bleed for her and I wish there is something I can do, to take her pain on myself. If I could – I would.

She jumps a mile when her lower-half accidentally brushes against my manhood. I see the split-second of pure fight or flight instinct in her blue eyes and she cringes back and slides a few inches down my thighs avoiding the offending part of me.

“Bethany …” I whisper and reach up to cup at her cheeks.

She takes a couple of shaky breaths before she will even entertain the idea of looking me in the eye.

“Beth … You’re safe now … I’m going to clean you but I won’t … the last thing on my mind is … is that … okay?” I am trying to be delicate. I don’t want to spook her anymore than she clearly already has been.

This isn’t the same girl that I met at the park last week. No. That girl is gone and that is my fault.

I will always be sorry for this.

I’m never going to ignore another call for help. Never again.

I just hope I’m not too late to salvage some part of Bethany. She has to still be in there … I won’t give up until I find her.

Bethany

It had been warm and dark. A white light had engulfed me and I felt like I was floating. I believed that I would finally be able to lift up and away from here.

This place is toxic … this place is death.

It’s cruel and punishing and I just want to be far away from here …

But something pulled me back. Something gripped me tight in the unending labyrinth of pure nothingness and wrenched me back into the pain … death … agony …

I could feel the pills … the water … as they were forced up my throat. I can still feel my throat is sore from his fingers down the back of it.

I retched for a good long time, even after he’d stopped forcing me.

I heard the flush of the toilet and I felt him lifting me again.

Time elapsed, passed … and now I’m spread for him – around him and I can feel the soft fleshy piece of him that makes him a man.

The piece that I wanted to be the first to touch my inner-walls …

Just the reminder that Alex was a flesh, blood man was enough to shock my system and make me remember my intentions … why I took all those pills in the first place!

And I wish I hadn’t taken him that letter. I wish with all my heart, that he wasn’t seeing me like this. Seeing me like a broken-down harlot without her faculties, because that is what I am.

I’m splintered and disgusting.

Untouchable …

So why is he touching me? Why is he trying to help me? I told him there isn’t anything worth saving and I meant that.

I meant it with every facet of my being.

I shiver with the top half of my body sticking out of the hot bathwater and I glance within his eyes, wishing I could make him understand what he’s doing to me.

My father wrenched me open and stole all the juiciest bits for himself. He took my dignity, pride, my will to exist …

I wanted, Alex … I did … I still do, deep down …

Just not like this …

Not when I look and feel like this.

Alex has these sad eyes trained on me and I want to tell him that he shouldn’t cry for me, but I can tell he has – and that he still wants to.

I hear him tell me that he’s not thinking about … that … but it makes me sick, because I am thinking about it. Not because I want him inside of me right now, but because Alex was supposed to be the one that claimed me. He was the one I dreamed would be my first since I met him in Jumanji.

Feeling that part of him didn’t just startle me into my senses, but it reminded me of what I can’t have now. Alex. Alex as my first – my only … and I can’t bear it.

I can’t bear that my father ripped that away from me.

I descend into tears. They pour down my cheeks and fall into the steaming bathwater and my vision blurs. Alex shows concern and draws me into his chest. I feel my breasts push flush against his front and I want him to touch me.

Not sexually … but with a loving, tender touch. I want him to comfort me, the way no one ever has before him. The same way he comforted me last week, when we stood in the park. His arms around my body, fingers tangled in my hair … I want – I ache – for that kind of compassion right now.

So, I ask for it, softly.

“A-Alex?” I whisper, “J-Just hold me?” I plead.

He promised that he won’t leave me again. That he is going to stay with me – protect me – but I don’t know whether to trust that sentiment. He still has two daughters … that need him … a wife that loves him …

I try not to think about it right now.

He saved me … even though I didn’t want him to.

He’s asking me to live – for him.

So, I’ll try.

Alex’s arms draw me in closer, until I’m so close I can feel him again – all of him – and I don’t flinch away this time. I settle into him, until my eyes grow heavy and exhaustion seeps under my skin.

Alex

I don’t know how long I end up holding her for. I just know that it’s what she needs, so I grant her wish.

The water is lukewarm by the time I separate her from the front of my chest, and I begin the long, tedious process of physically cleansing her of the filth and blood caked on her skin.

I start at her neck, scrubbing away the remaining blood from what looks like a blade that has cut her there. Then I make trails across her chest, trying not to innervate her skin, too substantially.

She makes little keens in her throat from time to time, but otherwise makes no move to stop me.

I can see embarrassment written in her eyes. It’s more like a deep, bruiting shame that doesn’t dwindle in her, actually.

I even notice her turn her face away when I reach her pelvis, just above her pubic area. Her jaw locks, then she turns her head back, to look me in right in the eyes.

I realize I’ve hesitated at her pelvis, and I note the darkness that dances in her eyes – it’s the same undeniable twinge that hit me when she told me about the boys that had ‘hurt’ her in the past, last week – and I understand immediately what has happened.

My hand starts to tremble and I can’t make it travel lower … I can’t make myself touch her there …

“Bethany …” my voice catches with tremors, and I ask her again, “Who did this to you?”

There is a flash of agony that sweeps behind her eyes, and is immediately followed by a breathy sob and shake of her head. Her hand lifts to conceal her mouth and she lets out guttural sobs and moans of tense, agony.

I want to help her. I want to take back whatever happened to her, today, but I can’t. I feel so helpless, because all I can do, is sit here and watch with devastation while she breaks down.

“W-Why didn’t you l-let me d-die? I w-wanted to d-die!” she starts to hit me, now, and I let her. I let her beat at my chest and strike me hard across the cheek with one of her hands. I let her crumble and I catch her, when she inevitably tires herself out and collides her face into my chest.

I kiss her forehead and soothe her as best I can, the way I would for my daughters. The way I would if little Bethany were hurting this way – or any way.

I wonder why Bethany’s parents aren’t here. For a moment I remember the smiling, happy little girl that Bethany had been when she was two. I remember her cradled in her parents’ arms with a carefree, glee, that only a toddler can possess.

I wonder what happened to tear that smile from her lips. And I wish so desperately to fix what ails her. But I can’t. I’m so fucking useless!

“I couldn’t let you die, Bethany … What about your parents? Hm? What about your Mom and Dad? They’d miss you so much.”

She goes stiff in my arms. I feel every muscle in her freeze with shock. Then, she is retracting from my arms, violently. Like I’ve physically violated her … then curls herself at the opposite end of the bathtub. Knees tucked up, face pushed in to hide it, and nails dug deep into the sides of her kneecaps. I watch her dig them in hard enough to draw blood!

“Bethany … What’s wrong? What is it? Did I do something? I didn’t mean to … Have I hurt you?” I panic, and search for the damage as I prop myself up on my knees, trying to inch in closer to her, without actually touching her.

She sobs harder and shrinks away with a flinch.

I take the hint and back away a few inches, giving her space.

I realize it might not have even been anything I’ve done. It could be a sudden flashback – or a memory … It could be the realization striking her regarding what has transpired …

I don’t know anything, for certain. And that’s the problem.

I’m floundering without all the answers that I so desperately need her to tell me.

I can’t push though; she needs to tell me in her own time. I want her to feel safe, not pressured.

I let her sit like that, for a long moment, neither of us saying anything, only her sobs filling the air. Every parental instinct inside of me, urges me to reach out and hold her. To comfort her until her tears, dwindle and fade away, but I don’t. I actively fight against those urges.

And eventually, her tears do stop on their own … but when she looks up at me, there is a hollowness in her blue eyes.

“Alex?” her voice is almost empty, quiet, “Would you ever hurt little Bethany?”

I furrow my eyebrows and I wonder what she means by such a question. It comes out of left field and I take a moment to gather my thoughts enough to supply an honest answer.

“Of course, not …”

She immediately looks away from me, and trains her eyes down into the soapy bathwater.

“Not even if you thought she was pretty? Not even if you were lonely?” I feel her trying to dig deeper and I feel my stomach turn. I don’t understand why she’s asking me these kinds of questions …

“I love her, she’s my daughter … I could never hurt her, Bethany. Same as I’d never hurt you … Of course, I think my little girl is pretty, beautiful even, but that’s what most parents think about their children, and it doesn’t make me want to hurt her … not in the way I think you mean …” I try to explain to her what it feels like to be a parent. At least in my mind.

When I became Bethany’s father it was under circumstances that I wished were different, but I found that I cannot regret her. Or Sarah. I love both of them with all my heart. I shudder to think of anyone, ever hurting either of them.

Bethany doesn’t look up she just keeps staring down into the still water in the tub.

“It’s because you’re a good, Daddy,” the way she says that word makes my skin crawl, apprehensively, “You wouldn’t climb into her bed at night … you wouldn’t touch when she pleads for you not to touch …” I can see her mind slowly fracturing apart. I can hear it in her voice … see it in her glossy stare …

I inch closer as understanding starts to worm its way underneath my skin.

She doesn’t try to pull away this time, as I fight back persistent tears and tilt her chin up in order to look her in the eye.

“Y-Your father … he did this to you?” I can barely choke out the words and I glimpse a quiver of revelation in her broken gaze. It’s only there for a second and then she tears her cheek from my hand and squeezes her eyes shut. Winding her arms so tightly around her drawn-up legs that her flesh turns from pink to white.

In this instant I hate that man with a raging fire that I didn’t know I could even possess inside of me.

I would have given my whole life to protect Bethany’s and this man had ravaged her … scarred her … ruined her … made her feel worthless …

There are no words that can express how deeply the fiery pits of hate burn in me towards the man that fathered her.

“I b-begged him to s-stop … I f-fought and I … I t-tried to stop him …” I bunch my hands into fists, the pigment shading white to match hers as I listen in agonized disquiet, “I-I was a v-virgin, A-Alex … I w-wanted to stay a v-virgin … I p-promised you … I promised t-there’d be n-no one else …”

I realize for the first time what she meant in the letter. About breaking two of her promises to me.

I couldn’t understand when I read it, what she meant by ‘being with someone else’ when she had clearly planned to end her life.

It now makes awful, mind-shattering sense.

“God … Sweetheart … You’re not … Bethany …” I scramble for words, but she collapses into my arms and I’m thrown for a loop. I draw her into my chest and I nuzzle my nose into her hair, breathe her in and kiss her forehead, cheek, temple … wherever I can, while my hands grasp tight to her hair.

“I’m h-his now, d-don’t you s-see? I c-can never b-be yours, b-because he m-made me h-his!” she hisses those words like they’re poison, bitter on her tongue. And I reel with the cusp of my own horror.

I spent so long simmering in my own pit of loneliness. I’ve been down to the depths of despair. I’ve known agony and self-loathing. And I remember how I felt the first time I laid with a girl.

I had been a virgin in Jumanji. Like Bethany … I’d never given myself to anyone. So that first night, when I got drunk and did cocaine for the very first time, after I’d returned, and I wound up in a random bed with a girl who’s face I can’t even recall now, I’d been so ashamed the next morning.

Because I’d realized that I could never just be with Bethany. I had ruined any and all ability to just belong to her. So, after that night, I’d belonged to no one. I’d been with as many girls as I could and I hadn’t looked back … I regret it.

All of it … But I can’t take it back.

And it’s different.

Its different than what happened to Bethany – my Bethany …

“Y-You could never w-want me n-now …” she breathes in a quivering tone.

I shake my head and I feel my belly roar with disagreement toward that statement.

“T-That’s what you think, Bethany?” I draw her face away from my chest and cup her cheek carefully in my palm, tracing patterns across her battered skin with my thumb, amicably, “You think I won’t want you?”

I go against my better judgement and I steal the softest of kisses from her lips. It isn’t feral and wild like the other night on that bridge, instead its soft and balanced. I taste her tears, subtly in the mix, and I finally retract, because I am so afraid that I’m going to frighten her, again.

“Beth … I want you, okay? Nothing I’ve done … nothing I’ve said … none of it’s ever been for lack of wanting you …” I smooth my hand across her back with my free hand, rubbing soap and water across her brutalized, but supple, skin, “And when you’re able … when you’re ready … I’ll make love to you.”

I feel her beginning to relax underneath my touch, her tears fall silently down her cheeks.

“Y-You can’t …” she breathes, “you’re t-too old f-for me … r-remember?”

My heart twinges with pain.

“Bethany—”

“You didn’t want me when I w-was pure … v-virginial … you definitely c-can’t now t-that I’m n-not …” she rushes out, clearly trying to flood me with reasoning.

“Listen to me, Bethany … Please …” I begin to plead with her, insistently, “What he’s done, it doesn’t count, Sweetheart … You’re not tainted … not in my eyes. You’re still a virgin, because you didn’t want it. You didn’t want him …” I can tell she isn’t convinced, and I decide to explain a little more, “I don’t remember who I lost my virginity to, Beth. I’ve been with so many girls … I’ve had so many one-night-stands, and I’m not proud of them. But they meant nothing to me. In my heart, I never cared for any of them. And I still don’t. Even being with my wife feels empty and hollow … nothing in the world would compare to being with you. Because I care for you … I love you … everything is different when it’s with the one you love, I know because even though I’ve never been with you, the kisses we share make me feel things that I haven’t been able to before. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be with you …”

Her eyes soften and I can tell that I am finally getting through to her. She’s finally starting to understand my meaning.

“I don’t want t-to ruin your f-family …” she admits.

I shake my head, softly. “You won’t. I love my girls, but when I thought I’d lost you … the whole drive over here for the duration I’d believed I would be too late … I realized the unforgivable mistake I made, by not choosing you, like I always planned to. I can’t live in a world where you don’t exist … and I don’t want to, Bethany. I don’t want that …” I kiss the base of her neck and touch my lips to her shoulder.

She winds her fingers in my hair and lets out a few choked sobs.

“I t-thought it w-was best … you s-said – on the p-phone—”

I clench my hand against her side, digging in harder than I mean, and she squeaked, prompting me to loosen my grip, “I know what I said …” I rush out, “and I’m sorry, Bethany … It truly was unforgivable. I should have known when you called—”

“I-It’s not your f-fault …” she simpers out.

I shake my head. “It is … it is my fault … I should have listened … you needed me and I wasn’t h-here …”

“It’s n-not … Mom let h-him in the house ... s-she told him he c-could s-stay … but he l-left after … a-after he …” I bunched my hand into a fist, in order to prevent myself from squeezing her in reaction.

“You won’t see him again … I promise. I’m going to take you somewhere safe … somewhere to recuperate … and after … after that I’ll figure something out …” my mind begins to race as I think about my family cabin, half an hour’s drive from here. I’ve had access since I was a teenager. Mom and Dad don’t mind if I use it. But I haven’t since before I met Tiffany. I doubt she even knows about it.

“Take me w-where?” she retracts and searches my eyes.

“I have a cabin, half an hour or so from here. Once you’re washed, we’ll head over there …” I didn’t want to risk that man coming back for seconds. Even if I am here to protect her, I don’t want her anymore traumatized than she is already, because I don’t think I’ll be able to restrain myself from bashing his head in.

She just nods, then lowers her eyes. “I w-won’t fight you …” she promises and I wonder if she doesn’t want to go, but then she’s handing me back the cloth I dropped into the water, and sudden understanding causes me to blush, “It j-just … it hurts so m-much, Alex …”

She spreads her thighs and I swallow the lump that’s suddenly lodged in my throat.

In this moment I have to remind myself that she trusts me – that she needs a fatherly figure right now – a true father … A caretaker …

I want to be that for her. Even if I can feel the bubbly instinct in my stomach that warns me of the implications of what I’m doing here. Of how the world will see the pair of us – I remind myself again, that I could have lost her.

She could have died … and I might never have seen her again.

It grounds me enough to turn her around and press her back to my front, so I can spread her legs apart and wipe delicately at her center. She makes little hitches in her breathing. Tenses up at the shoulders and actively cries out when I brush against her opening, still trying to clean all traces of the attack from her skin.

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.

Seeing – hearing – Bethany in this unspeakable kind of agony makes me want to kiss her everywhere. It makes me want to avenge her. And I want to kill her father for making her want to die – for convincing this sweet, innocent spirit that she’s not worthy of anything good.

I want to avenge her stolen innocence.

I wish I could go back and stay on the phone … go to her when she called for me. Rescue her from the man that marred and brutalized her flesh.

“Bethany …?” I finally whisper, when I’ve finished and she’s in agonized tears.

She doesn’t answer me. She just closes her legs, turns around on my lap, and clings tight to me, as though I’m her life support.

I drop the bloodied cloth and hold her in my arms. I cry with her and apologize to her in the cusp of her ear until my voice is dry and cracked. I want more than anything to know that she’s going to be okay. That she will heal, given time, but I don’t know if she will.

The words in her letter are still burned into my brain. And I know she might still believe herself to be a hollowed-out husk. A shell. Like our avatars in the game.

I want better for her. I left her so that she could have better …

I shouldn’t have left her at all …

I don’t know how long it takes to towel her off, after I pull the plug on the drain and heave her out of the barely warm water. I don’t know if I hurt her, because her eyes have gone distant again – and she’s not uttered a word through any of it. I don’t even know if she’s present, in her mind when I gather a duffel bag from her closet, and stuff a bunch of her clothes as well as a slew of her other personal belongings inside.

She won’t so much as glance at her bed, she insists on sitting on the floor, while she waits for me and I can’t help but notice the blood stains on her sheets. The proof of her stolen virginity is spattered on top of them. Right along with her father’s seed. I hadn’t noticed before, because I’d been too panicked while saving her life, to take in my surroundings.

My sense of morality kicked in to consume me.

I can’t leave her sheets like they are. She’s made it clear she doesn’t want her mother to know … and I won’t betray her – ever again.

So, I stripped the bed and throw her sheets in the washing machine and turn it on, before I return to help her dress.

Helping her up off the floor, I can’t help but see how difficult it is for her to even stand. I hold my tongue, as I help her into a loose-fitting nightshirt.

I’m not about to make her even attempt to wear real clothes. Especially not panties. I saw how she winced when I asked her if she wanted to try and don a pair.

The first words she speaks aren’t until I’ve packed up my car and return to her bedroom to collect her.

“I want t-to wear you j-jacket, Alex …” she manages to whisper out, “Please …”

I’d forgotten about my leather jacket. It was still in the bathroom, where I’d discarded it before I bathed her.

“Of course, Bethany, I promised, didn’t I?” I returned to the bathroom and fetched it for her.

She was quick to pull it on, bundling herself up, into the warmth of it.

Seeing her in my jacket … it makes me shiver through my entire body. My mind still refuses to process, how I almost lost her tonight. I don’t know if I will ever be able to process that I almost lost her.

After waiting twenty-one years … what was I thinking?

She’s the reason I’ve been so miserable … she’s who I’ve waited for … yearned for … and now she’s here … now she’s in front of me …

How could I have been so stupid?

The guilt is still a hungry beast inside of me, gobbling up my emotions and reminding me that I’m too old for her … but I have to try to fight past those feelings. Because she’s Bethany … and our ages are just numbers. I have to believe that my guilt will fade given time …

She catches me watching her, with her inquisitive optics and I reach out my hand for her to take in a gesture of solidarity – of comradeship.

“What will I tell, Mom?” she asks with a defeated tone to her voice.

I waver for a moment, realizing that her mother could consider what I’m doing kidnapping … that Bethany could be reported as a runaway …

“Tell her you’re at a friend’s house,” I clench her hand in mine, when she finally reaches out and takes it.

“My phone … its in the corner …” she seems to remember and stares over towards the corner next to her bed. I notice her discarded iPhone there, and realize that this is probably the longest she’s ever gone without it.

I remember how much she spoke about her phone addiction when we were in Jumanji.

I release her hand, venture to the corner and collect it.

It has a missed call from Martha, but no voicemail.

“Tell her you’re at Martha’s house,” I instruct, handing her phone over.

She nods, diminutively and pushes her phone into the pocket of my jacket.

“I can’t talk to her right now … I’m still too upset …” her voice isn’t stuttering anymore, but its still shaky. Noticeably unstable. Any parent would notice that something is wrong from the sound of it.

“C’mon, I’ll carry you to the car … it’s better if you rest,” I offer and she nods.

Without any further hesitation, I sweep her into my arms, bridal-style and carry her from the house and load her in the car.

She doesn’t look back at her house … not even as I drive away.

Bethany

I still feel the barbarous touch of my father on my skin. It crawls and slinks like a snake along the sand in the desert and cinches my heart … making it so I feel like I can’t breathe.

I want to explain the depths of my hurt to Alex – but I don’t at the same time.

Because I feel like he’s shocked … I’ve stunned him with what I tried to do and if I tell him the true depths of what I feel … then he’ll come back out of his cocoon of shame and regret and realize that he’s made another mistake.

He can’t be with me … he said so himself … and now he’s changed his tune because I tried to end my life.

I tried to make this hurt and this pain end …

He is so gentle and warm … and real … my Alex … but I have to keep reminding myself that he has a wife. He has two little girls … and most regrettably of all … he’s not mine.

He can’t be.

He. Can’t. Be.

The water had been like honey on my skin. And his touch as it had cleansed me had been well-intentioned, but still riddled with painful inflictions, in-between.

I feel detached and zombie-like. I don’t know how to be ‘Bethany Walker’ anymore.

Right now, … I just feel like a stupid avatar … like a shell that has been blown apart and pieced back together with glue that will wash away with the coming rain.

Alex is here … he’s put me in his car and he’s driving me to safety, just like I wanted him to do when I initially called … but I want to tell him that its too late. He’s too late to save my heart and my soul.

My father already took and shredded those.

All I had to give Alex …  is like a crumpled-up ball of paper … It’s impossible to work out all the crinkles once they are in place and I’ll never be completely whole to fall into place with him.

I want to. Fuck. I do …

But I don’t understand why he’s suddenly willing to give everything up for me.

I want to ask him what his wife will do when she realizes he’s taken a spontaneous vacation in the middle of his work week.

I have school tomorrow, but I can’t possibly attend while I look like a creature from the deep …

Social Services would be called and I’d endure a rigorous questioning from law enforcement and school faculty alike. I can’t handle that … not right now.

So, I’m grateful for Alex’s help. I know that I need it … if I’m expected to stay alive.

For him.

He’s the only person I’d live and die for, at this point. I think he understands the hold he has over me and I can feel him exploiting that right now.

Even if I wish he wouldn’t. I let him.

I hardly notice when his car’s engine sputters off and he climbs out to unload the things of mine he’s brought with us. I wonder why he hasn’t stopped off at his own house to gather any of his own clothes or belongings, but I don’t ask him.

I just watch, like a ghost, while he waltzes back towards the car and opens the passenger door, only to hoist me into his arms.

It’s warm in his arms … and I find myself seeking out and nuzzling into his body heat. I drape an arm around his neck and push my face into his chest and drink him in. He smells like the soapy bathwater he washed me in. I still can’t believe he took a bath with me … coddled me like I was an infant … like I’m his daughter …

That sentiment should make my skin crawl, but it only makes my heart flutter. Because my real father never gave me that. He’s always been rough and creepy.

Putting his hands where I never wanted them …

Alex isn’t like my father. He’s a good man … a good dad to his little girls.

When he tries to lower me to a king-sized bed, in what I assume is his bedroom here at the cabin, I cling tighter to him and I know its childish, but I ask him to stay.

“Don’t leave me, Alex …” I hurry out in a whispered plea, “… stay with me …”

I feel him tense. He goes uncommonly rigid for a second, before his forest green eyes soften and he offers me a nod.

“Just let me lock up the car, okay? I’ll be right back.” He does release me then and I relinquish my hold around his neck. I feel the cold, emptiness the second he leaves the room.

And even though he’s back before I can even feel the cold sink into my bones, causing me to clutch at his leather jacket, it still hits me like a freight train.

He’s a married man … this is probably the same bed he’s taken his wife in … and a surge of jealousy creeps into my heart.

Because I’m always going to remember my first time as something twisted and painful … but Alex’s wife probably remembers her first time as soft and gentle … especially if it was with Alex.

I try to shove those thoughts away as Alex reappears, strips off his coat and shirt, before climbing under the covers with me.

I gasp when he draws me full-on, into his chest. I drink in his manly scent and try not to think about the pain that plagues over every inch of my skin and bone. I try not to think about how much I wanted Alex just this morning. How badly I ached in a good way when I thought about him there with me … and now he is here and I’m unable to let him touch me that way.

Because of the trauma – because I know that the flashbacks will mentally shred me. And I’ll be steeped with guilt just thinking about his clueless wife – and how unworthy I am of what he’s done for me.

“Won’t your wife be mad?” I break the silence and must have startled him, because his muscles bunch at his shoulder-blades for only a second but long enough for me to notice, before he answers.

“I texted that I have a work emergency and plan to stay in the city for a few days,” he admits and I shiver up my spine.

I feel untenable guilt that he’s had to lie to his wife because of me …

“And do you think she believed you?” I press.

I know I shouldn’t ask … but I can’t help myself.

He glances down at me and I can see the beginnings of a worry-line on his forehead, just over his eyebrows.

“She always has before,” he admits with a gravely crackle in his vocals.

I feel more guilt swirl in my belly like a hurricane, stirring me up inside.

“She won’t call your work and make sure ...?”

Alex fingers my hair with tiny ministrations and I try to settle under the calming sensation of it, but still find it difficult, with all these thoughts spiraling in me.

“Beth … I don’t want you to feel guilty, okay? I never should have married Tiffany … I’ve never been capable of loving her like I should … My marriage was always bound to crumble … so if she does call my work, I’ll handle it. This is my mess; you’ve done nothing wrong …”

I feel like a child in this moment. I know he doesn’t have all the answers, but it feels like he does. Like he’s lived this whole life without me all these years, that I can’t quite compete with. He’s had all these experiences … all of this life … and what have I had?

What can I give him that warrants him walking away from Tiffany and his perfect picket-fence life?

My expression must be cause for concern in him and I realize I haven’t made any effort to respond to his words, in truth I don’t know what to say.

“You still want this, Beth … don’t you?” his voice trembles against my skin and I feel his breath on me.

I realize I could say that I don’t want him. That I can’t … and he might believe me. This could be the moment where I drive him to return to his white-picket life, to his marital bed and his daughters and I will be the thing that haunts his mind, but will always remain just a dream … A girl that saved him in a video game, that he wanted but was unattainable. I can choose to break his heart. I can choose to give him up …

But I find that the words won’t come.

That I can’t be selfless and make this road easier for him.

Because it wouldn’t be true. I can’t lie to him …

He knows my darkest secret now – and he still choose me for some reason. It might be his guilt over what I just did, that will eventually leave him after a while and make him decide to return to his wife like he did last week … but this also might be real. He might actually have chosen me for keeps … and that’s part of what holds me back, too.

The possibility that when the smoke clears and I’m bandaged back up enough to attempt to be his, that he’ll still be here. Wanting me … making love to me … like he promised he would in the bathtub.

“I’m always going to want you, Alex … You have to know that …” I finally relent with tear-stained eyes.

He seems to almost gasp a sigh of relief, that’s partially a choking sound and dips his head to kiss me. It’s soft and tender – like it was in the bathtub. And I lean into the kiss – lean into him. My heart races and I feel like I’m human for the first flicker of an instant since my father wrecked me.

He’s timid with his kisses right now and I know its because he fears breaking me. It’s a loving gesture and it makes me love him more than I ever thought it possible to love someone …

“Try to rest now … I’ll still be here when you wake in the morning …” Alex has this way of making everything feel okay … I can’t even explain how he does it.

Its this tone in his voice and it’s the same all-knowing – all-encompassing – tone that he used in Jumanji.

This wisdom that can only come with living a wide array of life. He’s lived through forty-two years of hell – in and out of Jumanji. That’s not counting the sixteen years he lived before he was drawn into the game – and another thought comes to mind.

“I was older than you …” I muse, tingles traveling my skin.

His eyes crinkle, and mouth draws into a tight line.

“What?” he questions me, gently.

“In Jumanji … I’m seventeen and you were trapped at sixteen for longer than you knew …” I put meaning to my thoughts, “I was technically older … and now you’re the one that’s older …” I trail off, a thoughtfulness in my eyes.

He lightens, the first hints of amusement twinkling in his green eyes that I’ve seen since he came for me earlier, and he plants an almost fatherly kiss to my forehead.

“Only technically …” he agrees, “What’s your point, Sweetheart?”

“Only that … that you’ve seen so much now … and been through so much … and I wonder … I wonder if I can compare … to the memory you have of me …” I realize I lost the point somewhere in there – if I ever had one at all. I blink a few times, a few loose tears falling unabated, leftover from the frenzy and wide-array of emotions I’ve endured these past hours.

 “What was it like …? To be sixteen for so long inside ‘Seaplane?’” I ask curiously.

He nudges me with his nose and seems to ponder my question for a time, and I wonder what thoughts are scurrying through his head. I want to be less immature for him. I want to be grown up – more like him – but I have a lot of catching up to do.

And I know that.

His face turns haunted, expression dismal, and he appears evasive, clearing his throat in this way that lets me know about his discomfort.

I advert my eyes. “You don’t have to tell me …”

“it’s not … it’s not that,” he divulges and sucks air through his teeth with a low hiss. “There was almost an unending loneliness to that place … like … like I had taken so much for granted in this world …” his hands dragged up to cup my cheeks, brushing the cusp of my skin, maddeningly slow. The skin is still bruised, but his touch is magnetic. “Like touch … I was so hungry for touch … human contact … a conversation … real food … I just felt hungry for everything I was missing. It was like the most exquisite torture … and then I met you, Beth.”

He tilted his forehead to brush mine and captures my lips again with his own.

I keen and wish more than anything that my body isn’t so painful right now. I’d ask him to touch me. To explore my every crevice, but I’m too touched by violence to let him. I’d hit the roof.

“I’m sorry …” I mumble, wondering how much of the sleeping pills are still in my system. Maybe enough to lower my inhibitions. Same as alcohol might. Enough to make me ask him such an insensitive question – enough to pry into his innermost thoughts and feelings unabated.

“You don’t have to apologize … You can ask me anything you want, Bethany, always,” he croons in his deep voice, “I’ll try to answer …”

I nod my head at him. But its not lost on me that his eyes are filled with exhaustion. We’re both depleted of our energy and I know its best if I do try to sleep. My body is screaming out for it, actually.

I’ve taken too many hits today. Physically. Mentally.

Everything that has happened has enacted a toll and I need to sleep it off.

My eyes are suddenly so heavy they can barely stay open and I vaguely remember something before I nod off, that I mumble to Alex.

“Forgot … tell Mom … M’here …” I don’t check to make sure he’s heard me before I finally drift to sleep.

Alex

It’s difficult to describe the mass of worry that’s lodged inside of me. I think it’s always been there … almost like a sinking gouge inside of me, waiting to erupt at the most inopportune moments.

I’ve experienced varying levels of anxiety ever since I returned from Jumanji. Almost like panic attacks … or PTSD.

Spans of time where I’m not myself and I scramble to find anything to take away the burning ache that lingers and eats away at me. That’s where the drugs came in – the alcohol in more recent years – the rampant nights of sex, used as escapism from reality.

I feel like I’m in that place now … watching Bethany try to recover from this. Seeing her struggle (even with my help) to rise from bed just to use the bathroom.

I feed her meals in bed. I stay by her until she falls asleep.

She’s slept off and on for days … I’ve made excuses to her school (pretended to be her father calling her in sick) and I’ve made excuses via text to her mother, so that she won’t wonder why Bethany isn’t home.

So far, I’ve said she’s at Martha’s. I hope to God her mom is buying it.

Her friends have been worried about her continued absences from school, I’ve made up lies about her having the stomach flu, to them. Kept the lies going even on her social media accounts, too.

The lies are piling up.

I’ve talked to little Bethany on the phone, but Sarah is too young yet to get on. I’ve talked to Tiffany, too, withholding as many details as I can so that she won’t catch me in a lie.

And the stress … the stress is eating me alive … because I’m petrified that after all of this … after everything … Bethany might try again.

She doesn’t talk much. I don’t even know what she’s thinking.

She eats, sleeps, uses the bathroom, repeats …

I’m afraid to touch her most of the time. Whenever she wakes up, she always flinches when she first sees me beside her, then seems to remember where she is, before visibly relaxing again.

I can hardly touch a drop of food myself. My stomach rebels against it from the stress of worrying about her.

Ever since the moment I read her letter I can’t stop thinking about how all of this is my fault. Why didn’t I just listen to her on the phone that day? Why?

Since I brought her here, I’ve only left her alone, once. Long enough to purchase food from the local store, and a few bottles of whiskey. I paid in cash, so that Tiffany wouldn’t see it on our bank statements. I would never be able to adequately explain to her why I was an hour away from my workplace, purchasing food.

I’ve held off for the past three days. But it’s Friday now, and my anxiety is tripled because I don’t know how to explain to my wife why I am staying in the city for work, through the weekend. And the gaping, aching wound in my stomach still isn’t any better. I tremble as I down half a bottle of whiskey in one chug.

I’ve tried to stay sober for Bethany’s sake … but those old monsters have raised their ugly heads to haunt me again.

Bickering and bantering in my head – reminding me that I’m not a savior to Bethany … I might have selfishly kept her alive because of my feelings for her … But that doesn’t make me a savior …

She’s a shell … she said so herself in the letter she constructed for me and I can feel it in the way she avoids eye contact with me. In the way she doesn’t talk … doesn’t react … doesn’t even ask to see her iPhone!

I know she is addicted to her phone – was addicted to her phone – and she hasn’t asked me for it once!

She’s nothing like she was the night I brought her here – and I wish I could see inside her mind. I wish I could ask her without feeling like I’m encroaching on her personal space.

I need something to tack down this crippling anxiety.

I feel the haze already with the first chug and I wait a few minutes for the warm sensations to come over me. I try to write off the demons in my head. The ones that remind me of Jumanji – of the jungle. Even after twenty-one years, I still fend off nightmares of that place.

Sometimes, even while I’m awake.

“Alex?” the soft sound of her voice wrenches me back down to Earth and I lower the whiskey bottle guiltily down to the kitchen table, as I focus on her.

She’s stood in the hallway, leaned against the wall, with only my jacket and one of my t-shirts on.

Her second day here, I showed her the old clothes I’ve had in this cabin since I was a teenager. Some of them still fit me (most do actually) and she’d asked to wear one of my shirts and I’d handed it over to her. It was one of the few things she has said, since that first day.

“Bethany,” I stand immediately and go to her, “What’s wrong?”

She chews her bottom lip and I see her hands are at her thighs, gouging into the skin and I wince at the sight, knowing she’s hurting herself, but I don’t draw attention to it. I’m nowhere near perfect enough to judge what she does to keep grounded.

“I woke … and you were gone …” she stares up at me feebly with a concerned look spread across her features.

“I’m sorry … I wasn’t gone too long,” I coo to her, my words are mildly slurred, even to my own ears. Through my concern it doesn’t register in my mind that she’s actually managed to get out of bed on her own, which is a considerable leap from yesterday.

I’m much too ashamed of my own stream of thoughts to notice. It’s difficult not to be attracted to her when she is dressed in barely anything and it’s that thought which makes me feel vile. Especially since I was able to overcome it when I bathed her, just the other day. So why is that self-control dwindling?

Her epidermis is still mottled with bruises, but still, I can’t help but find myself so aroused by her that I physically ache. I suppose I wasn’t wrong the other day when I’d believed her being close to me would wear me down, given time. Because it is … even though I can’t touch her, being near to her is enough to make the longing practically unbearable.

“You’re drinking …” she states the obvious, with a cant of her head toward the half-consumed bottle I’ve left behind.

I swallow my guilt. “Just a little, it takes the edge off …” I defend, solemnly.

Bethany chews her bottom lip, and I notice the bruise under her eye has lightened a bit in pigment, same with the one on her jaw.

“I’m sorry I’ve been such a burden … You must feel even more like a parent to me, than before …” she sounds dismayed about it and it makes my heart patter.

When she digs her nails in deeper against her thighs, I decide I can’t ignore it any longer and reach out to detach them. Brushing my thumbs over the bloodied tips of her nails.

“You aren’t a burden, okay?” I push as I try to make her understand.

“But you’re drinking because you do feel guilty … anxious about being here with me, aren’t you?” she retorts and I feel myself burn under her gaze.

“It’s not the reason I’m like this …” I can’t think right through the haze that has clouded my mind.

“You’re ashamed of your attraction to me. You’re always going to be ashamed.” She tries to pull her hands from my grip, but I don’t release them. I can’t let her believe that, even if it is true at least in part. Some very deep part of me is always going to believe I’m too old for her. I can’t take back the nineteen years of my aging before she was born …

“I’m ashamed of a lot of things, Bethany,” I admit, with an offhanded sigh, “and yeah … I’m always going to feel my age when I’m around you … when I think about you the way that I do … but Bethany … I’ve chosen you, okay? I haven’t figured out logistics, and I’m probably going to end up fucking up both our lives, but I just can’t think about where I’d be without you, Bethany …” I’m shocked that I can string these sentences together through the bleary settling of whiskey in my system, but I manage it.

And I recognize tears ringed in Bethany’s eyes.

“Alex … Tell me you mean it … That … That you are choosing me because you love me … not because you feel guilty about what I tried to do … Promise me that you still want me … after …” she pauses with a sniffle, and begins to squeeze my hands so hard I feel her nails gouge my skin. She must be drawing blood, but I don’t stop her … I’d rather she hurts me than herself.

That’s a sick thought, but I realize it’s true.

“… You saw what he did to me …” she finally manages to choke out and my heart skips around in my chest.

“Bethany—”

“… And I c-can’t … I can’t fathom how you could still want me after you saw that …  I tried so hard for so long to forget how he’d hurt me … and I tried to be so perfect … so perfect because it helped me erase who I was when he did those things … And I’d finally forgotten about him … about those memories … and now … now I’ll never be able to erase him from my skin … and he’s here … he’s on me like a leech … like this disgusting cockroach and I don’t know how to feel … I don’t know how you can look at me … and not see that night … how you’ll ever be able to love me the way you did before … look at me and see the girl that lived in your dreams for twenty-one years … Because … I’m not her now, Alex … I’m not pure and confident and pretty … I’m just all the regrets and things that he made me into …”

She’s gripping my hands so tight by now that I can physically feel my blood seeping out around her nails and I don’t even think she’s aware of what she’s doing. I don’t cry out, I let the pain seep into my skin – I feed off this pain that she’s granting me. I’m using it to latch on to her words, to listen to her the way she deserves to be listened to, and I don’t interrupt her.

“... I feel disgusting … I feel used … and I … I wonder why he hates me so much … why he came back after all these years just to rip away my purity … and I’m sick Alex … I’m sick because I keep wishing it was you … I keep wishing that you would have come home with me that night … the way I planned for you to … and I wish you would have taken what we both wanted … Because now … now I don’t think you want that, Alex … I don’t see how you can want that … you’re drinking because you can’t tell me that you made a mistake when you choose me last night … You saw how he broke me … and you’re a good man, Alex … You’re such a good man … and I’m a fucking train wreck …” she finally trailed off, having released every imaginable fear that she could, those somber blue optics of hers drifted down to our attached hands.

To the indentions she was making in my palms.

“Fuck …” she gasps, noting the damage she’s inflicted and tries again to detach her hands from mine, but I keep my hold on them.

She’s reignited this burning, searing ache inside of me that (in all honesty) probably never actually fades entirely. And it’s begun to take control of my impulses, especially now that the alcohol has loosened me up – made me feel less like myself … with all my morals and disheveled parts stripped down to my raw center.

I shouldn’t respond to what she’s vented out at me, the way my body wants me to – I shouldn’t even be thinking about it … about having this kind of reaction right now …

But this is the most she’s spoken since the first day I brought her here – and I’ve been driven half-mad with the wanting to know how she feels – how she truly feels – and why she’s been practically mute. Has all this been stirring in her heart? Her head? For the last three days?

I keep our hands conjoined and (despite my better judgement) steal a kiss. I don’t treat her like she’s breakable – not like in the bathtub – because I understand how that made her feel. She’s bruised … she’s scarred … but she’s not some fragile broken china … she’s not irreparable and I want her to understand that.

To truly know it in her very bones – her marrow.

So, I kiss her with everything inside of me. Every fiber that makes me up has been shoved down and packed into this bundle of stress – of nerves – and of everything. I’ve been ready to fall apart at the seams for years.

Bethany is at the heart of everything I am – and I don’t know how to convey that to her.

I don’t know how to tell her that I can never see her as just a product of her father’s destructive tendencies.  I can’t only see her as some disgusting, ripped apart, thing that is untouchable because of one event that was forced upon her – one unforgivable malevolent act that she never wanted.

No – nothing could ever change how I feel about her.

I’ve spent my whole damn life since I reemerged from that godforsaken video-game, trying to forget Bethany. Trying to get over what she did to my heart. Trying to get over her.

Her kindness, her selflessness, when she saved me … and could have ended up dying herself because of it. How can I construe all of that to her in words?

The simple answer is that I can’t … I don’t know how.

I taste her tears mesh into our kiss. I drag my tongue inside her mouth, parting her lips and tasting her.

She still tastes like honey and toast … the simple breakfast I coaxed her up to eat not very long ago (despite it having been after four in the afternoon) and I have to force myself to pull back. Because I have to use my words … I have to provide some kind of verbal response. She deserves that.

“I want you, Beth … I don’t care if you’re damaged,” I realize how that sounds and I backtrack, “I do care … but only because it makes me angry … and it makes me want to protect you, I want to kill him for what he did to you … for making you feel all those things … for making you feel like you don’t matter … like I could see you as this feral creature because of it …”

I finally release one of her hands and use it to draw her face towards mine, until we’re centimetres apart … until I can feel her breathe on my lips.

“If I’m ashamed of anything right now … in this moment … it’s that I do want you … that I have to use every ounce of my willpower not to take you back to bed right now and make you mine … That’s why I’m drinking … to stave off the urge …” I feel her shudder down her body, but not in a bad way. It’s almost beautiful the way she looks at me, as I tell her the truth, as what it is, and not what she’s perceived it to be.

I draw her in with my hand, until she can feel the bulge that I was trying to drink away when she caught me, out here. The stress has caused my tension to build and I use sex to relieve it. I have for so long, that I didn’t even realize I was doing it. Not really …

But without my routine … without being inside my wife … I’ve been without any release of the gathered pressure and I had hoped whiskey would do the trick, but Bethany is here now … and she’s said so many things … so many untrue things … and I want her to understand me … I don’t want to be this dark, hulking mystery to her.

I’ll let her see my darkest pieces if it will help repair those that ail her, too.

I hear her moan when she feels my erection, tenting out the front of my jeans. I know she doesn’t have any panties on underneath my borrowed, old t-shirt and I feel ashamed, but that truth makes my prick twinge in yearning.

“Alex …” she’s releases her grip on my hand and uses the new freedom of both her hands to wind up and tuck into my strands of hair, and she tugs, loosely, her tongue lapping out to wet her lips, and it’s like she’s made a decision, I see it there … twinkling behind blue eyes, “… you don’t have to drink …” she detaches her hands from my hair and begins a soft, burning trail down my neck, across my shoulders, down my chest … hot, searing, flaming touch, “… you have me, Alex … I’m here …”

I want to take, right here, in the hallway – and my mind drifts to thoughts of pushing her against the wall and taking what I’ve fantasized about from her, for twenty-one years …

But I steel myself against it. I try to fight what my body wants, in order to reclaim my commonsense. I don’t even remember doing it, but at some point, I’ve pressed her back against the wall, because I can feel her, all the way up my body – and my hands are bunched in the fabric at her waist. I can feel a few droplets of my blood (from where she dug in her nails) ooze into the material.

“Don’t tempt me, Bethany … it’s cruel to tease … If you knew how badly I want you … you wouldn’t do this to me …” I half-plead, half-beg her in my delirium and use every ounce of self-control to remind my touch-starved body that she’s still a walking bruise … that my touch will destroy her … anyone’s touch will …

I find solace at her neck, kissing up the column in order to give my trembling lips a niche to distract my rampant, sexually-charged, thoughts.

“I mean it, Alex …” she breathes, between keens and simpers in reaction to my ministrations.

I draw back in order to stare into her eyes. I need to know she’s serious.

“I promised when you were better—”

“I told you, Alex,” she cuts me off and I can see the seriousness in her expression, though I can’t understand it, “I’m sick …” she kisses my lips and its my turn to whimper, then, all at once the burn floods to my loins, full-force, because she begins to palm me through my jeans, cupping and kneading my aching need, “.. because I wish you had been the one inside of me … and I don’t care if it hurts, I trust you, Alex … and I don’t want to spend another minute … hour … day … belonging to him, when I want – need – to belong to you.”

It’s those words. Those simple, dark, demented words that finally shatter what remains of my resolve. I’ve fought myself – and Bethany for longer than I ever should have dared.

‘How have I held out this long?’ I wonder to myself. It seems impossible that I have …

This ache is too profound – too lodged down deep inside my innermost chambers, to fend off.

I have the presence of mind, to at least hoist her off the hardwood flooring. I carry her back to the master bedroom and push her into the pile of sheets and blankets.

There’s this need-driven frenzy between us, as our clothes are wrenched off of our bodies. I can’t even tell if its my arms or hers, in the thick of this moment, we’re so determined to feel one another’s skin …

I take in the perfectly-shaped mounds of her breasts, pointed upwards and perky, right in front of my eyes. I suck one of them into my mouth and lap at the puckered nub, tentatively. I try to look past the bruises and the scars that mark her up. Instead, I focus on how beautiful she is.

She purrs under my touch and arcs up her spine. It’s not fair that Bethany has been so mistreated – so abused. Because I feel my entire body engulfed by flames just from a single glance at her.

She’s like this beacon that draws me in and I am helpless to escape her every whim – her every desire. I allow her to draw me in with her moans and her kisses. She keens in her throat, tilts back her head and scratches her nails down my back.

Pain should turn me off – but instead the opposite is true.

The harsh, unforgiving dig of her nails, followed by the tearing bleed of my epidermis, only causes my prick to jerk at her thigh. God – I’m like a teenager again on top of Bethany.

I feel like I’m in one of my wet dreams – like I’m seconds away from spilling my seed … and I have to calm down … because I want to savor this … savor her.

“Bethany –” I whine in order to steel myself against my body’s whims.

“Please, Alex … If you mean it … if you really mean it … then make me yours …” she leaves little gasps between her sentences, pants against my skin just where my ear is.

She has no idea just how much I mean every word I’d said. I push apart her thighs in order to slat myself between them. The pressure mounts in my belly, and the static charges in the air. I want to be gentle – I need to be gentle – and I remind myself (through my arousal) that Bethany is going to hurt when I do this …

But it’s what she wants …

And I’m never going to deny the girl I love, anything she wants, ever again.

“Hold on to me …” I instruct, and wait for her to wind her arms around my middle.

Once I am finally satisfied that she’s prepared, I prod at her entrance with the head of my erection. I’m leaking over her mound, dribbling traces of pre inside of her, before I can even push all the way in.

I shudder with the first clench of her walls around my manhood. I jab my fingers into the mattress and clench my hands into tight fists of twisted pleasure. It’s never felt this way inside a girl before. I’ve laid with so many now, that I have forgotten what it felt like my first time, but I know it wasn’t like this …

Nothing in the world can compare to this …

“F-Fuck—Oh!” I simper and suck at the base of her neck in order to steady myself.

I want so badly to rut into her like a hound. I want to lose myself in the taking of her. I want to ravage her … God … I just want her …

But I have to be gentle, I have to prevent myself …

Bethany makes a small squeal when I push in and I listen to her noises, trying to determine if she’s in a detrimental amount of pain or if she’s okay. I can’t tell. I force myself to push up, just enough to steadily catch her eye, but even those beautiful blue orbs, aren’t giving too much away.

I lift my hand and cup at the cusp of her cheek. “Speak to me, Beth … Does it hurt too terribly?” I kiss her, in a bid to calm her, before I draw back to study her again.

It must be my fatherly instincts, but I need to protect her. I need her safe … and my carnal urges are being tamped down, somehow, just at the brink, while I make absolutely certain that I’m taking proper care of her.

“It’s okay, I’m okay …” she confirms, “You’re bigger than he is, Alex …” those whispers that tickle across my lips, shouldn’t send chills up my spine like they do … I shouldn’t be more aroused by the fact that I am more adept between my thighs than her rapist – her father. I should, in fact, be even more sickened that my Bethany knows what it feels like to take her own father … but in this moment, those words strike arousal in my chest. They fuel this ebbing need and I succumb to the scourge of urges that ply through my blood like fire.

I draw up her thighs and begin to pump my hips in steady, driven motions.

I moan against her throat and she drags her nails, again, down my spine, coupled with little noises that depart her lips.

“If I hurt you—” I start to whisper in a last-ditch effort to offer her reassurance.

“Don’t worry, Daddy, you won’t, I trust you,” she whispers hotly in my ear.

I should reel back in shock and horror at what she’s just whispered. I should probably climb off of her and insist that we can’t ever do this again, because of it … I should fight the instinct inside of me that screams ‘take’ the second the word ‘Daddy’ is out of her swollen pink lips …

But I don’t.

Instead, I overload with lust. Fit to burst and ready to scream out her name. I want to prompt her to call me ‘Daddy’ again. Possibly even whisper in her ear that she’s my little girl. That she’s always going to be my little girl … Then it strikes me like a thousand lightning bolts – I do have a little girl named Bethany … God am I sick …

I pull back enough to look into her eyes, my thrusts dissipate and I see Bethany’s eyes focusing into mine.

“You’re my daddy now, Alex … You’ll keep me safe, won’t you?” I feel my heart shatter and I struggle not to let the emotions that threaten to rake me to my core, take hold.

I drag my wet lips across her collarbone, follow a path that eventually leads them into crashing against hers in a sweep of powerful lust, that I hope speaks volumes.

Because I’m momentarily speechless.

That’s what she wants from me in this instance? A father?

Is that how she sees me when I’m buried inside of her? As a protector? A parental figure?

God, it’s perverse to think these kinds of thoughts, but I can’t help myself. I’m so turned on and I don’t even know the why behind it.

“Is that what you need, Beth? You need me to be your daddy?” I let the words slip before I really contemplate them. In this second, I’m too consumed by overwhelming arousal and the desperate want of my body to return to its sensual, swiveling ruts, from just moments ago, to think.

My left-hand quivers and tangles in her strands of blond hair, my breath uneven and shaky.

She makes an instant keen in her throat and pushes her nose up to brush my cheek.

“Yes, Daddy … Please …” she begs me.

I try not to let my guilt claw at my insides as I pick up the pace on my thrusts, beginning to drive into her again, with passionate force. I want her to feel me, but I don’t want to inflict untenable damage, however.

So, I desperately try to find a happy medium. My every thrust is heightened, while my muscles bunch at my shoulders, trying to deflect my arousal – trying to make this encounter last, between us.

But every friction-laced draw in and out of my prick to her tunnel has me reeling. My stomach is in knots and I see the beauty in her face – in her azure eyes. And my body makes me inescapably aware that I’m not going to last much longer.

Not when she winds her arms around my shoulders, draws me down until our bodies are pressed together and I’m rutting with sloppy jerks that shake us both, and she whispers hotly in my ear, “Harder, Daddy – Cum for your little girl …”

The wrongness of everything is totally gone from my mind, because it’s all I can do to ride her into the mattress. The bed hinges squeak and Bethany’s moans sound loud and clear in my ears. And I need to touch her – everywhere – anywhere. My hands need to touch!

I push one of them between her thighs, brush and tweak her little button at the top of her mound. She makes a noise between a gasp – and a cry – then her walls are squeezing down on my invading phallus. And I know I’ve made her sensitive body cum.

I know how sensitive a teenage girl is, I remember being a teenager – and I feel like I am one, now. My cock is angry red, veins bulging, foreskin dragging up and down the length until I am teetering right there on the edge of release.

She starts an endless trail of whispered ‘Daddy’s’ seductive and low in my ear.

And that’s it.

I shudder and spend inside of her. I cry out her name, sink into the furthest depths of her entrance and radiate with whines. Spurt after spurt of seed empty from my balls and I still my hips and quiver, bodily atop her.

It’s all I can do not to lose my mind, as I cry out her name in a longful moan that I’ve held in for twenty-one years.

I always knew sex with Bethany would be different, but I didn’t realize just how much … How much I would feel in the moment – in the immediate aftermath.

I feel like my skin is on fire, like my nerves are aflame and I want her to touch and alleviate the burn in my muscles … and almost like she can read my mind – she does.

Bethany’s fingers slide from around my shoulders and rub and grind into the muscles of my neck, then over my chest, massaging the built-up tension – the strain – and her sensual touch makes me keen in my throat.

I return the favor. Letting the sensitivity really hit home in her, as I rub and squeeze her sides, stomach, and nipples. She’s so sensitive to my touch that I feel her cry, push up her hips and cum again for me, just from her nipples being massaged.

“Fuck …” I sigh out, through the moment, letting her come undone underneath my skilled hands.

I want to make her feel good again, so I slide one of my hands back down between her still, splayed thighs, and circle her swollen, aching clit again with the pad of my thumb.

She’s so sensitive that she can’t take it and I feel her squirt over my fingers, eyes rolling back. She bucks her hips, chasing the pleasure, as I ride her through it, countless more times.

I’m suddenly addicted to the sight of her in the grips of release. I don’t want to see her come back down and remember her pain and bruised skin, so I keep rubbing – keep getting her off on my fingers, until her spray coats us both in clear liquid and the bedroom smells like sex and a combination of our separate musk.

“That’s it, Beth, keep cumming for me …” I coax down at her, and she squeezes her nails into my sides, hard enough to leave bruises – and make me bleed – but I don’t care. In this moment, it all feels so good …

So, I let her maim me and I drive her over the edge, repeatedly, until she’s curling her toes and quivering uncontrollably, and I know she’s seconds from being in pain – so I stop.

She breathes a sigh of relief and nuzzles her face into my neck, seeking comfort.

I wrap her in my arms and go slack against her. I can still feel myself driven up inside of her – still hard, but just barely. And I wish (for perhaps the millionth time) that I was still a teenager, too, so I could recover like I used to and go again. But my body is older and it doesn’t always do what I want it to, especially in the bedroom – and I hate myself for it.

“D-Daddy …” she finds her voice somehow and I lift my head to peer down at her.

“What’s wrong? Have I hurt you?” I mumble, because I knew I would (hurt her) when I started, but the way she pleaded with me – pleaded to feel something else – had taken the helm and I’d given what always should have been hers, to her.

“N-No …” she sighed out, “Just …” she paused again, “… this is the best night of my life …” she finally whispered, “I wanted you to know that …”

Her words strike this chord in my heart that I’m not quite sure what to do with. But I’d always meant to give her this – this night of love and passion. I’d always pictured that we’d have each other more than once, whenever we finally came together. That there would be nothing but love and need between us.

But that’s not how it happened.

There’s so much pain in this moment, linked to why she needs to call me ‘Daddy’ now.

Why she needs someone to protect her.

“Bethany …” I sigh, through my drunkenness. I want to say something beautiful, like she has. I wonder how much pain I’ve invoked in her – while I took my pleasure. I would ask, but I know she won’t tell. And I wish this ugliness didn’t hang over this night we’ve shared.

I wish for a lot of things, I can’t have.

Her eyes turn troubled and I see the shininess dwindle a bit, then darken.

“Do you not … was this not … not good for you? I mean … is this not … not what you expected it would be …?” she is suddenly self-conscious again, when she asks those words and I feel like shit for making her feel that – even for a second.

“No!” I’m quick to jump at the chance to defend my emotions about what we’ve done, “I mean, yes … no! Fuck …” I slow down and breathe my way through what I’m trying to say.

“Bethany … you’re everything I’ve ever imagined – dreamed – you’d be. I just … I wish I didn’t have to hurt you, to feel this way …” I realize that I’m slurring my words and they aren’t coming out like I mean them to.

I see Bethany, through my haze of vision with a few tears in her eyes, which is precisely what I don’t want. I reach up to swipe them away and she brushes my chest with her hands.

“What if …” her lips quiver, and she stops herself and looks away.

I guide her face back to mine and give her a questioning stare, “What if?” I repeat, prompting her to finish what she’d been primed to say.

“What if … I like the pain, Alex? W-What if … what if it helps me f-feel?” she breathes out, unsteadily.

I don’t know what to say to that – I don’t know if I even understand what she means by it …

“Bethany …”

“Don’t, Alex … I know it’s sick, okay? You d-don’t have to t-tell me …” she sniffles and closes her eyes.

“It’s … It’s not, sick … Beth … Baby …” I coo and kiss her lips with a subtle graze, “… If it’s how you feel … how you need, now … I won’t be mad … or disgusted …” I want to make her understand – need to make her comprehend, which is growing increasingly difficult with my current mental impairment, “You’re mine. We’re each other’s, now, you get that, don’t you? Nothing you need is going to make me think less of you … I made love to you, didn’t I? I’ve touched every inch of you, it’s humanly possible to touch …” I meld my lips to her neck and suck a loving trail of kisses, into her skin, and I run my hands everywhere I can across the landscape of her body, feeling her shiver under the sensation of it.

“Alex …” she whines in a little hitch.

“If you tell me you want to hurt – I’ll give you that …” I pinch the bruises I find on her skin and she hisses in her throat, cheeks flooding with color, “… If you tell me you want me to be gentle – to make love to you again, it’s your call, Beth … and I won’t judge it … I won’t judge how you survive what he did to you …” I make gentle quivering trails over her breasts, then slide them down over her belly, “… Just survive this, Bethany … survive him … because I can’t fathom losing you, and its fucking selfish and I know that, but Baby, I lived so long without you … I can’t do it again,” I hear her whimper as I connect our lips in a contemporary kiss, then lift up to whisper hotly against her petals, “I won’t … Bethany … don’t ever ask me to do it again …” I’m starting to crumble and I think she feels it, too.

She wraps me in her arms and I’m no longer sure just who is comforting who, as I settle into her arms and she kisses my forehead, just before I descend into an ocean of tears.

Bethany

I’ve lingered these past days in the between. Neither here, nor dead.

I’ve felt Alex’s touch and reveled in the way he holds me while I fall to sleep, but I wake from nightmares of my Daddy’s cock inside of me.

Always this forceful, meandering presence that makes me want to fucking die. I still want to take a bunch more pills, but I can’t – because Alex …

So, I let him take care of everything, while I had laid in his bed, thinking of all the times he’s fucked his wife in it – and wondered if I actually belong here, after all.

What does he plan to do? Is he going to leave her? Run away with me, like a rebellious teenager would? Abandon his daughters? Could I live with myself if he took that route?

I didn’t know, still don’t … because I don’t know anything. I just knew that I hated feeling like my Daddy’s used garbage – and I had wanted my Alex to touch me.

I wanted him to touch me like he promised he’d touch me, and I didn’t care about the consequences. I just wanted to feel wanted. After three days of letting him take care of me, I had needed to do something for myself.

So, I’d seen him gone from bed and struggled to make it to the living room. Seen him drunk and in torturous need of a woman’s touch and I gave him mine.

I’ve wanted to make love with him for weeks – wished he’d been my first so hard that I broke my skin with the wanting of it … but he can’t be my first, just like I can’t be his.

And I felt so disgusted with the reality of it, that I made him my ‘Daddy’ instead.

I’d realized in the moment, with him buried inside of me, taking his pleasure, that he is pushing forty – that he’s soft, warm, put-together in most ways like a ‘daddy’ should be, and so compassionate. And I’m in love with him – so why can’t I make him my daddy instead?

It’s sick – but I needed it, in the moment – and I still need it, now.

He made my first – consensual – time one of pleasure, not so much pain, and he touched my skin until it sang with the need of him and for him.

I will never forget the impassioned drive of his hips and shake to his breath – he’s built so handsomely and in such beautiful shape for a grown man. He made me feel his needs – and not my real daddy’s cruelty on my flesh.

Even his words after are more than I can bear. He’s so gentle and sweet and he means it … I know he does.

Even if I’m this broken, disgusting thing he’s in love with me. I get that now.

I don’t know what either of us are going to do, but I know that I can’t leave him again, even if I want to, sometimes, because I won’t hurt him … I never want to see him breakdown like this, again. Not because of what I’ve done …

“I won’t, I promise …” I whisper when he pleads for me never to ask him to live without me.

How could I do that, now?

Now that I’ve seen what it’s done to him … what I’ve done to him?

We’re both in tears by this point and I can’t hold back the floodgates any better than he can. I wipe his tears, while he wipes mine, and its seconds before we’re kissing again. This time it’s sloppy and needy and I want to be in control – I want to show him that I can handle it.

So, I roll him onto his back, managing to keep him plunged up inside of me in the process, and find myself straddling him, now.

He’s looking up at me with those tearful eyes and I smile back down at him, subtly. Because we need this … I need this …

“You think you can get it up again for me, Daddy?” I guide his hands from where they’ve moved to rest at my bruised hips, and intertwine our fingers, pushing them back on either side of his head, against the fluffy, feather-pillow.

His cerulean eyes stare up into mine, with this ache in them – maybe it’s the same ache from earlier – or a longing, but either way, I can see that he wants more than he’s taken – he was just afraid to hurt me.

“I don’t know,” he admits, sheepishly, with this embarrassment in his eyes and I want to take away his shame, because it isn’t shameful to grow older. It isn’t shameful to be less able to perform …

I swipe my tongue across my lips and I sigh, because my body is radiating with sensitivity from his earlier ministrations across my overtly responsive nipples and clit.

We’re both still coated in a mixture of our juices, but if anything, that makes me more aroused – to be filled with his essence – to know that someday I might carry his babies, too. It makes me feel trusted, loved. He trusts me with his seed, he loves me enough to give me his babies if I want them. He’s already promised to give me anything – all I have to do is ask.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” I reassure him, gently, “it’s okay if you can’t.”

I start to rock my hips in a slow swirl, ignoring the harsh bites of pain that shoot down my thighs, and up into my hips with every movement. I revel in the pain, because it’s a reminder that I’m alive …

Alex is hot in seconds. I see how he keens in his throat and jerks this way and that, under my sensual persuasion with my hips. He’s horny – and I see that reflected in his eyes when he looks up at me.

“Fuck … Bethany …” he grunts in his throat and humps up his hips, and I feel his seed-slicked manhood drive up inside of me a few times. He isn’t quite back to his fully erect state yet, but he’s getting there.

I wet my lips with my tongue and lean down to mold our lips together in angst and passion. He’s trembling and I feel him rut with increasing need, because we’re both excited again, and I can practically sense how deep into his emotions he is.

I roll my hips harder and faster, steeling myself against him with every drive forward. There’s such a tangible need and want to feel this pain – to revel in it – and I realize that I’m driving myself closer to my peak again, too.

He’s lost in the moment and moaning in seconds. I feel his erection is fully tumid again, but he’s too excited – and it’s too much.

I feel him spill again, hear the way he moans my name and floods with color when he realizes he lasted only a few seconds that time. But I can’t fault him for enjoying it – for finally knowing what it feels like to make love, after so many years of loveless, meaningless sex. It must have been taxing on him. To have these needs, to feel so much, and not be able to have the one he wanted.

I wish I could comprehend the kind of suffering he’s endured, but I can’t.

Just like he can never truly understand mine.

We’re soulmates, stuck in this vicious need for each other, but each with years of suffering in our hearts that neither of us can ever truly comprehend, in the other.

It’s a lot and it’s nothing all at the same time.

I shiver and work my clit against his pelvis, feel myself cum and spill juices down his twitching length, over his balls, and finally collapse down on his chest.

He wraps his arms around my middle and holds me tight to him.

I want to tell him what I’m thinking, but it’s a lot and I don’t really know how.

“Alex …” I breathe and turn my face up to steadily peer into his eyes, planting my hands on his chest, lazily.

“Hm?” he grumbles out, using one of his freed hands to stroke at my cheek.

“Did it hurt …?” I ask, and realize I haven’t said enough, “The years without me … I mean … I know you said you were with other girls but … did it ever feel good when you were with them …? Like this …? With Tiffany … was it ever like this?” I try to put my thoughts into concise words, but I can’t put how I feel into words … what I feel with Alex … it’s profound and like nothing I’ve ever known with other boys.

Even before this moment – even before our love making.

It’s like the universe meant for us to be together – like Jumanji picked us to need and want this way.

The game made him suffer loneliness for more years than he’d lived, and caused me to find him – to love him – because it was cruel. The game enjoys human suffering – feeds off it.

I know that now, after spending time inside of that dreaded landscape.

And Alex suffered so greatly.

He slides his hand across my cheek, brushes a thumb over my lower lip, and I close my eyes with a sigh, my hot breath on his thumb.

“You know it hasn’t …” he breathes, gently, “… Bethany … there’s no way I’d ever have this with Tiffany …” he plays with my lips, gently, with his own, “… with anyone,” he admits, “and you know how I’ve grappled to feel without you …” his eyes half-close as he says it, “… I’ve only come close with my children … with my daughters …” he hummed, “… they were my only light, before you …”

I shiver and chills shoot everywhere, simultaneously, as I allow myself to settle into what he’s saying.

I want to be reassured by it. Reassured that he’s as much in the moment and the wild-rush of it all, as I am.

“I love you, Alex,” I rest my chin on his chest and squirm remotely, jostling his erection still prodded up inside me.

He jerks and makes a low gasp from the sensitivity, I imagine, so I stop rolling my hips. I didn’t mean to hurt him.

“I love you, too …” he manages to breathe out. I lean in and steal a kiss, which he returns with tranquil movements.

I’m starting to feel tired and even though I don’t want this moment to pass, I know that it already is … I can feel my heartbeat returning to its normal rhythm and my thoughts are becoming harder and harder to draw to the surface. And finally, my eyes are becoming heavier and heavier.

We should get up … we should go take a shower, clean our mess off ourselves, but I decide, it doesn’t matter. Rather, I can’t be bothered to do anything about it, right now.

So, I cuddle in close and allow my mind to drift away.

Alex

After the first night, it felt impossible to be separated from her.

Like, the instant we finally took the final dive over the edge, neither of us were ever going to come back from it.

I tried so hard and for so long, just to exist without her, that I never realized how at ease I would feel once I actually had her. I forgot what it felt like to not struggle.

We woke the morning after, with our limbs and bodies in a tangle of parts. I’d carried her straight into the shower, turned on the stream, and taken care of my painful morning wood by claiming her against the tile wall.

I’ve never felt such happiness in my life – never felt so sure of myself. So certain that I’ve made the proper choice in her.

We stayed the remainder of the week in my family cabin, long enough for her visible bruises to disappear, so that she could resume her school life.

It was difficult that last night in the cabin. Neither of us had wanted to close our eyes, because we knew we’d have to return to civilization afterward. It was like being ripped from the best part of our lives and forced into a fire. It was excruciating.

I’d been extra explorative with her skin that night. Kissed and savored her like I was afraid to lose her, and she’d done the same with me. I’d lost count of the number of times she morphed my name and ‘Daddy’ together and screamed for me through the night.

I promised we’d meet up again. That the cabin was just ours, and that my wife didn’t know about our little oasis. It was sheltered up North and that I’d divorce Tiffany, just as soon as I could figure out how to go about it, and Bethany was of age.

When we returned to ordinary life it was pure torture – at least on my end – because I had to pretend to be in love with Tiffany, again. It took twice as much alcohol to actually perform in our marital bed. I think she noticed – how could she not?

I’ve always felt awful about Tiffany, but at that point I’d felt even worse. Everything about us had been a lie. Everything I told her, every kiss I gave her – every story I’d tell her right before I left for a night to go be with Bethany …

So many lies I’ve told – and lived.

I was tired of living in the lie. I’d been tired of living in the lie for twenty-one years.

But none of it mattered – because pretty soon the lies were over – I just hadn’t know it then.

I hadn’t known until that day …

“Don’t leave, Alex,” Bethany’s bottom lip protrudes in a pout that makes her look so damn irresistible, that I almost consider it, but I can’t.

“I have to, if I don’t leave soon, then she’ll be even more suspicious than she already is,” I sigh, and yank my t-shirt over my head, buttoning and zipping my pants, next.

“It’s my birthday, Alex … and you know I can’t sleep when you’re not with me …” she whines in that cute little tone.

It’s not fair when she holds this kind of leverage over my emotions. She knows how I feel about being her protector – her shield against the nightmares.

It’s been hell for her to have to sleep in her own bed, in the house where her own father violated her, but there’s been nothing I could do. She hadn’t been eighteen (until today) and now that she is, I plan to offer her the cabin as a permanent home if she wants it, which I’ve meant to be her final birthday surprise. I plan to take care of her, now.

“So it is,” I agree with a lingering smile on my lips, “and I’ve spent the past day worshipping every inch of you that it’s humanly possible to worship, but now its time to return to the real world.”

She’s stubbornly still not dressed and she makes her intentions clear. She climbs out from under the covers and spreads her thighs, while holding eye contact with me.

“I’m still wet for you, Daddy … come back to bed …” she commands in that low, sultry tone, she knows will have me on my knees for her in a heartbeat.

“Bethany …” I breathe out in a husk, “you know what that does to me …” I attempt to plead with her. I already feel my jeans tightening in the crotch. It’s only been an hour or so since I was last inside of her, but my body doesn’t care about that right now.

She comes in closer, positions her hand over my tented-out jeans, then strokes and kneads me expertly. It’s only been two months since we first came together, but she’s learned to play dirty like a pro – she’s learned quite a bit in such a short time.

“I know, Daddy … and I also know that you’re going to be hungry for it, tonight … aren’t you?” I groan, because she’s still fondling me while she says it, “Yeah … and you’re going to think about plundering my tight, hot, cunt when you’re inside of her, and you won’t be satisfied because she’s not me … will you, Daddy?”

It’s torture!

She’s torture!

Because she knows very well that I can’t stand the time lapses between when I’m with her and without her.

“Fuck … Bethany!” I whine and she uses one single fluid motion to straddle my hips.

I can barely function at this point and I start to pant, feebly, when she grinds her wet sex down on me.

“Stay with me … just one more night …” Bethany pleads and I finally crack and give in. I can’t hold out against her will.

How can I? When she’s all over me like she is?

I hoist her by her waist and launch her back onto the mattress. I climb on top of her and push her legs up in a ‘v’ then bite one of her thighs just to make her feel what she’s done to me – how she’s tortured me! – and I extract a little whine from her.

There are a great many scars on her thighs and my bite isn’t hard enough to even puncture skin, so it won’t stay. My Bethany has enough marks to last a lifetime – she doesn’t need another permanent one of mine.

I fiddle with my jeans, freeing my throbbing need, and thrust it up inside her, in one swift, decisive movement.

We both let out a collective gasp-turned-moan and I don’t hesitate to rut against her. She’s made me feel like a teenage boy again. I’m horny all the time – sensitive everywhere, and I just want to spend every waking second of every day inside her.

“You can’t tease me like that, Bethany … It’s not fair … You know how I need you …” I pant into her ear, between thrusts.

I have her on the verge in seconds – and I, too, am seconds from being pushed over the threshold. It’s like something about Bethany makes me almost feel younger, when we come together like this. I can’t explain it, and maybe it’s just because my body has finally linked with a girl that I’m actually madly in love with, but I’ve been able to go more rounds in one night with her, than I ever could with Tiffany.

 What I feel with Bethany … It’s almost magnetic and intoxicating.

“You tried to leave me on my birthday – I figured it’s all fair game now …” she hisses in my ear, while dragging her nails down my back through my shirt.

I cascade over the edge, after that. I can’t help myself.

I tremble and whine against her neck, while I breathe her in.

I wish I could morph with her – stay like this forever. Make our essences one in the same. Then I’d never have to leave her. Never had to go home to my wife.

I love my girls, but in the moment, I wish it was just me and Bethany. I wish we were the only two people on Earth. Then, the fear I have of society and their opinions of us don’t have to exist. It can just be the two of us – and no one else would be around to make me feel like a piece of shit for loving her. Because I know once it all comes out, no one will understand. And our little oasis will be hard to find again – it won’t be like this anymore.

So easy – so free.

I start to come down from my high, between shudders and deep breaths. I don’t know what I am going to do with my Bethany.

She’s so needy all the time – and she makes me crazy – and she makes me burn for her until I fear I may be consumed by my need.

“It’s almost Christmas, there’s things I need to do at home …” I grumble against her collarbone.

“Christmas isn’t for another week … and I need you, Alex …” she retorts.

“I have a wife …” I remind her, “… and two little girls that need me, too …”

She makes a face, “they’re asleep by now – and your wife doesn’t make you cum like I do,” she teases me and I chuckle.

“Bethany …” I groan, “you’re gonna be the death of me …”

She grazes my cheek with her thumb and steals another kiss.

“You don’t get to leave me … not until we have grandbabies, understand?” she always gets this panicky look in her eyes when I mention death. I don’t always think before I say things. I feel a stab of guilt in my chest.

“I won’t leave you,” I promise her, somberly, “not until we have grandbabies,” I agree.

Her eyes are still distant though. I can see that her impeccably good mood has been suddenly altered and my stomach flips over.

“I mean it. I’m right here, Bethany … I don’t plan on going anywhere …” I reassure her.

She stares up at me, with a look in her eyes that tears through me like a knife.

“Do you even want more children?” Bethany asks. “With me, I mean … We’ve never …talked about it.”

She’s right. We haven’t spoken about whether or not I want more children, but I figured she already knew the answer. I love my daughters, but my heart isn’t closed off to the idea of additional children.

“Is that what you’re afraid of? That I don’t want anymore children?” I ask her, incredulously.

She searches my eyes for a few seconds, then shrugs, “You have two, already …”

I kiss her cheeks, then her nose, and finish with her lips. “So then, when you have my children, I’ll have three and four. You’re my soulmate, Bethany. I want everything with you,” I wish I could make her understand just how much I want to have it all with her.

I’m still trying to work out how.

She brightens a little bit and I kiss across her jaw.

“I want to spend every night with you that’s humanly possible …” she whispers so softly I barely hear her, “but it feels like we spend more time apart than together.”

My heart cracks at the sentiment, but she’s right. We do spend more time apart right now, but that’s only because she’s been underage and I couldn’t publicly date her, while she’s underage. Then there are our mutual friends.

Spencer, Fridge, and Martha.

I don’t know what they will say when they find out – but I fear they might put the pieces together. Spencer especially. He’s highly intelligent, just like me. Our friends might not believe that our affair didn’t start until after she was legal. Especially considering all of the absences and excuses Bethany and I have made in order to spend these days together.

“After the holidays, I will file for divorce, I promise,” I spear a few kisses up the line of her neck.

“A divorce could take months to go through … and until then, I’ll be at home, in my bed … unable to sleep without you. The nightmares are worst when I’m alone,” she admits, but I already know they are.

I have more frequent nightmares when she’s not with me, too.

Mine are old, however. They’ve been around since I came home from Jumanji. I’m used to doing battle with them, alone.

“I have one final birthday gift for you, Bethany.” I decide that now is as good a time as any to unveil my intentions.

“A present?” Her eyes light up like little lightbulbs, causing me to chuckle.

I finally pull myself off of her and tuck myself back into my jeans, before I pull out the key, I tucked in my pocket, earlier in the day.

Her eyes reflect her confusion, and she rolls the key over her in her palm a few times. I attached it to a little rubber eight ball, keychain, and a dog tag that reads simply: Jumanji.

“A key? What’s it for?” she ponders.

“It’s for this cabin,” she looks up at me with bewilderment.

“I don’t come here without you …” she furrows her eyebrows at me.

“I know how it feels for you to have to sleep in that bedroom where … where it happened …” I clear my throat and shake away the unpleasant memories, “so I had hoped … I do hope that you’ll come live here, instead.”

Her mouth falls agape and her eyes bulge to the size of dinner plates.

“You mean it?” she suddenly looks like a princess being offered her fairytale, “You want me to live here? With you?”

I smile, “Well, only until my divorce finalizes. I’d come stay with you when I can, like I’ve been doing, but you would have a safe place, where you father can never find you … at least until I can move you into my real house.”

She shrieks and throws her arms around me. We plummet to the mattress and descend into a heap of arms and legs, as she kisses me.

“Happy Birthday, Bethany,” I muse against her lips.

“Now you have to stay, Alex …” she breathes.

“Yeah? And why is that?”

She shoots me a mischievous smile, “Because, I’m going to spend the rest of the night, showing my gratitude.”

She doesn’t give me a moment to register what she’s said, before she’s reopening my jeans, tugging out my length, and going down on me.

I let out a cry from my own sensitivity down there, but she doesn’t let-up, she’s determined to get me ready and raring to go again – and this time … I don’t try to stop her.

I wake up with my hair sticking up on end and Bethany tucked into the nook of my arm. I feel spent and exhausted, because we spent most of the night tangled in coitus and moaning loud enough for this entire empty cabin to hear. If I had neighbors, they’d probably have heard us.

I’m grateful for the distance between the cabins.

Bethany is so beautiful in the mornings. I wish I could wake up to her every morning.

Someday soon, I know I will. But the patience is killing me – killing the both of us, slowly.

I move to sit up and run my fingers through my tousled hair with a yawn. My movement wakes her and she stares up at me with a sleepy expression in her eyes.

“Mornin’” she hums and sits up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“Well you really did it, you kept me out all night,” I tease without a hint of disappointment in my blue eyes. I can’t be mad at her about this. She was right, it was her birthday, yesterday, after all.

I’ll have to make an excuse to Tiffany, to do with work. I don’t know if she still believes all my overnight stays are actually work by this point – but I no longer can be bothered to care.

“I did, Daddy … you gonna come back down here and punish me for it?” she goads.

I make a sound in my throat and kiss her chastely, trying to ignore the way my cock twitches when she makes such a lewd proposition.

“I can’t, I really have to go this time,” I shift over in the bed, trying to ignore her pout as I reach for my discarded phone on the nightstand, “Don’t give me that, I stayed, didn’t I?” I chastise. And I’m sure she’s about to respond, but within seconds … I can’t breathe …

Part of me wishes now that I never looked at my phone – that I never touched it. But I did and I can’t take it back. And it wouldn’t have changed anything, anyway, but at least I could have had one last time with Bethany, before the devastation, if I had just rolled over on top of her and kissed her instead, gave into my every whim.

There had been dozens of missed calls. From my parents, from unknown numbers, and ten voicemails – enough to fill my box.

I remember the panic … that I do remember. I remember how I opened the first voicemail, listened to it and panicked.

I don’t think I could speak at first, I don’t think I could even move.

The pain was sudden and like a stab in my heart and in my soul – and everywhere.

From just one voicemail my parents left, I knew the story.

Tiffany had been driving the children home from daycare, when a semi-truck lost control and dove through a traffic light – she never saw it coming.

And I hope to God, our children didn’t either.

It was the kind of pain I’d never felt before – worse than when I remerged from Jumanji to find myself a teenager still. A teenager without Bethany.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt the weight of my heart shatter the way it did when I heard my father’s tears, for my wife and children.

They couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t answer my phone. Why I had silenced it and vanished for a night. I have never been able to explain it to them, but I think they know now … I think they figured out the reason. Because they’d checked my office, they knew I wasn’t there … they hadn’t thought of the cabin, however, because why would I be there? But they must have guessed by now …

Because the devastation came first with the voicemails, then with the uncontrollable tears and shaking. Bethany had panicked – she’d held me and cried, before she even knew what was happening, because she’d never seen me like that, so she’d known it was bad … whatever it was.

I’d been unable to get a word out around the crippling tears, so I’d let her listen for herself. She’d heard the voicemails – listened to the truth.

That’s all it had taken for her to dress herself, then help me dress, too. She’d snatched my car keys and driven us back to town, down to the hospital. Where she’d walked with me, hand in hand, to the morgue.

I’ll never forget the sight of them, lying there.

Tiffany had been unrecognizable; her face was a mess of blood and tissue. I couldn’t look – I couldn’t see what the crash had done to her, before I was nearly sick. But it was our children that left the deepest scar. The mortician had warned me it might be too much for me to bear, but I had to see … I deserved to see.

Because I was supposed to pick up the children. It was my day to drive them home. But I’d lied about work … about staying late, to be with Bethany a few additional hours.

It should have been me in that car, on that street, at that light.

Not, Tiffany.

I had clenched my jaw and steeled myself against the reaction of my stomach. I could see the lifelessness – the pastiness of my daughters.

Little Sarah with her full head of darkish brown hair. I couldn’t bear to look at her for more than a second or two. I doubted even a single bone in her body hadn’t been broken, by the impact.

Then, Little Bethany.

My oldest girl. My beautiful, blond-haired, blue-eyed, dream … She’d been such a caring, compassionate little girl. I loved her with everything in me. Maybe even more than Sarah, which I never would have said out loud.

She’d lived up to the name I gave her. She’d saved the love of my life.

If she hadn’t come in when she did. Told me the ‘secret’ Bethany let her see, when she did … I’d have lost the love of my life. And I can never repay my little girl for that. I can never make her understand what she did for me that day.

I don’t know how long I stayed in there. I remember losing time, though.

I remember Bethany apologizing again and again, for keeping me that night. I also remember her driving me home. My parents had been there. Waiting for me.

I remember their curious expressions when they met Bethany for the first time, that day. Their bewilderment at how I knew her, and why she’d been driving me. I’d given an excuse. That Bethany and I had met at a park in town, when I’d taken the girls. She was Tiffany and I’s ‘babysitter’ on occasion.

It was another lie that I don’t think they bought. Because they’d never heard of her. And had Tiffany still been alive, she’d have backed their suspicions.

But in the immediate aftermath, I didn’t care.

Today, I put my wife and children in the ground.

I wished so many times that I never met Tiffany. Because she was a complication – she got in the way of me and Bethany … but my daughters … my precious daughters …

I’ve put them in the ground on Christmas Eve.

A week ago, I was planning Christmas, now … now I have a tree with all the presents underneath, but no one to share it all with.

Only Bethany.

The funeral was a lot. Bethany stood at my side, through it.

Fridge, Martha, and Spencer all showed up to pay their respects, and all three had thrown sideways glances at one another, because Bethany had an arm draped through my arm.

I felt a lot of disapproving eyes on me. But I no longer saw any of them. I think I blacked out the past week. I remember drinking a lot in the evenings. I remember Bethany taking more than one day off school to be with me, but I haven’t touched her … not since … not since that night …

And I have been sick, since that night.

Because in a way, I’d wished for this. At least in part.

I’d wished for something simple and easy. I’d wished to not have a lengthy, drawn-out divorce, that was traumatic and messy for our daughters … and now, it is a non-issue.

How sick am I?

How depraved?

I plan to blackout again, just so I don’t have to deal with Christmas Day. It’s warm near the fire, but I feel like ice.

The day was so long and trying, I just wish I could have been blacked out for all of it. The judgmental stares of everyone that saw me and Bethany, together … The whispers of disbelief in the wake of such tragedy that I would have a teenage girl on my arm for comfort … I’m sure the rumors are spreading like wildfire – like disease … But I’ve lost the wherewithal to care about any of it …

Bethany is still in her formfitting, black dress, my black leather jacket accompanied it. That also had inspired further whispers of disbelief. Not only had she been holding my hand, or been looped through my arm, but wearing my jacket, too.

“Alex?” It’s been silent in my living room for so long, that I didn’t think it’d ever break.

I lift the whiskey bottle to my lips and take a few chugs in quick pulls. I plan to forget – I need to. The pain is far too much for me to contend with.

“Bethany,” I whisper, but don’t look at her – can’t look at her.

I feel such guilt when I look at her right now. Guilt, because I never loved my wife – because I was a terrible husband …

Bethany settles on the arm of the couch and reaches out to squeeze my shoulder. I shiver at her touch and my body wants her, something fierce – but the guilt will swallow me alive if I give in to that … to my impulses, right now.

This is the longest I’ve gone without sex in a long time, and I haven’t touched myself, either.

I’m pent up … but I deserve to be.

I did this to my wife … to my daughters … I’m a fucking piece of trash – and I know it.

I shrug off Bethany’s touch and I can almost feel her face fall. I see out of the corner of my eye that she swipes away a few tears.

“You have to know I’m sorry. You have to know that … right, Alex?” I hear the beginning of her tears now working into her voice.

I close my eyes and lift my whiskey to take another swig – but this time Bethany stops my hand midway to my lips. She brushes the back of my hand with her thumb with this solemnness in her gaze that threatens to break me.

“Bethany …” my voice is harder this time, with an edge of warning in it.

She chews her bottommost lip and allows a few tears to stream freely down either cheek.

“If I’d known I never would have asked you to stay … Alex … Please …” she begs me and I flinch.

“You should leave, Bethany,” I whisper, “You should go back home.”

She stills in her tracks and I take advantage of her bewilderment to wrestle my hand away and take another swig.

“So that’s it then?” Bethany breathes, “J-Just like that … you don’t w-want me anymore--?”

“Bethany—”

“No! You promised you w-wouldn’t leave me … You promised … You p-promised you f-fucking loved me!”

“Beth—”

“So that’s your p-plan now?! You plan to drink until you can’t fucking s-see straight and k-kill yourself f-from it?! To join your family in h-heaven and leave me all a-alone?! You p-promised! Alex! You promised!”

I can’t speak because she won’t let me and I wish I could make her understand why this can’t be now, but I can’t – because I don’t know how to explain it myself. I don’t deserve to be happy if my family’s dead because of it. I can’t look at her and not see the worst thing I’ve ever done – the most selfish move I’ve ever made. Why can’t she see it, too? How fucked up it all is? Why am I the only one that can’t breathe because of this?

She’s wrenching the bottle away before I can stop her and its slammed on the counter across the room, before she jaunts back to me, with this purpose in her eyes. And I want to tell her not to, but she’s on me, before I can.

“You promised to stay with me! You promised that my home would be your home – that nothing would change us … nothing would change what we mean to each other! You can’t leave me, Alex! You kept me alive … I wanted to die and you made me stay … You choose me … Now you can’t just throw me away …” her lips press to mine and I’m overcome with too many emotions, because she’s also straddled my hips.

I feel her pressed down into my erection. I’m immediately aroused by her – I’ve pricked with my needs for a week, now. It’s gone ignored for a week.

“Bethany – Fuck … Bethany … Stop … please …” I whine, as my skin crawls with this frenzy for her. It’s the alcohol and the grief, and everything in-between. It’s a lot.

“I won’t let you kill yourself on me, Alex … I can’t let you … You have to be here for me … for me … and our baby …” I don’t think she meant to say it.

I see in her eyes, the moment it slips out that she didn’t mean to.

Her eyes are stricken and wide. Her fingers have stilled at my sweater collar, where they’ve cupped just up my neck to my jaw.

And my heart jumps a beat.

“What?” I breathe.

Despite my lack of soberness, that revelation has shocked me enough to sober me a bit. Enough to comprehend what she just said.

“Are you …?” I stare down between us, where her still flat belly rests, between us, “Bethany …” I trail off, speechless.

She takes the opportunity to clamor off of me and across the room. Sobs are now rattling her shoulders and tears are spilling down her cheeks. She composes herself enough to look at me, with despair – with agony.

“What did you think?!” she shouts at me, with this sudden fury in her emerald eyes, “Did you think you could just … j-just keep taking me and not ever leave a consequence? You spilled seed in me every time, Alex!”

I feel sadness build and clench in my heart.

“It’s not that, Bethany,” I manage to utter.

“Isn’t it, though? Because you said you loved me … You said it’s us against the world … Yet, you want me to leave … You’re casting me aside like garbage … took what you needed until you had your fill and then threw me away … like he did …” She does choke on her sobs this time and I gape at her, horrified.

That’s not what I intended … God … I fucked things up.

“I lost my whole family, Bethany. It’s not that I don’t want you – it’s that I do want you! That’s the problem! I want to take you to my bedroom and fuck you in my marital bed! I want to have you in every room of this house! I want to latch on to you and make you mine, until I’ve forgotten where you end and I begin … until I’m so dependent on you that I will never be able to claw my way back out of you – out of that dependency!”

I want to make her understand – I need to.

If I go down the path of grief with her in my house – in my bed – at my side – that will be the end of all of my morality at that point.

That will be the end of everything I was – everything I should be.

Maybe she understands, because her eyes shift from anger, to sympathy. Just like that.

There’s this brokenness – this defeat.

“That’s what this is about?” she presses, searches my eyes and must find the truth sheltered in them.

“Bethany … Look at me … look at us … Can you honestly say this is normal? That what we have is fucking normal? It’s perverse … We’re sick,” I try to make her see, I need to, “My wife and children are dead and all I can think about is being balls-deep in you! Spending the rest of my life, with you!”

I stand up, cross the room, and press her back into the wall, nearest the fireplace. I can feel the heat, but it’s not just from the fire-flames nearby.

“I’ll ruin you – we’re going to ruin each other … and a baby … look what I’ve done to my first two …” I brush my hand over her abdomen. Push and knead her supple skin.

“It was an accident. It’s no one’s fault, Alex. You couldn’t have known what would happen … It was a freak accident …”

I groan as she winds her fingers through my hair – tugs and plays with the ends.

“You don’t get to abandon me, Alex. Not over guilt …” she lifts up her chin and connects our lips. I grunt and moan and try not to rut my throbbing need against her belly in the process.

But my attempt to keep myself grounded, in this moment, are senseless, because what she says next, sends me reeling.

“Now, take me and your unborn child to what will soon be our marital bed, and make me feel your grief,” she demands against my lips.

It’s enough to set me off – enough to help (with the combination of alcohol) to abate the last of my inhibitions.

I need her and she needs me – and she’s carrying my child. She’s going to be a mother … I can’t even remotely wrap my head around that concept. Being a father … again … and so soon.

I have her in my arms, before I can think too much about it. In the dark shadows of my bedroom, I fling her back onto the bed – and I know its going to be rough and messy – like she likes it. She usually has to persuade me to give her pain – but this time, I offer it without haste – without hesitation.

I barely have time to open my pants, free my leaky, pulsating need, and push aside her panties, before I burrow myself between her thighs. I’m slatted between them and a mess of noises and whines. It’s not meant to be slow and pleasant.

I find I’m rough – punishing even.

And she sucks air through her teeth and screams for me. All while I bite, scratch, and fuck myself inside of her, like a brute. Like her father probably did.

It’s seconds and I’ve spent in her – not even a full minute. It’s ugly and real.

It’s my first release in a week and my balls spill a copious amount in her. Pent-up is an understatement, I’ve likely reached the state of blue-balls. That’s the only thing that would have made me spill like an inexperienced, horny teenager in seconds, the first go.

I sense that she can see it in my tortured blue eyes – the compiled grief and guilt. It’s all there, sweltering underneath my skin. Pulsating through my veins like a monster.

I’ve taken Bethany in my marital bed – in a sacred place that was Tiffany’s and mine.

It’s like I’m celebrating on her grave and that of our daughters’ too.

I want to punish someone for it. I want to show the hurt that’s built in me. So, I bite my Bethany’s skin. Her collarbone, neck, wrist, breast, everywhere. I draw blood, I leave marks – and I don’t stop until I’ve exhausted myself from it.

She’s crying, but it’s not because of what I’ve done to her – it’s because she feels it now.

My gut-wrenching agony.

I’ve given her scars that will mark her forever. I’ve given her a part of this grief that can be built into a picture – seared into a memory. Because it needs to be between us – forever.

What our love caused – what we’ve done.

It’s sickness – it’s codependency – it’s ugliness – and it’s ours.

The world will know that I cheated on my wife, the proof is in my mistress’s womb. I’ll be the scandal of this small little town and I’ll wear the scarlet letter I’ve earned like a badge of honor, because there is nothing else, I can do.

I don’t know how I can stay in this house, in this life, and know that my daughters – my wife – are probably watching us, from the other side. I wonder how Tiffany feels about what I’ve done. If she sees me for the despicable man, I am … or if she has sympathy, because of how long I suffered without Bethany.

I imagine she’d have sympathy. Tiffany was always a kind spirit. She was never cruel – never selfish – she wasn’t like me.

I delve between Bethany’s thighs, lick and tweak the bud of her pleasure, until she’s writhing for me. Aching for me – and I don’t stop until she’s came a copious amount of times – a countless amount. It’s my way of healing what I wrought on her skin and in her heart. It’s what I can do to mend a little piece of my destruction, tonight.

I have finally recovered enough of my stamina, by the time I’ve finished, that I can climb back over her and plunge into her again. It’s the bedsheets I wrench my fingers into, balling my fists. And the headboard I slam against the wall with every powerful rut, until the noise echoes through this bedroom like a cattle call.

Bethany asked for my grief – she pleaded for it – and now she has it.

All of it.

I’ve made her take it all and as I spill inside of her, I clench my jaw and grunt through another release – another spilled load of my seed.

The moans I release are almost animal – feral – and I can’t stop myself. I can’t contain what I am, now. What I feel. It’s too much – and I’ve endured too much.

I feel broken and tired, so I lay down on Bethany. I push my face into her chest – and I sob.

And I realize I can’t stop. The pain is all too much – too crippling – and it’s all I can do, just to fall apart in her arms.

And I do.

Fall apart.

Bethany

I’ve spent this past week in such a heap of guilt and betrayal.

Alex loved his daughters, even if he didn’t love his wife, I saw the spark in his eye that he’d get when he talked about his girls. He is such a loving father – a loving man – and I know the guilt he feels is near to breaking him.

It’s like this big, tilt that has functioned as a driving force inside him. Almost indescribable, but I had been looking forward to getting to know his daughters – my namesake.

I only saw her that once, but she’d been so beautiful – so loved.

And her fate has gripped me tight and made me hurt. Just like Alex has hurt.

I knew I was pregnant, when I asked him on my birthday. I’d taken a test that morning, but I’d been testing the waters. Waiting for Christmas to tell him the big news.

It was my present for him – my gift.

It’s all fucked up now, though.

Because as I lay here, under him, holding him – sobbing with him – I can feel this burn all over my flesh. Like a landscape of pain and suffering – and that’s what we are now.

We are pain and suffering.

At the funeral I had more than one person come up to me and question why I was on Alex’s arm like I was. That I was a little young to be all over him like that – that it was a shameful display. Spencer, Fridge, and Martha had all sideways glanced at each other, whispered amongst themselves about how long we’ve been together.

I know they were, because once I approached them, they all fell quiet and gave me disapproving looks. Martha was the one to speak up and say, ‘He’s almost forty, Bethany. This isn’t Jumanji anymore.’

I can agree with her on that last bit, this is no longer a game.

It’s real life, and people are hurting. Alex is hurting and I wondered if the best thing I could do would be to walk away … but when I saw him by the fire tonight … When I saw him holding that entire bottle of whiskey, not even bothering with a glass, just chugging it right from the bottle … I knew if I left him, that he’d die.

He’d drink himself to death.

He’d never come back from this guilt – so I’ve taken it on with him.

I will have his child, I will be his too-young, gold-digging, grave-dancing, slutty, wife and I will stay at his side.

Because we are in this together.

I listened to the bulk of the whispers today and I decided tonight that I won’t let them break me. If my father’s brutality – labels – couldn’t break me, then no one else will, either.

“I’m sorry, Alex …” I whisper to him again, because I have to – I need to.

I’m always going to be sorry for how this all turned out.

He doesn’t respond, he just sobs harder and pretty soon our tears are mixing together under the strain of both of our shared grief.

We must have nodded off, because when I opened my eyes again, it was light outside – and it was Christmas.

Epilogue

Alex

Everything moved at lightning speed, after that night.

I told my parents about Bethany first. They deserved to know, because I had lied to them while my wife and daughters laid dead in a morgue.

Of course, I couldn’t tell them the whole truth about Bethany, but I told them the bare minimum of what I could. That Bethany is the reason I named my first daughter Bethany … that she saved me, once, and that I owe her my life.

It didn’t make sense to them, it hardly makes sense to me, but they couldn’t hold contempt for a girl that saved their only son – only child – no matter how bizarre the situation had become.

They were the first to accept Bethany, to understand why I was so madly in love with her – and I’ve watched them together, welcoming her and the child that developed inside of her, into the family.

The rest of the town hasn’t been so accepting.

Bethany’s mother believes I intentionally preyed upon her daughter, and had threatened to press charges, (since the baby was proof, I’d had her before she was strictly legal) until Bethany stood up to her and insisted if she did anything to me, she would never see her again.

I don’t care for Bethany’s mother, because as far as I can tell she’s always been clueless about her own daughter’s suffering and never so much as cared to notice the way Bethany feared her own father. Enough to let that monster back into the house whenever he crawled back. That alone, is unforgivable in my eyes.

Martha, Fridge, and Spencer have also been leery about the pair of us. Whenever we meet for coffee, they are all visibly uncomfortable and brimming with clear disapproval. But they don’t voice their concerns (at least not in front of me) and I don’t ever bring up the elephant in the room. Bethany and I just chat about little things and our lives, and that’s an end to it.

Bethany and I have lived together ever since Christmas. She stays in my house and if we need an escape from the judgement of Brantford, I take a few days off work, and we head up to the family cabin where we find our own little oasis in each other.

I proposed to Bethany on her Graduation Day.

Still in her cap and gown, with her belly seven months swollen with our baby. This one, we’d found out, was a boy.

We’d married a month later, when she was eight months pregnant, and I can still remember the beauty of her, that day. I probably always will. Her hair had been styled in curls, her cheeks bright with blush, and her white dress bragged elegant lace, and flowers stitched into the corset.

I still feel the ache of guilt every single day, because I remember the daughters I will never see grow up, nor walk down the aisle at their own weddings, but Bethany’s given me a gift – she’s given me a second chance, at being alive.

I still drink on occasion, when it gets hard, but not enough to black out. Just enough to take the edge off of my substantial guilt.

Bethany gave birth to our son a year ago, now. July 8^th. And I’ve fallen in love with my new family, the way I (regrettably) never could with my first.

It’s in this moment that I stare over at Bethany and I watch her help our son blow out his candles, that I feel the eyes of my other family on me, and I mourn them in this instant. I mourn the birthdays we will never have, and the holidays we can never see.

I still have the presents from that Christmas tucked away downstairs. I couldn’t open them; I don’t think I ever will. Bethany had helped me move them down there, when we woke in the morning. Afterward, we’d settled on the couch and cried for the longest while. I remember the way our mourning turned to kisses, which turned to love making on the couch, and there’s still so much repressed guilt from that time, right after – where I found immeasurable pleasure with Bethany through my mourning for what I’d lost.

It’s in the now, that I reach for Alex Jr. that I wonder how we live with the overarching truth of things. Because we’ve carried on, but its still a hole in me. It’s still a hole in her.

Despite our smiles, Bethany doesn’t quite glow the way she did before, and neither do I.

It’s a disconnect between grief and love. Sex and feelings.

But I love the family we’ve made. And I always will.

It’s later today, after baby Alex is tucked into his crib, that I hold Bethany close and I drink in the scent of her hair and I wonder what she’s thinking.

“Bethany … Do you think we’re going to hell?” I’ve been thinking about my guilt a lot lately. I don’t mean to be so blunt, but the question just sort of tumbles out.

She tilts her head up toward mine. Furrows her brow and lifts a hand to brush my cheek.

“What? Why would you say that?” she’s nuzzled up to me on our bed, and I can feel the shadow of ghosts on me – around me – as I sit here trying to keep my composure.

“Just …” I sigh, “Don’t you ever feel like they’re watching us? My family … like they’re mad at us … for being so happy …” It’s a silly sentiment. I realize that after I say it, but I can’t take it back.

It’s what I feel.

“Oh, Alex …” she hooks a leg over my waist and makes to straddle my lap, in order to peer up into my eyes, “I don’t think your family would want you to be unhappy … They must understand now, why you did everything you did. Jumanji choose us to be together. I still believe that. We fought it and we lost …” she breathes.

It’s true. Jumanji picked us to love one another.

Perhaps the game – in its cruel twisted way – also did away with my family to make the choice clear. I wouldn’t put it past the game not to meddle with things, after we played. It’s a thought that’s crossed my mind, more than once.

“Why us?” I whisper, “Why did it have to pick us, Bethany? Why did it have to make me feel like I am such a fucking asshole?” I lean in and steal a kiss from her.

She moans when I drag my hand over the course of her back, straight up her spine, and braces herself against my chest.

“I don’t know, Alex,” she admits, “But I know one thing … I never want to give you up, even if that does mean we’re going to hell. I’ll happily burn there with you.”

I plant a few kisses to her collarbone, then trace up her neck. It’s like I can’t stop feeling this hunger for her. It’s been like this forever. At least it feels like it has. It’s torture to be without her. Torture not to kiss her – just torture.

All the time.

Everything about Bethany has me tortured.

“So, what then? We just feel like this forever?” I grumble, in a second of misery.

She rocks her hips and grinds herself down on my lap. I moan and clamp my hands against her hips, steadying her – trying to stop her.

“Does this feel bad, Alex? Does it feel bad when you’re inside of me?” she lifts my left hand, and drags her thumb over my gold wedding band. I lift her hand, and stare down at the diamond on her ring finger.

“You know it doesn’t …” I sigh out in hitch-y breaths.

“We’re married, now, Alex. We’re married and we have a beautiful son, and there’s nothing wrong with our love anymore … You don’t have to feel guilt anymore. Because I don’t. I never will,” she persists and I force a smile.

“It’s just hard to imagine what things would be like if they didn’t die … that’s all,” I manage to sigh out.

She kisses me again and I return the sentiment.

“I was older than you once, and I loved you, then, as a teenage boy, same as I love you in your forties as a man,” she admits, loftily.

I laugh, then. She loves to reminds me of when she was older. It reminds us both how absurd, the jungles of Jumanji were. How the game shaped us, both into the twisted mirror we are today.

“Yes, you were older,” I agree, “but our souls are the same.”

She beams and nods her head, “Yes, Alex. Exactly. And I don’t care if you’re forty or one hundred – you’re mine. Your soul is mine and mine is yours. That’s all that matters – all that I care about.”

She’s almost twenty, now. But I don’t see her as so young. I see her soul – inside.

The guilt stems from the death our love is mounted on.

But I don’t want to talk about it with her anymore. I want to fall into her, instead.

I want to be happy and I want to feel that guilt shy away. So, I do.

I kiss her and we shed off our clothes in a wild frenzy of kisses and parts. I find my home inside of her and I don’t think about anything else again, tonight.

Not until my dreams come to remind me of Jumanji. Those little nightmares that will never – never – go away.