Where We Found Our Home by Natasha Bishop
Ciara
The last month with Lincoln has been a dream. He’s truly my best friend. I think I’ve told him more than I’ve told Sasha and Nina, and I’ve told them almost everything. Everything but the most important detail—the real reason I moved here in the first place.
I haven’t felt like I’m being watched in weeks. I’m really finding my groove here. If only I could stop the recurring nightmares, I’d be golden.
And the sex.
Good Lord, the sex. I think the man has broken me. I’m pretty sure I’m ruined for all other men. I used to hate when women said that, but holy shit, I get it now.
The problem? Lincoln has opened up to me about everything that scarred him in the past, and I’m still being a fucking coward and not telling him about Eddie.
This is stupid. I want to tell him. I want to share my burdens with him, and I know if we’re going to have a real chance, I need to trust him with all of me but…fuck.
The smile on my face falls when Dr. Goodwin asks her next question. “So things are going well with Lincoln?”
“Things are going amazing with Lincoln.” Amazing is an understatement, but I don’t really want to get into the details of my sex life with my therapist.
“But I sense some hesitancy there.”
“I’m lying to him. I’m lying to everyone. Lincoln, Sasha, Nina, his parents, his brother, his other sister, his friends. They’ve all taken me in, no questions asked, and accepted me into their circle, and I’m not being honest with them about what I’m running from and the danger they could be in just being around me.”
Dr. Goodwin takes in my silence and keeps pushing on. “Are you afraid that if you tell them they’ll no longer accept you?”
Am I? “Umm…I…I don’t know. I don’t think that’s the reason.”
She clearly doesn’t believe me, but like the good doctor she is she just probes further. “Okay. What do you think the reason is?”
I don’t answer right away, and Dr. Goodwin just sits there patiently. “Shit. Maybe that is the reason. I don’t know. They would be well within their rights to tell me to fuck off. That they don’t want to be brought into my drama. Part of me wants them to do that, because if Eddie found me and hurt them to get to me, I would never forgive myself. But part of me…” I bury my face in my hands and Dr. Goodwin just does her patiently waiting thing again. How does she do that?
I continue. “Part of me doesn’t want them to let me go. But how selfish is that?”
“You think it’s selfish to want love and acceptance?”
Yes. I’m not worth the trouble. “No.”
“Do you trust these people?”
“Yes,” I answer with no hesitation. I do trust all of them. I know they care about me. I just don’t know if they should.
“But you don’t trust them not to hurt you or toss you aside?”
Hmm. “I think that if I tell them what happened to me, that’ll make it real.”
“You think telling them about this part of your history will invite your past to join your present?”
That’s it! “Yes! Is that crazy? It’s like Eddie is this ghost. Like Beetlejuice. If I say his name three times, he’ll show up and fuck up my life again.”
There she goes writing in that fucking notebook again. “I don’t think you’re crazy at all. But I do think you need to make a choice. Are you willing to take that risk to have Lincoln and everyone else close to you?”
The question of the year right there.
Lincoln and I are sitting outside at a restaurant for lunch. It’s a gorgeous day outside, but Lincoln has on a jacket and a hat.
“Are you cold?”
“Yeah, why?” He looks at me like he can’t fathom why I’m confused at his response. And I’m looking at him like I can’t fathom how he’s confused that I’m confused.
“It’s seventy degrees out,” I deadpan.
“Yeah, that’s kinda cold!”
I shake my head in mock disappointment. “Such a Texas boy.”
“And don’t you forget it.” He’s so damn cute I can’t stand it.
We’re walking arm in arm after lunch, but I’m stopped short when I look across the street and see a face I hoped never to see again. There’s no mistaking the coldness in those eyes. I jump away from Lincoln and stumble backward but barely catch myself before I hit the ground. Lincoln grabs my elbow to steady me, but I snatch my arm away from him. I can’t have him touching me right now. My skin feels like a thousand needles, I’m so on edge. The man I saw is nowhere to be found.
Did I imagine that? No. I know what I saw.
Do you? Fuck. I…I have to go. I need to get out of here.
“Ciara, what’s going on? Are you okay?” Lincoln’s eyes are wide with concern.
“I’m fine. I have to go.” I don’t even recognize my own voice. I sound so meek. So soft. I hate myself for it. My throat feels like it’s closing. My chest feels heavy, like an elephant’s sitting on it.
“Wait, talk to me.” He reaches for me again, but I back away. To the outside world, I look like I’m having a full-on panic attack, and I am. I am not okay. I can’t even bring myself to look at Lincoln right now. I don’t want to see the pity there.
“I have to go. I’m sorry.” I turn and run as fast as I can. I run inside a clothing store, and the cashier looks uncomfortable with my presence. I can’t blame him; I look shady as fuck standing by the door looking outside. He doesn’t approach me though, and that’s a good thing because I don’t think I even have the ability to speak right now. I stand in the store’s window until the Uber I called pulls up.
When I get to my building, I run up all six flights of steps and don’t stop until I’m inside my apartment. I rush through my security checks and sit on my couch, knife in hand. I sit on my other hand in an attempt to stop the trembling, but it doesn’t work.
I’ve missed four calls and three texts from Lincoln.
Lincoln: What happened back there? Are you okay?
Lincoln: You’re scaring me.
Lincoln: Please just tell me you’re somewhere safe.
I let out a deep sigh. I have to deal with this.
Me: Yeah I’m okay. I’m home.
Lincoln: Can I come to you?
I’m torn between ignoring him and telling him I need him and to come over.
You need to make a choice. Are you willing to take the risk to have Lincoln close to you?
He has to know. If I really saw Eddie, then he needs to know what I’ve done. The danger I’ve put him and his family in. Even if I decide to leave town, they still need to be vigilant. I send the text before I can chicken out.
Me: Please do.
Moments later, he’s knocking on my door. I wonder if he had been outside waiting for me to respond to his text or if he just broke a million traffic laws to get to me. When I let Lincoln inside, his eyes track to the knife sitting on the coffee table and back to my eyes. He caresses my face with his hand.
This may be selfish. But I don’t know how this conversation is going to go, and if this is the last time we’ll be together like this, I want to have him completely.
I lean into his touch and kiss the palm of his hand. “Please. No talking yet. I just…I need you.” He searches my eyes, and I don’t know if he finds the answers he’s looking for, but he nods and grabs my hand, leading me to my bedroom.
He kisses me deeply and then trails his kisses down my throat while pushing my shirt off my shoulders. He trails his fingers down my tattoos, letting me know with his gentle touch that he accepts me completely, and my heart bursts for him.
He sucks on my puckered nipple through my bra, and the thrill of the feeling has me ripping the cups down to give him more access. He helps me shove his pants down his legs, all while releasing my nipple with a pop before switching to the other one. He sits on the edge of the bed and in one swift motion, he shifts us so I’m straddling him and hands me the condom. He knows I need control right now without me saying anything. I stroke him a few times, letting his soft grunts guide me. I look directly in his eyes as I sheath him with the condom, and the look there makes me fall a little deeper for him. He lifts my hips and lines his cock up against my entrance. I take him in inch by inch until I’m fully seated, never taking my eyes off his. My hips start to move, and I bury my face in his neck.
I don’t even realize I’ve started silently crying until Lincoln lifts my face and kisses my tears away. He looks at me, a question in his eyes. I give him a nod, and he takes control of our pace. He flips me onto my back and kisses me passionately.
“I’m here, Angel.”
Angel. He doesn’t know how much I needed to hear that. I have no idea why he chose the nickname Angel for me. I’m not an angel. The things I’ve seen. The things I’ve been through. I’m too damaged to be an angel. I’m so close to the side of the devil I can feel the flames of hell nipping at my feet, but God, with him I feel like I could be one. This is different than any other time we’ve had sex. We’ve always been this passionate, and we’ve always had fun in the bedroom, but this is more than lust and this is anything but funny. This is healing.
“Lincoln!” I scream his name as I come undone, and he joins me a moment later.
He gets up and runs to the bathroom to dispose of the condom and runs back to bed as fast as possible. As if he doesn’t want me out of his sight for a moment. He crawls under the covers and pulls me against his chest, rubbing his hand up and down my tattooed arm. I know he has felt the scars under my tattoo, but he’s never asked about them—a fact I’m grateful for, but I need to address everything now. I take a deep breath. “Okay, go ahead.”
“Go ahead what?”
“Ask me. Whatever you want to ask me.”
He turns me so I’m looking him right in the eye. “Ciara, I don’t want to ask if you’re uncomfortable. I will never force you to tell me anything. But please don’t mistake my not asking for my not caring. I want to know everything about you, and I want to help you carry whatever burdens you have. I’m here. Whenever you’re really ready.”
And that right there is what changes this conversation from my telling him out of obligation for his well-being to my telling him because I trust him more than anyone else in this world and I know he’ll catch me when I fall.
“Two years ago, I was in a really bad car accident.” He winces, and I know part of his mind went to Erica, but he stays present with me and rubs my arm in support.
“A man driving an eighteen-wheeler crashed into me, and my car rolled four times before stopping. A few witnesses pulled me out before the car caught fire, but I still had a broken leg, a broken collar bone, a ruptured spleen, a collapsed lung, and I had to have surgery on my arm. It left extensive scarring. I hated the scars at first. It’s why I covered them up with these.” I gesture to the tattoos. He lays a kiss against my tattoo, and I already feel my composure falling, but I suck my tears back in. I need to get through this. “But now I see the scars and the tattoos as a reminder that I survived. The accident is what started the path my life took, and it was very traumatic, but it seems like nothing now in the grand scheme of things.” Lincoln still doesn’t say anything. He just continues to be a supporting presence. “The man who drove the truck is named Eddie Brighton. Apparently, he was drunk and high when he crashed into me. So naturally, he was fired. And he had his CDL revoked. He faced criminal charges, but he ended up just getting probation. He came to visit me in the hospital. I didn’t know who he was at the time. He was just some random white guy who stood over my bed, but the look in his eyes made me uncomfortable. He had these severely scarred hands, and he kept rubbing them together while looking at me. I remember looking at the call button on my bed, but it was actually a little out of my reach, closer to where he was standing, and he just looked me in my eyes like he dared me to try to reach for it. I asked him who he was, and he just said he worked in the hospital, but I knew that was a lie. I called out for a nurse and he left, but he said he’d see me soon. I found out it was Eddie later when a nurse said she saw him on TV regarding the accident.” I’ve researched Eddie, but I’ve never found anything besides the articles about my accident. I have no idea why he set his sights on me. It could be the influence of the drugs, but I doubt it. There’s more to it. There has to be. I take a minute to wipe the memory away before continuing. At least I try to. I start and stop my sentence three times before Lincoln steps in.
“We can stop if it’s too much,” he says.
I shake my head with so much force the tears fly off my face in all different directions. “No, I want to share this with you. Just…stay with me, okay?” He nods and squeezes my hand. I take a deep breath and continue. “I went through physical therapy after the accident, and the company Eddie worked for approached me and offered me a huge settlement so that I wouldn’t sue. I took it, of course, because I know better than to go up against a large corporation like that, and it was more money than I knew what to do with. I thought that was the end of it, but it was just the beginning.”
“What happened?” he asks. I chuckle because he knows me well enough to know I needed him to ask a question so I’d keep talking and not shut down.
“It started with phone calls from restricted numbers. The caller would breathe if I answered or on the voicemail if I didn’t but not actually say anything. Then I started getting deliveries to my house. Flowers, stuffed animals, chocolates. Then it escalated to dead flowers, stuffed animals with the heads cut off, rat poison covered in chocolate. The police told me that though it was weird Eddie visited me in the hospital, they couldn’t prove he was the one sending me the deliveries. The death threats started after I went to the police. He told me he’d kill me before he ever let the police catch him. I kept going to the police, and they kept doing nothing. It’s like they couldn’t be bothered. He would stalk me everywhere I went. He’d make himself seen only to me but would never put his name on any of the threats he sent me, so I had no proof it was him. Then he started sending me pictures of myself. Me walking into work, me out with my friends, me at the grocery store. I stopped going out. I basically became a recluse. Then he started sending me pictures of me in my house. In my bedroom and in my living room. I always kept the curtains closed so he couldn’t see inside, but the pictures looked like they were coming from inside my house. He had to have cameras set up inside my fucking house.” Lincoln clenches his fists, and he clenches his jaw so tight I think he may break it. I tap his hand and ask him with just a look if he’s still with me. I can’t handle him flying into a blind rage right now.
“I’m with you,” he says.
I smile and clear my throat. Thinking about the next part of the story makes me sick. I need to stand up. I jump up from the bed, and without a word, Lincoln follows me out to the kitchen and sits me down on a stool. He grabs me a glass of water, and I’m so grateful for this man. Deep breaths. Here we go. “I moved back in with my mom and called a company to come check for bugs in my house. They found five cameras and a wired bug. I had no idea when he had been in my house, but I felt so violated. I was losing my mind. One day, I was walking into work when he grabbed me and slapped his hand around my mouth so I couldn’t scream. I fought him with everything I had, but he hit me in the back of the head with something and everything went black. When I woke up, I knew I was in the trunk of a car. We weren’t moving. I looked around for a weapon or anything to cut myself loose and hit him with when he opened the trunk. But then, he didn’t open the trunk. Everything was just silent. I screamed and kicked the trunk as hard as I could. I knew I was running out of air. Up until then, drowning had always been my worst fear, but being trapped in a closed space and running out of oxygen blew that out of the park. I think that was the moment I accepted that I was going to die. I tried to scream again, but my throat was so dry I couldn’t. I kicked some more, but I was weak. Finally, someone noticed the car shaking and called the police. They got to me right as I passed out. Do you know where he left me?”
He lifts his brows in question.
“The fucking parking garage at my job. He never left the premises. He just left me there as some sort of sick fucking joke. The police found a note in the trunk with me that I didn’t see. It said ‘I can get to you anywhere.’ Still I couldn’t get a goddamn protection order against him because they still couldn’t prove he was the one doing it. The car he shoved me in? Stolen. From someone who worked in my building. I told them it was Eddie. That I saw his face when he grabbed me and that I had seen his face stalking me all over the city, but my word meant nothing.” I feel the anger from being so helpless rising, and I try to force it back down, but then I let it take over. I want to let the anger burn when I tell this story. I’m tired of wasting my tears on this monster of a man. “I pulled back from everyone. I stopped talking to people at work. I didn’t speak to strangers. Finally, my boss told me I could work from home for awhile because I was having panic attacks just walking to the building. Brittany, Simone, and Sarah wouldn’t let me get away with pulling away though. They were there at my mom’s house every day forcing me to let them in. Being my personal bodyguards. Not allowing me to drown myself in sorrow, but I think I had already lost myself by then. Fuck.” I stop when the tears come back, and I’m so mad at myself for letting them fall. Lincoln tugs my hand.
“Angel, we can stop. You don’t have to keep going tonight if you don’t want to. We can take it in stages.”
“No, no. I need to finish.” He nods and gives me a moment to collect myself. “My mom didn’t want me to be a recluse, but she understood, so she never tried to force me to go anywhere. But I wanted to be the woman she raised me to be, so I thought my big accomplishment would be stepping outside to get the mail. The fucking mail. I don’t know what I was thinking. I would always look outside before opening the door, but I didn’t that day. And when I opened the door, he was there. He stabbed me in my stomach and gave me this cruel grin as he twisted the knife. He left me there, bleeding out in front of my mom’s house.” Lincoln lays a gentle caress on the raised scar on my stomach, and it warms me. “Here’s the part no one knows. I never told my mom or the girls. He came to visit me in the hospital again. It was after hours. I have no idea how he got in there without anyone seeing him, but how was he doing any of this shit without anyone seeing him, right? I went to scream, but he pulled out a knife again. Honestly, at that point I was hoping he’d just kill me and put me out of my misery. But then he told me that he would never be done with me. And that if my friends and my mom tried to get in his way, he would tear them limb from limb just to get to me. He told me if I didn’t tell them to stand down from guarding me, he’d kill them all and make me watch. I knew they’d never stop. They would never stand down. If it were any of them in my situation, I wouldn’t stand down either. I’d sacrifice myself for them in a heartbeat, but I couldn’t let them do that for me. So I decided to leave. I told them I needed to get out, and I left. And now here I am. I wanted to self-isolate here so that if he ever did find me again I’d be alone and he couldn’t threaten anyone else on my behalf. But then Sasha and Nevaeh happened. And you happened. And Nina happened. And I’m so sorry, Lincoln. I’m so sorry. I’ve put you and your family in so much danger. I’m so sorry.” He hauls me into his lap and kisses my head repeatedly.
“Ciara, stop. You have nothing to be sorry for. Nothing.”
“No, Linc. I do. I think I saw him today. That’s why I freaked out. I swear I saw him watching me across the street. I think he found me. I have to leave.”
“No, you don’t.” That’s it. That’s all he says. Did he not hear what I said? The source of my terror is probably here, in our city. And he doesn’t think I have to leave? Is he just as nuts as I am?
“Yes, I do. I have to move again and become a true recluse. I can’t risk you or your family. I can’t…I am not strong enough to handle this.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. You are the strongest woman I know.” I roll my eyes, but he kisses me again before continuing. “You are. For the past two years you’ve been through hell. There are so many people who would’ve given up a long time ago. But you have stayed strong. You say you’ve become a shell of yourself, but the real you continues to shine. It’s what drew my sister and niece in. It’s what drew me in. Your beauty, your confidence, your strength—they can’t be contained. You moved to a new city where you knew absolutely no one just to attempt to keep your family safe. That’s brave. You are so strong for everyone else. Let me be strong for you. Please don’t run. Please let me be here for you.”
How the hell is this man real? I shake my head in disbelief. “I can’t ask that of you.”
“You’re not. I’m asking you. I am honored you’ve shared this with me, Ciara. I’m honored you trusted me with this. So now I’m asking you to trust me to make my own choice with the information you’ve given me. I choose you. I choose to be the person you lean on, the person to keep you safe, the person to be your strength when you feel like you don’t have any.”
Fuck.
Deep down, I knew this is what he’d say. But actually hearing it, I have no words.
“Please,” he begs again.
I look in his eyes, and I see a chance at a future. For so long, I’ve felt like I was on borrowed time. That I was just existing until Eddie got tired of toying with me and finally decided to kill me. But with Lincoln, I see a real future, and fuck, do I want it. Dr. Goodwin’s words play in my mind again, and for the first time I feel my head and heart align.
“Okay. I’ll stay.”