Her Story Read Free Page A

there if and when something happened to him? These were questions, in all honesty, she had avoided asking for years, not really wanting to know the answers.
     
    But now they were the only thing she could think about. She thought about them on her way home from the diner. She thought about them as she crawled back in between the sheets, glad that last night’s visitor had seen himself out while she was gone. She thought about them as she slogged through her shift at the bar. She thought about them as she navigated the dark city streets on her way home, grateful that on Sunday nights the bar was closed by 10 p.m. She thought about them right up until a young girl ran out of nowhere and in front of her car. She swerved hard to the left to avoid her. And drove straight into oncoming traffic.

 
    Chapter 3
     
    She had no idea how long she’d been sitting there, knees pulled in to her chest, huddled in the corner, rocking back and forth. She hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on. Back and forth, back and forth. She pressed her forehead into her knees and wrapped her arms tighter around her shins. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to shower. She knew she wasn’t ready to do either of those things yet.
     
    Her muscles ached. Her stomach was in knots. Her mind was foggy. One realization, however, made her stomach drop. She hadn’t locked the door. Bolting up much faster than her protesting body would have liked, her head became light as she clumsily hurried down the hall toward the front door. Door knob, dead bolt, second dead bolt. Click, click, click, one right after the other. A wave of unexplainable relief overcame her as she slumped back down onto the floor. She cupped her face in her hands, trying to make the room stop spinning. They smelled like wet dirt and drying blood. The smell triggered an overwhelming copper taste in the back of her mouth. Frantically, she crawled as fast as she could toward the bathroom, making it with just enough time to throw back the lid of the toilet before what little she had eaten that day was immediately propelled from her stomach.
     
    After she had finally stopped retching and her body stopped shaking, she pulled herself up to the sink and splashed cool water onto her face. Before even reaching for a towel, she slid her hand across the wall and flipped the first light switch her fingers came across. What she saw in the mirror was actually worse than she had expected. Staring straight forward, she focused on the reflection of her nose, the one area of her face that seemed untouched, and slowly loosened her focus, assessing the damage as she went.
     
    Her right cheek had survived with only a few cuts and scrapes, but one small glance to the left and she could tell her cheekbone was broken. It had already begun to swell, causing her left eye to look sunken and lost; the white behind that hazel iris now completely red from what she could only assume was a broken blood vessel, likely obtained from the same backhand that had shattered her cheekbone. Her bangs were matted to her forehead by a mix of sweat and dirt. Her lip was split right down the middle. She vaguely remembered biting it. Looking down at her hands, she realized why the smell of dirt and blood had been so strong when she had brought them to her face. Cuts of various size and depth covered her palms and the backs of her hands. Several knuckles were still slowly secreting blood. Almost all of her fingernails were broken, some missing completely, and at least two fingers on her right hand were so swollen she couldn’t imagine they weren’t broken. She couldn’t examine herself any further. The sight of her battered body was beginning to make her nauseous.
     
    Turning her back to the mirror, she reached in to the shower and turned the hot water up as high as it would go. Slowly and carefully she began to remove what was left of her clothes. Her t-shirt, ripped and bloody, her jeans, covered in dirt and soaked with sweat, fell to