EMBRACE winrina

CHAPTER SEVEN

When Leo stumbled home drunk on Friday night, I approached the situation in a much smarter way than I had been. I had just gotten home from work and Leo obviously headed straight for me when he opened the door, but I used my size and my speed to my advantage. His hand-eye coordination was delayed because of the alcohol coursing through his veins, and so I ran to the left but quickly turned to the right to grab his keys off the counter and run out the door.

I could hear him yelling as I floored his mustang down the street, my heart pounding. I knew that if I got pulled over I would be in a lot of trouble, but hopefully I had enough skill with driving to maneuver correctly on the road.

I didn't know where to go to avoid driving back home. I knew I couldn't return tonight, because if Leo caught me while still drunk, it would be really bad. I ended up driving aimlessly for a good half an hour, burning all Leo's fuel unintentionally, though I did get a little bit of enjoyment out of it. Somehow I ended up in front of large white house that hadn't been there the last time I'd driven down this road.

I was parked on my old street.

I pulled the keys out of the ignition, figuring that I had no where else to go for the night so I would just sleep here. I turned to look out the window, studying the newly built house that had been constructed over the ashes of my old one. The property in front of me held so many bad memories, and I knew that if I continued to sit here, I would eventually be sent reeling back.

But I didn't move.

I tried to remember what my old house looked like. I can't say that my five-year-old self was very observant, but I remember a two-car garage on the left, bricks lining the bottom of the house while the second floor was encased in beige siding. It wasn't much, because my mom wasn't working and my dad's child support only got us so far, but he gave us all that he could. I think I might've been one and a half when my dad and my mom got divorced, but it was mutual and the split was peaceful, my father and mother both still maintaining a friendly relationship while caring for me.

I really still felt like we were a family even if I understood that my dad and mom weren't together anymore. I might have been three when my dad met Emma and they started dating, getting married not long after. She played with me and brought a smile to my face, so I naturally accepted her into my life. Looking back, I'm sure now that my dad had an alcohol problem, which might've been why my mom fell out of love with him or just deemed it unsafe for him to live with us. She knew that he loved us with all that he had though and would never even think about stripping him of his parental rights.

But it was the night of my fourth birthday that things in my life started going south. I don't know too much about what happened, but I know that my mom and dad slept together without protection and produced my little sister, and my mother wouldn't even think about abortion. It wasn't a plausible solution in her mind. She had the baby and my dad loved her all the same, and somehow my dad and Emma still lasted even though he had cheated on her. I had come to learn that Emma kind of let people walk all over her, and when she loved someone, there wasn't a whole lot they could do to her to fuck that up. In my dad's case, it was cheating. In Leo's case, it was abusing her adoptive 'daughter'.

I forced myself to look away from the house because I knew that if I looked at it for any longer, my mind would start flashing through images of when I was five and I wouldn't be able to handle that. I would see images of the fire in my mind and I would hear my mom screaming, my dad talking to me calmly before running back into the burning house. The wind whisked through the trees then and a branch hit my window, causing me to hear the collapse of our roof from the night of the fire. I forced the images and sounds out of my head, sinking into my seat and trying to hold my shaking body still.