TW: MENTIONS OF ABUSE/PTSD
Dally and I have been dating for about one year now, and it just keeps getting weirder.
You'd think 'big bad Dallas Winston's too good for that' when it comes to the basics of life, but you're wrong.
The first week we dated he took me to his room at Buck's.
Now I know people take it that he's a teenage boy and boys are messy, but that's not always the case.
The house itself was trashed and hardly in shape but his room was clean as a whistle.
The bed was neatly made, the floor was spotless, and everything was neatly organized.
I asked him how it was so clean and, well, I got an answer.
Dallas had been in and out of jail since he was ten, and in jail you gotta be clean.
"When you've been doing the same routine for years, it sticks with you. In jail, if you're a pig, you get punished." He told me.
The second month we dated was the first time we shared a bed, that was a scare.
It was maybe three thirty in the morning when he began to toss and turn while his face contorted in agony.
He cried out for help, for mercy, for whoever was in his nightmare to stop, but the saddest part was when he begged for his mom.
I shook him, screamed at him, and finally poured water on him, which woke him up.
I though he would be mad, but he just looked at me without any emotion.
We went back to bed but I couldn't sleep not knowing what happened, so I asked him.
"Well uh, back in New York it was a whole mess. I lived with my ma and pa till I was maybe ten or eleven...Yeah eleven. I had a little sister, her name was Shannon. She was as cute as a button, two years younger than me. My ma died when I was ten in childbirth, my supposed to be little brother died with her. I had to see it all, the pain on her face, and her finally shutting her eyes. Pops turned to getting tanked or whatever and I had to use the little money we had left to live and take care of little Shannon. When the money ran out though, I had to steal. I was good, until I got caught. That was when I tried to swipe my sister a candy bar for her eighth birthday, I was in the slammer for three weeks, and in those weeks I guess I changed, it was horrible. When I got out, I found my sister sick with something and starving to death, pa hadn't noticed her dying on him so I took her to hospital. She died that night, I was with her the whole time. I stayed with my dad for a year until he began using me as his personal punching bag, then I rang up my uncle and his family here in Tulsa and moved in with them. At about fifteen I moved in with Buck when they ran to the county, said the gang wars and the big town were too violent for them. I still get nightmares though, seeing my mom die, and my kid sister. The first night in the cooler too, it was...I don't know man..."
I knew what happened in the cooler though, the way he acted, the way he perceived people, he was a ten year old in a jail, with creeps who did some mortifying things to him.
That's why he said he hated little kids, he didn't really though.
They made him think of his childhood, and for Dallas that was too much.
But when his cousin and his kids came to visit from Indiana, he loved the kids.
They'd tug on his pant leg to get his attention , the little girl would put bows in his hair while the little boy would play fight him, and he loved it.
