Nightchild

Chapter 34

More than an hour had gone tediously by when Blythe entered the clubroom. She was freshly scrubbed and void of makeup, wearing her terry robe, her feet bare. Padding noiselessly to the bar, she joined Nate.

Handing her a tequila-filled shot glass, he waited for her to throw back her head and down the contents. He poured her another. "Are you hungry? Ma left dinner in the oven. I'll get it for you."

"No thanks. Listen...I did some soul searching while I was upstairs. If you can handle it, I owe you the entire story. You have a right to know. Then however you deal with the information is up to you."

Glancing at his reflection in the smoked glass mirror, she knew he watched her intensely but his expression was unreadable.

"I did some thinkin', too. I don't want to make you deal with more than you're ready for. It's not fair of me to ask you to relive this...this..."

"Nightmare? Living nightmare, Nate. I live with it always. No, the time is now. I was wrong to believe I could go on as though it never happened...to believe you'd never find out. But I loved you so much, I thought that love would somehow make the past go away."

He left the bar stool for the comfort of the sofa and patted the cushion. "Sit here by me."

Blythe shook her head and began pacing about the room, her voice a lifeless monotone when she spoke. "I told you about my family, Ringwald and the estate. It's located on the edge of town on several acres, but not like this. It was within walking distance of town. It was a great place to grow up. We had creeks and woods with little clearings. We had secret places where the girls would hang out and we'd build campfires and talk about boys, tell ghost stories...those sorts of things.

"My parents always knew about the secret places though. We weren't too sneaky. I didn't realize it at the time, but they'd always send one of the employees out when we'd get home to check things out, make sure we hadn't started a forest fire or done anything dastardly. I guess if I'd thought about it, I'd have realized you could see the smoke from our house...smell it. I don't know, when you're young, you think you're invincible.

"Anyway, I matured really fast and was more than a little aware of boys...men, the way they looked at me. I was hardly thirteen when one old lecher of a teacher had the nerve to blatantly proposition me. Back then you didn't report those things because you'd be accused of lying or it being your fault. I can remember thinking it was so funny. I learned to laugh those things off. It was all I could do. I suppose I learned to laugh at the entire male species."

Emitting a deep sigh, she went on, "But it was because I didn't know enough about love or sex to take any of it seriously. It became fun...a game, that's all. I learned to flaunt and flirt at an early age, yet I truly didn't know what I was doing. You'd call it teasing.

"Even then, Connie was my best friend. We'd almost been raised together. Her parents had money, hung around with mine. She's a year older...was fifteen when it happened. She had this outrageous I'll die if I don't spend time alone with him crush on Beau Coleman Bledsoe. So, this one night, our parents were going out and they let us double to a movie. That was the only way either of us was going to leave our houses...together or not at all. "

Blythe paused and looked at Nate who hadn't taken his eyes off her as she paced and his expression was unreadable. She took a couple of deep breaths. "We devised this little scheme. I'd spend the night with Connie. Once we'd gotten out, we'd split up and meet later at an agreed on location at a certain time. The only thing was, we had to be really careful where we went and who saw us. It was a small town. Everyone knew us and our parents.

"The kicker was that I got stuck with poor Teddy Rosenfield. He was my age, had not car. Beau, on the other hand, was sixteen and had this fabulous fifty-seven Chevy. There wasn't much for Ted and me to do, so Connie and Beau let us off close to my house and we went back into the woods. There was a special spot my brother and his friends used to go to. It was way across the creek at the edge of the property."