thin walls (are calling me home)

Chapter 4

trigger warning for mentions of abuse, anxiety and a little bit of verbal abuse.

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The first time he hit her, Lauren had just turned twelve years old. Now, as they stood on the porch of Lauren's childhood home, more than a decade had passed but she still felt like a little girl under his gaze. Lauren couldn't help but squeeze Camila's hand tighter as her eyes locked with her uncle's brown ones and her breath caught in her throat at the sight of him. He didn't look all that different. His hair was grayer than before and a few new wrinkles had appeared, but his overall appearance was still the same.

Sweat was starting to break out of the skin of Lauren's forehead, and she felt trapped, as if there was nothing that she could do but stare at the one behind her anxiety. Most people don't know this, but animals don't possess only two responses to fear. It isn't only about flight or fight. People tend to forget that being paralyzed is something that happens too. The expression "deer caught in headlights" didn't appear out of nowhere, after all. And that was exactly how Lauren felt, like a deer trapped, frozen in place with her heart hammering in her chest, held captive by the headlights that were her uncle's eyes.

But she wasn't a little girl anymore.

"Uncle." She said, mustering up courage from within herself to hold her head high.

His lips stretched just a little more and he looked pleased with her. Lauren's first instinct was to scoff at the mere thought, as if he would ever be pleased by anything she did. As if she would ever want him to.

Even before he started hitting her, she disliked him. After, well, Lauren could only say she despised him. But she kept the appearance of normality for the sake of her family and maybe because he still had a grip on her, even if she didn't want to admit it. He shouldn't have that influence anymore, not after all this time. She was twenty-three, for God's sake, a grown woman, and she shouldn't be scared of her uncle. She wasn't, she couldn't be.

(Only she was and deep down, Lauren knew that. But she couldn't bring herself to face that hard truth, so she told herself she hid it for her family. They didn't need her problems anyway.)

"Hello, Lauren." Marcus said. "It's nice to see you after all this time."

Yeah, right. Like she believed any of his bullshit. His tone might've been polite, but Lauren could feel the venom underneath it. The disdain, the disgust. Lauren wasn't offended by his dislike for her, not anymore. She was pretty sure he didn't like anything but money. Others may not know it, but she had noticed time and time again how he talked to people and how he looked at them, like they were nothing but an obligation.

Marcus didn't treat her with any special hostility either, at least not around other people. This way, no one noticed anything. The subtle glares she sent his way when no one was looking, the animosity and the awkward conversations. He wasn't the most likable man anyway, so her parents, along with everyone else in their family, just assumed Lauren didn't like him very much, just like they didn't. No one saw the scars he'd left on her.

(The psychological ones, that is. Lauren still remembered the day her mother asked her about that bruise on her arm and she'd lied and told her she'd fallen down during soccer practice.)

Lauren couldn't help but wonder why he felt the need to hurt her in the past, why she was the one to suffer at his hands. That didn't mean she wished it upon anyone else, though. It didn't mean she had bitter thoughts about her siblings getting the better treatment. No, she had been beyond relieved when she first started looking for traces of fear in her brother and found nothing; when she started checking her sister for bruises if she stayed with Marcus for a day and found nothing; when she started searching their young eyes for anything out of the ordinary and found nothing. Even years after he last struck her, she kept looking. In all honesty, she could only relax after Marcus had a falling out with his brother and stopped paying visits. Her parents had enough to worry about without adding Lauren's mess to the list, but she would be damned if she let anything happen to her siblings.