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How does a girl cope when her twin flame is the definitive bad boy? (18+ Erotica)
Chapter 6 | Chapter 7: The Lost and the Lonely
Sally felt the sunlight’s lukewarm fingers running across the bridge of her nose. She opened her eyes to see its morning rays stream in through the partially closed blinds of a window.
Iain, my baby. My beautiful boy.
She blinked, lifted her head from the bed. Took a moment to take in her surroundings. Her brain registered finally that she was in the hospital, as a swarm of questions buzzed in her waking mind, unsilenced by sleep and still loud from the night before. This shouldn’t have happened. He’s only nine years old. This is my fault.
The shock when she had first entered the private room and seen her little brother hooked up to machines had been like a punch to the gut, and it hadn’t lessened now with the cold light of day. She wasn’t sure whether they had placed him in his own room because of fearing complications from his autism, or the seriousness of his injuries, but she was glad of the privacy - if of little else.
Seeing his unconscious little body bandaged up, dominated by a sterile bed punctured with call buttons and different coloured flashing lights, she’d felt her voice choke up and die in her throat. Her eyes blurred with the onset of tears, but she willed them away. How could she have thought this was a good omen?
She hadn’t even found the voice to challenge the doctor who’d said they were just keeping him under observation. This was clearly more than that. Her brother was fighting for his life. She assumed the doctor did it so she wouldn’t cause a scene, but she was getting tired of being lied to. She wanted to hear the truth however hard it was, because it hardened you. Lies weakened your immunity towards the truth just at the moment you needed to face it.
He is my responsibility. It’s my fault he’s here. And no matter how tough she had talked at first to the doctor who led her here, seeing the full extent of her brother’s injuries had winded her more than she could even admit to herself. She wanted to wake him, hold him, get him to recognise her, say her name. But a wall of plastic tubes and wires encased him away from her, working to heal his broken body.
His right arm was attached to an IV pole with a digital monitoring system, which had beeped twice in the night, every time a new bag was needed. A night nurse would silently come in through the private room’s large heavy door, engineered to open quietly and not to slam, while Sally just sat by the bed, feeling useless, watching the woman’s deft fingers do their work without saying a word.
What was there to say, anyway? Their shared silence in the private room was broken only intermittently by sounds that told you what the eye could not. That there were signs of life. Familiarising itself to the ear like the tick-tock of a clock. A heart rate machine beeping every few seconds, accompanied by a wheezing aspirator breathing for Iain.
His tiny ashen face masked by the apparatus meant she couldn’t even kiss him. All she could do was hold his hand. She had stayed like that all night, not remembering when she had finally fallen asleep. The guilt she felt had plagued her dreams relentlessly. Sleep was no safe harbour.
Sally stared at her brother’s small hand now, still in her own. She tried not to think of him alone in the dark. To imagine him so frightened that he could have done this to himself. Pushed himself into a darkness that no bedside light could chase away. Had he called out for her? Could he feel her holding his hand now? Did he even know she was here?
Stop it. This isn’t helping him. Or you. She had to be strong for Iain. She knew from experience how fear could find a way to crawl inside the dark places of the mind, to set up camp and tell its ghost stories. She reminded herself firmly that her brother was going to get through this. But of all the things that had ever scared her, this one was the heaviest.
Instinctively she tightened her grip on his hand, and tried to ignore the darker connotations brought on in the silence of the room. But her mind wouldn’t be appeased. In the silence, as she sat by Iain, there was little else to do but let her mind wander.
If everything has a purpose, than what the hell is the purpose of this? If she was going to perfectly honest, she had enough of life being an enigma. She wanted the simple. She wanted the honest. But all she had known was deceit from those closest to her. Even when she thought back through her relatively short life, and looked back at her childhood, she could only see it through her parents’ eyes. Her mother’s depressive moods, and the things the old man would shout at her with delighted bitterness.
The old man had told her with caustic relish that her birth was marked by it being the beginning of the end for her parents’ marriage. He had a hand in making Sally believe it was her fault that her mother was so unbalanced with her mood swings. Her arrival had changed her mother’s personality, and disappointed him for not being born a boy. She constantly overheard their bickering in the privacy of their rooms. How her mother had changed since giving birth to her. Her mother’s numerous affairs with younger men. He had always known about them, of course, even paid to cover them up. But how it would have been worth it all, had he been given a son to carry his name.
To everyone else she had the perfect parents, the perfect life, but her family life had really been a drawn out guilt trip. And after those fights, as Sally listened from the relative safety of her bedroom, she would creep out to find her mother, thinking it was up to her to make her mother happy again. That was when she had found the solace of books, and would read anything she could get her hands on. She would take her favourite book of the moment to read to her mother, who would stare glassy-eyed into the distance.
Those arguments and her mother’s moods ruled her young life, but Sally gradually came to understand her mother was unreachable. She realised quite early on that her mother was in her own world, acting out in her own fifties commercial the role of the perfect wife and mother whenever there was an audience. From the outside, it looked like her mother’s energy had been unflagging day and night; she remembered her taking pills every morning, and thought it was natural, and that everyone’s mother must take pills to get them through the day.
Behind the scenes, however, it had been a different story, because then there were the days when her mother shorted out, like a run down battery. She always felt that her real mother appeared in those moments, and that frightened her more than anything. So, she had been determined to escape home as soon as she was old enough - until her mother had fallen pregnant to Iain when Sally had been fourteen.
Her parents had put all their half-baked hopes in his tiny Moses basket, thinking his arrival would make them a real family finally. Somehow Sally was clued up even at that young age to know, deep down, her little brother was going to disappoint them just as much as she had done. When she saw her baby brother for the first time, some protective instinct had kicked in. She knew she had to stay.
Sally stroked her brother’s arm, watching his closed eyelids for a flicker of life. It had been the right choice. Her mother, horrified at her problematic son, had run off delegating her responsibility to her daughter, before - or so she had pleaded to her in a drug-induced state - she could bring him up as damaged as she was, too. Her mother had secretly carried the blame for Iain’s autism, unable to stop popping her pills during her pregnancy. Sally would try to hide them, but failed at that, as she failed to persuade her mother not to go, who eloped one night with a young suitor. The image of the perfect wife shattered forever.
After the scandal of her mother’s disappearance, her father had hidden away behind his oak study door, leaving them to their own devices. For the old man, Iain had been another, and bigger, slap in the face; the son he had always wanted was damaged to him. But Sally had fallen in love with the little man the minute she laid eyes on him. He came along at the right moment to light up her dark life, and the love denied to her she decided she was going to give to him, despite all the faults her parents said she had.
Of course, as she grew up and saw how her parents had failed to see how special Iain was, she began to understand that they weren’t really her faults at all. She had been labelled with her parents’ faults, and their own personal stash of shame into which she, and then Iain, had been thrown.
Her and Iain’s crime was to dare to be the imperfect siblings of the perfect couple, who were perfect only to the outside world. In reality, her parents’ union had been a marriage of convenience. He had been a wealthy landowner looking for good stock to breed a dynasty, she had been the daughter of a titled family who no longer had any money.
She was only to find that out years later though, after the damage had been done, on her father’s deathbed, in a room pretty much like this one. To her, her mother’s sadness had always been down to her. Sally was made to understand that whatever she said or did was never going to be anything special. She was the complete opposite of her mother, who seemed almost obsessed with Sally’s appearance, trying hard to hide her distaste that her little girl was not a raving beauty like her.
For Clara McMasters was a woman you couldn’t help but notice. When she walked into a room she would put most other ladies in the shade, and she knew it, and took joy from it. With her, everything was for her own pleasure and served to call attention to her best facet - her beauty. It was all a show, but a pretty one nevertheless.
Sally remembered one party, out of the many her parents had given for their friends, how stunning her mother had looked, and in particular her mother’s gown. It was made of black velvet, sleeveless, with a low neckline dressed elegantly with a string of small pearls, catching the light as she moved from guest to guest, or laughed. She had found her mother so thrilling as she watched from the stairs... their strange house filled with strangers melting with pleasure to catch a smile from her mother in greeting.
Quite the opposite, Sally had always been terrified when her mother had paid any attention to her. It wasn’t that her mother was openly cruel to her. It might have been better if she had been, it would have made it easier not to love her. But her mother constantly acted guilty, as though somehow she was at fault for producing a daughter that fell so below her standards, and kept constantly trying to spoil her with gifts to make up for what she called her featureless face.
Naturally, this just made Sally feel uglier than ever, as though she were some booby prize her mother had been stuck with from a beauty raffle. Her mother’s consolation gifts merely seemed to ram home her ugliness even further. It was suffocating. The times she felt she wasn’t the reason for her mother’s trauma, she felt the victim of it. It scared her, and made her angry.
Recalling the past bitterness she had pushed away, Sally shivered despite the centrally heated room. She was ashamed to admit that for a long time she had hated her mother more than the old man. She read to her less and less, and began to avoid her whenever she could.
But after she was gone, for how long she didn’t know, she would think of her. In the cold dark of her bedroom her ghost stories would spike her sleep, so she would re-imagine her mother the way she might have been had she been the daughter Clara wanted. Forced herself to become part of the deceit that had so informed her childhood. She would summon up her mother’s face and voice, soft with real love and full of accepting embrace, assuring her that she, too, was worthy of love.
When news came a year later that their mother and her lover had died in a car accident, drunk at the wheel, Sally was surprised to discover she had forgiven her mother for her childhood. But Iain had become more like a surrogate son, than her little brother by then, and she hadn’t yet managed to forgive her for deserting her brother when he need a mother the most.
Still, seeing the struggles Iain went through to cope with daily life had taught her that it wasn’t that some people were naturally brave and others weren’t; the courage came from being loved. Her mother had been unloved. She hadn’t been brave enough to stay to carry what to her must have been a bigger burden than having an ugly daughter.
Instead of a burden, however, Iain became the only true joy in Sally’s life, until Stephen had come along to make it two. Stephen made her feel beautiful. When he looked at her, she felt she could forgive the world anything. Because when she looked into Stephen’s eyes, despite all the chaos she felt - despite his own hidden demons - she finally felt protected, sheltered from the storms that raged from her past. That’s why she had trusted him so easily, and been devastated to find that trust misplaced when she found him in bed with Daisy.
Or so she thought... and there was Daisy. Inextricably tied to them in a way neither knew, and it was a secret that was becoming harder to keep. Especially if Sally discovered that Daisy had a hand in what happened to Iain. But when Stephen looked at her, stood side by side with her, she felt she could get through anything.
Now she suddenly wished her mother was still alive, to have some chance of forgiving her for Iain’s sake - and just to be kind. Sally knew better than most how much unkindness could hurt. Bitterness was so futile, she knew that, too.
Mum. I never asked you for anything when you were alive. But if you can hear me, I ask you to help now. Please. I beg you. Put in a good word if you can. Help me help my brother.
Looking at Iain, she suddenly realised how much he looked like their mother. Seeing her little brother in this helpless state made her realise more than ever how blessed she was to have him in her life... so what was she doing raking over the past? It was the future that concerned her now.
We are told everything happens for a reason, well sometimes we need to know what that reason is. Sitting and moping about the past isn’t going to help me do that.
Sally realised her eyes were wet with brimming tears, and she wiped them away. Tears were no good to Iain. She had to focus if she was going to get to help her brother beat this, and make sure he got the best care available to him. She stood up, and with her free hand pressed the call button above Iain’s head.
After a few moments, the room’s door opened noiselessly. A female nurse on duty put her head around the door. “Yes?”
“When is the doctor going to do the morning rounds? I need to speak to him,” she said.
“In about another hour.”
“You’re clearly not just keeping my brother here just for observation. I need to know how bad his situation is.”
“I can’t help with that, but I can tell you that the doctor looking at your case is one of the best in Scotland. You’re in good hands.”
“What, Moira McBride?” Sally could hardy believe it. Dr. McBride had looked as though she was just out of medical school.
The nurse shook her head. “She’s his assistant. I mean Dr. Merryweather.”
Sally visibly relaxed. That was their family doctor, the news must have reached him somehow. Bad news travels fast, but in this instance she was glad it did.
The nurse noticed her reaction. “You know him?”
Sally nodded, but before she could reply, there was a knock from behind the door. The nurse looked behind her in surprise. “Can I help you?”
Sally heard a woman ask in an apologetic tone from behind the door, “Is this the third floor?”
“No, this is the second floor,” the nurse replied.
The voice sounded familiar to Sally. Curious, she let go of Iain’s hand, and walked over to the door to open it fully.
She was met by a smiling plump lady, waving a coffee flask at her. “Hello, my dear. We meet again.”
“I do know you...” Sally couldn’t place the lady’s face at first. The image of a gypsy tent entered her head. Shiny ornaments rattling from its ceiling. A glass ball. “Madame Rosario,” she said, remembering.
The nurse stared at them both bemusedly for a moment, before deciding to leave them to it and return to her desk. The lady beamed brightly, looking happy to be remembered. “That’s just my stage name, dear.”
Her eyes seemed to twinkle. “Call me Molly.”
End of Chapter 7 | Read Chapter 8
Yours in love,
