The Shadow Grove Chronicles - Book I: Fated Reunion

VIII - Becca’s Earliest Games

I got the girl’s settled down on the fold-out bed inside Becca’s battered old couch on the ground floor. Now that I wasn’t as upset, I browsed the new pieces she had made. There were some realistic landscapes but with colorations that could never be found on this planet as the grass was pink with purple skies, numerous painted and sketched portraits of various people in various degrees of undress, and some still lifes composed of various fruits and vegetables.

I noticed that on her easel was a painting on stretched canvas that was still shiny, the paint still wet. It was of a tall leggy blonde in nothing but a smile and her dignity. I remembered what she had said when I first called her tonight and I had implied that she had a guy over:

“Something like that…” Indeed… She had good taste in choosing models at least, that is if she was a model. She may have been a paramour of hers for all I knew.

Jessi and Tammi went to sleep relatively quickly despite the strange circumstances that they had to deal with tonight. I was just glad it wasn’t a school day tomorrow. Oh, hell… I need to find out where the bus stop was and when it picked up. I may have just taken the first step in breaking their stable home life for a while, but I would be damned if that interfered with their schooling. I would have to take them in on Monday myself and ask the front office for the information I needed.

After turning off the main lights in the studio, I walked up the stairs to Becca’s loft, where she slept in her large California king-sized bed. Close to the railing that surrounded the open platform, I had a good vantage point of the girls as they slept. A sadness swept over me. Not for myself, but for those beautiful little girls. They had never had to deal with something like this and would be ill prepared to handle it with ank kind of aplomb. I vowed to myself to stay strong for them, to show them that the hard times ahead can be overcome.

Silent tears dripped down my cheeks as I thought about all that I had seen. Derrick was not the man I had thought I had married at all. I could handle his trips to the bar, and had thought I had done so for many years. It was the trap house and watching him get “serviced” by that stripper that really piqued me. When we were younger and we both still smoked pot, we would go to a house very similar to that one in the east side of town, but we were in community college. You’re supposed to do stupid s**t when you’re young, We were in our late thirtiess now, had a family together and various other responsibilities.

Then there was Lady Amelia’s “performance” with my husband. How could he dare accuse me of cheating on him all this time when he literally f****d a god damn stripper. No telling how long he had been at this kind of behavior. I made a mental note that I should go to my doctor when I got a chance for an STD screening. God help me if they ask me why. What should I tell them? The truth? Do I tell them anything? There were too many thoughts on my mind and I wasn’t anywhere near ready to go to sleep. Honestly, I wasn’t even mad that he paid that girl to f**k him, it was the fact that he had the gall to accuse me, for years, of that very thing, I shook my head in disgust as I though of him, pursing my lips.

I turned and faced Becca, already curled up off to the side of her enormous bed, facing away towards the wall. She was watching the video she had copied from my phone with the sound muted for the sake of the minors downstairs. When it finished, she turned to me as I stood over the bed, lost in my thoughts, and patted the unoccupied side, coaxing me to get in.

“I may have confessed to you, but don’t let that be a worry. I promise that I will not try to instigate any hanky panky. Girl Scout’s honor.”

I just looked at her, “I find it hard to believe that you were ever a Girl Scout, Becca.”

“Of course I was, and I was one of the best cookie sellers in my troop,” she beamed proudly. “But I had gotten out of it when I was twelve, and discovered that I liked girls. It was my mother’s idea after I told her my ‘proclivities.’ She didn’t feel comfortable with me hanging around other girls after that. She never said anything against it but I could tell that she didn’t really want a lesbian for a daughter. Phrases like, ‘It’s just a phase,’ or, ‘Why can’t you find some nice boy to hang out with,' started to be used a lot when I was around her.”

“I had no idea!” I sat down on the bed, one leg folded underneath me, looking into her pretty green eyes. I was amazed at all this. She had never mentioned her mother to me the whole time we had known each other and the one time I asked, almost five years ago, she had expertly changed the subject on me, a “Look! Shiny object!” maneuver that I hadn't noticed until the day after.

“Meh,” she started as she looked down to the end of the bed pensively. “It turned out that she was right and it was a phase. I didn’t date in highschool, all the boys either considered me a tomboy or an ice queen. Not intentionally mind, it’s just how I was. I thought they were mostly idiots. What few girls I did like were either in committed relationships or not interested in me in return.

When I got to college however, things changed. I had to beat the boys off of me with a very large stick, one of them was more persistent than the others, had good hair, sweet breath, a pretty face, and was the first boy I brought to my dorm room. My first girl was about six years earlier during summer camp with the Scouts. Now that’s a good memory.”

I had laid down and pulled up the blanket as she told me all this. I really didn’t know what to think about all of this, but she was my best friend and I’m really not one to judge people like that. Still, you think you know a person… Then again, who am I to talk? While I was not the proudly insatiable little trollop Becca was, I had done my small share of exploration before meeting Derrick.

“Well, Allie… I’ve had a very long night and it had started about five hours before you called me. Yes, the blonde that’s on my easel I saw you eyeing, and no, I have not slept with her. Yet. It’s been a very long negotiation just to get her in to model for me.” She turned over to turn off the table lamp next to her. “Good night, hon. Try not to beat yourself up over this. You’re not the one at fault. Remember that.”

“I’m trying not to Beccs. I just feel so stupid that I didn’t see it before.” I had been sitting up with my back against the headboard, watching Becca as she turned over and went to sleep. I stayed up for the next half-hour, still going over the events of the night. Oh! Ye Gods! I so want to kill that man. If I find out I’ve caught something because of him, I may do just that. There’s a reason for condoms after all. Scooching down, I let my head rest on the pillow, and was soon fast asleep.

I had woken up maybe two hours later, the gray twilight of dawn poorly lighting the place. I was still dealing with racing thoughts and the anxiety that I was now having to go through. I must’ve been crying audibly, because Becca rolled over and wrapped an arm around me in an attempt to comfort me and ease my mind. I fell asleep in her arms with my cheeks stained with dried tears.