The Bedrock Trilogy Box Set

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

Addison was six the first time she thought about the man she would marry. Immediately, she was transported back to the room in her grandparents home where she spent hours, so many hours, in front of that TV. It was there it all started, in a sense, it was there she first imagined what he’d look like, how they would meet, how she would finally, once and for all, get her happily ever after. She had seen enough fairytales on TV to know exactly what it would be like. It was rough being an only child. It was even worse that she lived with old people. That’s what the kids at school said anyway. No matter what they said, she had TV and her fairytales and she could always depend on them to keep her entertained. Growing up in a retirement community her options weren’t exactly wide open. At least she had a roof over her head, her grandmother often reminded her. It’s too bad a roof doesn’t make people happy, she said once and only once. After that she learned what it meant to eat your words.

Addison could imagine that their home was once a happy place, but she’d never known it to be so. It was quiet and stuffy. Her grandparents’ rarely spoke to her, and while they cared enough to keep her alive, that was pretty much the extent of it. To them, Addison was invisible. That’s not to say she really tried all that hard to get their attention. Mostly, she tried to stay out of the way, under the radar. Her grandparents were sad enough as it was, she surely didn’t want to make things any worse for them, so the older she got, the smaller she tried to become. She learned early on to keep her head down, and the longer she did, the less everyone suffered.

Her mother should have been better about keeping her head down, that’s what her grandfather liked to say. Even though he never really expanded upon his sentiment beyond that, Addison always assumed he was talking about her. Her parents were seventeen when her mother got pregnant. While she didn’t know the full story, she had gotten bits and pieces of it over the years, most of them coming from her great-aunt Sara, who loved to tell Addison stories of her mother, Constance. She, too, was an only child, the apple of her parents’ eye. She was smart, kind, and beautiful, the kind of child that parents dream of having, that’s what Sara said, anyway. Although, Addison always wondered whether it was really true or just one of those things you said about a person after they were dead. Constance was on the fast track to Princeton when she met Addison’s father at a soccer game in her last year of high school. Her parents insisted he wasn’t right for her, he wasn’t good enough, he was going nowhere fast. He would steal her dreams, they warned. Against her grandparents’ wishes, Addison’s parents had secretly been dating for a few months when her mother found out she was pregnant. Coming from a strict Catholic family, her mother knew abortion was not an option. And when Constance finally got the nerve to tell her parents, they insisted that she give the baby up for adoption.

Addison’s father, Michael, begged her mother not to give her up. He proposed marriage and tried his best to prove that they could build a life together. With time quickly running out, just two months before her due date, Constance finally agreed to marry him. Together they concocted a plan to forge the parental consent form required to get married and cross state lines, where they would get hitched and hide out until her due date. Constance was sure once they saw the baby, they’d fall in love and agree to help out. And, if not, well, they’d have each other. But that was where everything went terribly wrong. Two hundred miles from home, a drunk driver veered into their lane, forcing them off the highway and into a tree. Badly injured, her mother made it to the hospital where doctors delivered Addison who weighed exactly three pounds and, aside from being tiny and premature, was mostly okay. Her mother on the other hand succumbed to her injuries shortly after she was delivered.

As luck would have it, Addison was a dead ringer for her mother, which in addition to grief she guessed, was why her grandparents decided to keep her. Her grandmother had even told her as much once, that they had lost the one and only thing they loved, and since she was the only piece they had left of Constance, they couldn’t bear to let her go, too. She had always sensed that it was the guilt that drove the decision to keep her. Her upbringing certainly proved that it wasn’t one made out of love or concern.

Her father, Michael, had wanted to keep and raise her. But her grandparents hired a team of attorneys who quickly solidified in his mind what he already knew, that there was no way that an eighteen-year-old boy with nothing could win the case, unless you count good intentions, which as it turns out, don’t hold up in court. Her grandparents told her through the years that they hoped her father had learned his lesson. He had taken their daughter from them, and the least they could do was return the favor. Although her grandparents spent a small fortune trying to prevent it, a fact of which they boasted proudly, Michael was granted visitation. Addison remembered fondly the time she spent with him until she was around six or so and he moved to Colorado, where he started a new family. He had a new life, a fresh start, he called it, one without so much sadness, she assumed, because after he moved, the phone calls and letters grew further and further apart each year, until she rarely heard from him at all.

* * *

It was an unassuming, chilly, overcast fall morning the day Addison met the man who would later change her life, become her husband and father her three children. While it was just another ordinary day, in retrospect, the moment Addie met Patrick, though she would never admit it to anyone other than herself, she knew he was the one. It would take him a little more time. But Addison had decided, she wanted him and would settle for nothing less.

She had broken up with her boyfriend of three years the summer before, because, while he was the perfect boyfriend for her grandparents, she knew, she had always known, that he was not the one. It’s not that she wanted to hurt him but Addison had plans and he wasn’t in them. Her friends continuously gave her flack for having her whole life mapped out. And she did. She knew she would graduate, get married, and have two kids and the white picket fence, perhaps even a dog. She made it clear that her home would be a happy one, with dinner parties and lots of friends, and her boyfriend, the one her grandparents were in love with, he didn’t like parties. She wanted someone who wanted what she wanted and she intended to have just that.

In the meantime, though, she intended to enjoy college. She wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, much less a husband; she was looking to have the time of her life. She was looking for people, she was looking for company. In fact, she said it was the first time in as long as she could remember that she didn’t feel lonely. A prisoner who had escaped her captors she laughed, one night after a few too many, and admitted she finally felt free. Always the life of the party, Addison reinvented herself her freshman year, after all, no one knew her at Baines. Seeing that she could be anyone, anything she wanted to be, she chose to be audacious. And, while everyone else her age seemed not to take life too seriously, she was known amongst her circle of friends as a popular overachiever with a list of goals a mile long, of which she was promptly ticking things off. People looked up to her and she knew it.

Somewhere down the line, on her list of things to achieve was to find a good man, one who checked all the boxes. It turned out this didn’t exactly happen in the way she envisioned it, but it made for a great story, nonetheless.

* * *

“This is going to make a great story,” the deep voice said, jarring Addison awake. She blinked once, then twice, before opening her eyes completely. “You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this,” he added, as he arranged her arms the way he seemed to want them to be. Addison watched as he paused and stepped back. Next, he adjusted her restraints, before removing them altogether. He grabbed her hair, “Up you go,” he said, lifting her by her forearms. She tried to stand but her legs buckled underneath her. The man grabbed her hair. “Do you want to make this hard?”

Addison shook her head; her eyes grew wide as she watched him pull a syringe from his pocket. She moaned against her gag, pleading with him incoherently. She’d do anything to avoid whatever drug it was he was injecting her with.

He c****d his head. “Oh, you have something to say…” he asked as he studied her naked body. He was wearing a different ski mask than the one he'd worn before, but the glasses were the same. He stared at her for a long while taking the back of his hand and running it up the length of her and back down again. Her breath quickened and tears spilled over onto her cheeks. Eventually, he removed the gag. “I’d like to hear you beg, in your own voice.”

Addison swallowed the lump in her throat. Her mouth was so dry that it took several tries before she was able to form words. “I’ll do whatever you want,” she pleaded. “Just, please, no more of that.”

The man placed his hands on his hips. “You don’t like needles?”

She shook her head profusely. “I don’t like the way it makes me feel…”

“Too bad,” he said, grabbing her by the hair. He pulled her in the direction he wanted her to go. “You’re not the one in charge here, are you? This isn’t your story. It’s mine.”

“Please,” Addison cried. “I’ll do⁠—”

“You’ll do whatever I tell you to do,” he said, releasing her hair and shoving her to the floor. She landed with a thud that knocked the wind out of her.

Addison watched as he pulled a lever lifting a square piece from the floor. “Crawl in,” he ordered. She shook her head. “I said, CRAWL IN.”

She didn’t budge but she couldn’t make the sobs stop coming either. “Damn it,” he spat. “In or I inject you with this,” he told her, holding up the syringe. She watched as he removed the cap using his teeth.

“Please, don’t… I just want to go home…I have⁠—”

“You have ten seconds is what you have. NOW. GET. IN. Believe me, when you’re out of it, it makes it a lot harder to keep the critters off.”

Addison sobbed. He took her by the hair and drug her to the trap door. She eyed the syringe and then crawled in. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

He laughed. “Because I can,” he told her, after considering her for a moment. “That’s something you’d do well to learn. Lots of people simply do things because they can.”

“I—”

“Oh,” he called, cutting her off. “I almost forgot. I hope you don’t mind critters.”

Addison cried knowing what was to come. She didn’t want to be buried alive. She hated confined spaces. “Isn’t it funny?” he chuckled, as he lowered the small door. “We’re all just worm food in the end.”

She laid there in the dark, counting, just to keep herself from losing it altogether. He—or someone—had dug a hole in the ground, no more than a crawl space. With just enough room to turn from side to side, there wasn’t much to work with. Every once and awhile, Addison would feel something crawling on her. She’d find the insect, brush it off. Before long, she began to bury them in the dirt; thinking that if she could just dig far enough, then maybe she’d wind up in the center of the earth. Maybe she could dig her way out. At some point, he lifted the door and stabbed the needle in her arm. Before long, all there was was darkness.

* * *

It was a crisp fall Texas morning that would shape a good portion of her life. But it was clumsiness that would set into motion a chain of events that would take her down a long and winding path she hadn’t seen coming. Addison was walking from the library to the cafeteria, either lost in thought or thinking about what was on the lunch menu when her phone rang, startling her. Flinging her book bag off her shoulder, she dug blindly in search of the phone, she felt her fingertips graze it, but then she lost her footing, slipped, and nearly toppled over. In an attempt to avoid landing flat on her face, she dropped the books in her hands and let her bag fall to the ground. Thankfully she was able to catch herself from hitting the pavement. As she bent down to retrieve her things scattered among the lawn, she bumped into something, or rather, someone. Dazed and a little shaken, looking up she blinked rapidly, considering her eyes might be deceiving her. There, before her, was perhaps the most beautiful man she had ever seen. Studying his face, she thought for a second that he looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him.

“I’m sorry. Do I know you?” she asked, feeling herself blush.

He shook his head and then extended his hand. “Don’t think so,” he said. “I’m Patrick,” he smiled. “Patrick Greyer.”

She didn’t respond, not right away, all she could do was stare. The first thing she realized about Patrick Greyer was that he was kind. After he gathered her things, he insisted on walking her to the cafeteria just to make sure she was all right. Making small talk, he explained that he was from Dallas and was majoring in finance. Addison didn’t speak much, only enough to answer his questions. She was majoring in communications and hoped to go to work in marketing when she graduated. Patrick told her he knew what he was doing after graduation; he was on the fast track to gain employment at Morgan, Lehman & Scott, where he was already interning. He was sure of himself and she liked that. So, when the time for their next class came, Patrick casually mentioned having dinner the following Friday, how could she have said anything other than yes? The two of them exchanged phone numbers, and that was that.

Only it wasn’t because she waited for a call that didn’t appear to be coming. The waiting game was excruciating for Addison. Every time the phone rang, she made a beeline for it. She held her breath and crossed her fingers. And every time it wasn’t Patrick, her stomach sank and then she’d pout relentlessly. Three days went by and no phone call came. Had she been mistaken? Had she just imagined that there was an attraction? Was he just being polite asking her to dinner? No. At least she didn’t think so. Maybe he lost her number. Finally, just about the time she put it out of her mind, the call came. That day, when the phone rang, she knew it was him.

“Hello,” she answered, a little too enthusiastically.

“Hi, Addison?”

“Yes.”

“Um…This is Patrick. We met in the commons the other day…”

She smiled into the phone. His voice was even deeper than she remembered. She shut her eyes, lifted up a silent thank you, and smiled. “Uh . . . Yes, I remember.”

“Good. So . . . I was wondering if you still wanted to have dinner Friday?”

She silently screamed, doing a little happy dance around the room “Yeah, of course.”

“Great. I’ll pick you up at seven o’clock then.”

She plopped down on her bed and sighed. “Perfect. Oh, and Patrick?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

She heard him take a deep breath in and let it out. “Me, too,” he said.

* * *

The next few days both dragged on and went by in a blur. True to form, Addison started planning her outfit Wednesday evening. Wondering what she should wear, she realized that she hadn’t even thought to ask where he was taking her. This was the first, first date that she could remember. She had been with Jason for so long that he was practically part of her family. They never needed to make plans; it was just assumed that he would be there, that whatever it was they were doing, they were doing it together. This is what she missed the most. It wasn’t so much Jason per se, but always having someone to do things with.

Dating was all-new to her. She wasn’t even sure if she could technically count what she was doing as dating. Most of the time, the boys on campus simply asked to meet up with her and a group of friends. They’d ask what party she’d planned to attend and then there they would be. This time it felt different. Patrick felt different, which was, in part, why there was so much riding on this one date and why she insisted her outfit had to be absolutely perfect.

Addison knew how to dress for her body—always had. Tall and slender like her mother had been, she had curves in all the right places. It made dressing the part fairly simple. Still, she swore she didn’t have the fashion sense nor the clothing budget that her roommate Jessica had, which was exactly who she went to in order to help her find the perfect first-date outfit. Jessica was, of course, thrilled to help. While Jess wasn’t quite as fortunate to have the body type that Addison had, she was an expert at putting things together. More importantly, when Jessica couldn’t figure it out for herself, she was lucky that she had an unlimited budget and access to a personal shopper at almost every high-end store in town.

The only granddaughter of an oil tycoon, practically born with a silver spoon in her mouth into a family where they never wanted for anything a day in their lives, Jessica and Addison were opposites in every way, and unlikely friends. At 5’2”, Jessica was short with an athletic build. She had long chestnut hair and eyes to match. Jessica was everything that Addie was not: rich, worry-free, and extremely smart especially where people skills came into play. While Addison was organized and by the minute, Jessica was fly by the seat of her pants. While Addie had to study for days, sometimes even weeks to ace an exam, Jessica only had to show up.

Addie had dozens of potential date outfits lined up and strewn about her bed when Jessica came bursting through the door. She took one look at her friend’s perplexed expression and exclaimed, “Oh, no, no, no. You cannot wear this on a date! Or this, or this or this…”

“It’s all I’ve got,” Addison said looking away.

Jessica could see the disappointment on her friend’s face. “Well, then. You’re in luck. I decided yesterday that this occasion calls for a special trip to Neiman's. So, I booked us an appointment with my favorite stylist.”

“No—” Addison said. “I can’t⁠—”

“You can. We have to be there in thirty, so hurry up.”

“Jess—”

Jessica held up her hand cutting Addison off. “Oh, and by the way, I checked out this Patrick character, and I’m not so sure. From what I’ve heard, he’s mostly a loner, though a smart one: valedictorian and currently sitting at the top of our class. So, I guess, maybe there is potential. But you need someone who is social, not someone who stays holed up in his apartment and rarely dates.”

Addison picked up a dress and rolled her eyes. “Uh huh. How do you know all of this, anyway?”

“I asked around,” she shrugged. “And I may or may not have had Perry sneak a peek at his student file,” Jessica added, with her signature sly grin.

“That’s illegal. And Perry needs to stop doing everything you ask of him. If he weren’t so in love with you, surely he would know better.”

Frowning, Jessica picked up a shirt and threw it at her. “He is not in love with me,” she exclaimed rolling her eyes. “But whatever. Let’s go.”

Jessica, usually right, was also correct about the stylist at Niemen’s. Although, Addison knew that she had nowhere near the kind of money required to buy the dress and shoes that were put together for her, she knew better than to argue with Jessica. While she hated it, she knew that Jessica enjoyed buying her things. She saw it as Jessica making her a charity case, but deep down Addison knew there was more to it than that. “I have the money,” Jess shrugged. “So why not use it on something worthwhile?”

“I can’t accept this,” Addison told her.

Jessica laughed. “I hadn’t realized you had the option.”

Despite the fact that Addison had tons of homework and a paper due the next day, she agreed.

Later that night, although she was exhausted, she found herself lying there staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep, and wondering how tomorrow’s date would go. Would she say the right things? Would he like her? Would she like him? And when it came time to discuss her childhood, where would she find the words? How exactly do you tell someone that you’ve never in your life ever really felt loved? She sighed at the thought, but mostly, she wondered just how long could she put off having that conversation.