The Forbidden Love for My Step Brother

NELLA My name is Nella freaking Layton! I was known by a lot of my peers as the easy going and jovial bubbly girl who probably may be the most adorable girl you would ever encounter. I mean there was this natural teenage girl glow that comes from within when you just feel like all is well but now i must add a very stern correction, a teenage girl glow when you are deceived to believe all is well, meanwhile, you are just about to witness all hell breaking loose. The sixteenth of february; a date I would never forget, just two days after the perfect valentine. I had received a lot of cute notes and adorable flowers at school being my pretty self thank you! and had also come home to meet the most romantic sight ever with my dad holding a bottle of red wine tied with a red ribbon on it, standing in the midst of a perfectly pink rose petalled littered floor waiting to surprise my mom the moment she walked in through the front door from her workplace. I had come in first and so was very excited to join in the party. It was indeed a beautiful surprise and my mom was marveled by the sight, although for a brief moment i thought i had seen a flash of sadness on my mother's face before she quickly adjusted to fit the occasion but if i knew better like i did now, i would have taken that so seriously into consideration, stopped the whole play of pretense to ask if everything was okay with her, but i was too happy to even imagine a world with a little hint of unhappiness. Now I knew better because two days later, our lives would come crashing before our eyes, but mostly my eyes because even though that would be my first time experiencing such madness my mom had been going through it for the past six months without my knowing. One fact about me was that I always retired to bed early in the night and was a really deep sleeper. I may probably wake up a few hours before dawn and then scroll through my social media unlike my peers who were the opposite; scroll through social media for hours and then retire to bed before dawn. This habit of mine had made me oblivious to the agony my mother had been going through every single night since it all went wrong. Although I still don't know how it started or how it got to that point, I would come to find out that my mom was being domestically abused violently every single night for six whole months. That night i was up, it was the night of coachella and headlining it was my favorite korean pop girl group, Blackpink.There was no way i was going to miss it for the world or for whatever and so unlike every other night, this time i was up, as bright eyed as ever ready to dance to their hit songs they would perform when i heard a loud bang. I had thought I heard something which I was sure wasn't coming from my laptop or the performances, and so immediately reduced the volume of my audio to be sure. It happened again, this time louder than the first and so I quickly rushed out, panicking as I did so. My dad was always working late so I did not expect him to be back by that time, it would just be me and my mom and I needed to be sure we were both safe. Rushing out of my room, I heard a loud scream and I stood there frozen when I realized that the loud screams came from my mother's room, and I was sure it was her voice, she was screaming for help. Before I could let my brain think of ways to carefully approach whatever situation was going on over there, my feet already had a mind of their own as they took off immediately, carrying my whole body along with them, towards my mother's room. The screams of agony had gotten louder as I made my way there and I could feel my chest pound heavier. ‘Who was this intruder? Why was this person hurting my mom? Where is dad? Dad, we need you right now!’ were my racing thoughts up until i got to the entrance of my mother’s room and found the answers to the questions i was just asking myself, the only difference was the answers i got were not in any way what i had been expecting. There he was, laying his filthy hands on her, sometimes aiming with his fists, other times, aiming with his palms and the most unbearable the aim with the legs, kicking, hitting, fisting and slapping. I stood frozen and till now i still do regret it every time i think back, i would have immediately stopped him in that moment i saw him do all that to her but the shock of seeing the man i had always called ‘father,’ the man who would act as the perfect dad to me and the perfect husband to my mom, giving her affectionate caresses and planting little kisses on her fore heard or on her lips that may even gross me out sometimes when i am around them. That same man was the same person bringing her physical pain and didn’t even mind if his acts were about to kill her. Of Course it may have gotten to that point if I had not rushed in as swiftly as I could after recovering from my brief state of frozen coma. In a bid to stop him, I began pulling him away from her with all my strength, yelling that he gets his hands off my mom but he gives me a violent push which makes me hit my head after a loud drop to the floor; the last thing I heard being my mother's painful scream… ‘Nella!!’