Rock Chick Reawakening (Rock Chick 0.5)(11)

I got treated all my life like I’d been treated because that’s who I was.

I wasn’t even trash.

I was nothing.

And coming to this understanding, I stared out the window not seeing anything and I didn’t even try to build castles in my head. I didn’t surround myself with a moat, heavy doors solidly bolted to keep the bad away, knights in armor always close to protect me, pennants flying to the glory that was me. The princess high atop a turret in a stronghold, a glorious, magnificent, grand castle made of impenetrable stone, safe and protected where no one could hurt her with words or fists or anything.

You didn’t keep trash safe.

You threw it away.

But nothing?

Nothing was just…

Nothing.





I woke when I was lifted and immediately started struggling no matter the pain—throbbing in places, acute in others—that tore through me.

“Shh, darlin’, quiet now, it’s only me.”

I went slack in Smithie’s arms.

He carried me to my bed. LaTeesha was already there, folding back the covers.

She straightened and turned to Smithie and me as Smithie bent and laid me out on my sheets.

“You want me to help get you in your jammies?” LaTeesha asked gently.

In answer, I turned my back on her.

I heard her sigh.

I felt Smithie pull the covers up over me.

He tucked them lightly around me and then I felt his lips touch my temple.

I pressed my head into the pillows to get away.

“Baby girl—” he started to whisper in my ear.

“Not now, honey,” LaTeesha advised her man. “Not now.”

“Fuck,” he murmured as I felt him move away.

The light went out.

I didn’t hear the door close and I reckoned this was because one of them came back. I heard a muted sound like they’d put a very full glass of water on the nightstand.

Only then did I hear the door close.

So only then did I feel it was safe to turn carefully, doing this to my belly so I didn’t rest any weight on my scrapes, and I looked through the dark.

There was a shadowed bouquet of daisies on my nightstand.

I stared at them and I did it focusing only on the darkened shapes of the blooms until my eyes closed and I fell asleep.





And when I woke up hours later, those daisies were the first thing I saw.





And as the days passed, every one, there came a huge bouquet of daisies.

I went to bed wandering through an apartment filling up with brightness.

And I went to bed with the scent of flowers in the room, the sight of shadowed petals the last thing I saw.

And that bright, hopeful, happy beauty was the first thing that hit me every morning.





Chapter Three



Snow White

Daisy



“What happened to your face?”

I looked to the kid standing beside me where I sat on the bench in Washington Park, a place I’d gone to escape my apartment, my thoughts, my life.

And those daisies.

Even I couldn’t feel like shit in a house filled with daisies.

I didn’t think of daisies.

I looked at a kid who was young, in his early teens, maybe even younger than that, Hispanic and already a very good-looking boy. He had another boy with him, black, gangly. I could see the other one would be tall and he wasn’t yet growing into what he’d become, but the promise of it was there. He was standing further away, shadowed by the shade of a tree, not bold enough to approach, so I turned my attention back to the one who’d gotten close.

“It’s not polite to ask a question like that, sugar,” I told him.

“I hope you f*cked him up right back,” he said and I wished I was able to share that I had.

I looked closer at him.

“Fuck, you didn’t get the shot at f*ckin’ him up,” the kid muttered, his face turning hard, and my attention grew sharper.

When it did, I noted he needed a shower. A haircut. A change of clothes.

Food.

And he saw things others wouldn’t see.

Primarily, whatever my face had told him that other kids his age would never have seen. Hell, even most adults wouldn’t have read it on me.

Damn, he was a runaway.

I cocked my head. “When’s the last time you had somethin’ to eat, boy? And by the way, kid your age shouldn’t say f*ck. Comprende?”

His face got even harder before his eyes darted beyond me, his body grew tight, and his friend said urgently, “P, let’s go.”

He didn’t delay. They both took off and vanished quickly, even in an open park on a sunny day.

It was then the sun was blocked from hitting me and I turned my attention swiftly that way, bracing, preparing to launch myself from the bench and run if I had to.

I stayed still as I saw Marcus Sloan standing there in another impeccable suit, hands in his trouser pockets, eyes cast down to me.

“Daisy,” he murmured.

Please, God, let this not be happening.

My face was still a mess, as evidenced by that kid coming up and mentioning it to me.

And I was…

Well…

Me.

“Mr. Sloan.”