The Redemption of Callie & Kayden

though I wish it weren’t that way, feelings of guilt and betrayal lie within me. Maybe one day, though, they’ll be gone. “What?”
    He takes his time answering. “I think you should consider pressing charges against him. What he did to you that night… there’s a lot you can do to him.”
    I shake my head. “I can’t… especially since I might be getting charges pressed against me.”
    “You don’t have to do it now,” he assures me. “There’s a somewhat lengthy time frame for these things… Maybe it’s something we can talk about next week. If you feel up to it. But that’s the key here. I don’t want to push you until you’re ready.”
    Press charges against my father?
I want to. The idea of throwing him out to the world is fucking appealing. But every grain of fear that’s ever been inside me rises. “Okay, we can talk about it next week.”
    He nods and then gets up from the booth. I follow him outside, zipping up my jacket and tugging my hood over my head. I sling my bag over my shoulder as he gets into his car and drives away. I stand beneath the shelter of the carport watching the sunrise and the sky shift to a bright pinkish orange. It’s blinding to look at but I can’t seem to turn away. I keep staring at it until I see spots and then slide my hand into my pocket to call Luke, figuring I’ll skip the cold, numbing walk in exchange for a car ride. I turn on my phone and instantly feel like an ass. Callie has called and texted multiple times, asking if I’m okay. I’ve been gone all night and she’s probably worried sick.
    My voicemail light is flashing so I dial into it and hold my breath, fearing what she has to say, fearing she’ll say it’s over and realizing that I don’t want it to be over, a feeling that amplifies at the first sound of her voice.
    Kayden…
    So Seth thought it would be a good idea for me to write everything that I’m feeling down and please, pretty please, keep in mind that I wrote this before the beach, but I’m sure I still feel the same way.
    She takes a deep breath and it sounds like she’s about to cry.
    Before I met you, I was kind of a mess. Even though Seth had brought me out of my shell, I still felt so ugly on the inside and outside… so broken… so ashamed I guess. Sometimes the pain was so bad that I couldn’t take it, and it’s part of the reason why I’d make myself throw up. It’s part of the reason why I chopped my hair off in sixth grade. Why I wore baggy clothes for so long. Why walking through a crowd sends me into a panic attack. Why I hated being touched. It was basically the reason for everything that I did. And it was always there all the time… Sometimes I just wanted a break from it, but every time I looked forward to see if a break was possible, it never seemed like it could happen. I honestly thought I’d be that way forever, which sometimes made me wish that forever would be a really short time.
    She takes another deep breath and her voice falters.
    I actually thought about making it short a few times, but I never got further than the thoughts. I’m glad I did too, because despite all the ugly and heaviness and panic attacks, it was worth the suffering because I got you… You saved me from a lifetime of self-loathing and torture. You saved me from myself, from my past, from the painful, lonely future I’d set up for myself. And I thought everything would be okay. But then I found you on the floor… that night… and I realized how much you’d been hurting and how much you needed to be saved too. Not just from the injuries but from the pain I know you have trapped inside you.
    I get it. I really do. And I’ll do anything to help you. You just have to let me help. And I need you to let me help you because I need you. I can’t… I can’t….
    She starts to cry and it makes my own eyes water up. There are people walking in and out of the café and I’m standing underneath the carport in front of cars crying like a fucking baby. But it doesn’t matter. The tears, the pain, the past, none of it matters. They’re just things that exist inside me like the scars on my body. Sure, they’ll always be there, reminding me of what I went through, but it doesn’t mean I have to hold on to the pain. Scars fade and become marks on my skin. They weren’t originally there and although they do alter how my skin looks, they don’t change how
I
work and function.
    Her tears quiet and she sniffles before speaking