Megan Disgraced Read online

  He pulled the car to a sharp halt, and watched for a little longer as she made her way along the street. Yes, she was walking away from it, he was sure of that. But why? Had he taken her to the wrong place or something? He watched her a little longer, trying to work out what was happening, until suddenly she was level with his car once more. He rolled down the window and looked at her, eyebrows raised.

  "What’s wrong?" He asked. "They didn’t have room for you or something?”

  She shook her head, and smiled a little sadly, like she was bearing the weight of something vast on her shoulders.

  "I don’t want to go to a place like that," she told him, simply, as though it should have been obvious. He furrowed his brow.

  "What do you mean?”

  "I don’t want to be anywhere near those people," she replied. "They do bad things. I’m not going in there and letting them do things to me."

  "I don’t..." He replied, but then he shook his head and dismissed the thought before it could take root. There was likely a lot that he didn’t understand about the life that she had lived out on the street, and trying to get her to explain every detail was just going to make things harder for her, just going to stir up old memories that she might have been trying to leave behind once and for all.

  "I’m not leaving you out here," he told her, and he jerked his head to the back of the car. "Get in."

  "You don’t have to do that," she replied, and he pushed open the door on the passenger side.

  "Come on," he ordered her. And, after a moment’s pause, she did as she was told. And it struck him, as she climbed into the car beside him, that she actually trusted him enough to come home with him. That she might have had her doubts about the shelter, but that she didn’t have the same doubts about him. And that had to count for something.

  Just until he could find a more permanent solution, he told himself. That was all. But, as he glanced over to the girl sitting next to him, as she leaned her head against the window and watched the world swoop by outside, he found himself hoping that a solution didn’t turn up too soon for his liking.

  Chapter 5

  Let me touch you

  Megan came to, and, like every morning, found herself faced with a warm cup of tea waiting for her on her bedside table.

  She smiled as she reached for it, and closed her eyes to inhale the fresh citrus scent; Dravid had been getting her so many different kinds of tea, so that she could try as many as she could, and each day before he left for work, he would make sure that a fresh cup was waiting for her when she woke up.

  Propping herself up in bed, Megan held the warm mug in her hands and let the warmth of the tea rush through her body. And wondered once again what she had done to earn such a kind man in her life after so much time spent struggling.

  Because he was kind, she was sure of that. It had been nearly ten days since he had brought her into his home, and he had done everything that he could to make her comfortable and give her everything that she needed to stay safe. When she had walked away from the homeless shelter he had taken her to, she had truly been ready to return to the streets – he had done a kindness for her but she wasn’t going to sit around and expect more from a man she had just met. She never even intended to let him see her walking away, but as soon as he did, she had been back in his car and swept off once more, back to his home and to the spare bedroom that he had designated as belonging to her.

  It had been years since she’d had a room that belonged to her. Not just those hotel rooms that she had slipped in and out of at random when she had been able to scrape the money together to afford them, but a room that she could walk into and feel truly safe in. But this was that place for her; it was beautiful and it filled with sunlight in the early mornings and it usually smelled of tea or the candles that he let her burn in there in the evenings.

  Dravid had been so generous with her that she was starting to wonder what exactly he was getting out of this arrangement that they had going on. He had taken her to the hospital, to get her wounds seen to and check on the levels of vitamins and minerals that she was lacking in her blood, taken her to a dentist to get her teeth fixed up so that she wasn’t in pain from them any longer. In the middle of the work day, sometimes, he would come back with simple clothes for her, brand-new and as beautiful as she had ever seen. The days of clinging to the remnants of that tattered dress of hers were over; now, she had actual multiple outfits to choose from, a luxury so ridiculously out-of-reach to the version of her a couple of weeks ago she could hardly believe that it was really happening.

  She kept on waiting for the penny to drop. For him to get tired of her and kick her out once more. Because, yes, this might have been a novelty for him, being able to pat himself on the back and make like he was doing something good for the world at large, but she was taking up a lot of his time and money and she had only just moved in here. He had to be looking for a way to get rid of her, even if he was too polite to come out and tell her that he was to her face – she was sapping so much of his time and energy, and yet, he never seemed to mind, never breathed a word of complaint.

  In fact, he seemed to be getting used to having her around. He had started bringing home different boxes of tea every evening for her, once he had noticed that she enjoyed the flasks that he left behind for her when he went to work. He laid out the vitamin that the doctor had prescribed to get her healthy and functioning again alongside the flasks, and she would take them every morning and could almost have sworn that she could feel the warmth of actual wellbeing coursing through her veins once more. After all that time feeling like a half-person, like the girl that people didn’t even glance at on the street, she had a face again, a name, a personality. And God, did it feel good to be able to claim all that as her own once more.

  She knew that he was getting curious about her past, but she had managed to deflect the questions that he had thrown her way so far. He didn’t want to hear this stuff, not really, even if he thought he did – it was too horrible for most people to handle, and she didn’t want him to have to take on the weight of what had happened to drive her out of her home in the first place.

  But, one evening, when he was cooking her up a healthy dinner, she was tidying in the living room and he caught sight of her through the open-plan door that opened on to their living space.

  "Sorry," she apologized when she saw him looking at her. "Just, uh...force of habit."

  "You houseproud?" He replied, and she shook her head.

  "Not really," she admitted. "I just...bad things happened to me when I didn’t keep things clean. That’s all."

  A furrow appeared in his brow, and she tried to ignore the rush of her heartbeat in her ears. Was she really going to come out and tell him all of this? It was heavy, sure, but she had carried the weight of it for so long all alone that she didn’t know what else to do but spill it out.

  "Like what?" He asked, and she shook her head. She didn’t know if she could do this.

  "I don’t want to get you down," she told him quietly, and he reached over to her and took her hand. His warmth, his touch, somehow it didn’t scare her the way it normally did when men laid a hand on her. She looked at him for a moment, scanning his face, searching for the proof that she needed that she shouldn’t say a word to him and that he didn’t want to hear it in the first place. But, instead, she just found his kindness meeting her, telling her that she could share with him anything that she needed to. Closing her eyes for a moment, she took a long, deep breath, trying to steady and settle herself.

  "It was my father," she confessed. "He was...he never..."

  She had to stop again, and he squeezed her hand.

  "If you can’t talk about it, I understand," he told her, and she shook her head at once.

  "I need to talk about it," she replied, and she meant it. She had carried in her all these secrets for far too long, and frankly, she was exhausted with the weight of dragging them around all this time. She wasn’t going to keep it inside, b
ecause that meant that she would still be the only one who knew, the only one who understood. She was going to be honest. She had to be.

  "My mom died when I was little," she explained. "I couldn’t have been more than five or six, I barely even remember her, to be honest. And I suppose my father must have changed then, because… well, because nothing was ever the same after that."

  "What do you mean?” Dravid asked, and he switched off the stove that he had been cooking on and turned so that he could give his full attention to her. For a moment, it was a little overwhelming, but she managed to gather herself quickly and bring herself back down to Earth.

  "I mean...he had always relied on my mother to get everything around the house done," she explained. "And when she died, he just didn’t know what he was meant to do, so he put all of that on to me. At first, I thought he was just hurting, you know, from losing his wife, but the more time that passed the more it became clear that this was just the way that things were going to be as long as I was in that house."

  "What did she do to you?" He asked, bluntly. It was the question that Megan needed to hear, because she still felt such guilt about even sharing this part of her life with anyone. As though she was betraying the man who had abused her so badly. Even though he had hurt her, even though there was so much that she hated him for, he was still her family, and she supposed that it was hard to shake the idea that she should have stayed loyal to him, no matter what he had done to her.

  "I was expected to do everything around the house," She replied quietly. "I was so young, but I was cooking, cleaning, doing everything, and when something wasn’t up to his standards, he would..."

  Her shoulders tightened, and she tried to calm herself. Even thinking about this hurt. Thinking about the man who was supposed to have protected her, the man who had hurt her so badly.

  "He would hurt me," she finished up, finally, her voice so small that it felt like she could have swallowed it whole. In front of her, Dravid tensed, but to her relief, he didn’t say a word. She couldn’t have handled him being angry. She had dealt with so many angry men in her life, the last thing she needed was for this one, the one who was different, to prove himself the same as all of the rest.

  "But my big sister, she never got any of it," Megan continued, picking up the pace now, growing a little more confident. "Maura. She got treated like a princess no matter what she did, she was allowed to go out and have friends and boyfriends and join clubs, and I was at home just trying to find time to get my schoolwork done while I kept on top of all the work my father forced me to do."

  "Jesus Christ," Dravid muttered. He was still holding her hand. It was giving her the strength she needed to go on, and she was glad for his support at that moment; she wouldn’t have been able to keep herself going if it hadn’t been for him.

  "And I put up with it for so long," she confessed. "Longer than I should have, but then, I didn’t know any better. I thought it was normal to be treated like that, I really did. I didn’t have any friends, not really, and I never had anything to compare it to, so I just took it at face value and..."

  She was speaking so fast now that the words were tumbling from her faster than she could control them, and she did her best to gather herself and calm herself down. There was just something so cathartic about finally being able to speak the truth about what had happened to her after all this time, she couldn’t hold it back. Dravid was looking into her eyes like he could hardly believe what she was saying, but she knew he accepted every word as truth, a relief to her beyond what she thought it could be.

  "And it wasn’t until I was sixteen that I really figured it out," she admitted. "He… it was something that my sister had done, I remember that much. I didn’t want to rat her out for it because I knew that he wouldn’t believe me anyway, so I just kept my mouth shut, and he gave me such a beating for it. Some mess in the kitchen – like I was ever in there long enough to make a mess..."

  Her sentences were becoming more jagged and confused now, as the stream of memories that she tried to hide from at all costs came piling down on her in a way she could hardly handle. The memories of that pain, of her packing what few things she had that night and getting out, they were all so fresh that it seemed as though she was reliving them at that very moment. She wanted to calm herself, but couldn’t see how she could do that. Her skin ached, her body was crawling, but she needed to exorcise these memories once and for all. It was the only way that she was ever going to be able to move on from them.

  "I left," she explained. "I ran away. I knew I couldn’t stay there any longer so I just upped and got out. I thought I would be able to find a job or something, but I hadn’t got any references or any experiences outside my house so there wasn’t anything out there for me. I didn’t expect that I would be on the streets more than a week or two at most, but it just… it took me. I couldn’t find a way out."

  "What about homeless shelters?" He asked. "Did something happen with them? You didn’t want to go to the one I took you too..."

  "If you knew the shit they got up to in there, you would understand," she told him, shaking her head. "The men who work at those places, so many of them are just in it because they knew that the women there are vulnerable – they know that it’s not easy for them to get help at the best of times, and anyone in a homeless shelter or at a soup kitchen or whatever is hardly at the best time in their life, are they?”

  "Shit," he muttered. "And they come there to...?”

  "They come there because they know that they can get what they want," she replied, her voice aching with the memory of the dozens of men who had hurt her or tried to over the years. The men she had trusted. The men who, like her father, had only served to let her down over the years, to remind her that she was in this for herself and herself alone and that nothing else mattered but protecting herself at all costs.

  "Shit, Megan, I’m so sorry," He told her. She was still standing there in front of him, but she could barely look at him now, sure that his view of her would have changed now that he had heard the truth about what she had been through. People didn’t want to take on projects like her, and her wounds ran deep, deeper than any ER doctor could fix up for her.

  "You don’t have to be," she replied, shaking her head quickly. "You did nothing wrong. I just need to find a way to get back out there, and then I can-"

  "Or you could stay here," he replied, and she stared at him for a long moment, clearly trying to work out what he was saying to her.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I’ve been thinking," he admitted, and he returned his attention to the stove once more and continued to cook. The food smelled so good, deliciously savory, and her mouth watered as she eyed it in the pot in front of her. It felt like she was catching up on years of starvation, and now that she had the food in front of her, she was never going to stop eating.

  "I could use someone around here to help me keep things ticking over," he explained. "Someone who can do the cleaning, the housework, maybe some of the cooking. And I can pay in room and board, because I have the spare bedroom and everything."

  She didn’t take her eyes off him, waiting for the punch, for the reveal that he had something else in mind, too, and that he was just waiting for the moment to come out and hit her with it. But he didn’t.

  "So...you want to hire me as a maid?” She replied, carefully. It was close to what her father had expected from her, but Dravid at least was willing to make it worth her while – to pay her with a home, with warmth and food and the comfort that she had been lacking for so long.

  "I think so," he replied, and he glanced over at her to get a read on her reaction. "How does that sound to you?”

  She eyed him for a long moment, and considered the offer that he was laying out in front of her. It sounded almost too good to be true. The glimmer of hope that she had been waiting for all this time, and it had come from him, this man who had destroyed her little home – and then offered her a whole new one.

 
Normally, she would have been suspicious, second-guessed his reasoning and end up turning this whole thing down at the end of the day. But she had gotten to know him, and he hadn’t done anything to give her a hint of indication that he was anything other than sincere in his offer. And who was she to turn him down? She had been on the streets long enough, and now that someone was actually offering her something else, she wasn’t going to turn it down. Not a chance. She needed this.

  "I think you’ve got yourself a deal," Megan replied, and he extended his hand to hers.

  "Welcome aboard," he replied jokingly, and she laughed.

  For the first time in as long as she could remember, she looked to the future and with a slight glimmer of excitement for what was to come next.

  Chapter 6

  You've been a bad girl

  As soon as the door clicked shut behind Dravid, a smile spread over Megan’s face. This was where the fun began.

  It had been a month or so since Megan had officially accepted Dravid’s offer of work and a roof over her head, and things had been going better than she ever could have dreamed that they would. She would rise early in the morning and go out to clean up any mess that he might have made the night before, clearing up empty glasses and washing up any last dishes and sweeping a few crumbs away. Then, she would start cooking him a healthy breakfast when he was getting ready for work; as soon as she heard him moving around in his bedroom, she would leap into action, and make sure that he had something warm and filling in front of him by the time he emerged in his suit.

  He didn’t talk much in the mornings, but she was just fine with that; the glance and smile of acknowledgment when she served him his breakfast was all she needed to know that she was doing everything right. When he came back from work, he might be a little more talkative, and she thoroughly enjoyed the chance to share some conversation with him about his day. She had spent so long being the woman that people barely even glanced at, that now she had someone who actually paid attention to her on the regular she knew that she would never get tired of it.