44 | in which he trusts her

'What if I fall?'

'Oh, but darling ... what if you fly?'

.\.|./.

Ryan Falls

| in which he trusts her |

The minute I see him, I instantly regret my decision. I don't know what I was thinking, getting up on a whim and coming here. This neighborhood and its people destroyed me all those years ago, and after eleven years of putting up with shit here, I should have known better than to think I would get closure here.

Closure is not something I'm destined to have, because even though I came to mom looking for answers, I'm leaving with even more questions than I previously had. I don't know what hurts more, the fact that the woman I have thought was my mother all my life isn't even related to me, or the realization that neither my real mother nor my father wanted me. My mother threw me out as soon as I was born, and my father left me when I was seven, transferring money to a caretaker like that's all he thought I needed.

Okay, maybe I can live with this. I can live knowing I have no one. No parents, no family, no friends, and no home. I can live knowing there's no one I can turn to, and I can live knowing that those I hoped would help me heal, aren't even responsible for me.

What I can't live with, though, is having to through all of that again.

"Let's go, Crystal," I say, my heart beating so loud it deafens me. Even if I try, I can't tear my gaze away from the man standing on the porch of the house next to what had been my home for the first eighteen years of my life. He's staring at me, and the smile on his face tells me he recognizes me. As for me, I would recognize him anywhere in the world.

Crystal probably notices too, and I can see it in her eyes, the calculation going on.

"Ryan," she begins, her eyes boring into mine.

I take her hand in mine and begin to steer her towards the car.

"Ryan, wait ..." Crystal holds me back, taking a deep breath and looking at me firmly. "Ryan ...you can do this."

"Crystal, let's go." I tug at her hand.

"Ryan, we need to do this," she insists.

"Do what, Crystal? We need to go," I say, my panic increasing the longer I stay here.

"We will, but please listen to me," she keeps saying.

I don't want to hear it. I don't want her to tell me what I know she's trying to say. She wants me to do something I'm not ready to do and I'm not going to be talked into this.

"Crystal, I can't, I ..."

Her hand comes to rest on one side of my face as she stares unblinking into my eyes.

"Ryan, do you trust me?" she asks.

I hesitate, my mouth open but nothing coming out. Yes, I trust her, but I don't trust myself to do this. I don't trust this world and I definitely don't trust the man still standing a mere few feet from me and watching me with victory in his eyes. He knows he still has me in his control, and no matter how much I try, his gaze still sends shivers down my spine. His voice is echoing in my head, blocking out every sane thought that could exist. All I know is, I can't be here.

Wrenching my hand out of her grip, I take an unsteady step back, closing my eyes and clenching my hands into fists to prevent them from trembling. I don't want Crystal to see what a weakling I am.

My eyes snap open when her hands close around my fists, holding them. Her face is firm and she looks like she isn't backing down today. And though I love how stubborn Crystal can be when she wants something, this isn't the situation I want her to stand opposite me.

"You know when you told me Jeremy was using me?" she asks, her eyes sad but face calm. "You told me so many times, and even when he was standing in front of me, you stood beside me and told me to fight. You were there, ready to fight for me, Ryan, but I was scared. I was too weak to trust you, and I couldn't do it. But you know what? I wish I had."

She inhales deeply, and I watch her, knowing what's coming but wishing I'm wrong.

"You know what I thought with every punch he threw at me?" she asks me, and the image of her lying in her house, naked, bleeding, and bruised, flashes before my eyes. "With every slap and every blow, I wished I had trusted you. I wished I had let you fight my battle. And though it was my choice, I wish I had let you make my choice instead. I wished I hadn't tried to fight you and had instead stood beside you and fought against him."

I don't know what to say.

She cups my face in her hands, her lips inches from mine. "I don't want you to make the mistake I made," she whispers, closing her eyes so that I automatically close mine. "I don't want you to look back and wish you had taken a different decision today. I don't want you to leave this place without closure, Ryan. Let me help you get closure. Let me take charge of your decision. Let me fight your battle."

Her lips meet mine, and she kisses me with a warmth I have never felt before. The echoing in my head begins to fade away as her kiss intoxicates me, and my muscles begin to relax at her touch. I let her take control, as she says through her kiss what she can't say in words. I can hear them loud and clear, even before she pulls back and whispers them against my lips.

"I won't let you fall, Ryan," she says.

And I trust her.

Against my better judgment, I nod. Crystal kisses me again, smiling as she slowly loosens my fist and winds her fingers through mine. She doesn't speak as she turns around to look at the man watching us. He looks surprised but smiles nonetheless. He raises a hand to wave at us.

"How are you, kiddo?" he calls.

Bile crawls up my throat and my knees threaten to give out from underneath me. Crystal gives my hand a squeeze, and I focus on her warmth instead of what my own body tells me. She leans closer so that we're side by side.

"Hey, you're Martin Grey, right?" Crystal calls back. I'm impressed by how headstrong she can be when she wants to be. First in front of my mom and now here.

Martin looks taken aback, before smiling. "Yes, lovely, I am."

I swallow hard, wanting to rip his tongue out of his throat for calling my Crystal that.

"I've been wanting to meet you," Crystal says, her voice as venomously sweet as it was when she spoke to my mom. I have realized that Crystal is only ever this honey-voiced when she's boiling inside. "Ryan has told me so much about you."

Martin Grey glances at me, his face glowing and eyes flashing. The sight of his amusement sets my being on fire, but I pretend not to be affected.

"That's very nice of him," the man answers. "Would you like to come in and have some cookies? I just baked some."

My stomach twists when I remember the scent of his home-baked cookies. One of the reasons I will always hate cookies is Martin Grey.

"Great," Crystal says, not smiling but still calm. "I was hoping you'd say that. Let me guess, you make cardamon cookies, right?"

Martin nods over his shoulder and I realize how well Crystal knows me without ever saying it.

She leads me by the hand towards Martin's house, and I drag my cement-block feet forward. A part of me still wants to turn around, carry Crystal to the car, toss her in and drive away with her shouting at me to stop. But seeing as how confident she appears in her decision, I have a feeling it would break her heart. If she's doing this for me, the least I can do is trust her decision.

Martin enters his house, leaving the door open behind us. The prospect of entering, though, scares me to death. I would rather live on the sidewalk for my entire life than enter this house again.

Crystal stops and turns around. I'm not paying her attention, but she's watching me. She leans up and kisses my cheek.

"You got this, Ryan," she whispers, placing a kiss at the corner of my mouth.

I want to answer her, but can't, too afraid of saying the wrong thing. I'm afraid that if I open my mouth, the desperate pleas of my heart will slip out. I don't want to go inside, my mind already refusing to support my body through the open door. The place holds too many dark memories of mine, and stepping back into the abyss of my past isn't a decision I possess the strength to make.

My heart beats wildly and my brain reminds me of everything that happened within these walls. All those times I stepped through this door, I left a piece of me behind when I left. Every time I entered this house, I lost some more of myself. Every time I came here, I left broken and scared, wiping my tears and trying to hide the scars he left on my body and soul.

Too many times I wished I could burn this place down, and with it the evidence of the demise of my innocence. I wished I could set fire to my past and the walls that witnessed it unfold. I wished I could erase it from existence and hope it impacts would vanish from my mind.

"Ryan ..."

Crystal's voice is a whisper on the wind and I feel her put something in my pocket. I don't pay it any mind, too caught up in my own head.

I feel her hand curl around mine and take a step forward. She leads me through the door I never wanted to step through again.

The house is as it always was, deceptively clean and well-lit. The windows are uncovered and the air smelling of fresh flowers and baked cookies, a smell that makes me want to puke. The furniture is set in perfect places, exactly the way I remember it, and I automatically glance towards the door on the left, the one leading into the basement -- the place where it all happened.

'Let's watch a movie today instead,' Martin had said to me the day I refused to comply. He had asked me into the basement and I had refused, telling him I wasn't going to put up with it anymore. I was ten back then, but some things never change.

The panic I feel today is the same that soared through my veins when he played the 'movie' on his LCD-TV. The movie was mine, of my tears staining my cheeks and of the sobs ripping through my body. He had been filming me and every other child he molested and abused, using the tapes to blackmail us into silence. He only needed to show us once, telling us that if we refused, he knew what to do.

We didn't need to be told twice, especially me who had no one to watch out for me in the first place.

"Have a seat," he indicates the couch.

Crystal walks me towards it, gently getting me to sit down. She sits beside me, holding my hand and taking everything around her in. As for me, I keep my gaze rooted to the floor, ignoring everything about the past and trying to stay rooted in the present.

"Will you have tea or coffee?" the disgusting man asks Crystal, his eyes on me.

"Actually ..." Crystal says, not even looking my way as she slips her hand out of mine. "May I use your bathroom?"

And my heart stops.

.\.|./.

A/N: Do you think Crystal knows what she's doing or is she just going too far by forcing Ryan into this position?

The next chapter is going to be the last one of 'Fall', and I'll publish it in a few minutes. I'll start Rise some time by the end of this month and really hope all of you will stick around for it. I won't have a separate book for it and will continue this story with its parts so it's no trouble finding the duology. Thank you so much for reading this story. I'm dying to know what you think <3