Page 46 of Under My Skin

“Yeah. You do.” He sighed as he pulled back to look at me. “You’ve hadsomuch shit thrown at you in the past couple of months, Dani. You lost your sister, and you didn’t even have a second to let that sink in before you had to start making a bunch of hard choices. Choices you weren’t ready to make. Deciding to honor Amara’s final wish and take custody of that beautiful little boy. Deciding how you wanted to lay her to rest. Deciding whether to finish school or drop out and get a job flipping burgers to keep a roof over your head. Deciding to do all this stuff with me so you didn’thaveto drop out of school, and then deciding to stick with it after my stalker found out who you were and threatened you.

“You just went into survival mode and put everything you were feeling on the back burner because you didn’t have a choice. You didn’t have time to process your emotions when you were too busy focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. So this is me giving you that time. I want you to take this hour and just let it out. Put on some loud music. Scream. Cry. Take a sledgehammer to that ancient-looking computer. Throw those plates at the wall and watch them shatter into a hundred pieces. Whale on those boxing dummies with a lead pipe. Do whatever you need to do. This is a judgment-free zone.”

…And once again, I’d been rendered speechless.

Except that this time, it wasn’t because I was confused. It was because he was one hundred percent right. Ihadn’treally let myself feel anything that had happened to me in the past six weeks. Other than my outburst in Amara’s hospital room, I’d done my best to keep my composure. Sure, I’d cried. I’d cried more than I’d thought a human being was capable of. But I hadn’t allowed myself to really let the floodgates open and process it all. The anger and fear and sense of injustice that the one person I’d been closest to in the whole world had been ripped away from me before her time. I hadn’t been able to.Because I’d had to fly by the seat of my pants and figure out how to be a mother to her newborn son.

How ironic was it that the man who was responsible for my sister’s death was the one who was giving me a safe space to feel that loss now? And how ass-backward was it that rather than making me want to take one of these sledgehammers tohiminstead of that decrepit old computer, this gesture had just endeared him to me a little bit more?

The guy who was here to make sure we didn’t end up hurting ourselves went through a bunch of safety procedures with us and pulled up Spotify on the iPad, then went to stand in a corner, far away from the carnage. Walking over to the screen, I scrolled through the various curated playlists they had set up – although we’d been told we could play any music we wanted. I selected one of the lists and pressed play, and the heavy drumbeat intro of Disturbed’s “Down With the Sickness” started to blare out of the speakers.

“Nice choice,” Braden said with a grin. “So, where are we starting?”

Looking over the array of destruction possibilities in front of me, I decided to start small. This felt so weird and foreign to me that I honestly didn’t have a clue what to do. I had serious doubts about whether this would do anything at all to help me process all the big feelings I’d been keeping bottled up for way too long. But I’d promised to give it a try, so I picked up a teacup that looked like it belonged in a grandma’s china cabinet – you know, the kind that was for display only and never actually got used – and tossed it against the wall.

Okay, so the way it shatteredwaskind of satisfying.

“Come on, beautiful. You can do better than that. Let ‘er rip.” He picked up an ugly brown glass pitcher and chucked it at the wall with a loud, “Fuuuuck!”

Rolling my eyes and shaking my head, I moved on to a dinner plate, throwing it with a little more force. “Shit!”

Damn, it felt good to just scream at the top of my lungs.

Braden and I picked up dish after dish and threw them at the wall, belting out expletives with each toss. And I couldn’t deny it was kind of freeing to be allowed to tap into the rage I’d been keeping so carefully contained for the past several weeks. When we were out of things to shatter, we went back over to the table to select our next mediums of carnage. After testing out the weight of the various tool offerings, I selected a medium-sized rubber mallet and zeroed in on a worn-down wooden table, while he grabbed a tire iron and headed toward the massive desktop computer screen in the middle of the room.

Raising the mallet above my head, I brought it down with as much force as I could muster as the memories of that horrific night flooded my mind. I watched as a huge crack appeared in the wood and imagined it was that judgey nurse’s face.

“Fuck!”

Whack!

The droning of that flatlining heart monitor.

“Shit!”

Smash!

That doctor’s monotone voice as he’d called her time of death.

“God damn it!”

Thud! Bang! Crash!

Vicki, that goddamn publicist, telling me she didn’t care if my dead sister had been abducted by aliens and she’d sue and have me arrested if I ever called again.

“Rancid bitch!”

Whack-smash-boom-bang-wallop-crack!

This infernal man who had me tied up in knots. The way he almost made me forget every unforgivable thing he’d done. Thefucking butterflies I got in my stomach every time he touched me.

“Fuck you! Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou! GO FUCKING FUCK YOURSELF!!!”

My arms were burning, my throat was raw, and tears were streaming down my face as I dropped the mallet and collapsed to floor, wailing at the top of my lungs.

In the next instant, the hardhat was removed from my head and the safety goggles were being pulled off my face. And then Braden’s arms – both the last and only arms I ever wanted to be in – wrapped around me as he dropped to his knees beside me.

“I’ve got you, sweetheart,” he murmured, so softly I could barely even hear it over the screaming lyrics of “Psychosocial” by Slipknot, while pressing a kiss to my hair. “Let it out. It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

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