Page 53 of Elijah's Hope
“Tell him,” Jackson said over my shoulder.
When I turned around to look at Shelby, her face was ashen. There were tears in her eyes and she wore an expression of guilt.
“Shelby? What did you lie about?”
Jackson pushed past me into the cabin. He went over the table and opened his laptop. “Figured this would be the only way you would believe me.”
That’s when Shelby lost her shit.
“No!” she screamed. “Don’t show him! Please don’t show him!”
She leapt at Jackson and tried to pull the computer away from him, but he held her off easily with his size and strength. She was slapping at him to get around him, and I had to wrap my arms around her waist to remove her from him. I looked over Jackson’s shoulders to see what he was watching.
At first it didn’t make sense. It looked like… Shit, it looked like porn. Some guy was shoving his dick between two breasts he was squeezing with beefy hands. The woman’s head was thrown back off the bed, her eyes closed, her mouth open…like she was loving it.
The blonde hair. The perfect breasts. Her face.
Her face.
“No! Turn it off. Turn it off!”
She pulled away from me and I was too stunned, I let her go. She managed to snake an arm around Jackson and slammed the laptop closed. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t un-see it. Some strange guy dicking her tits.
“Found it on some paid porn site,” Jackson said. “I don’t have a problem what someone does to make money as long as it’s not hurting anyone. But she made it seem like she was some young innocent thing… You needed to know she’s not.”
“Fuck you, Jackson!” she screeched. Her back was to the wall on one side of the cabin. Her hands were in her hair like she was going to rip it out.
“You’re a porn star,” I said around a thick tongue.
“I’m not. That’s not what it looks like!”
I laughed without humor. “It looked like porn. No other word for that. And I ought to know. Grew up around that shit.”
“Sorry, brother. I didn’t know how else I would convince you.”
I couldn’t meet his eyes. Maybe he was right. Maybe had to do it. But right now, it felt like someone had reached in and crushed some vital organ inside me. Like I was empty where I had been full before.
“Just leave, Jackson,” I told him.
He nodded and a second later, he was gone. The silence in the cabin was palpable. I expected tears or explanations. Something. Not her sinking to her ass against the wall with her arm wrapped around her knees.
“I was going to tell you,” she said finally. “Today. All of it.”
I wanted to ask her why she did it. Why she would agree to make that video. But I guess for a lot of folks it’s not something they are proud about. My mother wasn’t. She hated doing what she did almost as much as I hated it.
But this wasn’t about some damn video.
“Tell me what’s real. Your father, your brothers? College?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t have a daddy. He left when my momma was pregnant. Like yours did. Then she died, like I told you. I went to live with my uncle after that.”
“I don’t understand. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t have just told me the truth.”
Her face got red, as if it was her right to be angry
“Because you wouldn’t have picked me! Admit it. You wouldn’t have picked some nobody from a trailer park in the backwaters of Shreveport to be your date. You said it. I was perfect on paper. That’s what made me stand out. I did that purposefully. Because I needed to get out of there.”
“You could have told me the truth,” I barked at her. “At any time, Shelby, you could have admitted who you were.”
