Saving Charlie (Stories of Serendipity Book 9) (29 page)

She willingly allowed the embrace, but when he whispered in her ear, he felt her tense up again. “I’m here for
you
, Sweetness.
You.
” Grabbing her hand, he led her to the window outside room 203.

As she stared at the distinctly yellowish man on the bed through the window, her mouth opened. Then snapped shut. Les held his breath, waiting for her reaction.

When it finally came, it surprised him.

Without taking her eyes off the man, Charlie whispered, “How did you know?”

Stepping behind her, Les wrapped his arms around her, and thankfully, she actually leaned on him, as if gathering strength. He’d give it to her. He’d give her everything.

“I didn’t. Rachel just found out and called me on the way home.”

Charlie took a deep breath, and Les waited.

And waited.

“He’s dying, isn’t he?” Her choked whisper broke Les’s heart. She sounded sad. Les was familiar with the psychological torture the girls were put through, seeing their traffickers as saviors, but it did something to his insides to see Charlie reacting this way toward hers. She was an adult. A successful adult, in his mind. Was the brainwashing this deep?

Wordless, he only nodded against her shoulder.

After a few more minutes of feeling her heart pound against his hands, Les felt Charlie squirm out of his grasp.

“I have some things to say to him.”

“I’m coming with you.”

She stopped and turned to him. “You don’t have to do everything, Les.”

“I know. I want to do this with you. I’m with
you.
” He repeated it, wanting her to understand she never had to go through things like this alone again.

Silently, she nodded, and slipped her hand into his before entering the room.

The antiseptic smell was second to the smell of death. The sounds of monitors beeping were a lulling backdrop. Charlie stood at the foot of the bed, Les by her side, squeezing her hand gently.

Douglas Manning had probably been attractive in his youth, capitalizing on those looks much the same way Ted Bundy had. Dark hair, chiseled cheeks, slim frame. He wore disease like a cloak though, his youthful vitality only a ghost. His stomach was distended and swollen, and he had the look of a man not long for this world.

His eyelids fluttered open, and a vague smile crossed his lips as his unfocussed gaze landed on Charlie.

“Carla… My diamond—”

“You stop.” Her command cut through the death in the room like a knife. “You don’t get to spew your twisted mindfucks, anymore. It’s my turn now.” She was shaking, and Les squeezed her hand again, showing support, wishing he could do this for her, but knowing she needed to do it on her own.

“For so long, I loved you. And hated you. I spent so much energy on you. Pleasing you.” Her voice choked on the last words, and Les gritted his teeth against the implications of her words. Charlie took a deep breath and continued, her voice stronger, and growing in strength as she spoke. “You stole my shitty childhood. You stole what little innocence I had left. You ruined me for years.” Tears tracked down her face. “I’m just now getting over the things you forced me to do, the way you made me feel.”

She took a step forward, leaning over his prone body. “I’ve realized that you never really owned me. Not all of me, anyway. I’ll
always
be Charlie. Never again will I be Carla. I’ll always be who I made myself.” She swiped a hand across her nose, leaving a trail of snot across the side of her face. It was the most beautiful thing Les had ever seen. The entire display made him want to haul her to the nearest preacher and make her his wife.

“I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can move on with my life.” She looked at Les, and the gratitude in her eyes filled him with longing. “I’m going to stop burying my past. I’m going to do more for girls like me.”

A nurse came in at that moment, and smiled. “Hello. Mr. Manning, I’ll be quick. You haven’t had many visitors.”

Les stifled the scoff in his throat.

“Um, Nurse? Can I talk to you outside a moment?” He shot Charlie a meaningful look, and she nodded at him before he led the nurse out the door and turned her back to the viewing window. He could see Charlie, but the nurse couldn’t.

“What’s his prognosis?” He did his best to affect a concerned demeanor, and while the whitless woman prattled on about the few days Mr. Manning had left, if he were lucky, Les watched over her shoulder as Charlie’s face got redder, her motions choppier, and finally…

She punched The Man in the nuts.

Twice.

From prepared Congressional report entitled: “Sex Trafficking of Children in the United States: Overview and Issues for Congress”

“It is more profitable for a trafficker to prostitute a child than to commit other crimes such as dealing in drugs. For one, the commodity (child) is reusable.”

Les drove Charlie home. After the nut-punching, she hadn’t spoken a word to him, and as well as he learned to read her, now was not one of her more transparent times. He had no idea what was going through her mind right now. But he held an internal celebration anyway.

He’d learned so much today. And she was honestly trying to move beyond her past. By letting him into some of it, she was allowing him to see her efforts. And by him forcing her hand, and making her confront Douglas Manning, he was helping her, whether she liked it or not.

He pulled into her driveway, next to his own truck he’d driven over this morning—minus a hood and a front bumper—but the rest finally painted a solid color, primer gray. When he cut the engine, he just sat, waiting.

After a few minutes of watching Charlie chew on her top lip, she finally blew out a breath that stirred the air in the cab and said, “Alright. Come inside and tell me how you found out about him.”

“Will you tell me the rest?” This couldn’t all be one-sided. They needed a dialogue, a back and forth between them.

She stared at him, eyes beseeching him. When she didn’t say anything, he reached over and grabbed a tendril of hair. “Charlie, I know you want to keep your secrets, and I understand that. But this isn’t something you can just bottle up and forget about. Please, let me come inside and let’s talk together.”

Another sweet breath blew across his face as she steeled herself. “Fine. Come on.” She threw herself out of the truck, and Les had to run around it to catch up to her.

He followed her inside and into the kitchen, where he watched her fill two glasses with wine, before drinking half of one glass in three large swallows, watching him over the rim.

“How did you find out about him?”

Les ran a palm over his face, realizing he’d have to initiate this. “At the banquet, when you fainted, I’d never seen you so scared, and I’ve seen you scared before.” He didn’t think she’d shown that side of herself to anyone, and at that moment, Les realized how rare he was to have seen it on multiple occasions. Something rippled through him, but it was a wholly inappropriate pride at seeing beyond her walls, so he tamped it down. “I told Rachel to find out who The Man was you kept talking about, and she did some digging. All she could find was Douglas Manning, who’d recently been paroled for kidnapping and prostitution, but she couldn’t find anything linking him to you, so I thought he was a dead end.” This next part was going to piss Charlie off, he was afraid. “This afternoon, I texted her the name Bookenhaven, when I realized you might have shortened your name, and she dug up the rest.”

Instead of the anger at Les for the abuse of trust, Charlie only nodded, staring blankly at the wall behind his head.

After a few minutes of silence, he broke it. “Charlie?”

She finished her wine in two gulps and poured herself another glass before twitching her head toward the living room, gesturing for him to follow. After sitting on the couch and resting her feet on the coffee table, as if they were about to discuss pending holiday festivities, she began.

“I grew up with junkies for parents. The Man paid for me with three eight balls of coke.” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “On my tenth birthday.” Les didn’t say any of the things he wanted to say. There was so much racing around his head, but if he spoke, she would stop. So he clenched his teeth together to keep his mouth closed and let her continue. It was a while before she did.

“He promised me a better life. Daddy had been abusing me for years, and letting his friends do stuff to me, so I already had a shitty life. I believed The Man, thinking things couldn’t get much worse. The first week or so, he kept me high and had sex with me, telling me how special I was. And I felt special. He bought me things all little girls wanted—Happy meals, nail polish, hair bands.” Her voice cracked, and Les unclenched his fists long enough to pull her body closer to his, tucking her into his chest. She trembled against him, but she continued.

“It wasn’t long before he started letting other men in, and the next thing I knew, I was a hooker, having sex for money. I had a quota. He would drop me off on a corner and let me work it, telling me I had to bring home so much money. If I didn’t, he took away the drugs, or food, or contact. If I didn’t bring in enough money, he left me alone for weeks at a time.”

“So I got good at it. I learned to make his money, because that’s when he treated me good.” Her voice had risen in pitch, and Les realized that she was re-living these memories as a child. He’d heard most of this before, from the girls at the Refuge. While it was shocking to hear from a girl fresh out of the life, it was worse to hear from the woman he loved.

“When he treated me bad, things were terrible. I couldn’t work because nobody wanted to have sex with a girl who was all beat. And I didn’t make money that way, and I got beat some more. It was a hole I couldn’t dig out of.”

“Things would get hot, and he’d move and change up the routine. A lot of times he’d rent a motel room, and line up Johns to visit us there. They’d get fifteen minutes or a half an hour, and then he’d get them out for the next one. We stayed tied to the bed. Or he would let them come to the house he rented. He kept he girls separated as much as possible, so we couldn’t really talk to each other, but we knew others were there. Sometimes, we travelled to different locations together. But we couldn’t talk.”

Les was trying to follow what Charlie said, but she was starting to babble. Her words poured from her as if a damn had burst.

“He started renting me out for parties. Gang-bangs. The first couple, he went along with me, but after that, he just got me really high and dropped me off. That’s where Adam found me…”

She stopped talking, lost in some memory, so Les prodded her, “Adam from today?”

Charlie nodded, “Yes. He was the captain of the football team. The quarterback. They’d just won the state championship, and one of the dads had rented me for them.” A small self-deprecating smile graced her lips. “I was their reward. Adam saw what was happening, and got mad at all of them, basically kidnapping me. He carried me out like a princess and I thought I could get him to love me.” Her eyes met Les’s for the first time since she’d started talking.

“I was good at making men love me. I thought I could do the same thing with Adam. But I couldn’t.”

“But he got you out of there.” Les wanted to find Adam and give him everything he owned for saving Charlie. She was lucky she hadn’t been killed. Then something dawned on him. “Y’all were married, so something must have worked for you.”

A scoff escaped her throat. “I tricked him into getting me pregnant, and I never really loved the baby. His parents made him marry me, because that’s the kind of people they are. But I fucked everything up, Les.” Her eyes on him were crystal clear. “I fucked it up bad, and Adam left me, taking Trent with him. I was so heartbroken at losing Adam, I signed over Trent to him without even really thinking about it. I didn’t want Adam’s baby if I couldn’t have Adam. And there really wasn’t any way he or his parents would let me have the baby after the things I’d done.”

Les held the woman in his arms, feeling completely helpless. There was nothing he could do for her that she hadn’t already done for herself. Who had he been kidding that he could save her? She’d already done that for herself. Even if she thought it was Adam who’d done it, he’d only gotten her out of the initial situation. She was the one who’d pulled her insides out and reshaped her own paradigm from one of a victim to one of a survivor.

Suddenly, everything started fitting together—the tattoos covering the cut scars, the casual, sex-only relations, the house and business choice, the willingness to talk dirty to a total stranger. Wait a minute…

“So, the dirty phone calls? You knew who that was; you said it was someone you’d never thought you’d hear again.”

She shuddered in his arms, and he almost regretted bringing them up. But this all needed to come out. All of it.

“I put him in prison. My testimony. Adam convinced me to testify, and I wanted to make him happy, so I did it. Adam sort of made The Man a cross to bear. He cared enough about me to want to put him away for a long time. I think it was a sort of self-righteous thing, he couldn’t imagine something so awful taking place in his own perfect world.”