The pan heated and she spread her palm wide over the copper base. Hotter and hotter the metal grew until her eyes began to tear and her arm began to tremble. A sharp ache shot through her flesh, stabbing her somewhere inside where her pain receptors lay. Liberty jerked her arm away from the stove and cradled her abused palm to her chest.
She took a shuddering breath and moved to pour a splash of olive oil into the searing pan and then dropped three fillets of Tilapia where her hand had recently been. She mixed the spring salad and moved to slice the mangos for the salsa. Her fingers worked in fast, rote motions that allowed her mind to wander, capably ignoring the stinging palm of her burned hand.
She couldn’t tell Mason, she decided. Would Sean? Her husband was extremely possessive when it came to her and he always made her safety his highest priority. Liberty knew she wasn’t in any danger from Sean. They had just gotten carried away. Like before, she wondered if her mind was exaggerating what had actually happened.
Her mind went back to a different time, a different place. She lay in the bed of her childhood home, staring as the moon played in the shadows of the curtains and knickknacks along the sill. She still could recall her heart jolting in her small chest at the sound of the knob turning. He always appeared so calm and patient at first. The way he touched her hair and ran a finger down her cheek was the act of a caring dad, but he wasn’t her dad.
Her gut twisted as she recalled one evening in particular when Eric had awoken her.
“You okay, cupcake? I heard you crying.”
She hadn’t been crying. She had been sound asleep and woken up from a peaceful dream by the feel of her stepfather’s hand rubbing her leg through her bed covers. At first she trusted him. Liberty could never recall the exact moment that Eric transcended from good guy to bad guy, but she knew that by the time of this particular memory she already figured him out.
Her jaw had locked as she cringed under his touch. How well he played the role of a concerned loving parent, so ready to take on the role of dad for the fatherless child. He was no father. He was a predator and he was smarter. One thousand trapped screams rested in her chest night after night as his visits became more frequent. She wanted to let them all out.
Liberty’s mind jumped to the day she confessed her fears to her mother, the repulsed look in her mother’s eyes as she judged Liberty and called her a liar and a whore. Liberty had been grounded to her room for two weeks that summer, a room, which should have been a child’s sanctuary, but for her had turned into nothing more than a torture cell. That was when her childhood crumbled.
It was those two weeks that she learned things no child should know and she was changed forever. That was when she started to burn herself. The pain outside sometimes equaled the pain within, sometimes took her away and helped her pretend. Only the evidence of real pain seemed to hold the power to balance her out. She needed to see it, feel it, know it existed, and it had to be strong enough to distract her from all the other hurt inside.
Later that summer she tried locking her door. When school started she had come home that first day to find the lock gone. Her stepfather made sure she understood she would never lock him out again.
A piercing beep rent the air and Liberty jolted back to the present. She turned and opened the oven where a sheet spread with brightly colored summer squash rested, roasting in the pan. Without thinking she reached in to pull the grilled vegetables out of the oven and hissed, jerking back as her fingers made contact with the hot metal.
“Shit!” she hissed, as the pan clattered down. Her pain was her least worry. She examined the tips of her fingers and prayed the damage wasn’t too bad. Mason would think she did it on purpose. She grabbed an oven mitt in her other hand and pulled the squash out of the oven, sitting the sizzling pan on the countertop then rushed to the sink to treat her burn with cold water.
The pain faded and she tried not to panic. Her gaze shot to the clock. Mason would be home in a few minutes. Her scalded fingers trembled as she turned the water off and on three more times then examined the damage. Not too bad. A little pink, a little puffy.
She needed to get a hold of herself. She couldn’t go back to the past. Her life was in the present. It had to be.