Chapter 34 – Control

November 21, 2012 – The day before Thanksgiving

“Ow!”

Lance winced when he felt the hard metal cooking spoon hit the back of his head, turning to see Mel looking at him, holding it in her hand.

“What the hell was that for?” he asked.

“Jealous high school girlfriend, Lance?” she asked. “Really?”

“She was acting ridiculous,” Lance said in defense. The girls had been talking with each other, out loud, about the fight that the two of them had days before, as if he wasn't even in the room helping with their Thanksgiving dinner.

“It's not unreasonable for her to want to move if she's afraid of Mackenzie,” Melissa said. “I for one don't blame her. I don't think I trust Mackenzie either.”

“Thank you,” Addy said forcefully, glancing at Lance sideways.

“That girl got her claws into you once,” Mel said, going back to rolling the dough for the pie on the counter. “I wouldn't put it past her to do it again.”

“Things are different now,” Lance said. “I care about Mackenzie but I don't love her. I told her the day that I broke up with her and went off to Los Angeles that it was over between us, that our time had passed. She's moved on and I've moved on. I'm married now.”

“Not for long if you keep calling your wife a jealous high school girlfriend,” Mel said with a grin.

“I apologize,” he said dramatically. “Addy, I shouldn't have called you a jealous high school girlfriend.”

“Apology accepted,” she said.

“I should have called you a jealous college girlfriend.”

Mel stopped Addy's arm when she reached over to the counter to grab a piece of sliced apple, preparing to throw it at him.

“No throwing food yet, kids,” she said, looking between the two of them, noticing Lance's grin. “Let's save the food fight at least until we sit down at the table and have more food to toss.”

Addy scowled and Lance chuckled as Chris came into the room.

“Who's tossing food?” he asked.

“Lance may get creamed if he doesn't watch his smart mouth,” Melissa responded.

“Oh okay, so nothing unusual then,” Chris said, pulling up a chair sitting in the kitchen.

“Mashed potatoes,” Lance said, pointing at Chris. “You're my first target.”

“Aim for my mouth,” Chris said. “Mel's mashed potatoes are to die for.”

Both of the girls rolled their eyes and smiled at each other.

“Addy wants to move already,” Melissa said to Chris. “Lance doesn't. Big fight. Things thrown.”

“Luckily none of our good china is packed and moved – yet,” Lance said.

“I'm personally on Addy's side,” Chris said. “We're changing the locks, installing bars on the windows, and getting the hell out of that apartment as soon as possible.”

“No, we're not,” Melissa said. “We talked about this.”

“Who talked about this?” Justin said as he wandered in. “What are we talking about?”

All of them turned to look at him as he pulled up a chair next to Chris.

“I want to move,” Chris said. “Mel doesn't. Something about the idea of some random person walking in at midnight and wandering into my bedroom and touching my girl just...doesn't appeal to me, you know?”

“Yes, yes, thank you,” Addy said, nodding her head in agreement. “It's creepy and scary and terrifying.”

“Whose girl?” Melissa said, turning around to eye Chris. “I'm not your girl. If somebody wants to wander in and touch me, they can. I'm not your property.”

Lance and Justin smiled at Chris.

“She told you,” Justin said.

“She's thinking crazy,” Chris said. “Damn female independence. She doesn't realize she could get hurt.”

“I realize I could get hurt. I still don't want to move,” she said.

“Sorry Chris, I agree with Mel,” Justin said. “Whoever it is, they still found Addy and Lance, even after they moved. No reason to pick up roots and replant yourself. It's a lot of work in vain.”

“You just don't want to help us pack and move,” Chris said.

“That too,” Justin said.

“Packing up and moving is running away,” Melissa said. “It's insane to pack up everything you own and run away from whatever is chasing you.”

“You did it once, Mel,” Lance said.

Everyone stopped, including Mel. By now, everybody knew that Mel's past was a complete mystery. She had never told anyone anything beyond that she had packed up a few of her belongings and moved from Arkansas as quickly as she could. She never gave them a reason, and all of them knew she preferred to keep it that way. It was one of the things they didn't often talk about, because if it was brought up, the mood changed.

“You need duct tape,” Addy said, looking at Lance.

“Duct tape can't control this,” Lance said. “It's hopeless. Mel, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have--”

“No, Lance has a point,” Justin said. “You have to wonder what was so bad that Mel ran away from back then, if this doesn't scare her enough to pack up and move again.”

Addy looked over at her friend, whose face was stone.

“Justin, shut up,” she said.

“I'm curious,” Justin said. “Sue me, Ad. You're a funny character Mel – a psychotic killer doesn't scare you, even when he's in your apartment touching you, but something scared you so much that you packed up and moved halfway across the United States. What was it?”

“Justin, keep your mouth shut,” Chris said. “You're worse than Lance.”

“It's okay, Chris,” Mel finally said. “He wants to know, then I'll tell him.” She turned to look Justin square in the eyes. “It was my ex-boyfriend.”

“That's it?” Justin asked.

“My abusive ex-boyfriend,” she said.

The room went so quiet that you could have heard a pin drop, and everybody who might have had a hint of a smile on their lips was now stunned.

“His name was Derek. I packed up my things and left because he used to beat me,” Melissa said, crossing her arms across her chest. “Until I was black and blue. One time, I couldn't go to church because my eye was so bruised I couldn't even hide it with makeup.”

Addy felt her jaw drop.

“And then he beat me for that, too, because it was my fault,” she continued. “I shouldn't have pissed him off in the first place. I should have known how to cover it up, because I was so used to doing it by then. He liked to project a certain image of us – in public, we were the perfect couple. Everybody thought we were so cute together, that we should get married and have children together. It was all a lie that he created, because he had to look good.

“Behind closed doors, he had all the control over me. I did everything – work a full-time job, cook every meal, clean up the entire house, do all his laundry, pay all the bills while he spent his money on going out for beers with his friends, or buying new things parts for his truck, or playing poker with his buddies. If a bill didn't get paid and the lights got shut off, I got kicked. If I didn't have the money and he had to pay it out of his own paycheck, I got punched.

“He would tell me I was fat,” Mel said, wiping away tears. “When I would eat anything he deemed 'unhealthy', he would make me exercise. He would use that as a reward – I could only use the computer or watch TV or visit my friends, what few I was allowed to have, if I earned it.”

Addy shook her head in horror as her eyes went to look at Melissa's body. She was relatively tiny; she couldn't weigh more than 130 sopping wet. In fact, Addy was pretty thin herself and she guessed she weighed more than Mel, even pre-pregnancy. There was absolutely no need for her to diet, and no excuse for anybody to call her fat.

“If he did something, I had to do it with him,” she went on. “He made me sit with him when he played video games or watched TV, because he was afraid of me having a life outside of what he knew. I might talk to someone, tell them that our life wasn't this fairy tale that he had fabricated to make us look good. I had to go to my classes and job with him. He would sit while I worked and watch me to make sure I didn't run or try to get away from him.

“One Thanksgiving, our families came for dinner at our house. He got mad and pretended to be sick. He refused to come out of the room. He threw a fit like a little kid. It was humiliating, having to lie to my family and stick up for him. After they left, he accused me of making him look like an idiot. He used to do it in restaurants too, especially if someone else was paying – order an expensive meal and then when it came to the table, suddenly he wasn't hungry and refused to eat.

“Last October, he came home drunk and found me asleep on the couch,” she said. “He got mad for no reason and woke me up by pulling me up by my hair and throwing me against the wall. And then he just beat the living hell out of me. He threw me around the whole room, knocking things off the wall and breaking glass. He made such a commotion that the neighbors heard and called the cops. That's when he got hauled off to jail, after they saw the cuts on my face from the punches and all the places he'd made me bleed. He got convicted of domestic battery and sentenced to two years in prison. The day after the trial, I packed up what could fit in my car and left. I made it as far as New York on the money I had from my last paycheck. I got a job, my apartment, and enrolled in school. And I've never looked back.”

Nobody in the room made a sound as she lifted her head to look at Justin.

“Now you know,” she said, before walking away and out of the kitchen.

Addy watched her friend walk out.

“I should go talk to her,” she said.

“No, Addy, sit,” Chris said, standing up from his chair. “I should talk to her.”

Lance watched him walk out of the room after Mel.

“Holy crap,” he said.

“You just can't keep your mouth shut, can you?” Addy asked, looking at Justin. “You have to continually torture her, don't you?”

“Addy, I swear,” he said, “I didn't mean to. I never expected her to say that.”

“I should call your mother,” Addy said.

“Mama Lynn's gonna beat you, boy,” Lance said, the slightest of smiles on his face.

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It didn't take long for Chris to find where Mel had run off to – he knew it would be the baby's room. It would be the one room that would attract her, because it was probably the most peaceful, the one that would make her the most happy – not to mention the only one that wasn't overrun with boxes that hadn't been unpacked yet.

“Mel?” he said, opening the door to peek in.

“Lance did a good job on the room,” she said, tears freely flowing now. She sat in an old-style rocking chair, one that she had convinced Addy to purchase. “I love the color. It's nice and bright.”

“Mel...”

“I don't want to talk about it, Chris,” she said, wiping away a tear. “It's in my past. I ran away from it for a reason. I told Justin because I'm tired of everybody assuming I ran away from something silly.”

“Nobody assumed you ran away from something silly,” he said, entering the door and closing it behind him. “We wanted you to tell us in your own time. I don't think Lance and I thought it went that far...or Addy, either.”

“I love you, Chris,” she said, holding tightly to a yellow stuffed bear. “But I'm scared to fall in love with someone else. I didn't know he was like that when I fell in love with him.”

“Nobody does,” he said, walking over to her. He leaned down on one knee in front of her, grabbing her hand from the bear and holding it in his own. “And there are a lot of things I can't promise you,” he said, referencing their conversation from a few days before, “but there's one thing I absolutely can promise you – I will never treat you like that.”

He paused a few moments, letting her cry while he squeezed her hand to comfort her.

“There's a few open walls downstairs in the basement,” he said once she had calmed. “Lance and I aren't carpenters or anything but I'm fairly certain that if you hold the drywall, we can handle nailing it to the studs if we shove Justin inside. He's full of hot air, he'll make good insulation.”

He smiled when she burst out laughing.

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It was hours later that Chris was sitting at Lance and Addy's dining room table. The girls had cleared the Thanksgiving feast already. Everyone had been stuffed to the gills by the time it was over, and had enjoyed coffee and pie for dessert while Joey's girls played outside in the snow that had started to fall gently that morning.

Everyone had been there – JC, Justin, Joey and Kelly, and of course Chris, Lance, Addy and Mel. They had enjoyed their own Thanksgiving meal privately as a group, before almost everybody had to catch flights to their own home states to spend the holiday with their families. Justin had left a few hours before to catch a flight back home to visit his family in Tennessee – not before apologizing to Mel and giving her a hug, of course – and JC had left before the weather got bad to make the three and a half hour drive to Maryland by car.

Joey and Kelly had left with the girls not long after, and now it was only the four of them left in the house – Addy, Lance, Mel, and Chris. Addy had disappeared somewhere upstairs with Melissa and Chris was enjoying some private time with his own thoughts at the table.

“Hey man, what's up?”

Chris looked up from his notebook to see Lance walking toward him.

“Hey,” he said, looking back down. “I'm stuck. I could use some help.”

Lance walked up to the table and picked the notebook up from in front of Chris's arms. He took a few seconds to read over the handwriting before a smile came to his face.

“Are you writing a song?” Lance asked.

“Sort of,” Chris said, slightly embarrassed by Lance's reaction. “Some things came to mind, I heard a beat, and...you know.”

Lance's eyes scanned the paper again, this time mumbling the words, his lips barely moving.

“This is amazing, Chris,” he finally said. “What do you need help with?”

“Some lines aren't coming to me,” Chris said with a shrug. “Like...”

He reached up and grabbed the notebook from Lance's hands and brought it back down in front of him. Grabbing the pencil, he scanned over the top of the lyrics with the eraser until he found what he was looking for.

“And someone cuts your heart open with a knife, now you're bleeding...after that, I'm stuck. I don't know where to go.”

“I could be that guy to heal it over time, and I won't stop until you believe it, 'cause baby you're worth it,” Lance said.

Chris paused, fitting Lance's lines in with the rest of what he had written, singing it in his head.

“Holy crap, that works,” he said, then looked up. “Speaking from personal experience?”

“Maybe a little bit,” Lance said with a smile.

“You wanna help me write the rest of this?” Chris asked. “I got my guitar here and everything.”

“Let's do it,” Lance said, grinning.

An hour later, both were huddled in front of the coffee table in Lance's living room, one on the couch and one in the recliner. Chris held his guitar in his lap and his pick between his lips in deep thought. The paper in front of them was smeared with pencil lines and eraser shavings.

“You like that?” Lance asked as he looked over at Chris.

Chris removed the pick from his lips with a slight smack.

“Yeah, I like it, let's try it.”

He picked his guitar up and put it into his arm in position to play. Lance lightly tapped out a beat on the paper with the eraser end of the pencil before Chris started to strum seemingly random strings, bringing together a melody to sing to.

“Said all I want from you is to see you tomorrow, and every tomorrow, maybe you'll let me borrow your heart...And is it too much to ask for every Sunday, and while we're at it, throw in every other day to start...”

Lance and Chris gave each other a smile before Lance joined him in the background.

“I know people make promises all the time, then they turn right around and break them...When someone cuts your heart open with a knife, now you're bleeding...But I could be that guy, to heal it over time, and I won't stop until you believe it, 'cause baby you're worth it...”

They didn't even need to go any further into the song. Chris stopped playing and they both smiled at each other before slapping hands in victory.

It was only a few seconds before they heard footsteps coming down the stairs.

“We heard music playing,” Mel said, coming down first.

“Yeah, what are you two up to?” Addy said with a sly smile, coming down behind her.

“Oh, nothing,” Chris and Lance said in unison, grinning.

“They're definitely up to something,” Melissa said, looking at Addy with a smile.

“And it can't be good,” Addy responded.