OPHELIA: Chapter 20

Blurb

Elizabeth Lockwick wants one thing… to ensure Ophelia remains dead.

For years she’s weaved a life seen through rose-coloured glasses in idyllic Vermont with her husband Sebastian Lockwick, an alluring man with a broken moral compass, whose intent lies in protecting his wife. However, apart from her unorthodox understanding of Sebastian’s dark and gritty hidden nature, she finds herself slipping away from her sanity in maintaining this picturesque life.

After receiving a gruesome gift from an unknown sender threatening to expose her, she finds herself haunted and possibly hunted by her buried past.

In order to make things right for herself and ensure that her secret is hidden, she reluctantly travels back to her sleepy small hometown in Wisconsin. A town where young girls seem to be mysteriously disappearing. There, she reunites with the dysfunctional Pierre-Louis’, a French-American family who sheltered her in their manor in her time of need.

With time slipping away, she struggles with her guilt and a dangerous affair and realizes that perhaps Ophelia wasn’t dead after all these years.

Elizabeth suddenly finds herself caught in a game of cat and mouse, unsure of which she really is this time and who she can trust.

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Chapter 20

 

The steamy water hit her bare shoulder and rolled down the gentle slope of her spine to her waist and feet, hugging onto every soft curve and filling into every pore. She let the water trickle down her face as she pushed her fingers through her wet hair back. The image of the dead girl stained her memory as she left the shower and threw over an oversized grey sweater which stopped at her thighs. The last thing she needed tonight was a bra. She didn’t want to feel suffocated. Her hair soaked into the material of her clothing as she brushed it through, thinking of what sick monster would shave the hair off that young girl. Her very room felt suffocating. Opening the window, she looked outside to breathe in a gulp of fresh air. The empty garden hung below her and it felt like it was what she needed at the moment.

Making her way downstairs and to the garden, she sat on the cold iron bench of the dimly lit area which faced the bed of endless flowers. A nausea filled within her and clung onto her lungs for air. The night sky sat menacingly above her. Ophelia wanted to scream at it angrily. She wanted to shove an iron rod up the ass of the person who hurt that little girl. Her throat felt dry and her heart ached. It ached for so many reasons. She should have never listened to Monty. Why did she leave? All she ever did was run away. Monty thought he was protecting her by sending her away from this town. She thought she was protecting Stefan from staying away from him. All this happened because of her. She could never forget Stefan. No matter what she did, how hard she tried, she’d keep that little book of his and read his poetry to just remind herself of his presence. To feel his comfort when the air was cold and heavy and thick. Every man she’d let touch her, it disgusted her that it wasn’t him. She’d drug herself, made herself drunk and numb when Sebastian wanted to fk her. As sick as it sounds, she tried to pretend it wasn’t anyone but Stefan, but she knew damn well the reality she let herself slip into. She even tried to forget him with Christopher but that was futile in its every essence. He didn’t even know how to please her properly to begin with. That whole experience was terrible.

She felt hot tears burn down her cheeks when her thoughts shifted back to the dead little girl and Claire Marie still being gone. It felt as if someone had held onto her heart and began squeezing it so mercilessly causing sobs to escape. Endless, tired, fked up, sobs that she held in for way too long, perhaps from years of bottling her unresolved trauma in. Hearing footsteps approaching, she quickly wiped her face with the sleeves of her sweater and composed herself in a more presentable manner. Popping open the pack of skittles she grabbed down with her she opted to make herself look more casual and threw two reds into her mouth.

Stefan stood a few feet away from her with black sweatpants and a white tee. “I should apologize.” He began in a deep textured yet soft voice. Somehow, if whisky had a voice it would be his. Or hard wine that burns down your throat, leaving behind a smooth yet warm stain thrill to your insides.  “I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that last night nor should I have pushed you away like that.”

“Stef,” she breathed, saddened. “Don’t apologize to me. You were frustrated, I get that. I haven’t exactly been- well- I’m sorry. For everything.” Ophelia looked down at the palms of her hand and squeezed them as he took a seat next to her. She opened her palm to a yellow and red skittle. He took the yellow, knowing she preferred the red.

“I want to make things better. I just don’t know how,” he admitted. His voice sore. “I feel helpless.”

“You’re doing all you can. We’ll find Claire,” she said and placed her hand into his, squeezing tightly, “We’ll find her.”

He soaked in the silence of the moment as she leaned against his shoulders and felt his unshaven stubble graze against her forehead. “I can’t get the image out of my head, Stefan. The little girl today. It makes me feel sick.”

“I know.”

“Were you happy?” She suddenly asked, tilting her head towards him as he looked down to her. “The last seven years.”

“Were you?”

“No.”

“Then how could I be?” He gave a soft, brief, ached laugh. “I tried. Painting was the only thing that got me through the days. There were many times I’d ask myself was it really the right decision? And now, now I know it wasn’t. I wonder sometimes what Monty would do. What would he tell me if he were still alive?”

Ophelia suddenly realized that Stefan had known of Monty’s death prior to her visit. “How did you know? How did you know that he was…?”

Stefan tilted his head back and deeply sighed at the question, lost in a memory. His voice broke as he spoke, “They decapitated him.”

Ophelia felt her heart drop and her spit too thick to swallow. This was beyond her. This was monstrous. “I’m sorry.” She spoke in a small voice. “Being back here Stefan feels like a plaster removed from an unhealed wound which is now being dug into. It’s because of me that he’s dead. The guilt never leaves me. I try to be strong Stefan but I’m running out of strength. I’m trying to be there for everyone but it’s difficult when I can’t even be there for myself.”

“Stop,” he protested. “Never blame yourself like this, Lily. No one’s asking you to be there for them, in a matter of fact, it’s the opposite. Allow yourself to let your guard down, you can rely on me, you can trust me. You know that. Let me be there for you. You don’t have to do this alone.”

“You deserve someone so much better than me, Stef.”

“You don’t get to tell me what I deserve.”

Ophelia looked away with a soft sigh and closed her eyes for a minute, “I dreamt of the incident last night. I couldn’t sleep and I don’t think I will. I keep getting this feeling like I’m missing something important. Like it’s right there, right in front of me, and yet I can’t touch it.”

Stefan held her as she spoke. She mumbled her words as she tried to relate a story that her father used to tell her before she fell asleep but finished with telling him she didn’t want to be alone. He couldn’t just leave her, he couldn’t lock her into her room and allow her to experience what she experienced last night. Part of him felt guilty knowing that he was the one that pushed her away last night. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. He’d made too many in the past and now made a firm decision to fix things to how they should have been in the beginning.

Carrying her up to his room, he placed her on his bed and sat at the sofa on the side with a book in hand soaking in the pages of Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. Ophelia shifted pleasantly on the softness of the bed and opened her eyes tiredly to the sight of Stefan absorbed in his novel. “I like the Bronte sisters,” she mumbled, gaining his attention. “Their books. They were my favourite classics.”

He smiled as she sat upright tiredly, “You were never an Austen girl, I remember.”

“Why are you sitting on the sofa? Are you afraid of sitting with me on a bed, Mr. Pierre-Louis?”

“I thought you may have wanted space.”

The sound of the rain suddenly began trashing against the roof of the house like angry soldiers at war. Stefan moved himself from the sofa to sit next to her on the bed with his book in hand. “I get this feeling that the ones who took Claire are somehow connected to us. Today I met a woman who recognized the tattooed symbol I saw on the man who broke into my home back in Vermont. The symbol connected back here to Rose Gap, to this brotherhood cult of some sort.”

“If this is true then we should take this information to the station tomorrow.” Ophelia had considered it, but the issue of trust plagued her mine. She trusted Charlie but wasn’t too sure of the Sheriff and other officers. “What’s wrong?” Stefan asked, taking note of her silence.

“I fear if we do then that would lead to more trouble and the last thing I want is to put you, your family and anyone else’s life in danger.

Putting the book aside, he gently stroked her lose hair tucking it behind her ear as she leaned into him.  “I’m beginning to think,” he began in a soft voice, “That being apart did more harm than good.”

She could feel his heart aching into her ear where she pressed her head upon his chest. Quickening, fainting, racing, calming all into one mellow consistent thumping sound she found herself unable to explain. “Don’t ask me to do it,” he continued, keeping an arm around her waist. “I won’t. I can’t.”

“I don’t think I want you to,” she admitted, pulling slightly away and staring up at him, inches away. Ophelia gently ran her delicate fingers along the stubble of his face. His hands held onto the tender flesh on her waist as she shifted herself closer, on top of him, feeling him like a rock beneath her. “I thought you every day,” she whispered while letting her hands travel beneath his shirt.

“Had you called me just once,” he frowned. He felt her pores raising to his touch as he trailed his hands to her upper chest and over her bare flesh. He could hear her breathing quicken as he did and a soft moan escaped. She tightened the space between them and kissed his bottom lip teasingly. “Is this alright?” She asked for both their sakes, removing her sweater. He peeled his shirt off and dropped it in the floor while putting both hands on her legs, pulling her body deep into his aching kiss. She could feel him now, every inch, every muscle, every throb. She felt a hand stapled on the small of her back pressing her into him and the other at her inner thigh, his thumb running in small circular sensual motions.

His kiss felt like the salty tang of the sea that she had been craving, missing, needing. It was a devouring sort of desire she had been denying herself. Stefan pulled her down gently as he kept his lips onto hers, trailing his lips down, kissing every inch of her he deprived himself of for seven fking years. Her fingers tangled into his hair and tugged as her breaths quickened from his actions. Bringing himself back up to her, face against face, she felt his weight onto her and wrapped her arms tightly around him.

**

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