We’d danced at the formal, surrounded by all of her friends in their dresses with their dipshit dates in fuckin’ tuxedos. If they’d played that fucking Kylie Minogue song one more time I was gonna outright execute some motherfucker. Tami had gone on and on about how this was “a night we’d remember for the rest of our lives”.

I’d remember it, alright, but it wouldn’t have anything to do with reaching a milestone to mark the passage of time.

In a way, I guess I’d expected to get my hands bloody tonight, and I had. Twice.

In a cheapo hotel room after the dance, I’d taken her virginity and she’d bled like a bitch. She’d also freaked the fuck out when I’d tried to go down on her afterward. So instead, we’d lain there in silence, naked and wrapped in one another’s arms. Or I’d lain there in silence; as usual, Tami talked too fuckin’ much about all the shit I didn’t give a fuck about, and then she’d bitched me out when I’d fallen asleep. It wasn’t that I hadn’t realised what this night had meant to her, or that I resented her fantasy for the perfect first time. Truth is, first times will always suck, no matter who you’re with. I tried to make it okay for her, but I know it wasn’t the experience she built it up to be. It wouldn’t have been, not with anyone.

She wanted romance and those three little words that she seemed to say almost every time she opened her mouth, but that I could never say back. I liked Tami a lot; I liked going down on her, I liked her going down on me, and I’d even enjoyed fuckin’ her, but I didn’t love anyone. I never would.

To love was to hurt.

My mother had taught me that, and it had been a lesson she didn’t even know she was teaching, yet it was likely to be the most valuable one I’d ever learn.

I see that now, as she crouches down on the floor beside the body of her husband. All the shit he put her through, all the bruised and busted up eyes, all the rapes, the violence, and the mental beatdowns, and still she cries over his dead body.

“Jonah, what did you do?” she whispers.

“What I had to,” I say evenly, though the blood on my hands makes me feel like the whole world has tilted on its side. I’m the only man left standing, and I don’t feel a single ounce of relief because of it. I pull her away from his prone body. “You need to stop touching him. Fingerprints, Ma.”

Her panic-stricken gaze meets my serene one. “We need to call the police; we need to report it. We can say he attacked you. We’ll say that it was self-defence. There’s a history of violence there; they won’t question it.”

“I’ll still go to jail, Ma,” I say. “And it won’t be juvie.”

“Oh, Jonah,” she says, and for the first time she seems to gather herself together. She stands and takes my blood-soaked hands in hers. I pull them away, because he doesn’t deserve to touch her anymore. Even the sight of the stains on her hands makes me sick.

“They’re so steady,” she says, and then she looks up at my face and her tears spill over. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Jonah.”

“It’s okay,” I say. My voice is a monotone. It doesn’t even sound like me.

“Let’s get you cleaned up.”

I shake my head and draw away from her. “I gotta get rid of the body.”

“Where?” She glances down at the monster’s prone figure. I guess I’m the monster now. I’m the one with blood on my hands. I’m the boy who finally grew big enough to fight back.

“The quarry doesn’t get used anymore—hasn’t been touched for years. I’ll weight it and drop it. No one will ever find him,” I say, as if I’ve only just thought of it. I haven’t. Since I was nine years old, I’ve known the abandoned quarry would be where I’d dispose of my father’s body. I’ve dreamed about killing him a thousand different ways, but I hadn’t prepared myself for the fight, or the sickening crunch of my knife sliding between his ribs. I hadn’t realised just how many jabs it would take with the bloody blade to take the fucker out. If I had, I might have used a bigger knife, though I hadn’t been thinking much beyond stab, maim, kill when I’d seen him bailing my mother up in the kitchen, probably over something as insignificant as whether she made him a fuckin’ sandwich the right way.

“He can never hurt you again, Ma,” I say, and I’m surprised to hear the tremor in my voice.

“Oh, my boy.” She hugs me, despite the blood painting my white shirt red. I hug her back, but my hands don’t touch her. I can’t touch her with his blood on my hands.

I wish I’d done it sooner. I wish I’d planned it better so she wouldn’t have to see. So the memory of her son murdering his father with a kitchen knife wouldn’t be burned into her brain for the remainder of her life. I wish I’d done a lot of things differently, but at least I wasn’t too small this time. I’d never be helpless again. My mother would never be helpless. I made sure of it.

When I hit sixteen, I got a job on the milk run. The hours sucked, but the exercise was good for me. I lost all my puppy fat, and I used the money to buy my first car and help out Ma. Then I started lifting weights. I couldn’t afford a gym membership, so I taped bricks to an old broom handle and added more and more each week. People started to look at me differently; the monster looked at me differently, and hadn’t lain a hand on either one of us since. Until tonight.

There won’t be a funeral for my father; we won’t report him missing, and it’s likely no one will ever ask. He has no family, save for Ma and me, and he played his friends for money a long time ago. No one gave a fuck about him. Besides, husbands leave all the time. They leave their families for other women; they walk out in the middle of the night for a pack of cigarettes and are never heard from again.

My father would never do anything again. He’d never come home from the pub reeking of piss, he’d never raise another hand to my mother or to me, and Ma would never have to live in fear again, because I’d gut any man who tried to harm a hair on her head. You protect the people you love; you don’t beat them down until they quake with fear. You love them, you cherish them, and you treat them right, and you take down any motherfucker who tries to hurt them.

I made a promise to myself in that moment that I’d never let anyone make me feel small again, including love. If you don’t love, you don’t get hurt.

At least, that’s the way it was supposed to go.

I lie down on the back deck in the sunshine and scratch behind Butch’s ears. He gives a lazy little whine before flopping his big head on his paws and stretching out with a doggy huff. It’s too cold for dresses, but I’m wearing the smallest one I own and it’s tucked inside my panties, which I’m wearing for once, because sometimes being a woman who’s been showered with expensive lingerie requires that you enjoy it.

I blink up at the cloudless blue sky and smile as the sun warms my face, and when I drift off to sleep, my dreams are plagued with him and his needles, and those hands that punish.

“It’s okay, Daddy’s girl. I’m here,” he says, and drives the needle in my vein.

I jolt awake, blinking up at the blackened sky several times. It’s dark, and at first I think I’ve slept too long and Tank has finally come home, but then the familiar rush of heroin pumps through my veins like a lead weight, and I slowly turn my head and glance at my arm. My whole body shakes, my breath comes too fast, too sharp, and I clamp my mouth shut so I won’t make a sound. The rubber cord tied around my arm is removed, and another wave of wonderful, maddening smack sluices through me.

“You’ve been a bad girl, Ivy.”

I shake my head, unable to move much more than that. I want to run, but I’m frozen with fear. I knew I’d seen him. I knew I hadn’t been hallucinating.