Both Shall Live

Many thanks to OhPossum for the editing help. However, any remaining mistakes are all mine. Feel free to comment, if you so desire. Feedback is always welcome, but especially the positive kind of it. :)

Also, as the events take place in her senior year of High School, all people involved are over 18 at the time of the incident.

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Coming from a strict church upbringing, I have led a very sheltered life. My parents kept me protected from the real world, and as such, I hardly knew what to expect from life. From what I had pieced together on my own, I believed life to be all roses and ignored the fact that with a rose comes those thorns. Love was a magical thing that swept you off your feet when you least expected it. Also, it was ingrained into me that my innocence was a treasure, which I was to cherish and save for my wedding night, to share with one person whom I deemed worthy of such a gift.

Somehow, that was how it actually happened. My husband Peter and I grew up as next-door neighbours. Being that there were not many other children our age in the area, we ended up playing together out of necessity, generally under the careful supervision of at least one adult. By junior high, I was head over heels in love with him and didn't even realize it. It made me happy just to see him; my day didn't feel complete if we didn't spend at least a little bit of time together and family vacations seemed to drag on forever because he wasn't there.

While Pete has never been the best-looking guy around, he is certainly still quite easy on the eyes. Reaching 6 feet 3 in height, he is as scrawny as a beanpole with shaggy brown hair that is persistently messy, even after he washes and combs it. His nose is long and perfectly straight; his lips are oddly full. Just under the surface of any expression on his face, he has a wide grin that is cheerfully crooked. His eyes, those big soft baby blues, are his best feature though. When he is happy, which is most of the time, they are the colour of the summer sky on a cloudless, perfectly sunny day. I can lose myself in their depth on such occasions, and he learned early on how to work this to his advantage. However, when he is feeling unhappy, or angry, or frightened, or any truly unpleasant emotion, his eyes darken to a stormy grey, much the same as the summer sky can change in an unexpected instant when a storm crosses it. They become a dark blue, almost navy in their intensity, and I can rarely hold eye contact when they are so.

While I am on a descriptive kick, I should also describe myself. I stand just tall enough for him to drape his arm over my shoulder, with violently red hair, and the freckles and temper to match. It curls wherever it wants to, so I generally try to tame it by keeping it tied up much of the time. My eyes are the colour of emeralds, probably trying to match themselves with the stereotype of my hair. Though I have never been fat exactly, neither am I skinny. My weight has always been a sore spot with me, and I started running as a way to try to be slender, like I imagined a woman ought to be. But I am naturally curvy, and no matter how hard I try, I am still a little plump and slightly round. Still, running has given me relative strength, despite that no matter what I do, I continue to look soft and weak.

In our freshman year of high school, all the other girls started throwing themselves at him. Strangely though, he didn't once return the interest. He was as friendly with the girls as he was with the boys; his cheerful & outgoing personality makes him hard to dislike. As I tend to be shy in crowds, not many guys expressed an interest in me. But each time one did, if he was around to witness it, his eyes would darken perceptibly. His mood would always take a weird swing from his usual cheerful way, and he would become strangely protective over me. This scared many of the guys off, and it didn't take long for every person in the school to learn that I was to be treated with respect. Unless of course, they wanted to incur Pete's enmity, which could be frightening, given his usually sanguine nature.

In fact, it was that very protectiveness that finally made me realize how I loved him. One day late in the spring of our senior year of high school, we were walking home together, as we always did. However, I had left him behind with my books, taking off running just for the sheer joy of it. Strictly speaking, I knew that I should stay with him, as I was not supposed to go this way by myself. It went through a small patch of woods by the local park, and the area had a bit of a bad name. The woods were an ideal cover for the kinds of people who wanted to use the woods to hide their activities from public eyes. Consequently, they were not a safe place for females to be in alone, as it was always dark in those woods, even on the brightest summer day.

But I was young and naïve. Such things were vague horrors that my father read about in the newspapers; they did not apply to me. To his everlasting amusement, I was much faster than Pete. However, it drove him absolutely crazy when I took off on him like that, particularly when we were walking this route home. I lost him quickly, and was glorying in my ability to go so fast when I literally slammed into what felt like a brick wall. In actuality, it was one of the football players from the college across town. But given how much larger he was than me I might as well have run smack into a tree. I bounced off his chest, actually causing him to stagger backwards a step or two, and landed flat on my back on the trail. As I struggled to catch the breath that had been knocked from my lungs, I heard a deep voice, "Well well, what have we here?"

Suddenly there were hands underneath my elbows, pulling me unceremoniously back to my feet. Once I was standing, those hands did not leave my elbows; in fact, they tightened painfully around my arms, holding me out from him, so that he could leer appreciatively at my body. "There's no need to throw yourself at me, my plump little vixen." His tone of voice was almost scary, especially combined with the look of lust that had appeared on his face. His grip on my arms grew tighter, leaving bruises behind, and he crushed me against his chest before I had gathered my wits enough to try to get away.

All things considered, I went from being on top of the world to absolutely terrified in matter of moments. By the time I realized that I should be screaming, he had literally lifted me off the ground, so that he could reach to kiss me. This was my first kiss, and it was nothing like I expected. His breath was hot on my mouth and his lips were rough, pressing hard against mine as if he was trying to leave bruises behind. My temper took control as he stole my first kiss from me. I had been saving that to give to my first love, not some random stranger!

Not understanding the rush of fire that flooded through my nether regions with this rough treatment, I bit down hard on his lip, almost drawing blood. Starting to struggle, I twisted like a hellcat, trying to push myself away from him. But his grip encircled my arms, pinning them to my sides, and without my arms to provide my finger nails to fight back, I could barely move.

In fact, my struggles simply served to amuse him, and he turned to press me against the nearest tree with a snicker. Using his body, he held me suspended in place, a good foot or more off the ground. Ripping the elastic from my ponytail, he wound one hand through my thick hair, deepening the kiss, brutalizing my lips with his. As he forced his tongue almost down my throat, he shoved his other hand up my shirt, shoving my bra out of the way to grope my breast. I tried to bite his tongue next, but this just caused him to grab my nipple as hard as he could and twist it. This made me scream shrilly, though his mouth muffled the sound. Tears sprang unbidden to my eyes from the pain, as it seemed to shoot through my body, straight to my private area.

With another cruel twist, he pulled his face from mine, only enough for me to see the evil grin on his face. "The more you scream, the harder this will be on you, little vixen. It just serves to excite me further." With each syllable, he twisted the nipple he had captured harder and further, causing me to cry out in anguish. Pulling my hair each time I made a noise, he moved his lips to the nape of my neck and started kissing me there instead. Not only did he kiss me, he bit down hard enough to break the skin and sucked with all his might, succeeding in his attempts to mark my fair skin. This drew an agonized shriek from me, despite the effort I was now employing to remain quiet. I did not want to give him the satisfaction of the screaming, if it would only serve to please him. With a particularly vicious twist of my nipple, he pulled on it at the same time, with what had to be all of his strength, so that I momentarily saw stars from the pain of it.

The next thing I knew I was crashing to the ground, and there was a crack in one of my ankles as I landed. It would later be discovered that I had broken it in two places. Huddling at the base of the tree, I sobbed from the lingering pain from his teeth and hands, not to mention the blinding white pain radiating from my ankle. I could hear something going on in the background, but the pain and shock left me unable to make out more than a blur of bodies in front of me.

After what seemed like ages, things seemed to settle down, and I heard the voice that I most wanted to hear in that moment of time. "Dasani... darling, are you okay precious girl?" Flinching away from the hands that touched me, I was absolutely terrified until I realized that it was the hands associated with the perfect voice that continued speaking in a low, soothing manner. "Come on Dasi Daisy Darling, it's me. There now, it's all over. I'm here, it'll be okay." Allowing him to gather me into his arms, I pressed against Pete's chest, sobbing with relief that he had stopped that brute from hurting me. When I had finally calmed down enough that I could concentrate, I looked up into his face. One of his eyes was swollen and purple, and he was bleeding slightly from multiple cuts and scrapes.

This made me start to cry anew, seeing the marks on his face that he had earned to save me from my tormentor. Despite the fact that my attacker was almost a full 100 pounds heavier than he was, Pete had thrown himself at him, fighting tooth and nail with him for daring to treat me so. In his single-minded determination to protect me, the football jock genuinely thought that Pete was trying to kill him. He had fled, but not until Pete had broken his nose, cracked his collarbone and blackened as much of his skin as possible.

Pete held me until I calmed down enough to let him call 911 on his cell phone. Normally he could have carried me home, as he is a great deal stronger than his scrawny frame gives credit for. But his damage was more than just the obvious that I could see; he had a cracked rib to match my broken ankle. In these moments, while waiting for the emergency vehicles to show up, I realized that I wanted to spend forever with this boy. When he asked me if he could tell the paramedics that he had been protecting his girlfriend, I was ecstatic. Just before we heard the sirens, he gave me what should have been my first kiss: a soft, gently brief caress of his lips on mine that left me breathless for all its sweetness.

The next few months were some of the longest of my life. The police never did track down that idiot football player, and I began to have nightmares. Night after night I would wake my entire family with my screaming. Though my father tried to calm me down, it was only Pete who was able to sooth my terror. As a result, he started sleeping in my brother's bedroom so that he would not have to come from next door each night when I started to scream. What stopped my nightmares is still a mystery to my parents. But the terror stopped haunting my subconscious when Pete started sleeping in the same bed as I.

Once everybody else was asleep, he would sneak into my room and curl up around me, cradling me in his arms while we slept. Not once he did behave inappropriately, nor even remotely hint that he wanted more from our relationship. He was simply protecting me, as he always had; it was just that this time, he was protecting me from my own subconscious, rather than an external foe.

To nobody's surprise but my own, my graduation present was his great grandmother's engagement ring. For all that our parents protested that 18 years old was too young to be married, we knew what we wanted. And having watched Pete and me grow up together, they knew deep down that we were not making a rash decision; we were simply acting on a decision that had been made before we were old enough to realize that it was being decided. In the end, our parents gave into us with relatively good grace. The week before we moved across town to go to college together, Peter and I were married, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, for as long as we both shall live.