***** Writer's Note: This series is my first attempt at writing here. This is the first in 30 Chapters of this story. If you want to know more about how and why I wrote it, look at the Author Biography on my Literotica page. Enjoy!
IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT
Sometimes, even real stories, stories that are true, actually do begin on a dark and stormy dream-tossed night. This was such a night. The fury of the storm ripping away restraints. Wind pulled at the roof threatening to tear it away. Its teeth gnawed at the window frames like some great beast trying to get in.
There had never been a summer like this summer. A huge wind and rainstorm storm was building off the coast. It was coming ashore tonight; but, it had already been raining for hours.
The river next to their house was full and roaring down the rocky canyon. Its roar like a beast of the night.
A beast of the imagination! A monster of the Id!
On a night such as this, one young girl on the cusp of womanhood rides out the storm in the safety of a small child's bed. Thinking only of the fury and the storm, she frantically clutches a large well hugged and beloved teddy bear. It's the guardian of her slumber. It's a match too all but the fiercest of her nighttime foes. The storm!
She has just turned eighteen, and this is the first night of the summer of the first year in her adult life. The first summer ever when, in the fall, she is not headed back to the Immaculate Conception Academy for girls.
I've survived a Catholic girls' school education; I'm finally actually free.
Olivia Nicole Grant lay in her bedroom listening to the thunder rattle the window panes. Hugging the bear tightly to her chest, she counted the time of the seconds between each flash, exactly like her dad had taught her. By counting, she could tell how close the storm was. The sky lit in a blinding flash that left her eyes seeing the shape of the cloud as the light faded.
"One one-thousand, two one-thousand," she whispered, listening to the rolling rumble of 'the sky breaking wind'. She giggled to herself at her dad's joke.
My Dad is such a retard! That is a horrible joke.
Nikki was afraid of storms. The Oregon Coast is not forgiving. The weather here can kill. The winds and rain can decimate entire forests. Storm winds blew off roof tops. They knocked down trees, dropping power lines for miles.
The rain sometimes falls horizontally not vertically. It was something not everyone knows. But storms spooked her and she'd learned to know things about stuff that scared her.
Knowledge is power!
My
dad says that.
Nikki was a secretist. In this family, you had to be. She knew things. She knew there was knowledge people hid. She knew knowledge was powerful. It explained things. She knew on some instinctual level 'things' were not what they seemed. And in her mind, the reason was the 'secrets' no one would share.
She divided the hidden world ofsecrets into two kinds.
First, there were the Secret Knowings. Powerful, but in some ways unsatisfying, they only 'explained' the world. Learning them was like being admitted to a club. Those kinds of secrets were like finding out Santa was really your dad; and, Daddy --not Santa-- ate the cookies you left out for him on Christmas Eve. The Tooth Fairy didn't really come into your room at night to leave quarters under the pillow when you lost a tooth. Nor did the Easter Bunny hide all the eggs.
More important were the Secret Doings. The real stuff of the universe. Beyond talking, it was the raw un-hidden acts of people. Things they did that showed who they really were. It was desires and needs made real. The acts themselves. These kinds of secrets could be personally experienced. They could be tasted, felt, touched, done. For Nikki, this kind of secret was life itself at its most basic. In the doing, you became you.
With Secret Doings, you could show someone else the truth of it. You could share the secret. The experience could be repeated, verified, refined, tested. These secrets were like alchemy. They metamorphosed the holder, the user, the keeper of the secret. And the secret could be used to change the world around you to understand it, to transform it.
When it came to secrets, she was a like a young scientist, but a secretist was an alchemist. Secrets were the ingredients of something between magic and science. Nicole had set out to be their Master.
The secret of counting the seconds was Secret Knowing. It had power, but only a little. When she was younger, her dad had told her that secret to help her be less afraid. She knew the storm was only half a mile away; but, now, it was just another fact about how the world worked. Now she understood the speed of sound, how fast the sound traveled.
The magic had faded to a kind of bored indifferent science.
I know how it works! There is no magic here.
Each flash lit the room then, as it faded, she could hold the image in her eyes-- even with them closed. She was like a camera as the negative faded away. If the flashes were close together, then everything outside her room moved like an old-fashioned kinetescope. She'd learned that marvelous word, 'kinetescope', from the Discovery Channel and promptly added it to her vocabulary.
None of these rationalizations helped suppress her natural urge to run from the storm. None could subdue a young girl's impulse to squeal every time a flash surprised her. She felt like she might jump out of her skin, which was covered with tiny goosebumps. She couldn't seem to catch her breath, and there was something else she couldn't identify. Some feeling she could not yet name-- somewhere between excited and scared to death. It was as though she was only really awake when life was like this. Everything slowed down. She thought faster, remembered better. Could see, feel everything. Smelled, tasted, heard everything. Everything! The world around her and her own feelings seemed more real than at any other time.
It scared her, which was okay. She sorta liked being scared, but only up to a point.
And
,
only because Daddy's just a short walk down the hall.
He's in that huge warm bed all alone, under the covers, just like me. Except he's already asleep because nothing worries him. Nothing!
It was a comforting image, and Nikki pulled the covers up to her chin, warming under them. She was safe and sound, wrapped in a clean, soft cotton quilt her mom had made for her.
In that moment of memory, the storm faded from her mind. She missed her mom; and with the thought came the painful 'almost-tears'. The kind that make your throat constrict in horrible spasms which hurt even more than real tears; and, your eyes get blurry but they're not wet. Her heart felt like it was nearing the breaking point. Then, she remembered she hated her mom for what she had done.
In her head, she listed all the objective reasons she hated her mom,
She left me. She left me and Daddy. My mom left my dad. When I was almost fourteen, my mom left us both. My mom abandoned our family.
Jack and Jennifer Grant were her parents and both of them were lawyers. She knew they helped people who were having trouble with their marriages. They'd called it a Family Law Practice. Her dad had always joked about calling it a practice because they had never gotten it right and they would practice until they did. Now she understood that somehow their divorce and her mom moving away meant they'd never get it right.
The joke isn't funny any more!
Mom was living with another woman, Dr. Samantha Green, mom's best friend according to her dad. Daddy would only say mom had become a lesbian. One time, when Nikki was younger, she'd asked the nuns what the word meant; they'd only told her it meant a woman, who liked to kiss women instead of men. Now that she was older, Nikki understood it was a bit more complicated. Daddy had also said Jennifer really loved Dr. Sam and he couldn't blame her. He said if Jennifer loved and trusted her, that meant Dr. Sam had be be someone very special.
Her dad hadn't dated since her mom left, four years ago. Nikki always wondered if he missed her mom and if he ever got lonely. If he did, he'd never let her see it. He was her dad, the strong one. Daddy was the one in whose arms she could cry; Daddy held her safe and secure. And when he did, nothing could hurt her.
Daddy was the one who kept telling her not to hate her mom.
Someday, Nikki, you'll understand. Nobody was at fault. Sometimes in life, someone just needs things that only a certain person can give them.
He tried to get her to believe Jennifer still loved him, and more importantly, that her mom had never stopped loving her.
People change, Nikki, but love doesn't. Your mom is still your mom!
There was something missing here. Nikki couldn't understand how all this fit together. She could sense that there was some secret she didn't know. That secret was shaping her life.
There is a missing piece in the puzzle of my life. It's a secret piece.
There were moments, special moments when she was in his arms crying, that she felt just like she felt right now. Scared, alive, alert, goosebumps everywhere and her heart was going to break.
There was a moaning sound from outside her window. The moan came from the tree next to the big window in the wall of her room. Whether wind, or rain, or one tree rubbing against another, it didn't matter. It was followed by a loud thump and a subtle jarring of the house. Even the night- lights in the hallway went out. She nearly squeezed the stuffing right out of the bear.
The electricity must be out. Shit!
She could feel more than hear something heavy moving outside her windows that overlooked the river. Since sunset, it'd become a menacing torrent of rushing water. Now, huge and ancient trees were tumbling into it, only to be carried down to the sea. As they were dragged along the river's bottom, they scraped in a protesting rumble. The awful noise reverberated against the bedrock of the river's bank far below; but it sounded like something was under the house itself. The ground beneath her grumbled.
Another flash ripped the sky in half and, before she could even get to
one one-thousand
the room shook. She squealed; but, no one could hear her because the crack of thunder overwhelmed the voice of one petite, blond eighteen-year-old, who'd almost peed her pants in surprise and fear. Before the light even faded, she was up and half-way to the door; but, the dark overtook her and she fumbled to find the doorway to the hall. She felt foolish and childish standing there in the dark in nothing but a pair of white cotton socks and panties. She felt for the door frame and made it into the hall, leaning against the wall for support. Still half-blind, she felt her way down the cool wall towards her dad's door. The flashes of lightning revealing the outlines of the hallway every few seconds. The thunder was now almost continuous.
The sound of the thunder was like the swelling power of a Taiko drumbeat. She'd always loved those thunderous drums in Portland. Her dad had been taking her to Taiko performances in Portland for years. When she was younger, she always climbed into his arms as the music crashed to its climax of a throbbing rhythmic pounding that shook your chest if you were close enough.
She could see the outline of her dad's door; safety was so close. All she had to do was reach out; but, she hesitated. Now that she was eighteen, she didn't want him to think she was a baby.
I've worked really hard to get him to think of me as a young woman and not 'his little girl'.
Big girls don't get scared do they?
Young women,
she corrected herself.
On the other hand, she needed to be in her dad's arms during the storm. She stood lightly on one small foot in the doorway, hesitating as she tried to decide which need was greater.
