A/N: This chapter contains inexplicit sexual references.
She is seventeen years twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes old when she loses her virginity to Freddie Benson.
The sex happened on her seventeenth birthday and she has since come to realise that many of the significant moments in her life seem to happen on the same day year in year out, be it sleeping with the boy who'd go on to rip her heart out, leaving Seattle on the run or her father tragically passing away.
He had been slow and gentle, not wanting to hurt her, and neither of them had known at the time that he should have gotten it over then because in twelve months time he'd be hurting her to the highest degree. It wasn't a planned occurrence and it certainly wasn't planned to be romantic in the slightest, but his fingers had been soft, barely touching her as they danced over her vast expanse of lightly tanned skin, soft because he didn't want to bruise or break her.
His fingers felt like electric shocks that sent pure ecstasy cursing through her veins.
Drinking a little too much alcohol-spiked punch at her birthday party had been the catalyst that caused her to initiate the foolish actions that subsequently lead to them sleeping together, but she hadn't been drunk, she just felt light-headed, slightly woozy and her skin felt like it was on fire. Freddie had been bone dry sober, laughing as he undressed her in the darkness because she hadn't been able to stand up without the aid of a wall and smiling every time she giggled when his cold fingertips made contact with her burning skin. He shuddered when she'd leant over and spoke explicitly against his heated cheek about how much she wanted him inside her and flushed a deep crimson when her clumsy fingers made hard work of undoing the button on his pants.
He had been tentative, so damn cautious that she'd been close to crying out to tell him to bend and break and pull her apart at the seams and hurt hurt hurt her until she saw stars and felt on cloud nine, until she bled and screamed and begged for more. It was slow, hesitant and uncertain, the thick air around them punctured only by the odd nervous laugh or stifled moan, but it was nice, good at very best. They'd go on to have better sex over the year that followed – in his car, on her couch, in his kitchen, in the shower – the list of locations becoming endless.
That night he let her dig her nails into any of his skin she came into contact with. She left half moon indentations on his sharp hip bones, long but shallow scratches down his slightly muscular arms and tiny cuts sprinkled across his shoulder blades that seeped scarlet blood.
She will never admit it, but she hurt him first, the sadist in her coming out to play and it started an irreversible chain reaction.
A game of who can hurt who the most. A game that they were all too willing to partake in.
She is nineteen years one month and twenty-seven days old when the first in a line of many men degrades and breaks her in ways Freddie never could.
She jolts awake to find herself still curled in the bottom of the bathtub, sodden through with her clothes clinging to her like second skin and she should be freezing cold, but her skin feels ablaze, like her insides are trying to contain an inferno.
The water must have shut off a while ago, the tank empty.
She feels disgusting, having not thought about him like that and certainly having not dreamt about him like that in the longest time, memories of steamy liaisons and embraces of passion punished to the dark corners of her mind. She hasn't felt this kind of repugnance towards herself since she buried what was left of their love, buried what were the remains of Samantha Puckett and Freddie Benson as a couple in the Nevada desert. It tugs at her insides and she wants to vomit until she is empty of her deceit.
She removes her clothes, sick to her stomach, and wraps herself in a blue towel she finds hanging on the back of the door and it matches the turquoise tiled walls and cerulean linoleum floor – his favourite colour used to be blue, presumably still is, followed by green and red. Bleary eyed, she finds her way down the hall to the room she'd fled several hours earlier and inside the curtains have been thrown open and natural light is flooding the room, the sky outside appearing grey and miserable and it looks like the clouds are ready to release another onslaught of rain.
They don't call Seattle 'Rain City' just because it has a certain ring to it.
Changing into the sleeping clothes he had left her – a large button-up shirt that falls to her mid-thighs and a pair of elasticated pyjama shorts that she has to double knot at the waist so they don't fall to her ankles – she turns to stare out of the window and she does not recognise the view except for the Space Needle standing tall and thin in the distance. She dries her wet hair with the towel and realises she needs to find a way back to her car so she can retrieve a box of hair dye and more coloured contacts. Her brunette hair is gradually fading to a mousy brown, the blonde still fighting to emerge through the unnatural colour, and she needs to change her lenses.
The prospect of explaining why her eyes have gone from brown to blue frightens her, knowing she'll end up yelling "I'm not the person you think I am!" in his bewildered face.
Slumping against the wall (she notes it is a mint green colour), she begins to think of why she is in freaking Seattle. She doesn't think she came back with a specific reason, but her memory is shot to hell; she thinks she simply wanted to revisit the city that holds so many poignant memories, revisit the place where she grew up and fell apart within the space of eighteen short years. She hadn't known if he would still be here, half-expecting him to have left for Hollywood to work as a technical producer on some lame comedy sketch show. She didn't have any intentions of seeing him, and absolutely no plans involving being taken home by him because he thought she was some homeless girl who needed his sympathy.
She does not need his goddamn sympathy.
And she isn't here to jump Freddie's bones because she can't think of anything sexual without feeling violently ill and she can't understand why she keeps having this reaction. After all, she's been there, done that and got the stupid t-shirt that reads 'I Slept with Freddie Benson' in flashing fluorescent LED lights.
She assumes she is here to right her wrongs but she is well on the way to making her wrongs worse by letting him think she is someone else.
She finds her way to the kitchen, observing that the floor plan is completely different to that of the apartments in the Bushwell Plaza where he used to live and it hits her that she has no idea where in the city she is. She has been absent for nearly five years and the time away has made short work of destroying the mental street map of Seattle she used to know like the back of her hand. At this rate she's never going to find her car without his help.
Freddie is sat at the kitchen island, a mug of coffee in front of him and he is staring intently at a sheet of paper in his left hand. His dark hair is a mess on the top of his head, his eyes tired and the stubble on his face is a shade darker than it was the previous evening. What aggravates her is that he is still so attractive, if not more so. She half wishes he'd grown up to be repulsive looking because it would have made this unfortunate meeting a hell of a lot easier.
"Uh, hello," she says and lifts her right hand in some form of half-assed greeting.
"Morning Stefanie," he replies.
Damn, he's chirpy; he never used to be a morning person, preferring to sleep until midday at the weekend which resulted in her often kicking him out of the bed. He moves his attention from the piece of paper to her and penetrates her with his eyes and they're full of worry and questions and confusion, "are you okay?" and "why did you spend the remainder of the night in the bathroom?" desperate to escape his mouth.
"How do you take your coffee?" he finally says, pushing his 'other' questions to one side.
"White with two sugars, please." Samantha always took hers black, the same colour as her soul.
He stands and goes to make her the first hot drink she has had in a week, placing the paper in his hands face down on the marble island top. A lump forms in her oesophagus as she casually reaches out and flips the paper over while his back is turned. It is creased and turning yellow around the edges but she can still make out the heavy crayon drawing, the stick figures holding hands, one with a mass of yellow hair and the other with a scribbled mess of brown and the figures are surrounded by a multicoloured explosion of flowers. The nausea takes over again and she is hit with flashbacks of drawing the picture and handing it to him and getting a kiss on the cheek as a thank you, his small lips sticky on her face from the candy he'd been eating all morning.
She never thought he'd still have it, thought it was destined to a one-way trip to the trash can once she left him. How he can look at it without feeling immense hate is beyond her.
"Who drew this? A niece, nephew, cousin or something?" she asks, finding enjoyment in asking him a question she knows will make him squirm in discomfort.
"No, uh, Sam drew me that when we were seven years old." He sounds unsure of whether he should be divulging such information with a stranger and he doesn't pick her up on how the paper had been the other way up before he'd turned his back.
If only he knew who she really was.
"I don't know why I have it or why I got it out after all this time. I guess I can't let go." He gives her a sad smile as he pours boiling water into a porcelain mug and the idea that he has never fully given up on Samantha blindsides her, knocking her into the middle of a busy dual carriageway to meet her untimely death under the wheels of a truck.
His refusal to let go is swiftly opening up endless opportunities for her. Some of them positive, some negative, and some utterly cruel and demeaning.
"Did you love her?" she presses, wondering if she can make him cry because she'd just love that. She'll laugh and sing and dance in a pool of his tears as he spills the contents of his hardened heart onto the kitchen floor.
"Somebody likes to ask awkward questions."
"I'm just naturally inquisitive," she flashes him a grin but it is false and feels foreign on her face. She isn't naturally inquistive, she is desperate for facts.
I want to know everything I missed the first time around. You never told me you loved me and I've despised you for it every day for the past four years eleven months and twenty-eight days. I hate you and I love you and I want to rip your heart out with my teeth and use your guts as a noose to hangs our heartless bodies from the curtain rail.
"I loved, love her more than anything."
She's too slow and he's beaten her to it, stringing her body up with her own guts, leaving her hanging like a piece of meat in a butchers window and he's grinning as she struggles against the restraints before her body goes limp and lifeless. He's gone straight for the jugular, sinking his teeth in and there is no going back from this. She is pressing her hands into the bloody wound in her neck, trying to to suppress the bleeding he's caused, but it is seeping over her fingers and staining them red. She can't rewind and never leave when she was eighteen just as she cannot make him take back what he said about still loving the girl who is still inside her somewhere.
She's got a big, bloody mess on her hands.
She is twenty-two with a broken heart that is four years eleven months and twenty-eight days old. In two days it will be five years.
When she left Seattle she had enough money to her name to get by, not enough for her to throw her money away by staying in fancy establishments, but she had plenty to keep her on the move. She had stolen cash from her mother's purse – she knew the insane, constantly drunk woman would never notice the money or her daughter disappearing – and she had guiltily lifted a couple of twenties from Freddie's wallet to add to her small stash of savings that she kept behind the headboard of her bed where her mother couldn't find it and blow it all on tequila. But money only got her so far when she was still interested in feeding herself, paying for petrol for her car and the alternate nights spent in cheap roadside inns that smelt like there were dead bodies hidden under the floorboards.
The nights in between having the comfort of a bed she'd sleep in the backseat of her heap-of-junk car.
The money she kept folded up in wads of a hundred dollars and stuffed inside her bra ran out in due course, she thinks it happened somewhere between Sacramento and San Francisco, and she had to stop running long enough to earn a wage in a greasy truck stop as a waitress/sex object for men to ogle at. It made her skin crawl, but money is money, how she got it wasn't an issue for her. Fat sweaty old men, balding black toothed idiots passing through from the Deep South, all the types of men she had spent her life trying to avoid reveled in grabbing her breasts in their meaty hands as she served them with tight lipped smiles or slapping her backside as she walked away, salivating over her barely legal body.
She didn't stay in the job very long; the only advantage of getting molested by filthy perverts was that she got tipped heavily. She felt like a prostitute, being paid for a quick slap 'n' grab, and it is ironic when she looks back on it because that is exactly what she later found herself becoming when she hit an all-time low.
Eventually she stopped using money – speeding away from gas stations with a tank full of free fuel, running from cafes owned by little old ladies without leaving a couple of dollars on the table for her coffee, coaxing gullible men into buying her drinks in bars with the promise of a good time that they never got. She evaded getting into trouble with the cops, using a fluttering of eyelashes and her impressive cleavage to get her out of any situation.
She felt like Bonnie missing her Clyde, Nancy without her Sid, Love devoid of her Cobain. She was missing what made her feel whole and no amount of self-punishment or recklessness would fill of the empty crevices that had opened up inside of her, ripping the remains of her internal organs to shreds.
She had no road map (she'd lent it to Freddie two days prior to her departure) and no satellite navigation system installed, instead driving wherever she wanted to and only knowing the towns she was passing through and the cities she was staying in from a vague awareness of the signs on the highway. She went from Washington to Oregon to California to finally Nevada, travelling the length of the west coast and then some more. Her bad sense of direction (not just in driving, but in life and love too) sent her from Santa Maria to Las Vegas via Reno, completely wrong and possibly the most time-wasting gas-guzzling way imaginable that didn't involved detouring through Virginia along the way.
It took her a little over a year to find her way to Las Vegas. Upon her arrival she found a new way to make cold hard cash in the city that never sleeps. It was not in the most conventional of ways, but selling her body to strangers became like second nature once she shut off her mind and emotions, becoming an empty doll to be abused and violated by drunken and often aggressive men. She'd put on a mask, barely recognisable under the thick layers of make-up, and she'd tell herself that it wasn't really her, it was someone stronger, someone doing it because it was necessary for her survival.
She sold her soul to the devil, an act she has come to deeply regret.
She spends two years four months and eleven days in Las Vegas, the longest she stays in one place since fleeing Washington State. The bright lights, the pure seediness, the dirty underground movement of Sin City drawing her in and refusing to release her, sharp teeth and claws digging into her soft flesh.
I'm falling like a snowflake; catch me quick before I disappear.
I'm fading like the sun and soon as I'm gone everything will come undone.
Disclaimer: I still do not own iCarly and until otherwise mentioned all lyrics used at the end of each chapter belong to Victoria Hesketh.
A/N: I hope I'm not confusing anybody with how this seems to be jumping from here to there and back again. I realise that including a back story and the main story at the same time is complicated (hell, I'm tying myself in multiple knots trying to figure everything out and I'm the one writing the damn thing!), but it will all make sense eventually, I promise. Give me a chance :) And thank you to everyone who has reviewed this fic, added it to their favourites or put it on story alert. Also thanks to those who are just reading this, the number of page hits is phenomenal. It means a lot.
