Warning: I added a fairly sized sprinkling of violence to this chapter. I would saw it's still well within the range of a T rating though. If you disagree please let me know.
ooo
As she changed clothes, Joan walked over to the mirror on her dresser and surveyed the damage evident on her bare upper body. Most obvious were the now purplish grip mark bruises on her forearms, aching and tender to touch. Adam gave her that particular souvenir of their relationship four days ago. There were scratches on her neck and she made a mental note to make sure that whatever she wore to school that day covered them. Although she couldn't see it, she was also painfully aware of the bruise on the back of her head where he had slammed her into a wall yesterday, but her hair covered that one so she didn't worry that anyone would notice.
The slap mark on her face from her first encounter with Adam this term had disappeared relatively quickly. After she had walked out of the biology closet she had ran out of school, got the first bus home and spend the best part of an hour nursing her face with a bag of frozen peas. Frozen vegetables had become her savoir, she considered as she once again picked up a bag of rapidly defrosting carrots from her bedside table and pressed them to the bruise on her left arm.
To assume, having seen all her wounds, that Joan came off worse in her all too frequent meetings with Adam, would be a mistake. There were purple marks scattered over his stomach, back and shins to prove it. In each of their meetings Joan endured the pain he caused her until she had him on the floor, so she could stand over him and know that he wasn't the boss in all of this. Joan never touched his face though, and he never touched hers. This was an unspoken rule between her and Adam. Nothing that would reveal to the rest of the world exactly what happened now when they got together.
It happened at different times and places every day, one person dragging the other into a closet or an unused and out of the way classroom, or even hidden underneath the bleachers on the football field once. Schoolwork took a backseat to these meetings. They missed lessons for them to take place and missed lessons to go home in the day and fix up their wounds. School was no longer a place of learning; it was a battleground.
The first bruise Joan had given Adam had remained, obviously. He blamed it on a fall down the stairs though, and after the school rang his father and became assured that Carl Rove did not hit his son, everybody forgot about it.
Joan often thought about how Adam could change when treated in a certain way. He would take her to an empty classroom with no intension of starting the fight that inevitably took place. He would try and talk to her, beg forgiveness and promise never to hurt her again. This was the old Adam. No matter how much she had pleaded with herself to end this charade that day, the anger would come bubbling up to the surface. She would curse him and push him, maybe even kick him while he just took it all and looked sad. Then with each further blow he would merge into the other Adam, whose eyes were black and whose face was contorted and whose handprints had squeezed bruises into her forearms. She would coax him out, heaving a sigh of relief when he finally lunged at her. She preferred to deal with black-eyed Adam; she didn't feel so guilty hurting him. These twisted power games they played, the bitter, angry attacks that now ruled her life, had become the best and very worst point of each day.
How the hell did we get here?
ooo
AN: Also not so nice. Things have got to get better soon, I know. I'll do my best. It's either that or kill them both… I shall think about it.