CHAPTER SIX

A few months went by since Yumi had run away from Ulrich and came to Odd. Around that time it had been spring and now it was summer and almost every minute a little kid on a bike or a group of teenagers would walk by the house and down the street to the local swimming pool or the park. The park across the street was filled with younger children while their parents lined the benches and picnic tables, chatting and enjoying just the parent time while their children tired themselves out on the slides, swinging on the swing set, or climbed to their heart's content on the jungle gym.

Odd had been happy and cheerful since when he had found Yumi out in his front lawn and she was also turning around herself. She was going back to her old self from when she was in school except she was now older. She was still extremely shy and fearful yet but she was able to walk up and meet Odd's friends when they came to visit or walk up to them and say hi when her and Odd were out in the town.

Yumi normally stayed at home but she wanted to go out into the work force but the thought of Ulrich finding her still haunted her now. She was used to going to town, yes, but only when Odd was with her. If he wasn't, she wouldn't go more than to the end of the driveway before turning around and running back to the safety and homeliness the house provided her.

Although she hadn't seen Ulrich or one of his friends since she ran away, it was still a possibility of one of them finding her and bringing her back to that hellhole.

Within those few months Cadence had called and stopped by a few times to see Odd. She was surprised and angry that Yumi was still there after Odd had told her that Yumi would be gone in a week since she last saw Odd. Both Odd and Yumi got the thought that Cadence was waiting to make sure Yumi was forever gone before coming back to beg for Odd to come back to her.

It didn't work because she found out Odd and Yumi were dating but it didn't stop her from trying anyways. Several times Yumi overheard them talking and Cadence always tried to convince Odd to come back to her. When Odd told her no and to quit asking, Yumi smiled and walked back into the room to sit down next to Odd and hold his hand. Cadence, by that time, had gotten up to leave, leaving Odd and Yumi to laugh and joke about her failed efforts later.

Odd was completely comfortable living with Yumi but she was still a little skeptical about it yet. She still had troubles sleeping in the same bed with him so she always made him go to sleep first and when she was sure that he was asleep, she would crawl under the comfort of the blankets and fall asleep next to him. For the first week or so after her and Odd started going out, she slept on the couch in the living room and didn't care if Odd testified against it or not. When she was finally comfortable about sleeping with him, she slept in Odd's bed next to him.

Although she trusted Odd with all her heart, she was still testy that he might in some way turn out like Ulrich had after a while.

Odd knew Yumi was worried about that so he didn't think of it strangely and let her work up to being more comfortable with him. He wanted to sit her down, hold her tightly to him, and rock her while telling her that he's not like Ulrich and never will be but he didn't want to drive Yumi away so he didn't and tried not to think about it. Instead he sat back and let his wants devour him while she slowly killed the beasts one by one with each new improvement towards him.

Odd had taken her out to dinner several times and all of them ended the same way; "Thank you for dinner again. Good night, Odd.' Sometimes he even heard her say 'no' and just go to bed.

He wasn't rushing her and he wanted for her to be more comfortable with him as much as possible. So he let her have her way most of the time on certain issues but on small things that weren't really important, he fought for them. He had to have some authority in his own house even if it was just over what to have for supper or what movie they were going to watch for the night.

By the end of three months, Cadence stopped calling and stopped coming over so it was just Odd and Yumi every day and every night doing the same old routine except when they decided to go out and have a night for them selves.

One night Odd came home with a new midnight blue, velvet dress. It was knee length and had a one shoulder strap to show off a lot of the back of whoever wore it. The trims on the end had sparkled material the same color as the dress. Odd knew what size she wore because he had gone shopping with her a lot of times these past few months.

Yumi glided down the stairs when she heard Odd come in the door. She stopped at the bottom of the staircase and stared at him, then the dress, and then back at him again.

"I bought you a new dress. I kind of hoped we could go out tonight if you were up to it," Odd explained when she didn't say anything.

"You know you don't have to buy me a new dress. I have five more upstairs that I could have chosen from," Yumi said, pointing behind her and up the stairs with her thumb.

"I know but when I saw the dress in the display window I thought you would look good in it," Odd said, holding it out. "Take a look at, try it on and let me know what you think of it."

Yumi took it and turned to go to the bathroom right behind the spiral staircase. She closed the door behind her when she entered the bathroom and her hands fumbled in the darkness looking for the light switch. When her hands found the switch, she flicked it on, looked towards the door and saw Odd's shadow behind it and knew that he was waiting for her to come back out.

Inside the bathroom, Yumi had hung the dress on the door and was looking at it while she was stripping off her jeans and T-shirt. She noticed the design and knew that Odd had spent a lot of money on it. When she was only in her underwear and bra, she fully examined the dress and its design.

It was all-around beautiful with no flaw to the naked eye.

Yumi unhooked her bra and took the dress off the hanger and unzipped the back. She slid one leg into the velvet and loved the feel of it against her skin. She then slid her other leg in and pulled it up her body. Once the strap was over her shoulder, she zipped it back up and felt how nicely it hugged her body.

She walked over to the mirror above the sink that was directly behind her and examined her self.

Yumi noticed how much the curves of her body showed and she loved it.

For once in the past few years, Yumi felt beautiful and unique. Living with Ulrich she had worn nothing but her old black tank top and underwear. She also had a bra but she seldom wore it because of the rips and tears. When she had to wash her few clothes, she wore it to feel somewhat decent around the house. Other times she used one of Ulrich's clean shirts if she had to wash her bra as well.

Ulrich had never bought or given her something nice to wear and if it was nice, it was stolen from someone he had killed which in that case, it would be stained with blood and would never come out. So she learned to deal with what she had and didn't complain about it or it would have turned out bad for her.

For a sudden moment, Yumi fell into a depressive mood. She turned away from the mirror and walked to the tub and sat down on the snow white ledge. Her head collapsed and fell into her hands, her elbows resting on her bony knees. Thinking of the life that she ran away from made her think that she wasn't worthy or destined to wear clothes like this. Ulrich had told her that she was a worthless piece of shit and that the clothes she had were the best she would ever get. He had told her that she would never be loved enough to gain the kind of living that Odd is providing her with now and to be lucky that Ulrich is even nice enough to love her despite that she's never going to amount to nothing but to stay at home and provide him with relief from his sick and twisted desires.

"You're the worthless piece of shit, Ulrich," Yumi said to herself. "You're the one who put me through hell every single fucking day since our marriage. You cut me down and told me I'm not worth it. Thanks to you I can't even trust another ring on my finger. Not since after you betrayed it. Well now I'm going to prove you wrong and show you that I am worth something and that someone does love me unlike what you claimed for three long, painful years."

Yumi stood up, defiant and invulnerable. She walked to the door and before she opened it to face Odd, she looked at the new, unafraid Yumi in the mirror. Although deep down inside her she was still a little scared, she didn't want to let it show and decided not to let it bubble up over the top of her newfound self so she could go out and have a wonderful evening.

She took a deep breath and opened the door, immediately searching for Odd.

He was sitting on the bottom of the staircase so she walked over to him and waited for him to turn and look at her. Once he turned and saw her, he smiled and tried not to gape at her.

"So, how do you like it?" Yumi bravely asked him.

Odd walked up to her and placed one hand delicately on her cheek, his other hand holding one of her hands that was dangling at her side while her free hand reached for the hand he had placed on her cheek.

He looked into her eyes and said with honesty, "Like the stars in the sky."

Yumi smiled and stared back into his blue eyes.

Odd began to lean down towards her lips, wanting to kiss her and Yumi began to lean up in return to accept his kiss but than he stopped and pulled away all too suddenly.

"I almost forgot. I also found matching shoes to go with the dress," he said, running to the rest of the bags by the front door.

Yumi let her head drop down in disappointment when he was rushing to the bags by the front door. She was ready and expecting their first kiss but now it seemed that Odd was the one who was chickening out. With how Odd was acting it wasn't helping her become more open and unafraid. It he kept doing this then she was sure to do the same thing only her condition would be worse off than his.

"OK Yumi. You don't want to go back with all the fear you've overcome in these few short months. If you want to progress forward you need to make some of the first moves or you'll be right back where you started from," Yumi thought to herself as Odd came back with a white cardboard box with different black line and bar designs crossing the front, sides, and bottom.

Odd lifted the lid of the box to reveal a pair of midnight blue high heeled sandals with a clear strap with sparkles inside the thick elastic that held the toes in place. The only thing that didn't match but at the same time did match as well was the charcoal black heel which was about one to one and a half inches thick and about two inches long. If you compared the sandals to the dress, it blended in just as well as if the dress Yumi was wearing draped down to her toes.

"Odd. They're…they're…beautiful," Yumi gasped as he gently lifted them out of the box for her to get a better look at them.

"All the best for a beautiful girl," Odd replied with a smile, swooping down to pick her up in his arms with her knees bent over one of his arms and her back resting on his other arm; the same way as the night Odd found her and carried her inside his house.

Yumi giggled and wrapped her arms around Odd's neck and laid her head on his shoulder. Odd set her down in a sitting position on the second step of the carpeted staircase, lifting one of her legs up so he could place one of the sandals on her feet and then doing the same for the other.

He did this was such delicacy as if her feet were made of glass or fragile porcelain.

Once the shoes were in place on Yumi's feet, Odd took her by the hands and pulled her back to her feet and into his tight, warm embrace. She laughed and hugged him back although not as tight as his but all the same she tried nonetheless. He reluctantly let her slip a ways out of his arms but just enough so that she was still in his arms but now able to look into her eyes.

"You look so beautiful. When Ulrich had you I always said to myself that he was always and would always be the one to treat you right and give you everything that you would ever need," Odd said to her, hesitating to go on with what he wanted to say next, "but after seeing what he did to you I can't forgive myself for ever thinking that. The way you came to me all battered, bruised and a complete wreck I could hardly believe that when you said Ulrich did that to you he actually did. And even if you looked like that I still thought that you looked extremely beautiful."

Yumi could hardly find the right words to say so she asked him, "How could you have?"

Odd only smiled and leaned his face closer to hers and said, "Because even with all those wounds she's still the same, beautiful girl as I remembered as a child while growing up with her."

Yumi's eyes filled with tears but because of a memory, a moment from a long time ago. She closed her eyes and thought back to the day of Odd's sister's funeral.

When Odd and his sister, Mai, were thirteen, they were separated because their parents had died in a car accident. Odd wound up going to their boarding school with his dog, Kiwi, and Mai ended up going in a foster home that turned out to be a horrible place. They worked her day and night and beat her whenever possible but when a social worker from the foster care services made monthly visits, the foster parents covered her skin with make-up and treated her well for an hour while the social workers were there.

When they weren't working her or beating her, they shoved her into their musty shed and locked it shut where she couldn't see and starved. When she tried to sneak food, she had to be quick about getting it into the shed without getting caught in the process and when she did get caught, they held her hand down and sliced her fingers open and pushed salt inside the cuts. To make sure she didn't wash it out later, they wrapped a piece of cloth tightly around her hand and knotted it so in order to remove it from her hand, they would have to cut it off.

Mai had taken a pen and a piece of paper from the house, a fully loaded pistol she had found in the barn and hid them under a loose floorboard that was buried under some moldy hay.

She had pried this loose within her first week of living with those two horrible people.

Inside the hole was a clear blue flashlight she had taken from a desk drawer inside the house, a few empty food wrappers that once held pop tarts, chips, and crackers, and the pen, paper and pistol she had taken earlier within the week.

That night when she was sure that both of her foster parents weren't around after they locked her up in the shed, she uncovered the hay and pried the floorboard open. She pulled the flashlight and the pen and paper out of the hole and leaned back against the far wall and began writing a note to Odd. The thing she liked about this night of all nights is that the social worker would be coming over the next day early in the morning and she knew her body wouldn't be shoved down a well or buried under the house without the social worker seeing them do so.

Once she had finished writing the note, she pulled out the pistol, placed the note on her chest, and turned off the flashlight and placing it back inside the hole before closing it back up again. She got onto her knees and held the note tightly to her chest as she placed the barrel inside of her mouth. The last thing she did was pull the trigger and 'bang.'

The very next day, the social worker came early in the morning and went to knock on the front door of the wooden household. The foster parents answered the door and pretended to look for Mai until they decided to pull off a little joke behind the social worker's back and hide the fact that Mai was always locked inside the shed at night.

The foster mother talked to her husband and said he might have locked Mai in the shed by accident last night because Mai had wanted to clean the inside of it and without looking or calling for her thinking that she was already inside and in bed, put the lock back on the shed door and walked back to the house.

So the foster father unlocked the bronze padlock when they were outside and standing outside the shed and opened the door of the shed and called to Mai from the slightly opened wooden door. When Mai didn't answer, the foster father opened the door all the way and walked inside, kicking Mai's stone-hard foot on accident. He bent down, grasped her ankle, and drug Mai's dead body out into the sunlight. The social worker saw the girl in a tattered mess, the way she normally looked without all the make-up the foster mother had put on her to conceal the wounds.

The social worker found the note in Mai's stone-hard hand and struggled to free it from the decaying grasp of the dead girl. After she read the note, she turned toward the two foster parents and called into the police station. They were taken into custody by two armed policemen and Mai's body was brought to her brother, Odd.

When Odd saw Mai, everyone around him could see his heart break in two in his eyes at the sight of his dead sister.

Her face was all bruised and swollen, and on her right cheek was a large, deep, infected gash. Her mouth stood ajar so you could see her cracked, chipped, and missing teeth. Her lips were chapped and split and a little charred from the gunshot.

Odd saw her fingers and saw how each scar had been reopened repeatedly with a new fresh cut. Inside the cuts he saw pieces of salt that were stained from the color of her blood and then noticed the white of her bones. The bones were covered in dirt and dried mud but there was still a fairly good amount of white to be seen.

Her arms held welts and other various cuts and scrapes and bruises. Her feet were dirty and scraped also with hints of old and new blisters and her legs were skinnier, more fragile, and carried a lot of cuts and bruises as well.

Every part of her flesh that Odd could see was all infected and gruesome.

The rest of her body was covered in a light, white dress that was just above knee-length and was just about as dirty as she was.

Odd didn't want to see anymore of her destroyed body but he knew what was underneath the dress.

He didn't need to see anymore of it.

The next thing that he was looking at was the note that Mai had written to him.

"Odd I apologize for what I'm about to do but it's not worth it anymore. Ever since I've been stuck here in this hell hole I've been forced to work all day, I get locked up in a musty shed at night with no food and scarcely enough good drinking water. Everything I do is wrong to them and I'm not going to suffer and wait to get out in a few months or longer. I stole a pen and a piece of paper to write this to you and a pistol from their barn with my Silver Bullet. The social worker comes tomorrow so I know she'll see me before they throw my body in a floorboard under their house or shove me down a well. I'm not going to wait for death in this hell hole so death better be waiting for me. I love you, brother and again I'm so sorry.

Mai"

At Mai's funeral, Odd had them play "Who You'd Be Today" and he had his own song be played by the group's own little band which he took the liberty to sing himself.

Odd hadn't sung that song in eight years and now he was saying the first part of the chorus to Yumi.

Yumi was shocked and felt a little saddened about that fact. The song was originally Mai's Song but now it somehow was being said to her.

"Yumi, I know what you're going to say," Odd said when Yumi didn't speak, "but don't worry about the song. Yes, it's my sister's song but that line reminded me of you. Please don't be offended by that."

Yumi nodded and looked up at him. Odd bent down and kissed her forehead, taking her face in his hands.

All of a sudden Yumi didn't feel like taking a chance to kiss Odd for the first time since they've been together. When he said that line, the mood changed and she knew it hurt Odd just as much as her because it brought both of them back memories of that dark and gloomy day as if it happened only yesterday.

No one wanted to remember it.

"We should be getting to our date," Odd said.

Yumi only nodded and walked with him hand-in-hand to the front door and then out into the warm evening.