To Each Her Own

  TO EACH HER OWN

  Molly Mirren

  TO EACH HER OWN

  Copyright © 2015 by Molly Mirren

  Digital Edition

  All rights reserved.

  Produced in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Disclaimer:

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locations are used only to provide authenticity and are used fictitiously. All other characters, places, incidents, and dialogue are products of the author’s imagination and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance between the novel’s characters and setting and actual individuals or places is completely coincidental. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author.

  Formatted by Author's HQ

  For my husband, who would have been disappointed if my idea for a story had been normal. I love you.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Funny how words could be sharp as daggers, how they could pierce deep enough to wound the soul. Erin could feel Blond Guy's words ripping into hers, and, God, did it hurt, like her stomach was being yanked out by a jagged hook.

  If Luis had looked away, he would have seen her, but he was too absorbed in what his friend—the blond guy with his back to her—was saying. Luis and Blond Guy were in the kitchen, along with Erin's purse, which she had remembered just as she’d reached the front door of Luis's apartment. She was on her way through the living room to retrieve it when Blond Guy began his tirade.

  “Devs are bottom-feeders,” he was saying. His blond hair was long enough to barely touch his broad shoulders and was sticking out from a backward black baseball cap with an Oakland A's emblem. Obviously, he was the friend from California Luis had vaguely mentioned last night.

  “Devs are even more perverted than those weirdos who wish they were paralyzed,” Blond Guy went on, “those people who pretend.” His tone got darker. “Don't tell me you fucked the freak.”

  “Yes, we fucked,” Luis answered in his lyrical voice. He had the hint of a Hispanic accent, even though he'd been born and raised in the U.S. It was a common thing for San Antonio, which had a lot of Latinos. “I'm exhausted,” he said. “After the sex, we had to have the standard 'deep' dev convo—blah, blah, blah—where I got to hear how hard it's been for her to come to terms with what she is.”

  Erin cringed at her own gullibility. She was officially the worst judge of character on the planet. And to think she'd bared all to him, mind and body.

  “It was a long time coming,” said Luis. “We've been talking for weeks.”

  “How was it?” Blond Guy asked.

  “I rocked her world, of course,” he said with a leer, dimples flashing in his cheeks.

  Erin drew in a sharp, silent breath. Just ten minutes ago, when she'd kissed him good-bye, she'd thought those dimples and his glossy, wavy black hair were adorable. Now they mocked her.

  For the record, Luis hadn't rocked her world, and she knew she hadn't rocked his either. Still, she'd thought there'd been some kind of connection, some kind of bond between them. Apparently she was a freaking idiot.

  Blond Guy let out a wry snort. “Right. You rocked her world. But what are you doing messing around with devs? You can do better.”

  Luis shrugged and lifted his hands, calling attention to his oddly curved, thin fingers as if to make a point. “Hey, man. Quadriplegic here. Not exactly a great catch—at least not to most AB women. They can't see beyond the fact that I'm a cripple. They don't know what they're missing, but devs do. With devs, at least I already have my foot in the door.”

  “They're all nutcases.”

  Luis shook his head. “I'm telling you, some devs are okay. Erin seemed normal enough, and she didn't bat an eye when I told her I needed help with a few personal things—no awkwardness about my catheter or helping me get undressed or any of that stuff.”

  “That's because she was probably getting off on it.”

  Erin clenched her jaw, hot anger coursing through her.

  “Probably,” said Luis. “But you have to admit, she's got nice chichis and a tight ass.”

  Oh, my God, thought Erin. What a compliment. Chivalry wasn't dead after all.

  Blond Guy's deep voice was filled with disgust. “I don't care how hot she is or how nice her tits and ass are. There's something wrong with anyone who's attracted to floppy, paralyzed body parts. Is it some kind of power trip or something? Is it a low self-esteem thing, like devs think us cripples will stick with them because we can't get anyone better, because we can't run away? That's bullshit.”

  He gripped his wheels, squeezing the handrims and tires together in his large hands, and the blades of his shoulders went back, drawing attention to the TiLite logo on the backrest of his sleek, compact, all-black wheelchair. Judging by the sureness of his grip and the arm muscles bulging beneath the sleeves of his long-sleeved T-shirt, he was a para, not a quad like Luis. “I've heard some of those freaks are attracted to actual wheelchairs,” he said, “and they don't care whether there's a dude sitting in the chair or not. They get off on humping an empty wheelchair. Devs are just gross, dude. They're fuckin' weird. Subhuman.”

  Erin felt the usual shame and denial twist her insides. It wasn't like that. She wasn't like that. Granted, she had just noticed the brand of his wheelchair, which no normal person would probably do, but she didn't want to fuck the damn thing! It was the same as noticing a cool sports car or admiring a badass guitar.

  “Christ. Name something disturbing in the world,” Blond Guy continued, “and there's always someone who gets off on it. I saw a thing once on TV where a woman got horny every time she saw saw someone throw up.”

  “Damn,” Luis said, his face screwed up in revulsion.

  “Yeah, I know. She'd try to get guys to throw up for her because she got off on it. But you know what? Devs are even sicker. People who get off on all the shit we have to deal with because of our paralysis are pervs and sadists. It's as simple as that, and there's no way in hell that'll ever be normal, no matter how some people try to sugarcoat it. A lot of child molesters seem like normal, upstanding citizens, too. Just ask the Catholic Church.”

  Erin felt like she'd just been punched in the gut. She wasn't even Catholic, but that insult dug a little deeper and was a little more humiliating than all the others. She started shaking with a terrible and sudden cold, filled with fury, embarrassment, and—although she tried hard to keep it at bay—self-hate.

  She'd had enough. Fighting not to show the turmoil inside her, she dug her nails into her palms, then stalked into the kitchen. Luis saw her first and
went pale beneath his caramel-brown skin, his face registering shock and then guilt.

  Blond Guy, whose back was still to Erin, swiveled his chair around. His eyes widened a little when he saw her, but that was it. There was no guilt or remorse in his demeanor, no awkwardness, no sign he cared that he'd just annihilated her character. What was it he'd said? Subhuman. In his eyes, she was less than human.

  Erin's nose and eyes started stinging, a signal of oncoming tears, but she'd be damned if she'd let these two assholes see her cry. She swallowed hard and cleared her throat. “I forgot my bag,” she said in a flat tone that sliced through the tense silence.

  Luis and his friend stared. She stared back long and hard, telling them each without words that she'd heard everything they'd said. When she finally moved, the thick soles of her black leather boots—the biker boots she never left home without—thunked as she walked across the wide ceramic tiles of the kitchen floor to grab her bag from the counter. She didn't look back as she strode out of the kitchen with as much dignity as she could muster, feeling their eyes on her back.

  She was almost out of the apartment when she heard Luis call her name. He'd apparently found his tongue, but it was too late. Erin never broke stride. She quietly shut the door behind her, too proud to allow herself the satisfaction of slamming it. She held herself together until she made it to her car, and then the dam burst. As she sat in the driver's seat, hot tears poured down her cheeks, and her throat felt thick and tight.

  “Don't tell me you fucked the freak.” The sentence reverberated through Erin's skull.

  Yes. She (said freak) had spent the night with Luis. The evening was a culmination of weeks of talking with him online and meeting him a couple of times in person for coffee. Last night had been their first real date because she'd wanted to do things right this time by getting to know a guy before she got drunk and screwed him. She hadn't exactly been a nun for the last five years—since the day her fiancé, Trynt, had dumped her and kicked her ass to the curb—but she'd been trying to change that.

  In her sluttiness, she hadn't discriminated. She'd liked able-bodied guys (also known as ABs in the world of disability) and wheelers (wheelchair users) alike, but the wheelers were the ones who really got her attention—the cute ones, anyway.

  Wheelers came in all shapes and sizes, just like AB guys. Some wheelers were assholes (Blond Guy being a perfect example), and some were nice. Some were incredibly hot and sexy, and some were not. Some were nerdy. Some were cool. And, yes, some were pervs. Some just wanted a fuck and would say anything to get into a girl's panties. After all, boys will be boys, wheelchair or no.

  It wasn't like disabled guys were on every corner and easy to find, but there were a few websites for people like Erin—people called “devotees” or “devs”—where wheelers who supposedly appreciated devs could chat with them. For some reason, it seemed a lot of dev women were primarily attracted to spinal cord injuries (SCI), while dev men were attracted to amputees, but that wasn't written in stone. There were also some who were attracted to other disabilities, like blindness or deafness. Name the disability, pretty much, and there was someone attracted to it.

  The site Erin frequented focused mainly on SCI and was originally meant to be a support group for the devotees who were attracted to that type of disability. It was a place where devs could meet other devs, where they could find others who understood what it was like to be a devotee and help each other deal with the stigma and guilt of it. Eventually the objects of their affection—the wheelers themselves—showed an interest in the site, and it evolved into an unofficial way for devs and wheelers to “meet” each other.

  When Erin was a newbie, she'd been played by a few guys before she developed an instinct for figuring out which wheelers were stringing her along and which were for real. Once she'd driven all the way to Seattle only to be blown off by a guy with paraplegia she'd been chatting with online for eight weeks and really liked. When she'd called him from her motel room, the guy had chickened out at the prospect of actually meeting her in person, saying he didn't think devs were his thing after all. Too bad he couldn't have decided that before she'd wasted two long days of her life on the road, racking up unpaid days off from her job and maxing out her Valero gas card.

  Apparently her instincts were still for shit. Luis was proof of that. She hadn't planned on spending the night with him. She'd wanted to take things slowly with him, show him she was a regular person, a person he could respect. Unfortunately, beer and several shots had gotten in the way of her good intentions, not for the first time in her life. She'd gone home with him and, yes, fucked him. Last night, however, she would have termed it making love.

  She'd trusted Luis, thought they had something special developing between them. He'd said he was okay with the dev thing, said he understood. So how could he let his friend say such disturbing things about her?

  Rummaging in her glove compartment, Erin found a McDonald's napkin that still smelled like french fries. She wiped her wet face and blew her nose. Maybe Blond Guy was right. Maybe devs—maybe she—didn't deserve the status of human being. Maybe devs were on a par with child molesters, rapists, and serial killers, people with sick urges they couldn't conquer. It was a thought she'd grappled with and tried to deny many, many times, but there were dark moments like this when she was afraid it was true.

  When her tears subsided enough for her to see where she was going, she started her piece-of-crap car and pulled away from the curb. Luis's apartment was in a new complex close to The Quarry shopping area, near Lincoln Heights. It wasn't that far from her house in Olmos Park.

  As she turned onto Basse Road, she tried to stop replaying Blond Guy's words in her head, tried to think of other things, but her mind kept going over and over what he'd said. She was a bottom-feeder. A perv. A freak.

  It hurt with a pain that was physical, that contorted her insides into a gnarled tangle. She slammed her hands against the steering wheel as rage flooded through her. Why was she like this? Why couldn't she make her bizarre desires go away? Why couldn't she just be normal?

  She hooked a left onto Jones Maltsberger, entering Olmos Basin Park, and felt the car veer off the road, as if it had a mind of its own. The park was small, but it had lots of trees.

  Erin knew she should steer the car back onto the road, that heading for a tree was a bad thing, that pressing the pedal to the metal was even worse. Her heart pounded in her ears and her hands shook. She told herself to take her foot off the gas, to slow down, but something dark and utterly desolate inside her wouldn't let her foot obey. It was stealing her reason and her will to live.

  Strange how many thoughts flashed through her head in the next few seconds. Would it hurt? Would it kill her? Did she want to die? As she got closer to the trees, her fear lessened and morphed into a numb resolve. She was detached from her body and unable to feel.

  No, she didn't want to kill herself, but she did want the bad, perverse part of herself to die. She was tired of feeling tainted, of being scorned, of being alone. She couldn't see an end in sight, just a continual string of failed relationships and a constant, exhausting fight to find self-respect and acceptance.

  She thought of her twin brother, and guilt slashed through her numbness. Zac would be devastated and so angry at her for doing this, for giving up, for killing herself the same awful way their parents had died.

  What the hell was she doing? She needed to turn the wheel and stomp on the brake. She needed to choose life for Zac's sake, if not her own.

  But by the time she made that decision, it was already too late.

  Chapter 2

  It was the painkiller. It was causing hallucinations. That was the only explanation Erin could think of for why, when she forced her heavy eyelids up, a fuzzy version of Blond Guy was sitting before her in his wheelchair, hands gripping his wheels, broad shoulders back and squared toward her.

  “Erin?” said Zac, distracting her from the disturbing vision. He was shaking her should
er. She blinked and squinted at her twin, who was younger than she was by five minutes. Mentally, it was more like five years. It couldn't be said that either of them had their shit together, but still, she was by far the more mature of the two.

  Zac’s wavy, mop-looking black hair came into better focus. Black wasn't its natural color. It was brown, like hers. He dyed it, and Erin thought it looked hideous. The hair dye shade had been called “black plague.” Where does a person even find hair dye with a name like that? It was a color that would never be found in nature.

  Well, that might not be quite true. Erin had seen sad, pathetic photos of animals covered in black, inky oil—victims of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—and those pictures brought the color of Zac's hair to mind. Still, for reasons she didn't understand, the state of his hair never seemed to stunt his love life. It must be the musician thing. There were always girls willing to be band groupies.

  “Erin,” Zac repeated, sounding a bit exasperated, “did you hear what I said?” He was looming over her, his face close to hers, his brown eyes expectant.

  She blinked again and tried to see around his big head at her surroundings, tried to slog her way through the potato soup in her brain and figure out where she was. Oh, yeah. Now she remembered. She'd been released from the hospital earlier that morning and had been blissfully lost in dreamland until Zac woke her up. She was lying on the sofa in the living room—what her grandmother had always called the parlor—in the small, shabby-but-not-so-chic 1930s Olmos Park house Erin had inherited, along with Zac, when Nana passed.