13 Years Young
Apri

Against all odds I found myself liking him, really liking him. I hadn't wanted to. I had tried to ignore him and every time he came to see me I tried remember that he was an enemy. One of them, but I couldn't.

His persistence and calmness had penetrated deep inside my mind. I was powerless to him. I had never needed friendship a day in my life but with him it was welcomed.

He didn't see me how I saw him but he still saw me. I was more than the girl who cried every night or the girl who sat by the tree by herself. No to him I was a little butterfly and I had this odd fascination with wings.

He came to see me everyday but he made sure that he would visit at times that Neema wasn't here. He just wanted to spend time with me and it felt nice to be around someone who liked me. I know some of the girls thought I was weird and that I didn't belong here but for the first time in a long time I felt like I did belong. Not in this place, not this compound but that I belonged with the people who surrounded me.

Neema was a strong force in my life, she spoke when I wanted to be quiet and was quiet when I needed to speak. We had the right balance and I could see that she respected me even though to most I was just a child. Neema recognized the age behind my eyes that was often overlooked by the lack of my height. She knew that I wasn't a child, there was no point holding onto the bodies age when the mind had long surpassed it.

I wasn't a child, I hadn't been one since the day my parents smeared me with mud and shoved me down that black hole. Their feet making loud crunches, purposefully brushing against trees as they ran from where I hid.

I hadn't been a child since I had found them dead in a pool of their own blood, smothered in the mud I used to hide myself. No one knew that, no one saw that but Neema.

Even Carson who I had genuinely begun to anticipate seeing could not see past my age. 13... 13 was still a pup but in the human world- in our world girls were women the moment nature told them they were. The moment that monthly course greeted them they were being prepped into womanhood. Cleaning, cooking, marriage, babies. It was all we were good for. The woman would be taught to read but only so she could educate her sons. Educate them to hate these wolves. 

I had been a woman for years, mentally I was there I felt it but my body wasn't. I was a tiny little thing, skinny and waif like. It made it easy for them to see me as a child, for him to see me as a child.

"Vanya, try to listen to me when I speak. Please." He mumbled, eyes pleading as he begged me to understand the words he spoke but I wasn't a child. I understood everything he said and wouldn't say.

I knew that they wouldn't let me out of this room because us girls needed to be "protected" from being compromised by our mates too early. I also knew that many of these girls had already been compromised in some way but not by any mates that they would have. Humans didn't wait and if you were girl with a poor family there were things you were expected to do for survival.

I also knew that he was my mate and that if he could survive visiting me in my prison without attacking me, then I was safe from him attacking me out there in the real world.

You see he fed me these lies that I desperately wanted to believe, that their law made it hard to let me leave but I knew that if he cared too he could. Perhaps it was better for him if I stayed behind these walls, that way he could live his two lives.

"I understand everything, Carson." My voice was soft and wispy. It was childlike even when I tried to make it deeper, more forceful. It was another thing that reminded him that I was "just a baby".

It was quiet after that, he understood my unspoken words and he knew that I understood his. What more could we say if neither of us were willing to speak the unspoken.

"You should probably leave now" I grumbled, voice surly and bitter. I was sulking another thing he would no doubt put down to my age but every woman sulked. It was our gods given right to sulk and I would never pass up the chance. A chance he had given me and I was only too willing to take up.

"I hope you aren't mad, butterfly" he asked pensively, hands running through his hair in nervousness.

I shook my head slowly letting him know that I wasn't, I never really was. Anger was still an emotion that I wasn't as accustomed to, I don't think it would ever become part of my nature. I felt it but I could never act on it, anger fluttered between my fingers like the butterfly he thought I was. I could never quite catch it, harness it into aggression. It just wasn't me.

I was more the type of female to feel frustration or become resigned to my fate.

Every time he told me that he had to go somewhere or that he couldn't see me as often I never got mad. I became disappointed and then resigned that this was my reality. Would my presence alone ever be good enough? I didn't know.

All I knew was that every time he stopped seeing me it hurt, and the wounds he caused keep festering inside me. My old friend loneliness beckoned to me every time he did this. It sung a sweet lullaby and jeered me into a dance, my most precious friend. Reliable at every moment in my life.

I had begun ignoring that call though because I knew that in a few days he would be back to seeing me daily. He would take time to gallivant and then he would come for me with the bitter scent of females lingering on his clothes and his body.

I knew what he was doing when he wasn't with me and why shouldn't he. To him I was just a little girl who could only bring him friendship, companionship but for me he was my future. I saw it all in him and so I bit my tongue. Bit my tongue because that damn hope had caught me unaware, it had me believing that he would one day see me for the woman I was.

Hope had me thinking of a future, what a silly female I was becoming. I was turning into those girls who sat around plaiting each others hair and plotting how many children they would have.

I hated what I was becoming but I couldn't let go of the vision of the future. I knew I was 3 years too young for him but I held on for the day I wouldn't be.

I almost wished those years away just so I could be with him but then I didn't want to miss spending time with Neema and her family. As much as Carson had begun to mean a lot to me, I would never risk Neema and her family for him. They were a constant. In the short time I had been here there was hardly a day when she didn't visit me she even took me outside of this room whenever she could. As rare as that venture was and as short as it could be I enjoyed her efforts of trying. The fruits of her labour were plentiful.

Neema and her family were the only people I could tie back to my old life. The life that everyone acted like never existed but I could never forget. Neema didn't forget either and I liked that about her, that among many other things. She was strong and dominant where I was naturally submissive. I hoped that her strength would rub off on me in time. I was tired of being treated like a delicate flower, like some fragile butterfly.

I was more than just that. Everyone forgot that butterflies had an ugly past before they became the thing of beauty. They were wriggly caterpillars, creatures that everyone overlooked and only paid them the slightest attention for their potential. Fuel or growth. A caterpillar would either feed others so they could grow into their future or they would manifest and live its own short lived one. The one that everyone remembered it for.

I felt that was how Carson saw me, he wasn't so much interested in the female I was now but more of the potential woman I could be. He was just biding his time until I was there. I needed to tell him that I was more than who I could be, that my emotions in the now where important. That who I was now would always be me even as I grew.

"Neema will be coming soon" I mumbled, hating myself even more for not saying all that I had been thinking. I was such a pushover and not only to this male, I let everyone walk all over me just for the sake of peace even though I had more I wanted to say. I always held back my truths, my opinions. I hated that about myself.

I subconsciously saw him nodding his head and climbing to his feet but I was too busy stuck in my self depreciation mode, it happened often. It was something I couldn't control because all that I thought of myself was true. I was weak.

I had been weak when I let my parents die to protect me. I had been weak when I had let them pull me from their cold lifeless body and I had been even weaker when they had encouraged me to stop crying. To put my parents behind me and join their village. I was a weak female. I could see why they thought me a little girl because no woman would let people control her, subdue her.

I was weak.

"Hey, hey. Don't cry" her wispy voice unclogged my mind. Light shone around her like a halo, a golden aura that shone from within her being. She was so beautiful and I couldn't compare to her, my heart wasn't that pure.

I harboured too much sadness, I knew that but I couldn't let it go. It was another tie to my old life, to my parents. I loved them too much to let them go, even though their faces were buried at the back of my mind. I could never forget them.

"Shh, It's okay... That's it, get it out. That's it baby girl let it out." Her soft voice unleashed the hell that I had kept hidden within my finely guarded walls. Tears ebbed from my eyes as my heart constricted like a vice. It hurt to cry like this. It physically pained me.

I didn't want to cry anymore, I hated it but her soothing voice overrode my brain, my pain. It travelled deep to that part of me that I kept trapped and she dug away at it. A little crack at the centre of my wall, big enough to let a small slither of light. I hated it but it felt good. The pain was good because it told me that my loneliness hadn't numbed me to the world. I could still feel strongly.

"Don't hold back, I got you" I could feel her tears trickling onto my head, dampening my hair. She cried for me and I only loved her more for it. She felt for me.