Her bed was moving strangely. She didn't understand it. Wasn't Ashlynn sleeping? She was so sure she was already sleeping when she had finally dosed off herself. "Ashlynn?" She mumbled sleepily. "What are you doing?" She felt someone grabbing at her, trying to hold on to her yet their grip kept flailing. "What's wrong?"

She turned around warily, hearing muffled moans and creaks coming from behind her. "Ashlynn..." She whispered, her breath unsteady. Her eyes struggling in the dark but she could still see...

She tried to shout yet her voice seemed stuck in her throat.

She couldn't move or yell or cry.

She only froze as she watched.

And watched.

And watched.

It was a rare day for Riaz to be home as she walked into their flat. It was a beautiful day and the sun was streaming down upon them, filling their entire apartment with its happy warmth. He was surrounded by reports as he shifted on his mattress before reaching for another stack of thick files.

"Hi." He looked up at her, removing the pen from his mouth before twiddling it in his hands.

"Hi. I forgot you get back early on Wednesdays."

"Ya. What are you doing?"

"I have to make a note of all the mechanical failures they had this year on the site." He pushed the file off his lap, rubbing his eyes.

"Were you busy with it since you dropped me off?"

"Ya. I lost track of time." Tasneem rolled her shoulders before stretching her neck from side to side. "Hard day?"

"No, I was just bent over a lot. Mr Umar asked me to make his frikkadels for him. Tannie had to go to the hospital and everyone else was busy."

"Is Tannie okay?" He asked referring to Mr Umar's wife. They had developed something of a soft spot for the couple over the few months they had lived there- especially Tannie. She always sneaked an extra helping of chips for them when her husband wasn't looking.

"Ya. She just had to go to the clinic for her tablets but it was taking longer than usual." She wiped a hand over her face, scrunching her nose at the fish smell. "I need to shower."

If there was one thing she hated about her job it would be coming home smelling of fish every day. She would spend almost half an hour with a waslap and lemon juice just to get rid of the smell from her hands. And even though she wore gloves, the smell still seeped through it all. "Do you want to go somewhere with me when I'm done?"

She shifted from foot to foot waiting for his reply. She wasn't nervous but the idea of sharing her spot with him caused something like an entire swarm of butterflies to meander its way through her stomach.

"Ya okay." He dropped his glasses back onto his face before he looked down at his reports. "I'll just get this done then."

"Okay. You'll still have some time. Don't worry." She rifled quickly through her clothes looking for something a just a little nicer than usual. She didn't have much but...

She wanted to look a little nicer all the same.

There are hours of lonely musing,

Such as when evening silence come,

When soft as birds their pinions closing,

The heart's best feeling gather home.

Then in our souls there seems to languish

A tender grief that is not woe;

And thoughts that once wrung groans of anguish,

Now cause but some mild tears to flow.

The sun was warm and the breeze gentle as it ruffled the bottom of her skirt. She could feel light grains of sand brush against the calves of her legs as her skirt fluttered softly against her knees. She felt the eyes of an older couple upon them. Their gaze was neither accusatory nor was it taunting but it was filled with a mild curiosity. She couldn't blame them. Even she knew they were a... strange looking couple. He was tall and big built and his muscles could be made out through the material of his t-shirt. And she was shorter and rounded and soft; even her exposed calves seemed to look as if she had stuffed them with bits of cotton wool to shape it into its thicker state. She was built like her father and no matter how little she ate she would always be this way.

She had kicked off her sandals, enjoying the moist grains beneath her toes as she watched him roll up the hems of his jeans. "Is this where you come every Wednesday?"

"Ya. I like it here. I don't ever go inside but I like to watch the water all the same." They had finally found a good enough spot to sit at before dropping their shoes heavily in the sand. "Is this spot okay?"

"It's fine." He said, bracing his elbows on his knees as he sat down. "I haven't been to a beach in a very long time."

She sat down watching the tips of her white skirt raise above her knee before she pulled it back down. She hadn't realised how stiffly he held himself until she nudged him accidentally. She turned to look at him, surprised to see his knuckles had whitened as his fists closed in on themselves and even the muscles on his legs seemed to twitch as if he couldn't wait to get up and leave. "I'm sorry. You don't like it here do you?" She had moved to stand. "We can leave and walk around somewhere else."

"No." He hadn't realised how tensed he had been until she stood up. "No, it's fine." He caught the bottom of her skirt gently, guiding her to sit back down beside him.

"Are you sure?" She looked at him uncertainly.

"Ya." They were just memories.

They were just memories...

She sat down, brushing her arm against his as she moved to sit a little closer to him.

"Why do you like it here?" He asked breaking the silence between them. They had been watching the same surfer for almost 15 minutes as he fell off his board over and over yet each time he was washed to the shore, he would get up and dive back into the water with his board.

"I have good memories of the beach. When I sit here it helps me to remember all of them."

"What kind of memories?" He asked.

"There's a lot of them." She thought, tugging her lip between her teeth. "The best was the holiday before my dad left. It was really, really cold and we all came with our swimsuits and we were shivering like crazy but my dad stilled pulled me and my younger brother into the water. And he started screaming because the water was ice cold but my dad still held us anyway because he knew we wanted to go in really badly. And eventually my brother ran out and it was just me and him..." She smiled, lost in her own world as she remembered what it felt like to be held against her father's chest. He had picked her up for an emergency hug or so he called it when she started to shiver and he blew warm air into her hands when he felt them before he ran with her into the waves- never letting her out of his grip. "It was so cold but I was laughing like crazy because it was just fun being with him. I don't even remember what we did but I remember having so much of fun that I started crying when we went out even though my lips felt as if they would fall off because it was so cold. My Mum was waiting for me with a blanket in her hands and my dad wrapped us up in it before he took us to buy ice cream."

He looked at her, wondering what it might have felt like to have a dad like hers. He couldn't even imagine it because all he had ever known was Zaheer and he had left too big a stain on his mind to leave place for any imagination.

"I didn't know that that would be the last time we would go to the beach together." She was too small to realise that their holiday was coming to an end which was why her dad was insistent about them going into the water and she certainly didn't know that he would be gone by the end of that year. He would go and never look back and never think about her again...

"It sounds nice." He said, barely realising that his voice held something like longing in it.

"It was nice..." She wrapped her arms around her knees, watching the gentle rise and fall of the waves before her. "It was very nice."

"Tasneem?" His voice called her out of her memories.

"Ya?"

"Why did you talk to me that day in school?" It had been a question that had plagued the back of his mind for as long as he could remember. He never knew her before that note and he never bothered looking at her which was why he had become so defensive that day in class. No one had bothered to talk to him and he always liked it that way...

And he could never figure out what would prompt her curiosity. She didn't know him or talk to him or even look at him and it confused him.

"You reminded me of a friend." She said softly, finally allowing herself to confess the true reason behind her note.

And feelings, once as strong as passions,

Float softly back to a faded dream;

Our own wild sensations,

The tale of other's suffering seem.

Oh, when the heart is freshly bleeding,

How longs it for that time to be,

When, through the mist of years receding,

Its woes but live in reverie...

"Which friend?"

"Her name was Ashlynn." Her name rang a bell but Riaz couldn't figure out where he had heard that name before. "She was my best friend and something happened to her one day. after that she was never the same and then one day..." She focused on the gentle waves before her, so different from the tumultuous feelings within her own heart."She killed herself. She hung herself because she didn't know how else to make it stop."

"Make what stop?"

The feeling of being torn apart. The feeling of pain swelling from deep within her. The feeling of a sharp, deep cut that could never heal. The feeling of hating herself and everyone around her. The feeling of the bruises on her thighs and the marks on her neck. The feeling of having herself taken away from her. The humiliation and the degradation of having him invade her body even after she begged him to stop. The feeling of asking for help and squeezing onto something-anything- to make the pain go away... The feeling of everything and nothing at the same time...

"The memories." She looked at him just once before she looked away again...

Why couldn't she move? She could feel her chest heave at the sight before her. She was sure she would vomit yet her stomach was clenched so tightly it pained her. She felt hot all over as she witnessed the atrocity before her.

Why couldn't she move?

She was so afraid and so terrified as he smiled at her.

He smiled at her as he gripped her best friend beneath her, watching as she struggled and moaned beneath him. She was begging him to let her go but her voice was muffled beneath his thick, disgusting hand. She was crying, tears falling everywhere as he rocked himself above her. She was still flat- she had no breasts. She wasn't a woman. She was only a girl but he didn't seem to care as he ran his hands down the smooth skin beneath him. She found Tasneem's hand, gripping on to it as if it were her last link to reality before she closed her eyes and screamed into his hand.

And through it all...

He only smiled at her, watching her watch him rape her best friend.

"I did something I wasn't supposed to." She said quietly. She could feel slight tremors course throughout her body at the idea of talking about it.

"What did you do?"

She could feel her heart beating out of her chest and a strange lurch at the pit of her stomach. She could barely say the words in her mind, blocking it off whenever she had tried but she had to try?

Right?

And it can dwell on moonlight glimmer,

On evening shade and loneliness;

And, while the sky grows dimmer and dimmer,

Feel no untold and strange distress,

Only a deeper impulse given

By lonely hour and darkened room...

"When I was 12," She couldn't look at him. To look at him would be to never tell him. Perhaps she could pretend he was not there and she was instead telling her story to an image in the mirror. "My brother began to m..." Her breathing was coming out in short gasps at the idea of speaking, of saying the word. "He began to m..."

She couldn't do it.

She couldn't say the word. It was stuck in her throat and her mind was not yet able to accept it nor could it even think to conjure it up.

"Sometimes, people touch you in ways they shouldn't." She said shakily, trying a new approach. "My brother was one of those people."

He listened, only looking at her waiting for her to tell her story.

"He would come into my room late at night and he would ask me to do things I never wanted to do. I hated it and when I tried to tell my mum, she didn't believe me." She said, her words coming out in strangled whispers. "So I tried to be brave and I did what people tell you to do. I reported him to the police but I didn't know that not everyone wants to help you."

She licked her lips, tasting the salt that lingered on them from the cool mists of the ocean as she gathered her thoughts.

"My mum didn't earn her seat at the high court by always being honest. There were times when she would look the other way or she would not hear certain things or she would understand things in a different way and when she did that, she was able to not convict certain people." She laughed humourlessly. "Nothing happens without money changing hands and nothing happens in this world unless you get something out of it and my Mum was clever. She knew who would provide her with certain favours and the man I spoke to happened to be one of them."

She remembered that day. She was barely even a teenager stuck in a small room with a camera on her as she signed a confession. But she never knew that those cameras were never rolling and it would never capture her greasy hair tied in a ponytail nor would it record the way her jeans hung off her hips or the way her shirt seemed a little too baggy for her. It would never hear her whispered stutters as she recalled every touch and kiss and fondle that she had endured and the paper she had signed would never bear testimony to every horror her brother had forced upon her. She never knew that it would be burnt as soon as she left the room, leaving behind a cold pile of ashes that would be swept away with the evening dirt.

And she had never, ever thought that this man would phone her mother as soon as she stepped foot out the door and pretend that he had never heard a thing on her mother's order.

"My brother found out about it and he was so, so angry with me." She shuddered at the look he had pinned her with the night he found out. "I thought he was going to hurt me but he never touched me that night. Or the next or the next..." She blinked, feeling a tiny grain of sand fly into her eye.

"I thought he was scared and so he had stopped but he was angry and his anger was building with each day and he was only biding his time until he could teach me a lesson. Almost 3 months passed and he never stepped into my room even once." She blinked faster now, the words spewing out of her mouth as if it were blood and poison. "I thought he was going to be gone the day we had a sleepover. He was supposed to be gone for a week for work. And she came over and he wasn't there. He was never there and we went to sleep."

She said, curling her toes in the sand, still looking straight ahead of her.

"I woke up in the middle of the night and he was..." She struggled to find the right words but no matter how much she tried, nothing seemed right."He was on top of her and he was hurting her and she tried to wake me up earlier but he wouldn't let her and when I saw what he was doing I froze."

She buried her mouth in her folded hands, leaving her eyes open to look before her.

"I was a coward Riaz." She confessed, ashamed of her own actions. "He was raping her in my bed and I couldn't move a muscle. All I could do was hold her hand as he raped her and he hurt her and I didn't do a thing about it."

It hurt so much to say the words. To confess to her cowardice and her weakness and her complete inability to do anything.

"He..." She breathed in deeply, trying to forget what was in her mind. "He smiled at me as he raped her and as she begged him to stop. He was smiling at me..."

She buried her face in her lifted knees, rocking back and forth as she thought about what had happened. It was a memory- it was such a distant memory yet the pain from that memory had transcended into every moment of her waking life and had twisted and turned within her as if it were a knife stabbing at her over and over and over again. Because the worst things about memories were that it actually happened.

And the pain from those memories were just as real.

"Hey, little bee." Riaz said, finally allowing himself to speak.

She peeped at him out of the corner of her eye, waiting for him.

"You weren't a coward." He said, knowing what it felt like to walk away from something he could stop.

"Then what was I?" She asked dubiously.

"You were a girl." He said, his soft voice rising above the crashing of waves before them. "You were just a girl who didn't know what to do because you should never have known what to do."

And while the sky grows dim and dimmer,

Feel no untold and strange distress

Only a deeper impulse given

By lonely hour and darkened room,

To solemn thoughts that soar to heaven,

Seeking a life and world to come.

It was almost 10 by the time they settled into bed but Tasneem was sure she would find no sleep. Her mind was too busy and her memories were too poignant for her to ever surrender to slumber just yet. She could hear him shift in his bed as he rustled the covers above him. She didn't know how to look at him- not now that she had truly acknowledged what had happened. She knew that he knew but she had never confirmed it. She had never said the words out loud and she wasn't sure how to approach him just yet. She didn't know what that feeling inside her was but it left her feeling awkward in his presence.

But she needed to talk to him. She needed to speak to him and ease her soul because he was nothing if not the only thing that could ever dim the voices in her heart. "Riaz?" She shifted the sheet between them, knotting it up in the middle so she would have an unobstructed view of him.

"Yes?" He looked up at her, his green eyes startling her as they always had without his glasses.

"Why did you send me a note back?"

He looked at her, stretching his hand to rest beneath his head.

"You reminded me of my Mum."

He remembered how lost she looked in class as if she was cracking slowly but surely and no one seemed to notice. He could almost hear her facade breaking and shattering and it scared him to know that he had seen his mother go through the same thing.

"Oh..." She laid her arm to rest beneath her head, much like him as she turned to face him.

"Where did he touch you?" He asked cautiously.

"Everywhere..." Her whisper echoed throughout their small flat. "But..." She stretched her hand slowly towards him, curling her fingers around his that lay at his side. "He never touched me here."

"Your hand?" He asked, grasping her hand firmly in his.

She nodded slowly. "It's...." She looked down at their enjoined fingers. "It's like my safe place." It was the only part of her that wasn't dirty and unclean and when Riaz touched her there, she didn't see her brother or feel his touch. She felt Riaz's touch and she felt his hand and she felt the calluses on his palm and she felt him.

Only him...

She watched as he guided her hand towards him. It was a slow, timeless moment that had her enraptured. Her heart seemed to skip a beat in its hurry to watch what was happening outside her body as he looked down at her hand in his...

Her soft, gentle, kind hand...

Before he dropped a single kiss to the tip of her ring finger.

You're my safe place.

The tip of her index finger.

You're my safe place.

The tip of her middle finger.

You're my safe place.

And his last kiss landed on the smallest tip of her smallest finger before her he curled her hand up in his and closed his eyes. He could still see the flush that had creeped up her neck, coating her cheeks in a bright red blush and he could still hear the soft gasps from her mouth as his lips touched each finger...

Her fingers were still shaking beneath his but she swore the butterflies in her stomach had returned to dance with her heart as it smiled for the first time in what seemed like forever.

You're my safe place, Riaz. You're my safe place.

You're my safe place...

A/N The poem used in this chapter is called Evening Solace by Charlotte Bronte. And this chapter is dedicated to haya-sh-z for making my amazing, beautiful cover and for being just... An amazing, wonderful person! Thank you