Have you ever been so lazy that you're tired?

Yeah, that's my life ever since I started Skyrim. Gah.

MPOV

The tea was as cold as my pale, trembling fingers. The dingy brown liquid sloshed when Brian's leg accidentally nudged the table as he shifted in his favorite of the couple of white sofas we were seated in. His boot tapped a leg of the glass coffee table, and the china clinked with sounds of disgruntlement. Some of my tea dribbled down the floral design of my cup and pooled beneath it; there would be a coffee ring, and Brian's mother would throw a fit.

Swallowing, I reached forward for one of the linen cloths resting on the table, but Brian's hand snaked out and snatched my wrist before I could reach it. I froze, eyes locked on stilling tea in my cup. I wished it wasn't cold; I craved something to warm the chill under my skin.

"Max," Brian said. He leaned forward, trying to capture my eyes, but I didn't dare look up into their green depths. "This is natural. Just let it happen."

I squirmed, legs stirring beneath the soft linen of my skirt. "I—I'm just not sure if I'm ready for that yet."

Chuckling under his breath, he stood and, not letting go of my wrist, came over to sit beside me. "Don't tell me you haven't been wishing for this moment. We've been dating for nine months. It's only to be expected we go forward."

I stayed silent, feeling ice creep its steady way through me. Something was wrong. I didn't know what—I couldn't place it—but it wasn't right. I licked my chapped lips, trying to find words to utter, but failing. Brian let go of my wrist, my hand dropping limply in my lap. Cupping my chin delicately in his calloused hand, he titled my gaze up to meet his eyes.

"Please, sweetie. How else will I know for sure that you love me as much as I love you?" he asked, a crease pressing between his brows.

I melted immediately, just as he knew I would. "Okay." My voice piked up a bit at the end, nerves wiggling their way through, but he either didn't notice or didn't care. A big, tender kiss was placed on my lips.

When he pulled back, he was grinning from ear to ear. "Thank you."

"Anything for you." My smile was much more tentative; my hands still trembled.

The next kiss was rougher, and it included those warm calloused hands pushing my shoulders back until I was lying beneath him, feeling smaller and weaker than the china resting on the table beside us. I kissed him back automatically, trying hard to shut off the tiny part of my brain restlessly screaming at me to stop. Brian was right. This was the only way I could show him how much I loved him. Maybe if he knew, the rumors of him getting tired of me would stop. Maybe he would stay with me, take me away from my mother and the abuse and give me a life worth living; a life of happiness.

Arms winding around his neck, I shut my mind off, ordered my hands to quit shaking, and allowed Brian's tongue entrance inside my mouth. I disconnected from my normal timid self as I kneaded my tongue against his. Brian was all I needed to be happy. This was okay. This was normal—natural.

After a few minutes, my lips were bruised and Brian was impatient. He pulled back, sitting me up with him. His hands gripped the hem of my dress, and I shut my eyes, breath hitching. Without asking to make sure I was doing okay, he tugged the fabric off over my head, tossed it to the floor, and pushed me back onto the cushions. Robotically, I helped him with tugging off my tights, trying not to think too much about how bare I was about to be beneath him.

Tights gone, I lied there shivering as Brian stood to strip down to his boxer briefs. I blushed when I saw the bulge there, but the heat in my face immediately vanished with the look he gave me. Something was wrong. He didn't look the way he usually did.

There wasn't love in his eyes anymore when he got back on top of me, pressing himself up against me. His hands were greedy leeches, roaming and groping all over my body and sucking any inch of warmth that could have been left there. My throat felt tight; it was a struggle to breath. That voice in my head was back again, and it was screaming louder than ever before. When my bra was gone, and his hands were kneading a whole new set of bruises into the supple skin there, I couldn't take the sinking pit of my stomach anymore.

"Brian," I said, pushing meekly against his chest. "Can we stop? I changed my mind."

The response I got were his nails digging into my breast, drawing bloody crescents. I yelped, pain blooming larger the longer his hand stayed where it was.

"What are you doing? You're hurting me."

My voice was ignored as he scraped his nails down my stomach until he was facing my underwear. He began tearing at the fabric, trying to get it off, but my legs were flailing and I ended up kneeing him in the face. Seizing the opportunity, I rolled out from beneath him as he clutched at his nose. Immediately, I grabbed my dressed and tugged it over me, forgetting for a moment the bra and tights also lying in a rumpled heap on the floor. I shoved my feet inside the flats waiting for me under the table and made for the door.

Brian dove off the couch when he saw me leaving, but I jumped out of reach at the last second. His hand caught my dress, tearing the back of it, but I didn't stop to examine it. Spinning away from him scrambling to get off the ground, I tore open the door of the guest room and ran down the grand staircase. I stumbled at the bottom, smashing my hip against the marble, but my hand on the railing prevented me from falling the rest of the way down. Wincing, I forced myself up and limped the rest of the way to the front door. I shut it just as I heard Brian calling my name at the top of the stairs.

My keys were still in the ignition of my BMW—no one in Brian's neighborhood would ever want to steal the hunk of metal—so peeling out of the driveway took all of ten seconds. One glance to the rearview mirror showed Brian bursting from the home with just his jeans on and trying to chase after me, but the tears welling in my eyes clouded any words forming on his lips.

Only I didn't wake up to the sun shining down on the perfect course of action to take with Brian. Instead, I woke with fear already clenching the walls of my stomach together, making me feel lightheaded. There was something cool and rigged pressed against the hollow of my neck in the darkness, and I froze, trying to blink through the haze of sleep clouding my mind.

"One sound, one move, and this knife is cutting right into your throat," a pair of lips whispered, the owner's teeth nearly nipping the soft lobe of my ear. I knew who it was without even having to look: it was the same whisper that used to carry private 'I love you's to me during the most unexpected moments.

I parted my lips to ask what he was doing, but a prick from the keen blade at me throat stopped me. "One sound," he warned.

I clenched my jaw tightly shut, feeling my muscles cord tightly together as fear shook through my hands. My window was open, allowing for the heat of the furnace to escape outside into the whirlwind of snow sprinkling down; a few stray flakes drifted down on my skin and hid beneath its surface, as if afraid to watch was to happen next.

"Are you going to be a good girl now?" Brian asked. I nodded carefully. "Excellent. Get up, you're coming with me. Don't want your mother waking up and interrupting us."

Keeping the knife pressed against my throat, he tugged me up by my arm and pushed me so that I started stumbling towards the door. I stepped out, trying to make as little noise as possible as I led us down the stairs to the front door, eyes glancing back to my sisters' rooms, doors tightly shut. For the love of God, I prayed with all my heart neither of them would open their door.

When I reached for my coat hanging on the rack beside the door, my hand was smacked away without a word of explanation. I looked down at my dad's old t-shirt and the pair of cotton sweats that were long enough to pool around the soles of my bare feet. "But, it's freezing outside."

"Oh, don't worry, I'll be fine. Brought my wool coat. Keep moving." His knee came up, knocking me in the butt.

Trembling fingers reached up and mechanically unlocked the chilling metal barring the door shut. With a click, I yanked the door open and was immediately pushed outside. Snow filtered down and joined the chill already sunken into my bones as I was forced towards Brian's car, hidden amongst the shadows on the other side of the street. I glanced around, wishing someone was crazy enough to be up at this hour and see what was happening, but the street was as silent as my nightmares. Not a soul in the world to help. It had begun to seem as though I was born that way— eternally alone.

Brian paused outside his car, hand releasing my arm so he could fish around in his coat pocket for his car keys. In this moment, my heart mind stilled, just analyzing every detail around me. Each flake bloomed into hyper detail, and a numbness encased my skin. It was now or never.

In a flash, I back kicked, my foot landing right where the sun doesn't shine. The knife sliced a thin line at my throat as he was knocked backwards, but it wasn't nearly enough to worry about at the moment. I ran as if there was some sort of unseen promise further on, encased within the shadows, but waiting for me nonetheless and whispering of a better life away from everything—all the pain and danger cascading around me and painting me in different shades of suffocating red.

I jolted awake from the dreaming shivering. The balcony doors were tightly shut, curtains drawn and casting a shadow over the entire room. Heat could be heard blasting from the vent nearby, and my comforter was drenched in sweat, but I still couldn't stop the impossible feeling of being just cold. Tears raced down my cheeks, as if picking right up from where I left off the night before.

Sometimes I wished I was just never born.

FPOV

Silence had been part of my life since the day my dad got shot in the knee while on leave in Afghanistan. It would be a lie for me to say I was upset to see him with a permanent limp, because that limp also meant he was permanently out of the war. Captain Xavier was could no longer properly fight, and was therefore sent back home to start up a new, mundane life with his family.

I thought it was going to be a good thing, always going to sleep knowing my father was safe, just a few steps away. But I didn't know just how much of a large part the military played in his life. Shortly after his arrival at home, his mind began deteriorating. Estranged mood swings, verbal abuse, and a twilight relief in the sea of pills he poured into his palm every morning.

How many times did I come home to my mother sobbing as my father's voice boomed against the walls? How many times did I bend down to scoop up the bewitching blue pills pouring out of the small orange bottle slipping from my father's limp hand, his snores drifting up from his comatose position on the couch? How many times did I find Nudge and Gazzy huddled together in Iggy's room, waiting for one of us to come home because dad had mixed alcohol with his pills again and they were scared of making even one wrong step?

It took two years before I couldn't take watching him waste his life away anymore. I exploded on him, and before I knew it, the two of us were locked in a fist fight, my mother choking on her sobs and shouts in the corner of the kitchen as Nudge ran for a phone to call the police. After seeing him carelessly beat his own son into a bloody mess without even a moment's hesitation, I shut down. There was no need to speak anymore. I was done dealing with this man who had somehow become a stranger to all of us. I lost hope in happiness because where had it been my whole life? If I allowed myself to be open and express myself, I'd become something I didn't want: my father.

Silence became my resolve. Speaking was a trivial matter, something to fill the endless space that encompasses us in our everyday lives, but it wasn't necessary. People knew what I was getting at with the arch of an eyebrow, or the twitch of the lip, or the harness of my eyes. I was content with living without voicing the content of my thoughts, because for the past two years they have only contained anger and disdain and reservation.

But then something happened.

One day, my mother dragged me out of bed, forced me to put on something nice, then took all of us kids down to the house that hadn't been occupied for at least a year. A knock, and the door swung open, and showed me—her.

Unruly caramel hair. Wide, curious brown eyes. Soft lips parted as if wanting to ask us a million questions, but unable to form even a single syllable. She was a ray of sunshine, and she didn't even have to say a word.

So when she shut me out of her life just as suddenly as she appeared, the silence that I had lived in for the past two years suddenly seemed all too deafening. Where was the buzz of my phone? The silhouette of her waking form, stretching as she trotted to her morning shower? Those eyes that held more expression than a Shakespearian poem? Everything that had become the noise of my life, just suddenly gone without a moment's notice.

I had to assume God was punishing me in some way. For what, I didn't know, because I have literally done nothing but go to school and come home for the past years of my life, but I had no other idea as to why something as wonderful as Max was dangled in front of me before being yanked right back. Did I do something wrong? Offend her or scare her in some way?

Groaning, I buried my fists in my hair and shut my eyes tight.

Max, Max, Max.

I didn't know what drove her to shut me out all of a sudden, but I did know that I wasn't ready to give her up. No matter what, I would be here for her, just like I promised. Because there was something scaring her. I didn't know what yet, but I was determined to find out.

Now you guys know the backstories. Hopefully this clears some stuff up.

R&R if you want more FPOV(: