Fake a Smile - Prologue:

The girl lay where she fell. She wore faded jeans and a black hooded jacket. Her head rang from the blow she had received. Her long pale hair billowed out on the dry, browning lawn beneath her. There were dark circles under her soft brown eyes, and she was pale under her tan. She brought one hand up to her face, using it to cool her hot cheek.
“Get up.” a low, harsh voice whispered from above her.
The girl looked up, but it was too dark to make out more than the man’s silhouette. Not that it mattered. She already knew who he was.
She looked past him, up into the night sky. The stars were weak, and there wasn’t any moon to speak of, allowing everything to be semi enveloped in darkness.
“I said, get UP!” the figure hissed, punctuating his sentence with a kick.
It connected solidly with her ribs, sending her sprawling. She rolled onto her stomach and started to crawl away, but his rough hand grabbed the back of her jacket, pulling her backwards and onto her knees.
The hand moved to her shoulder, grip tightening ever so slightly.
“Xylia…” he whispered, getting slowly to his knees behind her. “You know I don’t want to hurt you. I’m just… Well, you know how my temper is.”
She could feel him sitting down, imagining how his face was set, how later he would have to brush the dirt from the back of his own jeans, how the dark grey cotton of his shirt pulls tightly over his broad shoulders as he extends his other hand and-
The mans other hand gently tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, away from her smarting cheek.
And then he’s bringing her back, placing her into his lap like you would a toddler, stroking her hair, hand moving from her shoulder to wrap her in his arm, and has kissed her quickly on the neck.
“Just do as I say, sweetie,” he murmurs into her ear, blue eyes catching light drifting through the fence from the next house on. “Do what I ask you to when there’s something I want you to do.”
The girls’ face was as blank as that of the porcelain doll which it so much resembled.
“Don’t argue and fight with me.”
The girls’ breathing quickened, rushing oxygen to her brain in painful gusts.
“And don’t…”
He faltered, hand falling away from the girls’ long fair hair.
don’t tell mummy don’t tell her what you do to me
The man stood up abruptly, letting the girl slip limply from his lap. The sound of an engine, which was suddenly killed, and a car door being opened then closed.
“Mummy’s back.”
She spoke only two words, but they were enough to jolt him back reality and send him scampering.
He jogged swiftly up to the back porch, skipping the steps entirely and eased himself into the warm house, closing the previously open back door behind him.
She got shakily to her feet, the girl in faded jeans and a black hooded jacket. Dusted herself off. Patted at the dirt halfheartedly.
i hate him i wish he were dead
She walked purposefully round to the side of the house, where she had seen their shadowy outlines through the kitchen window all the way from the backyard.

Signed: K.O.D