What Is Love by Ashley N. Rostek

I can’t remember a time my skin was not blemished with black, purple, and blue.
I don’t know what it’s like to breathe without the weight of fear on my chest.

From a young age, I mastered how to lie and how to hide my pain behind a practiced smile. I was never told, but I’ve always known that I need to cover my punishments beneath pretty, pastel clothes and white pearls.
I must always appear perfect. The perfect student. The perfect girlfriend. The perfect daughter.
Some days, I meet those expectations. Some days, they change to something unachievable, and pain and fear become my whole reality.
I wish I could run away, but with my family’s money and connections, I know they would find me.
My past, present, and future have already been decided without my consent and it seems like death would be my only escape. So I don’t have any choice but to continue on with my perfect façade that grows harder and harder to bear when there’s no end to my misery in sight.

That is, until someone unexpected offers me his hand in a moment I need it—a moment I can’t hold my practiced smile. Despite so much risk of being caught, I take it, and I follow him and his friends into their world of worn black leather, ripped jeans, and dangerous men on motorcycles. A world, as my mother would say, on the wrong side of the bridge.