that moment. To assign a word to someone that encapsulates them.” I shrugged. “One of my many quirks, I guess. I never had one for myself. Until the morning after it happened. Until I looked in the mirror. My word was rape.”
I’d never admitted that before.
To anyone close to me. Which wasn’t hard, because I didn’t have anyone close to me, not counting Katy, and we kept each other at safe emotional distances.
“My word was still rape when I found out I was pregnant,” I continued.
Saint’s body jerked but I continued.
No one knew this. No one.
“That would be the name I saw when I looked at the baby. If it was born. I was going to get an abortion,” I said. The word was blunt. Jarring. Ugly. Because it was full of complicated truth. “But my body did it for me. I did it for myself. Maybe because I was so full of hate and ugliness, it expelled whatever was growing inside of it.” I shrugged. “I guess it’s a good way to make myself feel better, that I didn’t do anything on purpose. But I still get the nightmares about it.” I shrugged. “I guess that kind of stuff affects the worst of us.”
“Baby, trust me on this one. I’ve spent my time with some bad fuckers. Gutter dwellers. You’re nowhere near the worst of us. Only thing different about you and all those do-gooders is you’re a lot more honest.”
I moved from his lap. He let me.
He paused, his knuckles clenched on his knees. He stared at the lake for a long time.
“You were attacked at a signing, that’s when this happened,” he said. It was a question even if it was essentially just a statement of a fact.
A fact I had spent a lot of time, money, and influence making sure no one beyond those involved didn’t find out.
“That record was sealed,” I said by answer.
He got up from the chair and stepped forward. “As you said, I know a guy. Didn’t give me the full info. Just that there was something that happened. Someone was charged. No names. Your people are good.”
I gritted my teeth against my innate urge to take a step back. To retreat. It wasn’t an instinctual thing. My instincts were honed, trained, perfected not to show weakness, and certainly not retreat.
But I was a victim of ego. Of pride. I felt much too safe in things the world knew about me. And more importantly, what they didn’t know about me. I was happy they created a narrative about me out of half-researched facts and fully-researched lies. Cobbling together information from interviews, pictures, and a Google search.
I liked the person they all created. She was close enough to who I really was for me to be comfortable. And far enough from who I truly was to be able to breathe and sleep.
“You’re really comfortable with people hating you instead of knowing the truth?” he asked.
I scowled at him. “Really, kettle?”
“Ah, but people would hate me more if they knew the real truth. Which I don’t give a fuck about. But people don’t really give a fuck about me enough to dig. Or to care. But if people knew the real truth then people might like you.”
“No,” I snapped. “People would pity me. And that’s not what I’m looking for in this life. I don’t want messages of support. Be the one that broken women send their stories to. I do not want to be the symbol for them all.” I paused. “And yes, I don’t want them to like me either.”
I chewed on my lip. He wasn’t saying anything. Wasn’t trying to comfort me. He was just waiting. He would wait as long as it took, I knew.
“I don’t remember a thing,” I said. “Obviously that’s a side effects of Rohypnol. Some women might think it’s a favorable side effect. This horrible, violating thing is done to you, at least you’re given the gift of not remembering it, right? That’s what a few people insinuated. The very few people that knew, of course.” I thought of my mother’s reaction, when I made the mistake of telling her.
That was a moment of weakness. The little child inside of me that was still waiting, wanting, for something I wasn’t even equipped for anyway.
“At least you don’t have to remember it, sweetie. This will be easier to recover from. You won’t even need therapy because you have nothing to talk about.”
It sounded callous, because it was.