I look at her, head jerking back in surprise. Surely, she can’t be saying… “What, you’ve been up there?”
But she nods, looking nonplussed. “Toby Catchall. Halloween, junior year.” Her nose wrinkles. “He kept calling it ‘Clit Cave’, which is hilarious considering he couldn’t find one with a map and a compass. He was nice, though.”
“He was nice,” I echo tonelessly, eyes fixed to hers. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
She frowns. “What?”
“You let some guy fuck you?” I push off the car and walk three paces, only to double back. “Some guy named Toby? I mean, what the fuck?”
She glares daggers at me, jaw clenched. “First of all, I didn’t let some guy fuck me. You say that like I just laid back and let someone go to town. Pussies aren’t shiny toys that girls just lend out. And secondly, one of your past hook-ups literally lives with me, and you’re going to be salty that I’m not a virgin? You have no fucking right!”
“Georgia and I did not sleep together,” I clarify. “And I don’t care that you’re not a virgin. You said no one could touch you, I just figured—”
“Oh, you figured,” she snorts. “Well excuse the fuck out of me for managing to grasp a shred of something resembling a normal life before I became a total freak.”
I step between her legs and gently wonder, “So what was so special about Toby?” She doesn’t lean away from me, but she doesn’t lean into me either, even when I reach down to clutch her dog tags. “Look, it’s not that I’m salty or mad. I get people having a past, it’s not about that. I just really fucking need to know why you tried for him, but not for me.”
Her face puckers up angrily. “Fuck you, Sebastian. I am trying. No one here has touched me as much as you.”
“Every time I ask, you shut me down,” I point out, fighting the urge to just take. “And that was fine—I was okay with waiting. Only now I know there’s a fucking Toby, and you apparently told him yes, so I’m just wondering.” I don’t know what she sees in my eyes—frustration, need, more patience than I probably possess—but it deflates that tight, bristling anger in her posture.
“It wasn’t always like this, okay?” She looks away, eyes troubled. “It’s always been bad, but lately, it’s just… worse. There was a time I could handle being touched. I didn’t like it, but I could push through it. And then…” But she trails off, leaving it hanging.
I already know it’s useless to ask, but I try anyway. “What happened?”
To my surprise, she meets my gaze, and there’s steel there. There’s bitterness, too. “I met some asshole.”
Fuck, I don’t want to voice it. I don’t want to even think about it. Part of me is scared of my own goddamn head, like what if knowing sends me off the edge of something that’s too hard to pull back from? I don’t back down from facing it, though. That’s not how I’m wired. “Did he do… things to you.”
She looks so taken aback that her face twists in a way that might be comical if I weren’t basically asking if she’s been raped. Then, she barks a quick, incredulous laugh. “Jesus, no. He just punched me in the fucking face.”
Now it’s my turn to be taken aback. “Wait—what?”
“I don’t know why,” she says, eyes dropping to my hands. “Just after that night, it’s been un-fucking-bearable. It’s not like you mauled me. And it hurt—of course it hurt—but it wasn’t so bad. It just made it all worse.”
I let go of the chain, stepping back. “This is my fault?”
“No,” she says. “Not really? It’s like I said, it was already bad. You just—”
“Made it worse,” I finish dully, turning to stare out over the lake. Like it wasn’t already bad enough that I hit her, now I bear the blame for this, too. Pretty fitting, I guess. I’ve always been good at fucking things up—making things worse—before even realizing that I want them.
Her voice is gentle when she says, “I know you didn’t mean to.”
“That doesn’t exactly help you, does it?” I give her a tight smile, but inside my head, there’s all this shit brewing. Because I couldn’t leave it alone before, but now that I know that I’m at least partly to blame? Fuck. “Let me try.”
“I can’t.”
“I’ll be so fucking careful, Sugar. If it’s bad, I’ll back off. I’ll—”