Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,173

of it. If I could just do enough to be who he wanted me to be…”

Shaking her head, she let out a breath.

“I’ve gotten so many things wrong,” she said. “And when my thoughts and my feelings tried to tell me something was wrong, I did it anyway. It’s like I was at war with myself. It was that whole Law of Externals thing. I thought everything out there could somehow make me be okay in here. If I could just… get them to like me or not leave me or whatever, if I could just get an A in that class or get that office, win that award. I mean, that stuff started all the way back in high school. It was like being popular was more important than being myself.”

Greg understood that though he’d never really thought of himself as all that popular in high school. He was far more the hanger-on to their rock star lives.

“I mean, I look back now and I think, ‘Who was that? Was that really me?’ It’s like I lost track of what was even real, and real became whatever everybody else said it was.” Her voice started sounding farther and farther away. “I remember the first night we did drugs in the apartment. Trina had just stormed out, and honestly, I didn’t blame her. I wanted to go too, but I couldn’t because I knew I had started that whole mess.” She paused just a second. “Chris said the stuff would just take the edge off, that it would calm me down. I’m not sure that’s what he really wanted because after we got started on it… Well, the next thing I really knew, I woke up in bed with him, and I couldn’t really remember anything about what had happened. I felt like… I felt like I’d been raped, but then, I did the drugs, and I didn’t tell him no, so… That’s the way it was the night he took the pictures too.”

It was taking all of Greg’s willpower not to physically react to hearing all of it. But this time she wasn’t crying about it. If anything, she sounded detached as if she was talking about needing to get milk from the store.

“He said it would be fun and that they would only be for him.” Taylor shook her head. “I know, it sounds so stupid now, and honestly, I didn’t even really believe him back then. But… it was like I couldn’t say no even when I knew…” She stopped and thought for a long second. “I wasn’t safe.”

Well, that much he could have told her.

“That’s the first question we ask,” she said as if trying to see something in the air that wasn’t there. “The Law of External and Internal. Am I safe? Do I feel safe? If the answer is no…” It wasn’t that she was puzzling about it, more that she was thinking it through. “I never even got to the Law of Externals until afterward. I didn’t feel safe with him, so I was always in fight, flight or freeze mode. All the time. I couldn’t fight. I knew that. And trying to get away didn’t work either. So all I was left with was freeze and trying to… whoa.”

“What?” he asked, now seriously becoming worried. If this went awry, he wasn’t sure he would be capable of bringing it back to okay.

“I was coping,” she said as if that helped explain it all. “I was literally just trying to survive. I was in full-on survival mode. I couldn’t fight him. I couldn’t run. All I could do was freeze in place and try to cope long enough to survive it. It was a mess, and I knew it. I was just trying to cope with it. But coping was never the answer. He used me not fighting back against me, to stretch me even farther. Oh, wow, I see it so clearly now. I was stretching myself farther and farther between doing what I had to do to survive and being who I was. If I just would’ve seen that…”

“I did,” Greg said, and when she looked at him in surprise, he tipped his head. “No. I did. I saw it every time I was around you. I’ve seen it since you left even. Remember that time when you came and we talked at Subs?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, that was long before Chris, but already then, you were…”

“Not me.”

Greg nodded. “It was like you were