Page 103 of Crave Me

He wrestles with what to say, and maybe what to believe, too. “You didn’t consent to this—”

“No,” I respond, cutting him off. “I wouldn’t let him, even when he asked.”

“Him?” he asks, his tone curt.

I’m barely able to speak, the ache in my throat twisting into a knot. “That’s Bryant in the videos with me,” I admit. He has a different look in each one. Short hair. Long hair. In the one of me up against the wall he’s wearing that stupid black cowboy hat he bought at that rodeo he’d dragged me to. I’m thin in the one where I’m touching myself. Real thin. Which means he started pulling this shit at the very start of our relationship.

God damn it.

God damn him.

Every muscle in my body threatens to give way as a floodgate of memories bust through my mind. I should have known he’d wreck me like this. But this isn’t just cruel. It’s sick. He took pleasure in exposing me at my most vulnerable to the world.

“He did it without me knowing. Evan . . . you have to believe me.”

He doesn’t respond. But how do you respond to something like this? Darkness claims him in a way I’ve never seen. I hate it. All of it—what I let Bryant do to me, but mostly what it’s doing to Evan.

Bryant made Evan watch him fuck me, hand delivering everything to Ashleigh to make sure it would get back to him. That was her, waiting for him on the street. I glance around, working things through. It wouldn’t take much for him to find her, not after those articles she was featured in, where she bashed Evan and his business practices.

She meant to make me look bad. But Bryant’s sole intention was to cause us pain.

I bury my face in my hands, when Evan orders Alfred to turn on the lights. I don’t want to think about what it was like for Evan to see me like that—me, the woman he loved, naked with another man on top of her.

“I’m sorry,” I stammer, clinging to the last of my resolve.

He lets out a ragged breath as his hand falls to his side. I want to beg him not to let me go, but I’m so ill I don’t manage.

“In the video, directly at the center,” he begins, jerking his chin away and muttering a curse as he seems to recall it. “You were different there than you are with me.”

If he means to ask more questions, they don’t come. Maybe that’s better, as it is my chest feels like it’s caving in. “You can say I wasn’t myself,” I answer quietly.

He cocks his head as if he doesn’t understand. But as anger replaces his confusion, I know that he knows, just like I realize I can no longer hold anything back. It’s too late to spare him or myself. That doesn’t make what I say any easier, or that I wouldn’t give anything to take back that night.

“I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore,” I begin. “That I needed space. He kept calling, trying to get me back.” I glance down to where his hand rests at his side, wishing he hadn’t let me go. “I finally agreed to meet him and talk.”

My mind returns to that night, it was cold and I pulled on the sweater Ma had bought me for Christmas. A deep plum as soft as silk. He smiled when he saw me, and told me I looked hot in the skinny jeans I wore. I don’t bother sharing that much with Evan, because even then, Bryant didn’t make me feel good. Not anymore. I just never imagined he’d make me feel worse.

“What happened?” Evan presses, when I suddenly stop.

“He bought me a drink, and another one after that.”

“He got you drunk,” he says, his comment more of a blunt statement than an actual question.

“Not exactly,” I admit, my tone heavy with all the shit I tried to forget about that night.

Evan straightens while I shrink inward. “He drugged you,” he says, his tone and expression so lethal, I can barely hold his gaze.

“I don’t remember a lot about that night,” I confess. “Just enough to know I participated.” I glance at my entwined hands. “Very actively as you probably saw.”

He scrunches his eyes closed as if trying to erase the image of Bryant plowing into me. But it’s fixed into his memory as much as it’s fixed into mine.

With another wicked curse, he opens his eyes slowly. “It was not consensual,” he states. “You were not in your right frame of mind.”

It’s one thing to know, but it’s a whole different thing to hear the man you dream forever with say it. “No.”

“Christ,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell me—why didn’t you tell anyone?”

“Because this wasn’t supposed to happen to me!” I fire back, my voice rising. “I got into my first fight before I lost my first baby tooth. When I was fifteen, I fought off a grown man trying to drag me into an alley. I have six monstrous brothers at my beck and call, ready to defend me and I teach women self-defense.”

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