Page 601 of Dark Love

“Your stern face is cute.”

“And your attempts at distraction aren’t working.”

I am brave.

I am brave.

Small steps are hard, but I am brave enough to take those steps for a better life. “Promise me you won’t think less of me.”

“Less of you? You’re talking to a man with blood on his hands and you're worried about me thinking less of you.” He stands up and walks away. “Yourmother threatened me… She talked about you living through enough and told me I better not hurt you. Is all of this what she was referring to?”

Mom told him my life was hard. “Probably. But it was all of my own making. Can you believe the worst thing that ever happened to me was by my own hand?”

“There’s something worse than being drugged in my bar.”

That should have been the worst day of my life. “You saved me. There was no one there to save me when I ruined my life. Instead, they decided to record it for posterity.”

Vex…Maverick sinks down to his knees in front of me, taking my hands in his. “What happened?”

“I was a stupid kid. Just like millions of other stupid kids around the world every day. At fifteen years old, all I wanted to do was to be one of the cool kids. Being an awkward book nerd didn’t help. When I got invited to a sleepover party at the most popular girl in school’s house I was thrilled, even though I knew it was a pity invite. She was Montgomery’s girlfriend.” Can I do this? Can I really talk about it to him?

“Eyes on me.”

Huh? I look up into his eyes.

“You’re here. You’re safe with me. Whatever happened then is in the past. We are forever. Your mom is planning our children’s names already.”

“If we have a little girl, I’d like to name her after your sister.”

He cups my cheek. “Then that’s what we’ll do. But you need to keep talking so we can move past this, and you can explain to me how vegetable curry is your favorite food.”

That kind of has to do with my story. “The party was just supposed to be a silly teenage thing: music, junk food, and gossip. But someone decided we needed to really make it a party by drinking and dancing outside by her pool. I didn’t bring a suit the same as most of the girls, so we just wore our underwear. It wasn’t supposed to be anything. It was just supposed to be silly fun.” Silly fun.

“Were you raped?”

“No. That I could have blamed on someone else. Even drunk, it would have been their fault. But this was all me. It’s not like I’d never had a drink before. Mom didn’t want it to be something we did because it was the forbidden fruit. I didn’t really like drinking. One or two sips and I’m good. But somehow that night I got stupid drunk. The kind of drunk you only get when you’re in a safe place. I must have thought I was safe. My memory of that night ends after the first sip. But I thought I’d never stop seeing what happened in my mind.”

“Breath in. Breath out. Calm your mind. Focus.”

I do as Maverick says. “Everything was fine until I went to school the next Monday. Then my whole world collapsed. Someone had recorded me dancing at the party. Just me. No one else. I was all alone, dancing with my clothes off.” Why did I do that? “Why did I take them off? Why would I ever take them off? Even then I was shy. Why would I take my clothes off?”

“Someone recorded you dancing naked when you were fifteen?”

I nod.

“Then spread it around your school?”

“Kids and their stupid pranks.” That didn’t feel like a prank. “I wasn’t like those girls you see in movies. You know, the strong ones that just laughed it off. I was weak. And every day I got weaker until it destroyed me. I don’t know if it was the fact that everyone in school saw me naked, that they laughed at me all the time, or that suddenly all the boys thought it would be cool to grab me. Every day I died a little more. Until one day I told my mother I wished I was dead, and if she made me go back, I’d find a way to make it happen. She knew I meant it. I never went back to school. Therapy started that afternoon.”

“Was that what you were afraid of telling me? That you did something stupid as a teenager? I don’t care.”

“My weakness didn’t end there. Through high school, I made some progress, but leaving my house was a struggle. The fear of seeing someone from school ruled my life. But between my mother and my therapist, they convinced me college would be different. The kids would be more mature. They weren’t. Theywere the same horrible people from high school. I don’t know how it happened, but halfway into the first semester, someone covered the school with pictures from that night. And the video was sent to everyone on campus.” The laughter and leering never stopped. “My mother picked me up that day, and I never left my house. They fixed up the guest house for me to live in as I got older.”

“How did the video get out?”

“We had no idea. Someone from school must have really hated me. For years I hid. It got to the point where I was terrified even to go into my own backyard. I’d stay in the guest house and write. One of Mom’s friends worked at a publishing house. Nepotism got me published, and somehow my books took off. Living in such an insular world, my online writing group was my one source of human contact. My first big step to living a real life was going to a conference like the one I just went to. I’ve made so many small steps now the big ones don’t feel so big anymore. But when I told you I was afraid that if I didn’t go to work, I’d never leave the house, that is still a real fear of mine. It would be so easy to slip back into hiding from the world.”

“I’d never let that happen.”

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