Page 71 of A Love Like Venom

Since last night I have taken ten showers.

Ten.

And yet still I don't feel clean.

My skin is rubbed raw. Once pale now alabaster pink.

There is nothing I can do to wash away the feeling of his hands on my flesh. Bile presses at the back of my throat from thinking about it.

But my mind can't seem to stop, thinking about it that is.

It seems my mind wants to torture me. Have me relive the horrible encounter in every nitty gritty detail.

It's been such a long time since someone has treated me that way before. Such a long time that it almost feels like a lifetime ago when at the same time feels like it just happened yesterday.

That's what they don't tell you about trauma, it always lives on inside your head. You can try to lock it away in Pandora's Box, but your subconscious knows that it's there.

What Razor did to me was brutal. It was wrong. It was utterly disgusting.

The most tragic part is what he did was nothing compared to what happened to me at seventeen.

Both committed sexual assault.

Except when I was seventeen that sexual assault took away my innocence. He took something that wasn't his to take. Something that I can never get back. He did that to me, and he did that to me in my own trailer. Right on the living room sofa that was my bed.

He did what he promised that one night in the kitchen after dinner. I can still hear the eerie calming voice of his as he said with such certainty,"one day."

That one day came.

That one day came alright and it broke everything inside me.

Chris Blackwell raped me when I was seventeen.

Reed Carter killed him.

I helped burn the body.

We promised that night to each other that we would never tell another soul what happened to Chris Blackwell.

To this day I have kept my word. There are days where I curse the day Reed Carter was born for how much pain he has caused me. Days where I hate him so much I can taste the bitterness on my tongue.

The taste stronger ever since his return.

But my lips have remained sealed.

And I will never . . .neverbreak that promise we made to each other.

I will keep it with me until the day I die and then some.

What people may fail to understand is I can't betray him. Not like that.

Not when he tried to salvage back a piece of my soul. When he tried with bloody hands to pick up the sharp broken pieces of my heart and put them back together.

I may hate the man he's become but I love the man he once was.

That's who I am honoring.

And I wish on every star that there is that my Reed Carter will one day return.

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