Page 6 of Did They Break You

Shifting in the leather chair, I absentmindedly run my fingers up the sleeve of my hoodie, just grazing my wrist. I feel the split skin, and some sick satisfaction in knowing Dr. Ravi has no idea what I do in the dark.

“Are you still keeping away from horror?” she asks, bursting through my smugness.

I run my tongue over my dry lips to buy time. For a second, I’m running through the woods again. I was drunk. It was dark. Hot. Cortland was so close to me, laughing, nudging me with his shoulder.

I felt so alive. So safe with him.

Until I didn’t.

“Yeah,” I answer truthfully. “I don’t even know what’s out anymore.” I shrug, glance down at my white Chucks, see one of my laces is untied.

I remember how he tried to yank them off of me that night in the woods.

They were tied too tight, though, and when he was fumbling around with them, they only knotted tighter. He gave up, in the end. My jeans were around my ankles and he shoved my underwear to the side.

The shoes didn’t really matter at that point.

The box of memories threatens to burst again.

“Did you say no?”the detectives asked me.“Because Chase McGowan says you said yes.”

Heat rushes to my cheeks with that thought. It wasn’t even, technically, a lie. I had said yes. Before the woods. As a joke. Trying to fit in.

“Would you let us all fuck you, Remi?” Chase had asked me at that table as we took shot after shot.

I hitched up one shoulder, glanced at Cortland directly across from me. My heart had fluttered in my chest. I was a virgin and he knew it. I wasn’t supposed to think aboutfucking.My stepdad would kill me. But he was out of town. That night, I was free. Free, and buzzing from a few too many drinks. “Yeah,” I’d answered Chase, eyes on Cortland. His had narrowed with my answer. “Sure.”

Everyone but him had laughed. Storm. Brinklin. Chase.

But Cortland’s jealousy made him even more possessive. It felt kind of like love.

I sit up straighter, trying to blink the memory away. Of that night, and all the ones after. The next morning.

My stepdad, Silas, waiting by the door with a Scotch in hand.

I skip over that in my mind. The glass. The call.All of it.

Charges were filed. Due process forged ahead.

Not long after, it was all dismissed.“You may not have said yes, but there’s just not sufficient evidence that a crime was committed.”

If the emptiness I felt that night, the morning after, and the weeks after that counted as evidence, they’d be behind bars.

But they’re not.

Don’t think about it.

“Well,” I sigh, desperate to talk about anything that isn’tthat,“I don’t mean to cut this short but my roommate?—”

“Sloane?” Dr. Ravi prods, still tapping her pen against the notepad. She arches a brow, her dusty pink lips pulling into a soft smile. I know what she’s doing. Reminding me that she remembers me. That I’m not just another trauma walking into and out of her office.

I mean, I’ve been coming here since a few weeks after it happened. Since Sloane attends EU, too, I’m not surprised she remembered. Besides, Sloane is one of my only friends. Best friends since middle school, when her family moved to Aben, my hometown, just ten minutes from here. We were cheerleaders together at West River.

We both gave that up once we got to Ely.

Her, for more of a social life.

Me, because I was never really invested in the first place. My mom wanted me in it and after she passed, it was a nice distraction. A way to get out of my house. Put more distance between me and my stepdad.

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