Page 22 of Only This Once
“Oh.” She nodded, her hands moving to her knees. “Okay. Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
He didn’t mind her asking. It made it easier. “Once,” he forced out, his heart starting to pound in his chest. “I did it once. At that party.”
“What?” Her fingers gripped her knees. “You mean that college party? The night you were upset?”
He’d cried all over her. Part of it was because he’d always dreamed she’d be his first. It had been a pipe dream, but he’d wanted that, so badly.
“Was it… not good?” she asked. “It’s okay if it wasn’t. Sex is something you can learn to be better at.”
“I—” He swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. “I didn’t want to do it.” The words had been pounding in his mind for years, but he’d never been able to say them out loud, even to his therapist.
“You had sex when you didn’t want to?” she asked. “Oh, Jinx, that can mess with your head. If you don’t want to, you need to say no.”
“I did,” he mumbled.
“What?” Her nose flared as her eyes widened. “Jinx, are you saying…”
His lips had gone numb. He stared at his lap. “I said no and asked them to stop.”
“Them?” she asked. “More than one girl forced you to have sex that night?”
“Only one before I got away. There were two girls, and one of them was stumbling while the other struggled to hold her up. I offered to help take her to their car, but she said her friend just needed to lie down, so I helped carry her to the bedroom. It… happened there.”
“Jinx.” Julia’s hands grasped his face, lifting it so he’d look at her as she leaned in closer. “Are you telling me you got raped that night?”
“I—” He cringed from the word, and she released him. His hands went up to his hair, tugging at it. “I mean, I got hard. I didn’t want to, and I told them that, but their hands and their mouths… It felt good, I guess.”
“You didn’t want to, and you told them that.” Julia’s gaze was steady. “That’s rape. It doesn’t matter if you got turned on, or even if you came. No means no.”
“I froze at first. It was like I couldn’t say anything, but then I did say no. I asked them to stop, but one of them started kissing me and I couldn’t say anything after that. I tried to bite her to get away, but she seemed to like that.” He tugged on his hair again. “The other one went for my pants. Before I knew it, she was touching me and using her mouth, and I—”
He’d gotten hard. He hadn’t wanted to, but the sensation of her mouth had done it. It had been unlike anything he’d felt before, and he’d liked it even as he’d wished for her to stop. It confused the hell out of him. He couldn’t even masturbate anymore without remembering. Any time he got turned on, all he felt was shame.
“It’s not your fault your body reacted,” Julia said, her tone matter of fact. “That’s biology.”
“Once—” He swallowed. “Once I was hard, she got on top of me and—” He didn’t want to say it, felt dizzy just thinking it. “We had sex,” he whispered, doubting she could even hear the words.
He’d tried to buck the girl off, but she’d moaned, freaking him out, so he’d held still after that. The other girl’s mouth smothered his whimpers while her friend rode him. “Once she got off of me, I was able to get away.” The other girl had been talking about whether they could make him hard again so she’d get a turn, and he’d rolled off the bed to the floor, holding up his pants as he stumbled to his feet and ran. A tear slid down his cheek as he remembered how fucked up he’d felt, and he swiped at it, hating himself.
“Damn it,” Julia muttered, her arms shifting open.
He stared blearily at the way she held them, his eyes watering, threatening more tears.
“Come here,” she said, motioning him closer.
He leaned into her, his head resting on her chest, just as it had the night of the party. The similarity made the sob trapped in his throat tear loose, and then he was crying against her, as if he’d gone back in time to that night and no time had passed at all.
Chapter 6
Julia closed her eyes to keep her own tears within and held Jinx tighter. She’d known something bad had happened to him that night; she just hadn’t imagined this.
He’d only sobbed the once, but she could still hear the echo of it inside of her. The rest of his tears were quiet, soaking into her shirt until they eventually began to slow. As his breathing calmed, she bit back the need to demand names and asked the next thing weighing on her mind instead.
“Did you tell anyone after? Besides me just now?” If he’d been living with this, carrying it all by himself for years, she really was going to cry.
“Charles knows. At least, some of it,” Jinx mumbled. “He encouraged me to talk to a therapist.”
“That’s good.” His older brother must have been just as pissed at what had happened as she was. “You can also report it. Even four years later. You know that, right?”
