He tucked his hands into his pocket and grinned away.
“Vann, for real, is this for me?”
He shrugged. And shuffled his foot. “You’re always complaining about how uncomfortable bike seats are.”
I turned to face him, readying to throw my arms around his neck and kiss him senseless when a voice called out from the ugly recesses of my past.
“Dillon? No way!”
Dread curdled through me, tightening around my bones until they felt crushed beneath the pressure. I froze. Actually froze in place. My limbs refused to move. My heart stopped mid-beat. My brain turned to an unusable icicle in my head. I stood there, half turned toward Vann, half sucked into the vortex of my hellish nightmare.
“Dillon!” the voice called for a second time. “No fucking way!”
I could feel Vann’s curious gaze crawl over my skin. I could hear the questions bouncing around in his head, filling the air with my worst fears. I could sense my past, that night six years ago, springing from the grave to zombie the shit out of my present life.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Not being able to respond, did not deter Justin from carrying on a conversation. He was exactly like I remembered him. Stoner meets ungodly amount of family money meets only ever interested in a good time. He was one of those people you could never be good friends with because he was all shallow end and no substance. “Do you know the bike shop guy? Are you buying this bike?” There was a pause before he tried a different tactic. “Is she buying this bike?”
“It’s a gift,” Vann answered, his voice taut, strained. “Dillon, are you okay?”
“You do know each other! How crazy is that?” Justin just kept babbling like my behavior wasn’t totally off, like I clearly didn’t want to be anywhere near here.
“How do you know her?” Vann demanded. His hand landed on my back in what was meant to be a protective gesture. I flinched at the contact and pulled away, finally breaking the paralysis that had taken over.
“Dillon and I go way back,” Justin explained. He folded his arms over his long-sleeved shirt and grinned at me. “We grew up getting in trouble together.”
God, that sounded way more salacious than it was. But then again, wasn’t that the whole point? We would party together. We would drink and experiment with drugs together. And we would apparently let each other get drugged and raped.
Those fuzzy memories tripped through my mind again. The ones I couldn’t quite grasp. The ones that whispered the awful truth but never let me examine it closely.
“Is that so?” Vann asked, reaching for me again.
I stepped away, wrapping my arms around my middle and wishing for a getaway car. I just wanted to run away. And then I wanted to crawl into a steaming hot shower and never leave.
“God, I haven’t seen you in fucking forever, DB. It’s been at least…”
“Six years.”
He grinned at me, not understanding the significance at all. “Has it really been six years? What the hell happened to you? You just…” he made an explosion sound with his mouth and gestured with both fists, “disappeared.”
Courage slithered between my breastbone and heart, forcing a path where fear and pain and my past threatened to crush and destroy. “Do you remember the last time we saw each other, Justin? Do you remember that party?”
His blank look said everything. To be fair, I didn’t think he was the guy that had drugged me. He liked to have a good time, but he also liked for it to be mutual.
“It was at your house. Right after you got home from Ibiza.”
His face lit with recognition. “I brought back the good gummies.”
I didn’t know about that. Gummies. My party had ended after a cocktail.
“You were wasted that night.” His head tipped back as he laughed at the memory. My stomach turned and my mouth watered with the nauseous threat. “Good times, good times.”
“Are you here for a reason?” Vann demanded. He was practically vibrating with fury, but all I could do was stand there and tremble.
“The taco and beer ride?” Justin turned back to me. “What happened to you, Baptiste? Nobody’s seen you in forever. Scotty heard that you died.”
“I didn’t die.” But there were nights there at the beginning that I thought I might want to. Not for any other reason than to get the disgusting feeling of a stranger’s unwanted hands all over my body out of my head.
“You should come out with us again,” he insisted. “We’re going to Bendi’s tonight. And next weekend, we’re going up to Leyla’s lodge. You should come. Remember her fucking hot tub?” He laughed at his own phrasing. “Remember the time we—”
“No.” The word was a sterling silver bullet blasted from my mouth.
Justin’s manicured eyebrows lifted. “What?”
“I don’t do that stuff anymore. I have a job.”
“A what?”
“A job.”
He looked around at the bike shop, trying to figure out how I fit. “Here?”
“Er, no.” I let my answer hang in the air for a few minutes while Justin tried to process everything. “At a restaurant called Bianca.”
“Oh.” Justin squinted at me and dropped his voice. “Wait a job? Are you like… poor now or something?”
I rolled my eyes. Some of the crippling fear receded in light of this guy’s lunacy. “No, dummy, I’m not poor. I just… I needed purpose. I didn’t want to waste my entire life at Leyla’s lodge. I went back to school and got my culinary arts degree. I just took over as the executive chef.”
He ran a hand through his floppy dishwater blonde hair. “That’s cool.” The interest in catching up with me had already diminished. I was a different girl than the one he knew six years ago. “Oh. Sweet.”
Said in the flattest voice ever.
“I want to go.” I heard the words as they left my mouth, but even I was surprised I’d said them.
Justin looked at me funny. “What?”
I realized he thought I meant to Leyla’s. Turning to Vann so there was no confusion this time, I held back tears and whispered. “I want to go home.”
Vann took a step closer to me and grabbed my biceps with supportive hands. “Are you okay?”
I ripped my body away from his touch, not able to disconnect his comfort with my unwanted past. Wrapping my arms tighter around my waist, I shook my head and hiccupped a choked sob. “No. I need to go.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Justin asked Vann.
Tears blurred my vision so I couldn’t read the look Vann gave Justin. “How about you back off and let me take care of her?”
“Dude, something’s got her fucked up.”
“Yeah, dude,” Vann snarled. “I’m starting to think that fucked up something is you. So back up.”
Justin finally stepped out of the way, arms raised in surrender. “It’s not me. I haven’t even seen her in forever.”
A guttural cry escaped the prison of my chest and I nearly collapsed right there in front of Vann’s shop and the crowd of cyclists gathering near the curb. Vann reached for me out of instinct, but drew his hand up short when he saw me flinch again.
“Fuck,” he muttered to himself. “Let me… put this inside. Do you want to walk with me?” He grabbed the pretty blue bicycle that he’d surprised me with by the handlebars. I cried harder, realizing I had just totally screwed up our night.
Maybe our entire relationship.
Justin’s face was all over my mind now and with it, memory after bad memory of all the terrible mistakes I’d made. But most prominently the horrific mistake that wasn’t mine to claim, but mine to bear. Forever and ever.
Vann managed to get the bike inside his shop and lock the door while I huddled near him without touching him. He kept shooting furtive glances my way. Every single time those stormy gray eyes filled with concern it made me cry harder.
Hadn’t I been praising my breakthrough with this man not minutes ago? And now I was trapped in my nig
htmare, a mental loop of the events of that night spinning around in my head without stopping.
Somehow, I ended up in Vann’s Jeep. And somehow he drove me home while I curled into the fetal position in his passenger seat.
He kept saying, “It’s going to be okay, Dillon. I’ve got you.” Over and over those words were like a blanket on my ice-cold skin.
I’ve got you. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.
He parked at my apartment building in a visitor’s spot and turned off the car. I had expected him to drop me off at the front and drive off into the sunset, anxious to get away from the psycho in the middle of a nervous breakdown.
“I’m going to walk you upstairs,” he told me firmly. “I don’t think you can do it on your own.”
I nodded numbly, not knowing what else to do. I was afraid he was right. I was also afraid of what my doorman, Teddy, would say if I stumbled through the front door looking like this.
There was a huge chance Vann was right too—I couldn’t make it upstairs on my own.
“Just… please, don’t touch me.” My voice was ragged and small, barely audible.
His voice broke too. “Dillon, you’re killing me.”
Fresh tears poured out of my eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t. Please don’t apologize.”
He shoved his door open and hurried around the front of his Jeep to open my door. I wished I was strong enough to ask him to carry me upstairs. I wished I could find the courage to touch him. To remember that he wasn’t the one that had hurt me.
But my body had locked down. When confronted with fight or flight, I’d chosen to freeze. My teeth chattered as my body surged with adrenaline and those groping, clawing, intrusive hands.
He ripped my dress off and tore my underwear away from me. He shoved my legs open and thrust inside me. Then he held my arms down as I weakly tried to fight back.
I gasped for breath and tried to sink to my knees. Vann scooped me up even while I cried out.
Minutes past as I fought for clarity, as I beat the demons back and tried to reemerge in the present.
When Vann was finally able to take my keys from me and open my apartment door, he deposited me on my sofa and hurried to the kitchen. I heard water running as I pulled my knees to my chest and rocked myself back and forth.
“Should I call someone?” he asked, hovering over me with a glass of water in one hand and a throw blanket in the other. “Ezra? Your mom? Vera?”
I shook my head. This was bad enough. I didn’t want to introduce anyone else to my secret shame.
“No,” I sniffled between sobs. “I’m fine.”
He was silent for a minute before saying. “No, you’re not, Dillon. You’re not fine. Something is seriously wrong.”
I cried harder. His words had hit with such precision, it was like they’d punctured my heart and ripped it open.
Tipping over on the couch, I stayed there sobbing, with my knees pulled up to my chest for a long time. Vann covered me with a blanket and took a seat at the other end of the couch.
“I’m here for you, Dillon. I’ll be right here. If you need anything let me know.”
I couldn’t find the words to thank him, but his presence was enough. It was soothing to know he wasn’t going to leave.
His presence was like a guard against the evil thoughts and memories from six years ago. He sat still and silent at the end of the couch, respecting my wish for him not to touch me, and slowly the broken pieces of my soul started to piece themselves back together again. My sobs became silent as the tears continued to fall, but my body shook and trembled less, and my heartbeat began to steady.
I hadn’t had a crying jag like that in a couple years. Not since my senior year of school.
My therapist would call this a relapse. And that was exactly what it felt like. All the careful work I’d trudged through to make the small steps toward healing undone and erased.
Two small steps forward, six hundred steps back. Right to that memory of that bedroom. Right to that drug-blurred night.
Eventually there were no tears left to cry. My eyes dried and my soul shriveled. I sat up and I turned toward Vann, tucking myself into the farthest corner of the couch.
He looked at me, eyes red and strained. There was despair there, fear I had never seen except when looking in the mirror.
“I was raped.” The words fell out of my mouth as an apology and an explanation. “Drugged. And then raped.”
Twenty-Two
Vann didn’t even flinch. I realized my reaction to Justin told more than my words ever could have. “Was it by that fucking asshole? I will go back and kill him if he touched you, Dillon. Say the fucking word.”
He was serious. The truth of his threat rang through the room. Another piece of my soul clicked back into place. I didn’t condone murder by any means, but Vann’s willingness to go that far for me helped restore some of my faith in humanity in a messed up kind of way.
“It wasn’t Justin,” I told him, fighting through the sick feeling curdling in my stomach. “It happened at his party though.”
“You’re sure?” Vann asked. “Because that smug motherfucker rubbed me the wrong way.”
My lips twitched at his zeal. It had been six years after all. Six. I had survived the aftermath for six whole years. I wasn’t a victim anymore. I was a survivor. Even if the pain of what happened still threatened to suck out my soul and shatter it into a million unfixable pieces.
“It was a guy I didn’t know. I don’t even remember his name. I’m not sure I ever knew it to begin with.”
“What did you tell the cops then?”
I pressed my lips together, ashamed to admit the truth. And maybe this was what killed me the most—that at the end of the day I was a coward. I was a fucking coward that hadn’t even been able to stand up for myself.
These words had never left my mouth before. Not all of them. My therapist had heard broken, battered bits of the story, but never all at once. She had been the only person I’d been able to tell. And only because it had felt like life or death, only because the secret couldn’t stay trapped inside only me. I needed someone else to share the burden, to understand the depth of my pain.
“I didn’t,” I whispered, feeling like I would choke on the truth.
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t tell the cops.”
His lips pressed into a straight line, his eyes filling with sorrow, frustration, and anger. So much anger.
The words came in a rush. Confessing my personal sin opened the floodgate and my secrets spilled from my soul. “I was drugged. I remember taking a cocktail from someone at Justin’s, but I don’t remember who. Someone had been passing them around. Mine was drugged. Or maybe they were all drugged. I’m not sure…” I turned my head, staring out the window at the city. I couldn’t look at Vann. I couldn’t bear his judgment. “I have memories of what happened, but they’re blurry. Foggy. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve made them up completely.” I took a steadying breath and let the words settle in the air. The truth, in all its messed-up-ness was like getting thrown off a bridge. The falling sensation rocked through me like a cannon.
“I can’t remember what he looked like,” I whispered. “I don’t have a name. Or a description. Or even clarity of what exactly happened that night.”
Vann ground his teeth together. I could feel his anger, his outrage. I felt sick, too afraid to ask if it was directed at me.
And then, as if I needed to prove myself to this man that had trusted me until now, the events of the night came tumbling out of me. “I used to be wild,” I told him. “A total mess. My dad was sick and then dying and then dead… It started in high school though. We were rich assholes with too much money and not enough parental supervision. I was at a party every weekend and nothing was off limits. Alcohol, sex, drugs… When my dad died, I just… I just lost the ability to care about consequences. He’d been absent my entire life. Even when I lived at his house, he wasn’t
there. Even when he spent time with me, he was never there. Never truly present. I grew up being the thing he used to manipulate my mom. Or the party trick he would prance around social clubs with. I wasn’t his daughter. I was his weapon. By the time I got to high school and he could no longer use me anymore, I didn’t even know what my purpose was anymore. I mean, how fucked up is that? That’s when the drinking started. And then the drugs. And I was out of control. When he died… I don’t know, something snapped inside me. By the time I showed up to Justin’s party, I thought I didn’t care about anything. I thought nothing could make me feel again. Nothing could make me care. And then I accepted a drink I shouldn’t have. The memories are blurry at best. I woke up to hands all over me. They were rough… painful. I remember trying to swat them away, but I was so damn weak.” Tears leaked from my eyes again and I was surprised there was any moisture left in my body. My chest shuddered as I tried to breathe through the lancing pain across my rib cage. “He pulled off my clothes and I could not stop him. I was in and out of it, waking up in the worst of the pain. He would shove my face with his hand, shutting me up when I tried to make a protest. He smelled like too strong cologne and cheap beer.” I glanced at Vann, my voice breaking when I saw tears reflected in his eyes. “I woke up naked and sore and sick the next morning. Justin’s place was mostly empty. But I didn’t stick around to see if anyone was there or had seen anything. I fled. I ran away. And I never went back.”
“You didn’t tell anyone?”
I shook my head, loose strands of hair getting caught on my wet cheeks. “I didn’t know what to say. I was too ashamed to tell Ezra. I should have gone to the police, I realize that now. But I was twenty-one and terrified. I had no hard evidence. I had no memory of what the guy looked like. I had nothing. Plus, at the time, I was afraid that if they called in character witnesses, they would find out that drugs were… I wasn’t like this upstanding citizen, okay? And the thought of them using a rape kit on me…” I hiccupped through another sob, wishing I could shrug off the shame that had followed me since that day. “I would do things over if I could. I would do anything to go back to that morning after and make different decisions.”
Opposites Attract: The complete box set Page 119
