by Laney Wylde
Never Touched
Laney Wylde
Contents
Also by Laney Wylde
1. JANUARY 2018
2. SEPTEMBER 2014
3. OCTOBER 2014
4. DECEMBER 2014
5. FEBRUARY 2015
6. JULY 2015
7. MAY 2016
8. FEBRUARY 2017
9. APRIL 2017
10. MAY 2017
11. JUNE 2017
12. SEPTEMBER 2017
13. OCTOBER 2017
14. NOVEMBER 2017
15. DECEMBER 2017
16. JANUARY 2018
17. FEBRUARY 2018
18. MARCH 2018
19. APRIL 2018
20. MAY 2018
21. JULY 2018
22. SEPTEMBER 2018
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Afterword
Also by Laney Wylde
Serenade
Also by Laney Wylde
Never Touched
The After Twelve Series
If She Were Blind
If She Plays His Game
If He’s Watching
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
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Never Touched
Copyright ©2018 Laney Wylde
All rights reserved.
Crimson Tree Publishing
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Summary: Sawyer is a survivor—gritty, determined. But the struggle to put it all behind her is something that's with her every second of the day. Her abuser is in jail now, but he'll never truly let her go. When she tries to shelter in something good, the darkness inevitably follows. The effects of the abuse flow through her life in this coming of age drama about finding the courage to keep fighting.
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ISBN: 978-1-63422-312-6 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-63422-313-3 (e-book)
Cover Design by: Marya Heidel
Typography by: Courtney Knight
Editing by: Cynthia Shepp
For Caroline, Elizabeth, and Susan who helped me find my voice by listening even when I spoke with it.
To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don’t let it.
~Ernest Hemingway
1
JANUARY 2018
My soul is crooked and dark, depraved and destined for hell. At least, that’s what Pastor Jeff told me…
Smile, Sawyer. I couldn’t. Stop crying. I tried to stop. You’re defiant. I had to be. Don’t you love me? No. Don’t you love Jesus? I didn’t know anymore. Why can’t you obey like Simone? Because I’d rather go to hell. Simone, show Sawyer how to be good. I didn’t want to watch. Sawyer, open your eyes. I did. To Simone’s—blue, clear like shattered glass. Shattered by the threat of hell. Shattered by Jeff.
The therapist I was forced to see wanted me to talk about this, I presumed, since she wanted me to talk about my childhood, about anything that could have led to my December incident.
Bitch, please.
“Is there anything on your mind, Sawyer?” Dr. Harper started each session with the same wordless stare before crumbling into this question. She had two personas: soft, sweet therapist with a gentle manner, and assertive pain in my ass. I imagined her psyching herself up for our forty-five minutes twice each week. I liked to picture her in front of the mirror saying some kind of Sawyer-specific mantra—I will make it through the whole session as sweet-therapist. I will not break character. I would have felt bad for her if she wasn’t making so much money off my incarceration.
Her simple question, “Is there anything on your mind, Sawyer?” was already an admission of defeat. Every session was a game of Talk Chicken. Who would cave to fill the awkward silence first? The first time was the longest, a full six minutes before she broke. Our fourth round, the undefeated champion: me.
I shook my head.
“You’ve been here for two weeks now.” Was that all? She crossed her legs and propped her delicate face in her spider-leg fingers with her elbow on the arm of the chair. “How have you been adjusting?”
I shrugged.
“Do you like your roommate?”
“I don’t like that she has six pillows.”
“Are you saying you don’t have enough pillows?”
“I have one.” Which wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t paper thin and my spine wasn’t battered from years of gymnastics and cheer. “The second night I was here, I asked one of the nurses for a second one, and she said they were all out. But I knew where they were. She offered me a Trazodone to help me sleep.”
“Did you take it?”
“No. I don’t need medication.”
“I have here in my notes,” she started as she lifted a page in my file, “that you are on Effexor and Zoloft daily, Xanax as needed, and were given an injection of Haldol on the tenth. Are you saying you’re not swallowing your medication?”
“Haldol? Is that booty juice?”
“Yes. Did something happen on the tenth?”
“Sure.” I switched my bare feet to squish under the opposite knees. “Some nurses pushed me face down on the solitary room bed, then pulled off my leggings and panties.”
“I’m sorry if the shot was triggering for you.”
I scoffed. “It’s not a trigger. Nothing’s a trigger. It’s just normal instinct to fight someone when they pin you down and take your clothes off, isn’t it?”
“What led up to the ‘booty juice?’” she asked, but she already knew. She had the file.
“I’m told I threw a chair at Louie…” I flicked my fingers as if this had yet to be proven to me. “During lunch, apparently.”
“You don’t remember?”
“Of course I remember,” I lied.
“Okay.” She lifted her chin from her palm, her brown hair swishing over her collarbone as she challenged me. “Where’d you hit him?”
“In the thigh.” Lying again. And to a psychologist, which was basically lying to a mind reader.
“No, Sawyer, you missed.”
Shit. Of course I missed. I should have guessed that. Dad always said I had terrible aim.
I crossed my arms. “Then why did I get booty juiced?”
“What was the last thing you remember before throwing the chair?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you tell me why you did it?”
I shook my head, though I knew. Sure, I was violent, but not without reason.
She softened her voice and leaned forward, her sharp elbows poking into her knees. “Sawyer, I know what he called you. Were you feeling unsafe?”
I snickered. “You all say that word a lot, you know? Feeling. Like everything I experience is some delusion, a deviation from fact. But if you know what he called me, you know I wasn’t feeling unsafe. I was unsafe.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“It’s almost visiting hours. Can I leave now?” I asked as I dropped my feet to the carpet.
She sighed, her eyes moving past me at the clock on the wall. “You may, but do you understand the conditions of your hospitalization?”
“I’m here to pay my debt to society.”
“You’re here to get help—”
“Mandated by the courts.”
“But if you don’t let us help you, we
can decide that it is in your best interest to stay longer. If you continue to cut your sessions short—”
“Okay.” I sighed and bounced my toes against the floor. It was probably a psych patient thing; I’d scan any circle of us here and find a lot of restless legs and fingers. Or maybe it was just this place. It was January, and the AC was blasting. We were all bundled up in our drawstring-free hoodies, shaking to get warm. “Tell me what I need to do to get out of here.”
“Basically, I can’t sign off on your discharge until I have evidence you’re not going to repeat the kind of behavior that got you arrested last month. Are you ready to tell me about that night?”
“Isn’t everything in my file?”
“I meant talk about it for your sake, not mine.”
“I’ve already told the story a hundred times: to the police, to my lawyer, to the shrink who evaluated me for the plea bargain—”
“Right, but you haven’t talked about how you felt.”
I summoned my most melodramatic eye roll yet. I could imagine Dr. Harper’s view of it: the white of my eyes showing as my pupils revolved back into my head in slow motion. Contemptuous and gorgeous. I’d been working on it for years. “I feel that it wasn’t my fault. I feel that I shouldn’t be locked up here. I feel that it is unfair.”
“Unfair, okay—”
“If I have to stay, can we talk about something else?” I sank back into the couch, crossed my arms, and kicked my bare feet onto the table, one ankle dropping onto the other.
“Of course, Sawyer. What’s on your mind?”
“Nothing.”
Dr. Harper sighed discreetly and flipped through my file. “Why don’t we talk about your CBT assignment from yesterday?” She pulled out a stapled packet of papers, glanced at it, then dropped it on the coffee table between us. Her needlelike fingertips pivoted it my direction. “I was intrigued by how you filled it out.” That was shrink talk for—I was pissed to see that you didn’t even try to follow the directions.
I didn’t have to see the Behavior Chain Analysis form, which was a diagram of blank bubbles representing links in a chain from a trigger to a bad behavior, to know what I wrote. The idea was for us to fill in all the bubbles, and then find the best link in the chain to break before we misbehaved again. Over the entire page, I had scrawled JAKE in intricately filled bold letters.
“What was the problem behavior you were trying to address?”
“December 2.”
She nodded. The date was more than enough to explain. “And who is Jake?”
2
SEPTEMBER 2014
Indian summer was five glorious days of actual warm weather in our southern Oregon shit town—sunny and over eighty degrees. Decadent. Glorious. Clear and present danger of suntan. My sophomore year, it landed the first week of school.
This, of course, meant that a lot of pale shoulders and pasty legs made their school debut, put on display by short dresses and tank tops. When I covered my semi-Cuban skin with a modest cheer tee shirt and jean shorts, I hoped Travis’s eyes would lead him to another target. After all, he had me after school whenever he wanted. When the school bus stopped in his neighborhood since his license had been suspended again, I slouched and moved my backpack to occupy the seat beside me. Maybe he wouldn’t even see me.
I couldn’t ever be so lucky.
He chucked my backpack in my lap and sat down next to me. His clammy hand slid from my bare knee up my thigh where it rested, hidden beneath my bag. I tried to push him away by his forearm, but his fingers dug into my leg.
“Travis, back the hell off!”
He looked at me calmly, his words calculated. “You don’t get to say that to me, or is the deal off?”
The deal being I let Travis do whatever he wanted to me…and he agreed not to leak a video of Simone and me on the “Overheard at BHHS” page, the anonymous gossip site everyone at our school followed. His friend Jeremy found the video four months ago, and he immediately showed it to Travis and two other basketball players. As far as any of us could tell, no one at school knew it existed. Until then, I didn’t even know the video was out there. But now that I did, I knew it couldn’t have been the only one.
And sure, I heard the rumors that circulated after those guys started screwing us. But rumors were just talk. It wasn’t so bad being talked about. Even the stories those guys spread weren’t all that shocking among the other cheerleaders. I was still popular. Being talked about did that. Being seen, though—I would never let it happen.
I dug my nails into the fleshy underside of Travis’s wrist. He grimaced, but kept his hand sliding to the top of my shorts.
It was then I heard a voice from behind us. “Excuse me, is this guy bothering you?” Travis and I turned to see a guy with dirty-blond hair one row behind us resting his elbows on the back of our vinyl seat.
No, say no. No, no, no. But before I could, I was nodding—this involuntary motion like my body and mind were run by two different people.
“Okay.” He scooted into the aisle, now only inches from us, raking back the rogue hairs that fell in front of his eyes. “Stand up,” he commanded Travis. “We’re switching seats.” Now that he was standing, I realized how small he was, especially compared to Travis, a six-four, two-hundred-plus-pound athlete. Travis could chew him up and spit him out in seconds.
“Fuck you,” Travis spat before turning to me.
“Get up.” The guy’s eyes narrowed as if this would be threatening. Travis straightened to stand, about to swing his fist. Crap. Poor guy.
Before Travis had the chance to make contact, the shorter guy’s fist smashed into Travis’s face. His massive frame was blocking my view of most of the action, but from the crack I heard, I guessed it was his nose. His other jabbed Travis’s gut. Travis crumpled into the seat.
There were gasps all around, and of course some idiot started chanting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
The guy put his hand on the back of our seat and stooped to meet Travis’s eyeline. “Now, how about switching seats?” Travis stood again, obviously not to switch seats, but that guy kneed his groin before he could do anything.
Damn, how many times had I wanted to do that but never had the balls to?
The next thing I realized, the bus stopped, and the driver was escorting the blond to a seat at the back. Bruised ego and bleeding nose, Travis moved to the row behind me—had to have been his nose then.
So the fight was lame, but I got to ride the rest of the way to school alone. Bonus: I got to see someone half Travis’s size beat the shit out of him in front of forty-plus people.
The bus stopped at the curb behind school. Students started filing out, throwing stares back at Travis, who had fat drops of blood falling from his nostrils and crusting in his tee shirt. I waited in my seat until Travis left and the kids in the back started down the narrow aisle. “Hey,” I called the guy as he was about to pass me. I slid out to walk behind him. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” He flickered a half smile before heading down the steep steps to the sidewalk. I stood there beside the bus watching him walk toward school with his backpack slung over one shoulder. He disappeared behind the glass doors.
The twenty-eight hours after that were quiet, in that eerie calm-before-the-storm kind of way. I went from class to lunch to class to practice without seeing Travis at all. My phone was absent of booty calls. I didn’t even see him on the bus. I spent the whole night refreshing the Overheard page on my phone, sure I’d find the video posted there. But I didn’t. Maybe hell had finally frozen.
I left fourth-period Calculus the next day hesitant and hopeful. But once my locker was in sight, so was he. Travis leaned against it, glaring me down. My feet felt heavy, my progress down the hallway slowing. I convinced myself that the more time it took for me to get to him, the tougher I would be when I got there. It only kind of worked.
“You’re in my way.” I shoved past him to my locker.
“Hurry up,” he said as he
stepped aside. “We’re going off campus for lunch.” This meant Jeremy’s house, a block away and always unlocked.
Jeremy and his other two friends opted out of our arrangement months ago, growing consciences after Simone found her own way out. I could never decide if she was braver or weaker than I was for doing it. In the swirl of screams and stiff silences that followed, I was pissed at her. The little bitch abandoned me. Now I was just one girl left alone to protect the secrets of two. Every night, I fell asleep to the thought that I’d grow the courage Simone did, the strength or balls or foolishness to just say, “Fuck it, let the chips fall where they may.” But each morning, I woke up to the cold reality of the currency she spent to keep her darkness locked up, safe underground. All she needed was for me to pay my share, a small price compared to hers. I could afford it. I owed her that much.
My stomach twisted as I pulled the books out of my backpack one at a time, slipping them into my locker as slowly as I could. Time. I just had to buy some time. I knew from experience this would do me no good, but I kept up my slug’s pace anyway. I was about to pull my fifth-period Chemistry textbook out, when I jumped. There was an unfamiliar hand on my naked shoulder, one raised with callouses.
I turned my head to see the guy from the bus the day before. “Babe, are you ready for lunch?” he asked. We stared at each other, him straining to communicate something wordlessly that I couldn’t understand. I went along with it anyway. Anything was better than lunch with Travis. His hand stayed on my shoulder until I threw my backpack over the other. Then his fingers slipped between mine.