Lured In (Dark Paradise, #1)

by Avent, V. R.

  “Anyway. I heard his voice from inside the study, and since he was always an ass to me, I didn’t bother to greet him. I was in the study with Carmen, Karen, and Rachel, my friends from school. They had come over so we could finish our research papers on the Italian Renaissance. We were learning the language. Lauren adored Connor and was happy that he had come home early. After they had talked for a while, I heard Lauren tell him that she and Derek were going out and would be back around one in the morning.

  “He asked something like, ‘That gleeful bitch is here?’ Lauren told him not to say that because I was in the study and could probably hear him. He asked Lauren if she thought he gave a fuck whether or not I heard him and said that he didn’t give a fuck about me. I yelled from the study in Italian, ‘I don’t give a fuck about you, Connor. Stupid-ass idiot.’ The girls all laughed.

  “Connor didn’t know what I’d said to him, so he yelled back to me, ‘Yeah, whatever you just said goes double for you, you little bitch.’ I closed the door to the study and ignored him. Lauren left at some point, and Gabe rang the doorbell at seven. I knew it was him; he’d told me he would stop by after baseball practice. I left Carmen, Karen, and Rachel in the study to answer the door. I walked past Connor and his friends, who were in the living area drinking, smoking weed, and playing video games. Dustin commented, ‘Damn, Abi. You filling out those pajama shorts and tankie, aren’t you?’

  “I blew him off with a wave of my hand and opened the door for Gabe. We embraced, and Gabe heard Connor’s friends making comments about how fast I grew up and curved out since they last saw me. That was the first time I’d seen Connor or any of them in more than a year. Gabe got upset—jealous, maybe. He walked into the living room with his arm around my waist for them to see. When he saw it was ‘Connor and the amazing three,’ as they were called in high school, he was all of a sudden a little understanding, as he was friends with them also. They had all hung out and played sports together. They saw Gabe and it was all bromance from there. I pulled on Gabe’s arm for him to come to the study with me, and he asked if he could have a few minutes to catch up with them. I looked at Gabe, more than mad, and walked back to the study alone.

  “They talked about sports, college chicks, and other things. Connor, out of nowhere, asked Gabe, ‘Dude, do my parents know you fucking their precious St. Abi?’ Gabe told him it wasn’t like that, and they teased him and asked Gabe if he even knew what to do with curves like mine. Gabe told them again that we didn’t have that kind of relationship. I stormed out of the study, and Carmen, Karen, and Rachel were quick behind me. I asked Gabe in Italian if he’d come to see me or them. He replied back in Italian, ‘You, my love,’ and they commented about him speaking Spanish. I told them it wasn’t Spanish, that it was, in fact, Italian. Gabe eventually came into the study with us and we finished our research paper. Around eight, Gabe, Karen, Carmen, and Rachel left, and I went up to my bedroom. At some point after they left, he—Connor—must’ve sent Pete, Dustin, and Kevin home.

  “I was lying in bed listening to some old Italian romance songs on my MP3 player. I didn’t hear him come in. He yanked my headphones from my ears and pulled me off the bed by my ankles. I never thought he would do anything like that; it had never crossed my mind. I just thought he was being mean to me, like he had been so many times before. He kept calling me St. Abi, Ms. Gleeful, and Ms. Happy-All-the-Damn-Time. I got up from the floor and slapped his face and told him to go sleep it off. I knew he was drunk; I could smell an entire liquor store on him. Richard would always tell him go sleep it off, and he would comply without argument. He came close to me and asked me if I wanted him to sleep it off, and I told him yes. He asked me if I knew what would make him sleep it off, and I told him to just sleep it off like he always does. He pulled my hair, hard, and said, ‘Why the fuck are you always so fucking happy? Why do you smile and laugh so goddamn much? Huh, St. Abi? You a saint, Abigail?’ I pushed him away from me and called him a drunken idiot.

  “‘I have something that will make you happy, St. Abi. You want to be happy? Let me make you happy,’ he said. He grabbed my ass and tried to kiss me. He reeked of booze. I pushed him forcefully to my bedroom door and asked him what the fuck. The push inadvertently closed the door. He smiled and said, ‘See what you did, St. Abi? You locked us in here together.’ He locked the door and reached out to grab me, but I moved out of his reach. I started crying, and he said, ‘Fuck those tears.’ I cried and begged him to leave me alone and promised I wouldn’t tell anyone. He came closer, and I tried to kick him, but he grabbed my leg and moved really close to me. He let my leg go and grabbed me by my throat. He started taunting me, ‘Oh, St. Abi. No need to cry. I promise to make you feel better than Gabe does. I promise to make you happy. You like being happy, don’t you?’

  “I begged him not to do it. I begged him to stop. I told him he was drunk and slapped him again. He picked me up by my neck and threw me on the bed. I scooted back to the wall and tried to get away from him, but he was too quick. He pulled me by my hair and forced me back to the bed. He got on top of me and told me to shut the fuck up and stop fighting him. I tried to fight him. I did. I even bit him. But he was too, too strong. He held my hands above my head with one of his hands and pulled my shirt above my head with the other. He ripped my bra and put his drunken mouth on my breasts and asked me if I like the way his mouth felt on my breasts. I told him no and to stop it right now. I screamed for help and he teased me. ‘No one can hear you, St. Abi. This is the only house in a mile radius. It’s just me and you.’

  “He put his alcoholic lips on me again and told me he was going to fuck me real good, but if I kept struggling he would do it over and over all night. He promised me he wouldn’t stop. He yanked at my shorts until they tore to shreds, and I closed my thighs and knees as tightly as I could, but he managed to get them apart somehow. I don’t know how when I fought so hard him to get off of me. I heard his zipper. Then I felt a horrible, horrible pain that made me scream before I was robbed of my voice. I don’t know why, but I just stopped fighting. I lay there voiceless and motionless. My ears didn’t work anymore. The sounds were faint. I felt terrible pain and couldn’t cry out. He finally stopped and just lay on me. He laid his filthy body, his filthy head on me. He didn’t move for a long time; he just lay there on top of me. Then he lifted his head and looked at me. He said something, and I couldn’t quite make it out because my damn ears didn’t work anymore. He said something like, ‘Gabe and I share all the time. He never left one this damn tight.’

  “He rolled off of me and stood up. And that’s when I saw myself. I saw me, my purity, there on his filthy penis. He looked down and saw it too. He pulled at his hair on his head and looked at me. He pulled me off the bed. My legs didn’t work anymore either, so I fell to the floor. And that’s when I saw more of me. I saw my purity soaking the lavender sheet. I laid my head on the floor and saw the blood all over my thighs, too. He tried to make it go away. He did. He made me stand up, but my legs still didn’t work anymore. He stood me up again and dragged me into the bathroom. He turned the shower on and put me in, and I slid down in the back of the shower.

  “He came back after a long time, both hands filled with feminine products. He held out both hands and asked me which one. Still dazed and confused, and with little sound to my ears, I looked at him and said, disoriented, ‘I already had my period.’ He pulled me up and out of the shower by my hair and told me to repeat myself. I told him, again, that I already had my period. He grabbed me by my throat and said, ‘If you tell anyone, I will tell them you got drunk when your little friends left and couldn’t control yourself. I’ll them that I had to force you off of me when you climbed on top of me when I was trying to sleep mine off, and you were obviously too damn drunk to remember how you were conducting yourself—you’re probably just angry that I didn’t let it go any further. You understand me? You got that? Don’t open your fucking mouth about what happened, and if you do, I promise to do it again. And no on
e would believe you.’

  “He made me walk back to my bedroom, and when we got there, he pushed me onto the bed and told me to put some fucking clothes on or he was going to do it again. Something looked different to me—he had taken the evidence. He had taken the lavender sheet soiled with my virginity. The clothes he had torn off of me were gone. I looked at him, and he yelled at me to get dressed. I remember thinking to myself, at that moment, that he must’ve done it before; he must have raped some other poor little girl. I guess I was too confused and still out of it to move fast enough for him because he came over and pushed me back to the orange sheets he’d put on my bed while I sat lonely and scared in the shower. He got on top of me again, and I started crying again. ‘Fuck those tears,’ he said to me again. ‘If you don’t put some fucking clothes on, I will do it again. Do you want that?’ In a haze, I got up and put on a pair of pajama pants and a shirt.

  “I sat in my bedroom for nearly a week and a half, not knowing what to do, who to tell, or if I should tell or not. I didn’t leave my room for anything but to use the bathroom and to shower. I barely ate anything my mom brought up to my bedroom. I didn’t talk; I couldn’t talk. My voice was still caught up in that lavender sheet with my virginity. She thought I was on drugs—my mom. Can you fucking believe that? My mom thought I was on fucking drugs. My stepdad came in my room one day, sat beside me, grabbed my left arm, and put a tourniquet around it. He must’ve taken seven, maybe eight tubes of blood from me that day. I can still hear him say, ‘Since you don’t want to fess up and tell us what drugs you are on, we will find out our way.’

  “Well, after a week, Richard and my dad came into my bedroom and demanded me to tell them what drug I took because the toxicology report reported no drugs in my system. My dad was all, ‘Princess, you have to tell us. I promise you won’t get into any trouble. Whatever drug you are taking is so dangerous that it doesn’t register in your system.’ I got so upset that no one asked me what had happened—they only assumed I was on drugs. I looked at my father and said in Italian, ‘Of course it was not a drug. I was raped.’ My dad replied, ‘Sweetie, you know we don’t understand Italian. You have to tell us the name of the drug in English.’ I repeated it again. Richard told my dad to grab my cell phone, which I hadn’t used since that day, and to call all the numbers in it. It had been left uncharged for over a week and a half.

  “Sometime later that day, my mom had called Carmen, Karen, and Rachel and told them I was on some drug and asked if they were using drugs also. She told them that if they were, they had better tell her what it was before she called their parents. Carmen came over with Rachel, and my mother let them up in my room. They asked me what was going on, why my mom asked them about drugs, and why I wasn’t answering my phone. I looked at them and started crying. They both quickly wrapped their arms around me and asked me what was wrong. I cried, ‘Connor raped me.’ They asked what and when, and I repeated myself and told them the night he came home from school drunk. I told them what he said about doing it to me again and how no one would believe me.

  “They insisted I tell my parents right away. Carmen yelled for my mom, who came in with Richard. Carmen demanded I tell them or she would. I couldn’t bring myself to say it to them. I started crying, and Carmen yelled it out. ‘That drunken asshole, Connor, raped her.’ They immediately called Connor, who strolled into my room like nothing had happened. Richard asked him flat out if he had raped me. He casually told them no, and I called him a liar.

  “My mother told Carmen and Rachel to leave, and Carmen told her, ‘Hell, no.’ Richard told Carmen, ‘Leave—this is a family matter,’ and she told him, ‘Fuck no. If you want me gone, then call the police to have me removed. I’m sure they would love to decide if that rapist bastard is lying or not.’ They let her stay, and she put her hands around Connor’s throat and told him, ‘I have a meat clever with your name on it.’ Can you believe how she protected and stood up for me back then? And she’s still doing it to this day.

  “Just as he’d promised, Connor lied and blamed everything on me for opening my fucking mouth and telling the truth. He told them I approached him in a drunken moment and that there was never any contact—not consensual and definitely not rape. They believed him. Can you fucking believe that? They believed that lying, drunken, evil rapist bastard over me.”

  After I told Zach about that dreadful night, he got up, pulling me up with him. Sitting on the brick-colored lounger with canopy, I sat all the way back, drew my legs up to my chest, and hugged them. Zach sat in front of me on the ottoman and asked, “Abi, what did your folks say when they heard what he had done to you?”

  “That I was probably too drunk to understand that nothing happened, though I wanted something to.”

  “Your father—he didn’t believe you either?”

  “No one. Connor made sure of that. When Richard and my dad asked him why he didn’t come forward when it first happened, he told them he had simply swept it under the rug and contributed my unusual and immoral behavior to whatever I was drinking—he never thought I would make up a slanderous allegation like that.”

  “Fucking psycho,” Zach said. “Did you tell your folks what he did to you from your mouth? Or did they judge the situation solely on what Carmen told them?”

  “I told them word for word—everything I just told you. That’s the reason they sent me to Dr. Epps—because they didn’t believe me and wanted to know why I would make up a lie like that. I told them too many goddamn times during the past eleven-plus years. They just didn’t listen or believe me. And because they didn’t believe me about Connor, they didn’t believe me about Epps, and Dr. Epps knew he could capitalize off of them not trusting me with another slanderous accusation.”

  Sitting beside me with his fingers in my hair, caressing my scalp, Zach said, “What happened to you is horrendous, and everyone around you failed you. I am so sorry for that, Abigail. I’m surprised that your dad and stepdad allowed this shit to happen to you.” Changing subject, he continued, “How did they become friends anyway—your dad and stepdad? It seems pretty odd that they’re best friends.”

  “They’ve always been cordial to each other for my sake, but their friendship started after Connor raped me. Because they assumed I was on drugs when I first shut down, they were working hard together trying to figure out what drug could’ve been in my system and found that they had so much more in common than they did with my mother. Soon after that night, I started drinking and smoking weed, and the more I indulged, the closer they became.”

  “They seem so much alike.”

  “They’re far from alike. My dad has a really bad temper and is stubborn as hell and aggressive, whereas Richard is the complete opposite. He’s not as aggressive as my dad, and he keeps a cool head.”

  I laid my head on Zach’s chest and thought, The past stole my voice once, but with Zach here comforting me, I’m able to open up about that horrific night, thus releasing a huge burden. I got my voice back. Lying on Zach’s chest, I felt completely free.

  Chapter Twelve

  I woke up the next morning in paradise—against Zach’s chest—with his arm still tightly wrapped around me and a thin blanket shielding us from the cool Washington, DC, air. We had fallen asleep on the terrace sometime in the night when he was consoling me after my admission. I looked at the watch on his wrist, and it read 8:18 a.m. I kissed Zach softly on his neck and got up to use the bathroom.

  Afterward I went to Gabi’s room to check in on her. She was still sleeping peacefully, so I closed the door and headed back downstairs.

  Zach was in the kitchen with a spatula in one hand and a box of pancake and waffle mix in the other. He asked, “What do you want to go with your bacon, eggs, and oatmeal? Pancakes or waffles?”

  I kissed and hugged him tightly and replied, “Waffles.”

  “Waffles it is,” he said, smiling.

  “Can I help you with something?” I asked.

  “Measuring cups,” he answered. />
  I pointed in the direction of the measuring cups and asked, “Can I take your shirt so it doesn’t get dirty while you cook?”

  “Are you trying to get me out of my clothes, Ms. Winterfield?” he asked, walking over to me.

  “I just want your shirt, for now,” I replied and winked.

  I kissed him slowly as I unbuttoned his shirt from bottom to top. I ran my hands seductively along his strong shoulders and well-defined biceps as I pushed his shirt down and off his back. I removed his monogrammed cufflinks and kissed the insides of his wrists. He had a fitted white T-shirt underneath.

  I watched his muscles move as he cracked the eggs and mixed the batter. He looked absolutely marvelous moving about in my kitchen. I could no longer resist the urge to kiss and fondle him again. Walking behind him, I laid my head on his solid back and wrapped my arms around him. Slipping my hands under his T-shirt, I pressed against his stomach and chest while I kissed his back. His skin started heating up beneath my hands and lips, and I turned him to face me. I looked up at him, and he was all smiles and flirty eyes. We devoured each other’s tongues, and he moved his hands under my shirt. His hands felt so right on my back and ass. They were strong, confident, and comfortable.

  Gabi’s footsteps on the stairs heralded her arrival, and she stopped short when she saw me with Zach. My eyes got big, and my breathing ceased. Zach pulled me closer to him and whispered, “Breathe, Abigail.”

  He knew I wasn’t ready for the two of them to meet. I released an agitated sigh and hugged him even tighter.

  Looking at Gabi, I told her, “Zach is a friend of mine.”

  She looked Zach up and down. I swore she looked like her father sizing someone up. “Hi. It’s nice to meet you, sir,” she said after giving him the Goodman stare down.