by S. L. Naeole
His expression grew stern and disapproving as he held my chin captive between his fingers. “I’m going to say this one more time and it’ll be the last time I ever say it. I will never lie to you. Ever. I valued your trust long before Vonne told me anything, and I never plan on violating that trust. In the same vein, I want you to value my trust and never violate it.”
My heart fluttered at his words, at the promise that lay at their surface and the hint of more beneath them. My hand lifted to caress his cheek, the scruff of a day’s worth of growth scraping against my palm. “Why?” I asked, because I needed to know; what did I do to earn this man’s trust?
“Because from the moment I saw you I knew that no one valued trust as much as you do.”
I shook my head. “You figured that out from my bloody face and broken arm?”
“No. I figured that out from how everyone around you listened to you, valued your opinion, and sought your hard work and detailed eye.”
My breath caught in my throat, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth as a truth revealed itself in his words. “You…the day of the accident…that wasn’t the first time you saw me.”
Rocking his head back and forth he pressed my hand against his cheek, trapping it there before he shifted his face just slightly to kiss my palm. “No, sweetheart. I’ve seen you a lot over the years, hiding during the galas while still taking control where it’s needed, hunting down rich widows and convincing them that their inherited pieces need thousands of dollars’ worth of restoration, encouraging overstaffed set directors and costume designers to take on more employees so that your friends have steady work.”
“You spied on me?” I gasped with a jolt.
He kissed my palm once more, this time tracing a line going across my thumb, pulling out a groan from my lips as ribbons of heat flowed through my veins and traveled to my belly. “No. I didn’t spy. I observed. I observe everything about my museum.”
“Y-your museum?” His teeth nipped at the fleshy part of my palm, eliciting another throaty sound to slip from my lips.
“Yes, little one. My museum. I own the grounds that MOAT sits on and the actual buildings it occupies.”
A million thoughts dashed through my mind at his revelation, but the one that stood out the most, the one with blinking lights and neon arrows flashing in its direction was, “Does this mean you’re my boss?”
Laughter, rich and masculine, filled the car. “No. I’m not your boss, Victoria. I don’t run MOAT, I don’t sign the checks, and I don’t make any major decisions other than whom to hire regarding security, given that the property is mine to protect. I have access to every area, naturally, but that is only because, again, the property is mine.”
“And that’s why you were able to follow me into the catacombs,” I said with wonder, that final puzzle piece clicking into place.
Nodding, he lowered his mouth to mine and pressed gently. I felt the kiss down to my toes, even after he lifted his head to look earnestly into my eyes. “Yes. The look that you gave that day in the café, sweetheart…that look did something to me. I’ve been observing you for years and never, not once, did I ever see such fear and panic in your eyes. Honestly, I would’ve followed you to the ends of the earth to make sure that you were okay.”
A choking sound came out of me as my hands moved over his face and down his neck, my head shaking back and forth with confusion. “But why? Who am I to you that you’d feel so…so…concerned?”
“Sweetheart, don’t you know by now? I’m your biggest fan.”
I giggled, because there was nothing to be a fan about, and yet as he spoke and listed all of the pieces that I had worked on over the years, I realized that there was no lie in his words. He truly was my biggest fan. In truth, he was my only fan, and that only caused my heart to swell even more at the wonder of it.
“Michael—”
“Mal,” he corrected with a kiss on the tip of my nose.
“Mal,” I sighed, the taste of his name on my lips filling me with a sense of satisfaction I hadn’t known was possible. “Tonight…when I ran, I thought…”
He reached behind me and tugged at my hair tie, loosening my ponytail until it was out completely. Running his fingers through my hair, he pressed kisses along my hairline and sighed against my skin. “You thought that your friend had betrayed you and revealed your biggest secret.”
Nodding, I pulled away and looked at him, wishing I could see the colors in his eyes swirl and change with his turbulent emotions. “I wanted to tell you myself. I told you when you left last week that we would talk. I wanted to tell you…because I need you to understand when I pull away and I needed to know that you…that you wouldn’t—”
“Wouldn’t what, love?”
“Despise me,” I whispered.
“Tell me, Victoria. Tell me what happened. I won’t judge you. I won’t blame you. I’ll just listen. Trust me to just listen.”
My hands shook, my heart stuttered in my chest, and my eyes welled up with tears that turned the world blurry, but my mouth moved and the sound that came out was in the form of words that horrified him.
“I grew up in a nice neighborhood in Anaheim, California. I had a normal childhood with somewhat affectionate parents, and I had friends. Good friends. Sisters, really. I wasn’t a bad student, but I wasn’t stellar either. I was average in every way and that made it easy for me to blend in and disappear. After a while, I didn’t want to disappear anymore. I wanted to stand out. I wanted to be noticed. Senior prom came and I had somehow managed to get asked by the guy I’d had a crush on since my sophomore year. Franklyn McAvery. He was everything to me and I thought…I thought everything would be wonderful because my mother had finally decided to buy me a dress and my dad had even agreed to shoes.
“By that time my dad had been out of work for a while so this was a big expense. I had a part-time job but every cent I made went to my parents so if they said we had enough to buy a dress and shoes, well then we got a dress and shoes. My mother even let me wear her pearl necklace. I got ready at Kara and Lara’s house. Their dates arrived and waited for Franklyn to show up. They waited for an hour but when Franklyn still hadn’t arrived I told them to go without me.
“I walked home and cried in my room the rest of the night. The following weekend my parents were at the Breakfast Barn celebrating their twentieth anniversary when the gas line in the kitchen blew. Eight people died instantly. Six others suffered third-degree burns and later died at the hospital. My parents were part of the six.”
I heard Mal shudder with sadness, felt his hands move to rub comforting circles on my back, but he said nothing. He let me have ownership of the quiet, let me break the silence with words because he knew I needed to. A small part of me fell in love with him at that moment.
“Three weeks after my parents died I was busy packing everything because the house didn’t belong to my parents; they’d rented the place my whole life and I never knew. The landlord didn’t want me to stay past the last month’s rent so I had to leave. I was going to stay with Kara and Lara until graduation and then move up here to New York and stay with Vonne and study art and music and be absolutely bohemian like she was. That’s when Franklyn showed up with flowers and a picnic basket and this long speech about how he was an asshole for standing me up at prom.
“And because I was an idiot and still thought the moon rose and set with him, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. I went with him on that picnic, believing he was sorry, believing that he was sad that I was leaving and that he’d hurt my feelings. I don’t remember anything about the picnic, or if there even was a picnic. After I left my house, all I remember—”
I stopped, not because I couldn’t speak anymore, but because my hands were shaking so much that my entire body was vibrating. I grabbed Mal’s hands and pulled them around me, wrapping them around my body while I snuggled down against his chest, needing him to anchor me, settle me. I couldn’t believe that I was about to tell this man eve
rything while he held me, sheltered me against the tide of horror I was about to unleash.
“All I remember after that is the bright light hanging over my face, and the chains and the hands and the bodies.”
My voice was a whisper, and yet the sounds that came from me were like screams. I closed my eyes.
“Franklyn put something into my food or drink. He never admitted to that part, but I woke up in his basement. I woke up in his basement surrounded by the entire varsity soccer team. All of them were there, t-touching me. They’d chained me to a sofa bed so I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t fight back…”
The tension in Mal’s body was so hard, so sharp, I felt as if one twitch, one shudder would cause him to slice me in half, and yet he continued to caress me gently, tenderly. My tears were an endless stream of pain and regret as revulsion pulsed through my body and into his. His arms tightened only slightly as he took in every single quiver. I continued.
“I struggled a bit, but in the back of my head I kept hearing a voice telling me to just lay still, just lay there and they’ll get bored. They’ll let me go. Just pretend like it didn’t bother me and I’ll be free. That didn’t happen.
“By the second day, I’d been stripped of all my clothes and Franklyn had gotten some of the baseball team to pay him five bucks to come and jerk off on me and touch me...bite me. Not hard enough to leave marks, but hard enough to make me scream. I learned later that every guy at school knew about it. Five bucks got you a chance to grab my breast or t-touch me down there while getting off on my body. Ten bucks got you a hand-job that I was forced to give through threats. Sometimes Franklyn would throw the money on me and take photos after they’d...” My voice trailed off as I took a shuddering breath, hating the way my voice sounded so small, so weak. I’d spent literal years building myself back up after everything and now, with one partial confession, I was back to being that helpless girl chained up again.
Shaking my head to get rid of the self-deprecating thoughts, I continued. “He laughed at me and said that’s what I got for being a stuck-up whore. I didn’t know why he was so mad. I still don’t,” I sniffed, my lips trembling with every word. “On the third day he left me alone and I thought, this was my chance. I got the duct tape he’d put on my mouth off and started to scream. I screamed until my throat felt bloody. I knew if someone didn’t come, Franklyn was going to start charging more money for people to start raping me. I knew it because he’d said as much. I thought things couldn’t get worse before he told me what he had planned and when he did, I couldn’t take it anymore.
“So when someone finally came down those stairs into that basement I thought I’d been saved. I thought…I thought… But he wasn’t there to save me. He was Franklyn’s uncle, said the whole family was gone and that we’d have the whole house to ourselves. I started screaming again and he hit me. I don’t remember hitting him with my head. I don’t remember biting him. They said I did, they said I put up a good fight because one minute he was trying to…trying to rape me and the next he was dead on top of me.”
My eyes squeezed shut tightly, so tightly that it hurt, but I needed the darkness to keep speaking. I needed the darkness to not fall apart, to not allow the memory to trick me again like it always had. I didn’t need the small space in the Clam’s cab to turn into that couch. I didn’t need the touch of this wonderful man to turn into the harmful, hateful grip of Franklyn or the heavy press of his uncle. More than that, I didn’t want it to.
“They said he’d had a stroke, that his heart was bad or something. I really didn’t care how or why he died because he died on top of me and I couldn’t get him off. His body was so…big and heavy. I was lucky, they told me, that he hadn’t smothered me. But he was dead and I was alone and we were both naked. The light in the basement had never been turned off, not once, so I could see him on me. I could see him and not do anything about it.”
My body quaked as the memory of his weight pressing against me, the sinking cold that crept into me as his body chilled stole a few precious moments of my sanity. Michael’s warm hand pulled me out of the dark well I’d fallen into, the heated circles he’d never stopped making reminding me of where I was—when I was.
With a shake of my head, I continued. “Franklyn didn’t come home that night. He didn’t come home the following day or the next night either. F-four nights. I stayed under his uncle for four nights. I hadn’t eaten or drank anything. I had to…I had to relieve myself on that sofa bed. And Franklyn’s uncle’s body…”
I couldn’t finish the sentence as the nightmare of the decomposing process pulled scents out of the air I’d thought I’d long forgotten, each rotten note making my skin crawl while bile burned in my throat. I could still feel the way his dry, coarse skin turned soft and slimy after the rigidity of rigor mortis left him and decay set in. The fluids that seeped from him, the stickiness of the sheet beneath me stuck to my skin where it had dried, acting as another prison that trapped me in a fluorescent-lit hell where I saw everything.
Sucking in a breath, I focused my gaze on a speck of bird crap on my windshield as I gathered the strength to go on. “Finally a neighbor came by because they saw the light in the basement. By then I couldn’t scream anymore. I couldn’t speak anymore. I was catatonic. I was told I’d been trapped under Franklyn’s uncle’s body for seven days, and trapped in Franklyn’s basement for eleven. I was severely dehydrated, malnourished. Franklyn and his family had gone on vacation after graduation, which is why he didn’t come down to check on me. Why no one came.
“The police waited for a week before I was willing to talk and give my statement, and then it was just a storm of interviews and statements and media. Franklyn and eight other boys were charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, sodomy... Franklyn was charged with attempted murder because he’d knowingly left me alone chained up. He wasn’t even scheduled to return until the end of summer before he went off to some college in Texas. Some of the boys who’d come to the house testified that I was a willing participant, that I’d liked what they did to me and that I had gotten paid for it because I hadn’t told them no. The defense used the pictures Franklyn had taken of me with the money he threw on me as proof that I was just a disgruntled prostitute who was upset that the kink with his uncle went wrong.
“That’s how I was painted in the media; as some kind of sex-crazed teenage prostitute. It didn’t matter that no one who knew me could even remember me having a boyfriend let alone date anyone. I’d made myself invisible, remember, so anyone could say anything about me since there was nothing to contradict them. It didn’t matter that I’d been reported missing by both Kara and Lara’s parents, as well as Vonne, who’d traveled back to California to search for me. It didn’t matter that by the time they’d found me, I had been missing for almost two weeks and I’d lost ten pounds, most of my hair had either fallen out or been cut off when one of the boys Franklyn had brought over said it was his fetish, cutting off girls’ hair. It didn’t matter that Kara, Lara, Vonne, and Holly all testified that I would have never done anything that Franklyn’s lawyer accused me of.
“None of it mattered. My name was leaked to the press and I became known as the Huntington Whore. People I didn’t even know came out to say that they’d slept with me, that I’d been giving blowjobs to anyone with a dick for years to pay for my parents’ drug habit—my parents didn’t do drugs but that didn’t matter. I started receiving death threats and people would scream at me and call me a slut and a whore right in the middle of a restaurant or a store. Sometimes even the street. My name was plastered all over the internet with pictures of me naked, the money Franklyn made selling off places in his little circlejerks thrown all over my body attached to every single post.
“Evidence and testimony from some of the guys who’d taken immunity in exchange proved that I wasn’t lying, but in the court of public opinion, I was guilty of a crime worse than kidnapping or rape. I was a whore; that made me a justified target. It got to the point where
I couldn’t even go online to check the status of my college applications because ads on some of the sites contained pictures of me being used on porn sites and other places. It’s why I knew nothing about you. I don’t google. I don’t have a social media account. I don’t go online if I don’t absolutely have to. I check my email and that’s it. I refuse to go online and run the risk of seeing myself like that again.”
I stopped speaking for a while, needing time to breathe, time to focus. My head was starting to hurt, the crying having built up an intense pressure in my temples that felt as though at any second, one more tear would push me over the edge and my skull would explode. I pressed my forehead into Mal’s neck and sighed when he brought his chin down, securing my head and adding one more layer to his embrace, one more strand to the cocoon of reassurance and comfort he’d woven around me.
My hand lifted to rub against the bulge in his neck, my fingers floating gently over each arch and swell as he swallowed. I marveled at the fact that I could do this. More importantly, I marveled at the fact that I wanted to do this. I wanted to feel this man’s skin beneath mine. I wanted to feel his pulse beat beneath my fingers, so strong and so necessary. This knowledge, coupled with each renewing throb filled me with reassurance and encouragement.
“Franklyn, on the advice of his attorney, took a plea deal and so did the others. Franklyn pled guilty to kidnapping and to solicitation. They dropped the attempted murder charges and all but one sexual assault charge. The others pled guilty to solicitation and conspiracy to commit felony assault. Each got two years with ten-years probation but were released early due to overcrowding. In total, they spent less than four months in jail. They all had to register as sex offenders and they had to admit what they did in court, that Franklyn had kidnapped me and that he’d charged his friends money to jerk off on me and molest me, assault me.
“Their statements were printed in newspapers all over the state, many under the headlines that said they’d only plead guilty to solicitation. I was told by the prosecutors that the plea deal was the best we could have hoped for, and no matter where they went Franklyn and his friends would have to carry the label of sexual predator so that others knew what they did, what kind of people they were. I was told that because I hadn’t actually been raped, the effect of the charges simply wasn’t strong enough to convince a jury, given my supposed reputation, which was why I should be grateful that everything was settled.