Cassie

by deMora, MariaLisa

  “Then do it. I’m here, Cassie.” His promise to her, no matter how it killed him to keep it.

  “I heard it all.” She nestled against him again, pulling her chin back down to hide her eyes. He allowed the distance, willing to give her whatever she needed to get through the next few minutes. “Every whisper in the hallways. Every laugh from behind a closed dorm room door. They speculated on so many variables, trying to convince themselves I’d deserved it. That it was my fault somehow. Maybe my skirt was too short. Maybe I flirted too hard. What if I was drunk or on drugs.” She paused, and he cradled the back of her head, holding her in place. “Maybe I asked for it. Took a walk on the wild side and then had buyer’s remorse, crying wolf.” Her palm flattened over his heart. “I wasn’t any of those things, but they didn’t care. They only cared about how they could twist the story.

  “When they were done with me, I couldn’t move for the longest time.” He knew she was talking about the rapists now, not the students, because her heart had started to thunder in her chest again, beating solidly against his ribs where she lay. “I made it to the campus clinic.” Her barked laughter held no humor, only pain. “I scared the receptionist. Coming in bleeding and crying, looking over my shoulder every step. They’d cut my clothes for access, and hadn’t been careful. There were ribbons of blood on my arms, my legs. I remember seeing a bloody sneaker print on the floor. I still had my shoes on, you know? It seemed surreal that they could have gotten to the most intimate parts of me, but I still had my shoes on.” Cassie’s voice sunk to a whisper. “The campus officers showed up halfway through the exam. They stood right outside the canvas curtain, joking and laughing. It was like I had no privacy, even in this super vulnerable moment, you know? These men who were sworn to protect the students knew what had happened, what the doctor had told them, and they still were just crude about it. The nurse who was doing the rape kit apologized for them. Surreal.”

  “They were glorified security guards. Why didn’t the clinic call the cops? Fuckers should have had their asses handed to them.” Hoss felt Cassie’s lips touch his chest. “That shit ain’t right, babe.”

  “No, it’s not, but they didn’t have any kind of training for what happened to me.”

  “Doesn’t excuse them being idiots. Even if they didn’t realize how damaging that kind of callous behavior could be. Assholes.” He flexed his arms, giving her a squeeze. “I’m so sorry, honey.”

  “It was a long time ago, Hoss.”

  “Doesn’t make it less painful for you. I don’t want that for you, Cassie.” He kissed the top of her head. “Only good things from here on out, promise.”

  “You can’t promise that.”

  “Just did.”

  They lay there silently for a moment, then she picked up the thread of her story. “They did quieten down eventually. It hurt, what the nurse and doctor had to do for the exam. When I started crying, they got quiet.”

  “Shouldn’t have taken your pain to remind them to be human.”

  “Hush. I’m okay.” Hoss held his words. Telling Cassie she was far from okay wasn’t the way to keep her confiding in him. “The doctor was just as bad, you know. He wasn’t kind, wasn’t careful. He talked to me about a morning after pill, but that information came with a large dose of how he personally felt it was murder, which was worse than rape.” Jesus. Layer after layer of shit on a little girl, barely grown. “Told me what STDs they were testing for, and what treatments would be available if anything came back positive. They didn’t in the end, but he was so loud, I imagined everyone in the building heard him telling me about HIV and herpes.”

  “He’s an asshole, too.” She snorted, and he heard a tiny thread of amusement in there. “Fucker.”

  “The nurse gave me a set of spare scrubs when they were done. She collected my clothes, not that there was much left of them, and told me she’d hold them for the police.” Cassie shook her head. “I told her I didn’t know what to do. That I didn’t want anyone to know. She said to report it, said she would because she didn’t trust the security guards to do it right, but it would take me talking to the real cops.” She paused, and he pressed another kiss to the top of her head, giving her another squeeze. “So much for not wanting anyone to know. I got back to the dorm to find out bad news travels fast. Everyone I talked to had a tone and I just knew they knew. All the things those men had done to my body, and everyone knew.”

  “God, baby.” Brute’s goddaughter had suffered similarly after she’d been attacked at a school out west. She’d left campus and driven nonstop to Fort Wayne. Brute had told Hoss how Natty had imagined her attackers behind the wheel of every car on the road. “Like you couldn’t get away from it, huh?”

  “Yes. With everything that happened, emotionally I was a wreck. I’d wake up and look in the mirror and see a different me every day. Sad me. Angry me. Depressed me. Frightened me. I’d wake from dreams and imagine I still smelt them on my skin. Lock myself in the bathroom and try to get clean.” Her voice shook and his chest was wet. God. “There just wasn’t an end in sight.”

  “Did you get nervous before?” The women Hoss knew who had suffered similarly all shared some traits with Cassie, but none had the same crippling anxiety.

  “Some. Normal kid stuff about boys or tests. After the attack, it took on a personality of its own. Blew up from being controllable to impossible to manage.” She sighed. “I started looking for something I could control. If I couldn’t control my own mind, then I’d find something else.”

  “You looked for something to beat it back.” He understood the tactic. “Find success in something you could control and it would give you the confidence to tackle something else. Something bigger.”

  “Yeah. That worked.” A pause and Hoss tensed, waiting. “That worked for a while. Then I missed my period.”

  “Oh my God.” He rolled, careful to not put weight on her. As fragile as she had to be right now, the last thing he wanted to do was set off another panic attack. “Baby. One of them?”

  “Uh-huh.” Cassie rolled her lips between her teeth, biting them bloodless as she struggled to keep her chin from quivering. “I couldn’t get away from what happened. Everything felt like a nightmare at that point. I hadn’t told my parents what happened, but obviously, that had to change.”

  “Had to change? Why?” He stroked her cheek with the backs of his fingers as he kept his gaze locked to hers.

  “Well, the rape crisis center offered options, but there was only one decision for me. No question in my mind.” She blinked wetness away, and he swiped the escaped tear from her temple, fingers cradling the back of her skull. “My graduation pictures weren’t what you’d expect. I finished school seven months pregnant, and by that point, I didn’t care who talked trash about me. The baby was the single redeeming factor in what happened.”

  “You kept it. The baby.” His throat tightened around the word, because there was no child living in her home.

  “Yeah.” She smiled, sadness radiating out from her expression. “I wanted it. Him. It was a boy. I didn’t set out to be a single mom, but I would have rocked that.” A fierceness suffused her features and she glared at him. “I would have rocked it. I would have done anything for him. I sang to him, told him stories, and promised him he would be born in love. Maybe not made from it, but I loved him.” She reached between them and cupped her belly, fingers trailing the scar tissue that bisected the flesh. “I loved him.”

  “I can see you do.” Keep it present, like my love for Hope. Just because someone was gone didn’t mean a person’s love died too. It stayed with them and changed them in good ways or bad. It all depended on the individual and how they chose to live with the loss.

  She leaned into him, burying her face against his chest. Muffled, her voice was still audible as she said, “He died. Inside me. He stopped moving, and I got scared so I went to the doctor. We went from normal soccer practice against my bladder to this utter stillness that terrified me. I still have
pictures of him, this 3-D thing they did. Ten tiny fingers, and ten tiny toes. He was perfect, Hoss.”

  “How far along were you?” If she’d been seven months pregnant when she graduated, then the baby had to have been fairly mature. “Were you near term?”

  “Thirty-eight weeks.” Two weeks before her due date. Jesus. “They couldn’t tell me why. One nurse told me it was God’s will.” Cassie was weeping openly now, sobbing against him. “Like that made it any better.”

  He’d heard the same platitudes after Hope died. Nothing helped, and being told that some anonymous supreme being decided they wanted a loved one more than the survivors needed them had only fostered anger. “No, it doesn’t help the pain.” The scar. “What happened next?”

  “The doctor’s office was connected to the hospital. Next thing I knew I was flat of my back on a gurney, belly rising like it always did those days. I couldn’t see my feet.” He remembered Hope’s pregnancy, and her feigned irritation at how round her belly had been, how it had gotten in the way of so many things. “There were lights and announcements. Nurses running around like crazy. Everything echoed until I couldn’t hear myself think. I couldn’t wrap myself around the idea that my son was dead, and they were telling me he needed to be born. ‘But he’s dead.’ I remember telling one doctor that and he shushed everyone and got close. ‘Cassandra, he is dead. There’s nothing I can do for him. My only concern at this moment is you, and we have to get him out from inside you.’ To me being born was this glorious idea of life and living, and beauty, and here they were telling me it was an unfortunate necessity.” Cassie lay quiet for a moment, shoulders shaking and he felt the force of her grip on his arm, tight fingers leaving bruises behind. He’d take them, take anything from her if it gave her a chance to move past this pain.

  “You were having a panic attack, weren’t you?”

  She nodded. “Everything echoed and boomed, and all I could hear were fragments of all these conversations. It was as if the doctors were talking about someone else. They needed to know what I wanted to do. How I wanted to do it. I couldn’t find enough of myself to tell them anything.”

  “What did they…how did they care for you?” If he made it about her, maybe he could soften the blow.

  “I just wanted to go home. Go home and crawl under my covers and stay there. But he, the doctor, kept after me. There were procedures and processes, things he told me that didn’t make sense. I felt so bewildered by the medical terms. Hoss, I was so scared.”

  “Were you alone through all of this?” Where the hell were her friends, her family?

  “My OB’s nurse had called my mom when they did the ultrasound. My folks lived about four hours away. By the time they got to the hospital, I was already hooked up to an IV. Induced labor. I remember looking up at one point, and my mom’s fingers were wrapped around the IV pole, like she was trying to hold it back. It took forever.” She sniffed, fingers wiping at her nose. Hoss shifted and pulled a bandanna from his back pocket and pressed it into her hands, smiling slightly at her murmured thanks. “Hours and hours. Then something went wrong and suddenly they had to do surgery.”

  “The C-section scar.” This time it was his hand that drifted to her belly. He touched her protectively, as if he could stop whatever was coming.

  “They took me to an operating room. I felt awkward moving from gurney to the table, all the tubes and things were in the way, and they were in such a hurry. There were boards for my arms, and the fastenings made this noise. Like ripping as they were tightened, then tightened again. I couldn’t move. There were nurses everywhere and this guy who kept leaning over me real close, telling me I’d be asleep soon. He told me to count backwards from one hundred.” Cassie shivered and burrowed closer. “At fifty-eight, I was still counting.”

  “What happened?”

  “The anesthesia didn’t work right. My heart was racing and I couldn’t stop shaking. One of the nurses held a mask over my face and it felt like I was suffocating. I know I wasn’t, but that’s what it felt like. Tied down, I couldn’t fight back. Then they made the first incision.”

  “Fuck, baby. You were awake?”

  “Yeah. Only for a minute, I guess. They were shouting, and I screamed and the doctor yelled at the anesthesiologist. It burned like ice, then scorched like fire. That’s all I remember.”

  “Jesus, Cassie. That’s enough for a lifetime.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  She’d recounted seeing her son four hours later when she awoke, had held his lax body for barely an hour before her mother urged the hospital staff to take him away. Wrapped in a donated blanket, his coffin had been scarcely the size of a breadbox, small and final. Stillborn.

  Hoss well remembered the wealth of amazing emotions that had filled him when he’d held Faith for the first time. Seeing her only moments after her birth, warm and squirming, her tiny body dangerously slick. He remembered how she’d loudly protested the cold, bright chaos of the delivery room after being carried in careful sanctuary for so many months. His daughter had cried and squawked until the doc placed her on Hope’s chest, skin to skin. Those cries trailing slowly to silence as her little face burrowed close, hands relaxing at the stroking touch of her mother’s hands, safe within the sound of her mother’s beating heart. The murmurs of Hope’s awed voice mixing with his as they lovingly cataloged their daughter’s charms. His and Hope’s Faith. Healthy and precious, and a miracle he cherished to this day.

  Hoss couldn’t imagine her any other way. He couldn’t even bear to think about her born silent and still, scooped lifeless out of a belly, no thin shrill, then stronger-still demanding cries voiced in the room, or ever. No sunny chatter through his house, phone and vid bills running up, laughter ringing bright and true. I was right about Cassie. His arms tightened reflexively. Bravest woman I’ve ever met.

  Ever since the unthinkable happened to her, Cassie had been fighting demons. Fears assailed her everywhere, people and places pulling unmetered responses from her. Then there was the sheer terror of the panic, which had proven as much a deterrent against reentry into the world as the actual attacks. She was determined not to be stifled, though, always looking for ways to expand her world, push back the horizons that seemed to be shrinking in on her every hour.

  His art had become one sure way for her. Cassie had found the emotion in the pieces enough of a draw to bring her out to shows. Each moment of the night carefully orchestrated, but managed. Hockey another, finding what she could stand and maneuver her experiences into that space. Use of tools and rituals her measuring stick of success. Now the bike, a thing she could control, something to master. Her own competence finally winning out, bringing her into the world in a way so unique it beat back the terror.

  Fuck.

  He had triggered her twice in this bed without knowing it.

  The first when he lost her eyes, when she couldn’t see his face—when she could no longer see him—she’d felt the rapists’ hands on her, experienced again the paralyzing fear when all she could see were the stocking-distorted faces, noses smashed flat and upturned, porcine in appearance, their obscene tongues waggling through strategic slits, nothing to make them human.

  The second was when he rolled her, leaning in for a kiss. His weight morphing into a restraint in her mind, his mouth the operating room mask that mixed with the pain in her memories to turn it into a terrifying thing.

  Two things I can easily avoid, he thought, stroking her hair slowly.

  My gorgeous girl. So fucking brave.

  Show me

  Cassie

  The next time she woke it felt more in line with her normal routine. Heart jackhammering in her chest, she knifed upright and swung her legs to dangle off the edge of the bed. She sat there for a moment, elbows to knees as she pushed her hair back from her face, nightmare-triggered sweat chilling on her skin. Eyes to the floor, her gaze traced the tangle of clothing lying there, and she blinked in surprise. What?

  There were a pair
of boots on her floor, one upright, a sock draped over an edge, and one on its side, the companion sock nowhere in sight. A man’s boots.

  Hoss. She recalled everything, memories washing over her in a rush. Her eyes sank closed as her chest hitched. I told him…everything.

  Boots meant one of two things. Either she had freaked out so badly he had run from the house barefoot, uncaring of the gravel paths, or he was still here, in her house. Last night had been so confusing. First had been riding behind Hoss for the first time, something she’d enjoyed more than expected. The positioning on the seat a necessary intimacy, she’d taken advantage of, wrapping her arms tightly around him. Then dinner with his friends, and she’d only realized after the fact how much care had been put into the plans. Hoss had worked hard to create a safe space for her, and Cassie couldn’t remember the last time someone had done such a sweet thing.

  They’d been back home when Hoss had held out his arms and she’d stepped into them. Just moved to him, into his arms as if she belonged there always. She’d felt so secure, even telling herself it was an unspoken promise when they tightened around her.

  That promise had been immediately tested last night when she had not one but two freak-outs on the man. Then I had to go and tell him the entire sordid story. Cassie blinked fast, driving tears from her eyes. Promise tested and broken, just like me. Her eyes rolled almost of their own volition, then closed, holding back the sight of yet another failure. Poor little Cassie, did the bad men hurt you? She shook her head, ruthlessly shoving down the pain of Hoss leaving. Suck it up, buttercup. Shit happens.

  Going to sleep next to him was nice. She snorted a laugh, because his absence proved it’d been a mistake. And the safety she’d felt in his arms would never again be experienced. Time to pick another door. She listened intently to the quiet permeating the house, then snorted again. Definitely a runner. With a sigh, she eyed the abandoned boots. A barefoot runner. Fingers folding into her palms, she fisted her hands, straining until the muscles in her arms shook. I’ll mail his property back to him. Then she straightened and with eyes still closed, began her morning ritual. As always, as ever—alone.