by Adore Ian
His hands stop their perusal, his lips slow down. I open my eyes and see him taking in my room. Wonder crosses his face and he pulls back but not away.
My room is the one place in my apartment I do decorate. Framed all around are old movie posters, three wall hooks hold years of pink satin pointe shoes. There’s a picture of Alice and me on the dresser next to a vintage perfume bottle and an old film camera. A bright, multi-colored bedspread sits like a cloud atop the bed, beneath a small mountain of pillows with clashing, uncoordinated prints.
Damian steps toward the dresser and I take the opportunity to close the door. The lock clicks as I turn it into place, but it’s the sound of the chain sliding that pulls Damian from his survey of my room.
His eyes go straight to the chain then the deadbolt. A grim sort of comprehension crosses his face and his eyes find mine. His expression is calm, aware. We both know what’s coming. It’s not a conversation I want to have, but it’s one he deserves to hear.
It’s now or never.
My heart gallops in my chest as I grip the hem of my shirt and pull it off.
I know Damian’s looking at me but I can’t look at him. Not as I reach behind me to unhook my bra.
Maybe the sight of my breasts will distract him from the sight of my scars.
Black straps slide down my arms, satin whispers as it hits the floor.
I unbutton my jeans.
I pull down the zipper.
I grip the two pieces of fabric, holding them together. My hands shake.
It’s okay to be vulnerable.
I close my eyes, inhaling deeply through my nose and exhaling slowly through my lips. Part of me wants to vomit and I know if I focus on that part, I will vomit. I inhale and exhale again. The third time I exhale, I do so while pushing my pants down.
Strong hands hold my wrists. “Let me.”
My eyes open right into Damian’s. Warm breath fans my face. Gently he pulls my hands away, guiding them to my sides—where he leaves them to slide his own lovingly up my arms to my shoulders. His lips brush mine.
His kiss is soft, delicate. Quiet in the ways of midnight whispers and shared sorrow. It’s paper-thin but strong as steel. A kiss to calm, to reassure.
He does the same to the corner of my mouth,
the curve of my jaw,
the column of my neck,
hollow of my throat,
the valley between my breasts.
His lips move down my body. There’s a reverence to his touch as his hands slide down my sides to my hips. His thumbs hook in my jeans, my heart skips, he guides them down, slow and attentive. They scrape my thighs my calves, then I’m stepping out of them.
“Look at me,” he says, hot breath caressing the skin just below my belly button.
I open my eyes. He’s kneeling before me, adoration in his eyes. A slip of red silk is all that’s between his eyes and me, but I’m already bare.
The panties sit too low on my hips.
His lips find my skin and he presses kisses beneath my belly button. Once, twice—
The first scar is numb—they all are. I feel only where his lips touch the skin around them, the rest is a dull, tingling awareness that’s uncomfortable if I think about it too long.
“Beautiful,” he whispers. He kisses the second scar and then the third.
An ache starts in the back of my throat, a wisp of moisture circles my eyes, my jaw trembles. Damian looks up at me and I have to close my eyes because what I see in his…
He stands and scoops me into his arms then lays me on the bed. I open my eyes when the covers come over me. He strips to his briefs then turns off the light. Bare, muscular flesh caresses my body as he slides in beside me. My breasts compress against his chest as he pulls me to him. He hooks a hand beneath my knee and pulls it over his waist. His warmth seeps into me like summer sun.
“Tell me,” he whispers into the darkness.
22
Damian
“Let me.”
Marrin’s eyes open, she looks like a doe in a clearing. I know she’s about to show me her scars. She doesn’t know I’ve seen them and right now that’s not the point. The point is she wants to show them to me. Even though it terrifies her.
I guide her arms to her sides and kiss my way down her body. I will my love into every touch, every caress. I worship her like a sinner after salvation.
I remove her pants, she stills. I look up to see her eyes wrinkled shut. I stroke her hips. “Look at me.”
She does, and again I’m reminded of a scared animal. Only this time she isn’t a doe, she’s a wounded bird looking up from inside a shoe box. She’s trusting me to care for her, trusting I won’t hurt her.
And I won’t. I wouldn’t.
I resume my path of kisses. The third lands on the first scar. A part of me aches for her. For the trauma and memories she carries along with the scars. I know her mother stabbed her. It’s not hard to guess.
“Beautiful,” I declare before kissing the next two scars.
When I look up at her, it’s with more love and understanding than I’ve ever shown her.
Relief and gratitude transform her face and she closes her eyes. It breaks my heart to think she worries people won’t accept her after they learn the truth. Makes me sick to think she’d thought I would be one of those people. But I get it. Because I’ve been there.
Sometimes horrible things happen. And while some of the people they happen to can move on and thrive, other people cannot. When I told my parents I’d been abused, the look on my dad’s face…
It was as if he didn’t know who I was. As if when he looked at me, he only saw a victim, not a person. A failing, not a blessing. I wasn’t his child anymore, I was the sum total of a collection of someone else’s horrible actions. Only worse because he looked at me as if it was somehow my fault. I was a blemish on his perfect reputation. He wasn’t worried about me, he was worried about himself. Worried what people would think about him if they knew about me.
It’s a look that’s burned into my brain. A look that drove me to feel ashamed and guilty for years. It was the look I didn’t see two years later when I drunkenly confessed to Vicky’s parents what’d happened to me. It was the first thing I spoke about when I sat down in a therapist's office after Vicky’s parents made me go.
Something horrible happened to Marrin and I would never, ever judge her for that or see her differently.
I pick her up and tuck her into bed next to me. Her skin is soft and warm in all the places mine is not. She molds to me like a key does a lock. She was made for me, this woman—Marrin.
“Tell me.”
She takes a deep breath. “For a long time, my mother has had boyfriends and a drinking problem.”
She tells me she grew up alongside Alice and that her childhood was mostly happy. But as she got older, her mother started drinking more and bringing home her boyfriends. She tells me about a man who came to pick her up from dance class one day and how Alice got custody of her soon after.
She jumps to Thanksgiving two years ago, telling me her mom had reached out wanting to see her and how she’d hoped her mom had changed.
While her mom and her new boyfriend were at work, Marrin started making dinner but stopped to shower before anyone got home. She tells me she’d brought clothes with her into the bathroom because she didn’t want to walk around a house she didn’t live in half naked and because her mom’s boyfriend gave her the creeps.
“I got out of the shower and dressed in my pajamas, closing my robe over top. It was one of those big, fluffy, knee-length ones. When I left the bathroom, I was fully clothed—I swear.”
“I believe you.” I have a sick feeling I know where this is going. “I wouldn’t care if you weren’t.”
“But I was.”
“I know, baby. I believe you.”
Her voice is quieter, shakier. “Halfway to my bedroom, Frank grabbed me from behind and, like,” she swallows audibly, “pressed himself agains
t me. He was home early and, like, started saying all this weird, fucked-up shit about how me wearing shorts meant I was coming onto him.”
She pulls away, needing space. It’s dark, but I can make out her silhouette as she sits against the headboard, knees to her bare chest.
I grab my T-shirt off the floor and hand it to her.
She mumbles, “Thanks,” and tugs it on. “When I realized he wasn’t going to stop, I got serious about fighting him. Not that I wasn’t serious before. I’d made it explicitly clear I wanted nothing to do with him from the beginning—I swear.”
“I believe you.” Dread buzzes through my body like the hum of neon lights, building slowly with each word she speaks.
“I managed to get all the way to the living room before he tackled me. There was a lot of screaming and fighting and he, um…” Another audible swallow.
The buzzing in my body turns up and my fists clench, jaw grinds, every muscle contracting to the point of pain as I brace for what I think she’s going to say next.
“My mom walked in right as he was pulling at my bottoms.”
Her bottoms, not her shorts, not just her shorts.
A savage kind of fury erupts into me because I’ve been there. I know what that feels like—know the rage and humiliation and fear when someone overpowers you like that. I hope this fucker’s in prison or dead because I am going to end him.
Stop, you fucking Neanderthal. Anger is only going to make this worse for her.
“I was so relieved to see her,” Marrin continues. “Frank backed off immediately and my mom started yelling. I remember running to her because I wanted, like,” her voice cracks, “a hug or something, I don’t know. I remember not understanding why she was looking at me and yelling and not at Frank. And then I realized she wasn’t yelling at Frank, she was yelling at me. Calling me names and accusing me of trying to steal her boyfriend. Frank just egged her on.”
She sniffles and I can make out just enough in the moonlight to see her wipe her eyes. I scoot closer and wrap an arm around her. She leans into me.
“Then out of nowhere there was a knife in her hand and she was coming toward me and I didn’t know what to do or think. She was my mother, her boyfriend attacked me. The whole thing wasn’t registering in my brain, and then she grabbed my hair and I was on the ground and she brought the knife down. I was screaming and fighting and begging my almost rapist for help, and he just stood there like a fucking idiot.”
I press my cheek into the top of her head.
“Then Jake charged in and got her off me. She ran off with Frank and Jake called 9-1-1. A policeman, Officer Lawson, was close by and showed up almost immediately. He had a medical kit and together with Jake, they packed the wounds and saved my life. I remember Jake holding my hand and telling me it was going to be okay. I made him promise not to leave me and he didn’t. He rode with me in the ambulance.”
“That’s why you put up with him.”
She nods. “No matter what he does, I know deep down he’s still the guy who threw a chair at a window so I could go to the bathroom and change my tampon. It sounds so stupid—”
“It’s not stupid at all.”
“I know it all happened fast, but Jake was the only one who came to help me. Where I used to live, people screaming and yelling isn’t out of the ordinary. But there’s a difference—you know?—between someone screaming out of anger and someone screaming because something is wrong.”
I nod.
“That’s the night Jake and Vicky met. Why he remembers her. He grabbed my phone before we left the house but couldn’t unlock it. I didn’t have a wallet on me or anything, so he had no way of getting in touch with Alice. Vicky happened to call and he answered and told her what happened. Her family was having Thanksgiving at a relative’s house about an hour away, so she and her mom drove to the hospital. Vicky unlocked my phone and called Alice, which is how they met.”
“Not in your dorm?”
She shakes her head. “Alice and Gavin drove back that night. Vicky and her mom stayed at the hospital until they got there. Alice did go to my dorm to get my things when I had to withdraw from classes, but the story Vicky tells about how they met isn’t what actually happened.”
“I’m so sorry this happened to you.” She nods and we settle back under the covers. “What happened next?”
“I had two surgeries, one that night and one early the next morning. One of the stab wounds punctured my uterus—hard to accomplish being that it’s about the size of a lime and tucked behind the pubic bone. Vicky’s mom, who I guess you know is an OB-GYN, was adamant about having a surgical specialist friend of hers take a look at me. The lady works at one of the university hospitals and came right over. I guess she decided they needed to go back in and make sure some stuff was done a specific way or something. I don’t know, I was out of it. I remember waking up the next day and asking Alice why the walls were moving, I was so high on pain meds.”
“Been there,” I say. “Had my wisdom teeth surgically removed senior year. Woke up and thought I was in a lava lamp.”
“Same. It was trippy… The cops arrested my mom and Frank. Turns out my mom was high on some new synthetic drug. She got seven years in prison and Frank went to jail for, like, a month.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I know. But violence against women is institutionalized. What’re you gonna do…”
“Is Frank your stalker?” It’s out of my mouth before I can stop it.
“Yes. He’s not a stalker like in the movies. He doesn’t have a collage of my face on his wall or try to sneak into my apartment to watch me sleep or anything. He just likes to let me know when he’s around. It’s like a scare tactic or something.”
“That’s stalking.”
“I know. It’s just more on the Asshole side of the spectrum than the Psycho side I guess. I’m not trying to make excuses, I just don’t want you thinking he’s planning to kidnap me or something. He’s pissed I put my mom in prison and took away his meal ticket.”
I tilt her chin to me. “You didn’t put anyone in prison. She did that to herself.” I kiss her forehead. “I’m sorry that happened to you. I can’t imagine how hard it must’ve been. It took an incredible amount of courage to tell me.”
“Thanks. It was pretty horrible. When I came back the following semester, I was still having trouble maneuvering stairs, and I wasn’t allowed to lift anything heavy. Alice assigned Conor to be my bodyguard slash nanny. He carried my books and helped me get around campus while also keeping an eye out for Frank. I’m fine now, so I can’t complain.”
“Were there any… complications?”
“Not physically, no. Well, unless you count not being able to poop for a week.”
I laugh. “Surgery will do that to a person.”
“There’s a chance I could have a hard time getting pregnant from adhesions and stuff, but I’ve honestly never wanted kids so…” She shrugs. “There are surgeries to fix that, but so far so good.” She shifts onto her back, quiet for a moment. “Remember when you asked if the rumor about me putting someone in the hospital was true?”
I nod.
“Fall of sophomore year, I went to a party with Vicky. It was the first big social thing I’d done since everything happened. Conor had stopped playing bodyguard by then and I was anxious about being out at night and in a crowd… We started dancing and this guy came up behind me and put his hands on my hips. I totally freaked out. It felt like I was suddenly back in that hallway with Frank. The guy’s hand grazed my scars and that was it. I panicked and kicked him in the balls. He passed out from the pain and spent the night in the emergency room with a severely swollen testicle.”
I cringe, imagining the pain. “Ouch.”
“I still feel bad about it.” She turns back into me. “The school disciplinary committee got involved. Luckily, they were sympathetic and only sentenced me to mandatory therapy. Turns out it was exactly what I needed. I still go from time to time. It help
ed a lot. I was more affected by what happened than I’d thought.”
“Therapy is funny like that.”
“Did you go after…?”
“Yeah. It was a few years later in high school and only because I showed up drunk at Vicky’s house in the middle of the night. I think I did it because I wanted someone to help me and didn’t know how to ask. Her parents had always been kind to me. I think her mom always suspected but wanted to let me come to her. But, yeah, they sat me down, asked what was wrong, and I lost it. Ugly crying—all of it. I spent the night on their couch and the next day they made me an appointment with a therapist. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. That and martial arts. Vicky’s dad enrolled me in classes. It helped me channel my anger and build my confidence.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Vicky’s parents kind of adopted me. I owe them a lot.”
“That’s why you said you didn’t know if you wanted to be intimate with other people, wasn’t it?”
I nod. “I had a hard time being intimate with myself for a while. All the feelings and memories it brought back. Sometimes it was fine, but other times… The thought of someone else seeing me that way was enough to make me never want to try. It was like a miniboss in a game—a big ugly monster that suddenly appeared in the middle of a level and wouldn’t let me pass. So I avoided it, resigned myself to never moving forward. But with therapy, I was able to face it. Knew that I could. It wasn’t a battle I always won, but eventually, defeating it became second nature until it wasn’t a problem anymore. Well, until that night you and I came together after Back Cellar.”
When we didn’t use a condom and I almost had an anxiety attack.
“What happened that night?” Mar asks quietly.
“Old insecurities,” I say honestly. “One of the reasons I always use a condom is because a part of me thinks no one could ever want me like that if they knew what happened to me. That night, I knew I was in love with you and that you’d trusted me to share something no one ever had before. I felt like I didn’t deserve it because I hadn’t been entirely honest with you.”