by West, Jade
“Lucas?!”
I was down on my knees and reaching out, but she was so scared. It was only when my hand took hold of hers and pulled her closer that she broke and cried, and I was there. I was right there.
My voice was quiet, and my arms were holding her tight, and she was freezing. Freezing and trembling, with ragged breaths and tears.
I asked her what happened, calmer this time, but she wouldn’t answer, just shook her head.
I took off my coat and wrapped her up, and asked her to come with me, pulling her to her feet, but her legs were weak and she collapsed right back down onto the grass.
“Please just talk to me,” I begged, and I was straight back down beside her.
This time she sucked in a breath and tried to calm herself. Her hands were shaking as she held them out, and I thought she was reaching for me, but she wasn’t.
She let out a gut-lurching rumble of a scream and twisted the diamond ring from her finger, then threw it into the water with more rage than I’d ever seen in her.
“What the fucking hell did he do to you?” I asked her, and I knew it was bad.
I knew it was really fucking bad.
She shook her head all over again, then pulled my coat tighter around her, and it was something in the way she tugged her knees up to her chest and squeezed them closed so tight.
“Anna,” I said, and my voice was so soft and so low, “come with me, please. Let’s get you back in the warm.”
Her lip trembled and then she nodded. She breathed and nodded.
I took her hand and helped her to her feet a second time around, but this time I was ready. I took her weight and held her steady, and then I lifted her up from the floor.
Her arms wrapped around my neck, and she was holding so tight, and it was the most natural thing in the world as I carried her back to the truck and lowered her into the passenger seat.
“Do you need a doctor?” I asked her as I turned on the ignition, but she shook her head.
Then she managed to speak.
“No. I don’t need a doctor. Please just get me away from here.”
I didn’t ask her where. There was only one place we were going.
She didn’t respond to any questions as we drove the lanes and headed to mine, just kept her eyes on the road ahead and sucked in the breaths as her tears subsided.
My driveway was on us in what felt like seconds. I jumped out of my side and helped her out of hers, and she was steadier on her feet this time, pressing into my side as I led us to the front door.
It was warm inside. I got the lights in the kitchen and she pressed into the counter, and I could truly see her in this space. Hollow and scared and barely conscious – my beautiful little magpie with her barbed thorns torn to shreds.
Torn to shreds by him.
I had no doubt she’d been torn to shreds by him.
“What the hell did he do to you?” I asked her, but I already knew.
Something deep inside me already knew.
“He…”
She paused.
“He…”
“Say it,” I encouraged. “Tell me, Anna. I promise you can say it.”
“I was drinking prosecco and he didn’t like it… he didn’t like it… and we… we argued, and he.” Another pause. “And he…”
“Say it,” I told her. “Come on, sweetheart. You can say it.”
Her lip trembled, and I was right there all over again. I was on my knees with my hands on her thighs so steady.
“You can say it,” I said again. “I promise. You’re safe now, Anna.”
She looked away from me, staring into the darkness through the windows. And then she said it.
She fucking said it.
A breath. Barely audible. Lip still trembling through her words.
“He raped me.” Her face crumpled. “Oh my God, Lucas… he raped me… Sebastian raped me…”
Holy fuck, my gut twisted like a knife.
“I told him to stop… but he didn’t… I screamed for him to stop… but he didn’t… he wouldn’t stop…”
I pulled her down towards me, and she gave up the fight to stay standing. She buried herself in my arms and I held her so strong. I rocked, and she rocked with me, and she cried all over again.
“They said I should go back to him… they said he was my life… and I believed them. I wanted to believe them.”
I held her face to my chest, and my heart was pounding with rage, so angry and so fucking broken along with her.
I don’t know how long we were sitting there, but the first cracks of dawn were showing through the window when I eased us to our feet and grabbed her a juice from the fridge. Her fingers were still shaking as she took it from me, and she looked so awkward as she slipped a hand down between her thighs.
“It’s ok,” she said, and then she sighed. “I just thought I might have… I had a seizure at the fountain, and I thought I might have…”
My heart broke in two.
She’d been alone, in the cold, in the middle of the night, battling a brain that was failing her after a cunt had failed every fucking thing a fucking man should ever be.
And what if I hadn’t woken up? What if I hadn’t clicked on her details and found her there? It didn’t bear thinking about.
I lit up a cigarette and handed it over. She was grateful. She sucked in a decent drag and pressed herself back against the counter, and I lit up one for myself.
“Tell me what happened,” I said, and there was a new clarity in her eyes as they landed on mine.
It took her a long time to tell me what happened.
Her words were stuttered, and her breaths were hard, but she told me. Every little detail through her pain.
I had to fight back my own rage enough to stay calm, because I wanted to drive right back into fucking town and skin that disgusting cunt alive, but I stayed calm for Anna.
“I thought he loved me,” she said when she reached the end. “I always wanted to think he loved me. But he didn’t. He never did. He doesn’t know what love is. Not really.”
I kept quiet, because I wanted her to carry on. Freely, in the flow, and however she wanted to tell me whatever she needed to say.
Her face crumpled again as she found the next words, and I crumpled inside along with her. But still I kept my calm.
“Oh my God, Lucas…” she said, and held her stomach. “Oh my God, there was so much I never wanted to see… so much I never said… not to anyone… not even to me…”
I said it again.
I took a breath and I said it again, with my hands on her shoulders and my eyes fixed tight on hers.
“Tell me.”
She nodded, with my hands on her shoulders, and her eyes fixed tight on mine.
And then she told me it all.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Anna
Clarity comes like a butcher’s knife when you least expect it. It slices through everything. The hopes and the fears and the beliefs you take so much for granted as you live your life.
My hopes and my fears and my beliefs had been held very tightly by Sebastian Maitland for a very long time. I’d believed in him. I’d believed he believed in me.
I was wrong.
Lucas was such a support as he sat across from me and listened to my inner voice finally find faith in itself. He was close, and warm, and he listened harder to me than I’d listened to myself in years as my niggle of intuition spiked and pricked.
Sebastian was an evil prince in a beautiful mask. Too slick behind his smile.
Far too slick for anyone to ever see the true ugliness. Least of all me.
I’d been an easy rabbit to snare. A wide-eyed piece of potential roadkill waiting for the truck to hit when he’d found me lost and held out a hand to save me.
He’d started off so kind as he’d picked me up from the floor of my own fucked up dreams. His smile, his touch, his concern.
He’d been the saviour in my storm, and I’d thanked
my stars every single minute of every single day that he was in my life.
He’d ask me how my day was, and how I was feeling through the nights. He supported me through the seizures, and the scans and the epilepsy diagnosis.
He’d ask if I was warm enough for the wind outside, and what I’d been eating for lunch at work.
How much I’d slept and if I’d been staring at screens too much, or drinking too little, or whether I should really be watching the things on TV I wanted to be watching so close to bedtime.
Everyone loved him for it.
I loved him for it.
Everyone saw the beautiful mask on his face and nothing more – until his true self started to slip through the veil, but only to me.
It started in the tiny details, far too small to give them note. The pinpricks. So soft at first, you barely feel them.
Asking if you’re warm enough becomes an instruction to wear a warmer coat – and that instruction to wear a warmer coat becomes disapproval if you don’t wear exactly what he wants you to.
Him caring if you’ve eaten enough becomes an instruction to eat food that’s healthy for you –
and that instruction to eat food that’s healthy for you becomes him deciding your meals for you and making digs if you eat anything else.
And you listen.
Over time, you begin to listen.
Your croissant at the local cafe turns from a nice snack to a niggle of doubt that you should be eating it. So you don’t.
Wearing a tiny jacket in a colour you like becomes a niggle that it doesn’t wrap you up enough and keep you warm. So you wear a different one.
And then, even more slowly. Softly, softly, softly, those pinpricks turn a bit more painful.
Disapproval becomes outright criticism, and always behind closed doors where nobody is watching – but it doesn’t matter by then, because you’re already in so deep, you believe it.
You believe it because it’s disguised as caring, and you believe it because the whole world is smiling and singing their praises of the evil prince in his beautiful mask.
You believe it when they insist that you would be a broken mess without him.
You believe it because they believe it.
Because they care.
Because they love you so much.
Because you don’t know what you’re doing.
Because you’re so ill you can’t take care of yourself.
Ungrateful.
You’re ungrateful.
You’re pitiful.
You’re so lucky, Anna. What would you do without me?
Good job I love you, isn’t it?
I love you so much, Anna.
I love you even though you wet the bed at night. So disgusting, but I love you anyway.
You’re such a beautiful person, even though your brain is so fucked you can’t remember your own name.
Nobody else would love you like I do.
Nobody else would help you change the sheets like I do.
Nobody else would tell the world how amazing you are, and how much I love you like I do.
I don’t know when Sebastian turned from the man who’d stare at me with love in his eyes, into the man who controlled every scrap of everything I ever did.
I don’t know when I became the woman who believed everything he said and tried to live up to his instructions, and his demands, and his expectations. But I did.
Slowly, over time, I did.
I stopped working late, and stopped eating what I wanted, and stopped feeling like I could go to bed past midnight, or reading under lamplight, or watching horror movies with the lights off.
I stopped feeling like I was well enough to go places where I wasn’t holding his hand.
Yet still, it was all masked in caring and people loved him for it. Everyone loved him for it.
His lovely smile, and his hand holding mine so tight. Him helping me spoon the vegetables onto my plate at the dining table. The way he’d be so worried about my seizures, and what I was and wasn’t doing to prevent them.
Everyone told me how lucky I was to have him over and over and over and over again. A mantra that lasted a decade and was still bleating strong now.
I believed them.
I believed him.
I believed everyone but that tiny little voice inside me.
Me.
I believed everyone but me.
Because I wasn’t me anymore.
I was the ill person he wanted me to believe he was saving.
I was the person he’d attack with savage little verbal blades whenever I didn’t do what he wanted.
And he was the person who needed control. Always so much control.
But when I took it back…
When he couldn’t control me anymore…
I stopped for a pause as my revelations caught up with me.
“And nobody saw any of this?” Lucas asked. “Nobody saw him saying that shit, or forcing you to dance to his bullshit tune every day of the week? They just all thought he was some kind of perfect hero parading around like Jesus in a suit?”
I shrugged. “He was always so caring. Most of the time I believed it too. It was just late at night, or sly little digs, or in anything he could twist to make me feel like I wasn’t good enough. And I did feel like I wasn’t good enough.”
“You’ll always be good enough,” he said.
The tears came then, and my breath hitched as I struggled for the words as it all came crashing in. And those tears weren’t just about the vile savagery of the rape, or the way he’d abused me so hard on that one evening. It was about all of it. So much of the decade I’d spent at his side.
It was about the tiny ways he’d gripped me so tight with his caring that I’d choked on my own fear. It was in the way he’d wrapped me up so deep in paranoia that I didn’t know my own mind.
“But I thought he loved me,” I told Lucas. “I really thought he loved me. He was always so caring and kind that I always blamed his bullshit digs on myself. Always. I mean, I never even thought about it. He’d be vile after a few drinks sometimes, but even then it was always wrapped in a pretty bow of concern. Wanting the best for me. Seeing the worst in me. Wanting to change that.”
I saw Lucas’s jaw clench and I knew he was struggling to keep a lid on his rage.
“And what about helping you get better? With the seizures, I mean. How the fuck did he help you get better? Did he even want you to? I bet he fucking didn’t. Bastard piece of shit.”
I shrugged at that, because I didn’t know. Not anymore.
As the morning broke through the window and Lucas stared over at me, I didn’t know much about my life with Sebastian Maitland at all. It was all still tumbling, and I was still reeling.
I stared up at the ceiling and tried to pull myself back to my senses in the room, and then I finally registered where I was.
Oh crap, I registered where I was.
My eyes were fast to land on his.
“Shit, Lucas. Where’s Maya?! Surely I shouldn’t be here… she must be around… I mean, I should go… I don’t want to cause any–”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he said. “Why the hell would Maya be here? She never comes here.”
The confusion in my stare must have rivalled his. “Well, you’re back with her, right? The three of you? Hasn’t she moved back in here yet?”
He shook his head like my questions were the most absurd things he’d ever heard.
“I’d never be back with Maya. I’m doing what I can with Millie, jumping through her stupid fucking hoops to see my daughter, but I’m not back with her. I hate being in the same room as her, so there’s no way I could ever share a bed with her.”
I shook my head like his answers were the most absurd things I’d ever heard.
“But that’s why I walked away… I thought you’d go back to her and make it right again…”
He squeezed my hands in my lap, and his eyes were so raw.
&
nbsp; “Jesus Christ, Anna. I’d never have gone back to Maya. Even if I never saw you again in this whole fucking lifetime, I’d never go back to Maya. I couldn’t. We’d never be able to make it work.”
“But the family pictures…” I said. “Your mother showed me the family pictures… of the three of you all together… how happy you were…”
“How happy we wanted to be,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter what anyone pretends is picture perfect, not unless it’s fucking real.” He sighed. “It was never real for me, I just wanted it to be.”
“But what about Millie?” I pushed. “If you don’t get back with Maya like she wants you to, then how are you going to see Millie?”
He shrugged. “Fuck knows. But I can’t get back with her again or be anything else. I don’t love her, I never did. I should’ve accepted that years ago and been done with this bullshit.”
I let out the most insane little laugh. A bitter, sad little giggle as my brain churned over the carnage.
It was toxic. Painful. Blunt and savage.
It was poison.
But sometimes the antidote comes from the strangest places.
Maybe, just maybe, I was staring at mine.
I breathed out. “Damn, Lucas. It’s one serious pit of bullshit we’ve both managed to drop ourselves in. Two shitty sides of one shitty coin we’ve been trying to make work for a decade.”
“Two shitty sides of one shitty coin we’ve been trying to make work without each other, more like it.” He leaned in to rest his forehead against mine. “And I’m done with it. I’m sorry, but I’m done. I’m not spending the next decade without you, Anna. The world can get fucked.”
The pressure of his skin on mine was enough to give me butterflies under the pain.
Because I was done too.
I didn’t want another day without him. Not anymore.
“Don’t leave me,” I whispered. “Please, Lucas, don’t leave me again.”
“I won’t be leaving you for anything,” he said. “And I swear to you, Sebastian Maitland won’t be coming anywhere near you ever again, that’s a certainty. He’ll never fucking hurt you again.”
I took a deep breath, my forehead still on his, and then I gave up the fight.