He didn’t say anything at first, when he did it surprised me. “Nothing you tell me can change what I see when I look at you, Raelynn. I need to know. There shouldn’t be anything between us.”
Before today, I’d been afraid of that very thing. “It’s not that, not now. I just…promise me you won’t do anything stupid.”
“You’re here with me now.” He slid the hat back on and rubbed circles on the small of my back. It was the closest thing to a promise I was going to get.
“Don’t feel guilty because of some stupid shit I got myself into. I survived. I’m a stronger, smarter version of who I was before everything changed.” I leaned against the fence as the sun began to disappear. “I don’t hate myself anymore. I’m remembering all the good things in my life. You’ve helped me with that.” The more time I spent with Jordan, the less Caleb lurked in every shadowy corner, the less I heard his voice tearing me down. With Jordan in my life, Caleb ceased to exist.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to see him in my mind, to remember what he’d done to me. Instinctively, I reached for my throat. My fingertips tracing the ghost of healed bruises. Jordan didn’t miss it, instead he turned and took both my hands into his much larger ones.
The question in his eyes proved I wasn’t over as much of it as I thought I was.
“I…I—” I shook my head and closed my eyes.
“Tell me,” he whispered as he pulled me against
that large expanse of chest. I nuzzled him and breathed in the scent of his cologne, of man, of summer. Jordan was my anchor.
“And you have to promise not to tell anyone. Not even Aiden or Breanna,” I pleaded. “Raelynn—”
“Promise me, Jordan. There are some things that I don’t want them to know. Just like there are things you don’t want them to know.” He wouldn’t see me in that way. He’d survived so much worse. I trusted him with my secrets. I trusted him more than my own family.
He nodded his ascent against the top of my head and I took his silence as his promise. My faith in him was that strong.
“I didn’t want to have sex with him. We’d come close—but I didn’t—he wasn’t you. Just like Hunter wasn’t you. Eventually, Caleb didn’t take no for an answer. He held me there, with his hands wrapped around my throat, until I blacked out… He raped me.”
I spit out the last words as if I could spit out the taste they left in my mouth. Beside me Jordan went rigid, like stone. His hands fell away to his sides and jerked my heart down with them.
When several long moments passed and he didn’t say anything, I sighed. “I let it go too far, I’d known I was letting Caleb take it too far. But flirting with that edge had seemed exciting. It had kept me from thinking about home and all the things I was missing. Because in truth, I’d never really wanted to leave. I left to prove a point, to myself…to you.” I left the fence, pacing, itching for movement.
“I came home realizing I never should have left, I’d never wanted to be anywhere else—” Anything else I was going to say was lost when he wouldn’t look at me. I needed him to look at me, to see me.
“Look at me, Jordan.” I waited, wrapping my arms around myself to fight back a nonexistent chill, until he brought his stormy gaze to mine.
That storm was filled with guilt and anger. I’d been naïve to ask him to feel neither.
“I let it go too far, I kept pushing the limits. I knew how he was. I knew it was only a matter of time until I pushed too far.” I faced my shame head on and took responsibility for it. I was no longer going to be a victim. “It was my fault.”
“Bullshit,” he snapped and moved so fast my head spun, he loomed over me. His words were terse, spoken through gritted teeth. “I don’t care how far you let him push, he should have stopped the second you said no.”
I’d pushed Jordan before. I’d seen him angry. Never angry like this. For the first time in my life, fear prickled at my skin because of Jordan. Not for me, he’d never hurt me. I feared for the damage he could do elsewhere. At that moment, he could lay waste to entire civilizations.
Words left my mouth in a rush as I tried to calm him. “It could have been worse, Jordan. He didn’t really hurt me.”
“The hell he didn’t!” he shouted. His large hands reached as if to grab me before they turned and gripped the fence hard enough for the wood to creak under the pressure. “Just because no one can see the scars, doesn’t mean they aren’t there, Raelynn! Each time you flinch away from me, each time you touch your throat, those are scars too. He hurt you.”
He was right, I couldn’t argue any of that. How many nights had I lain awake with the ghost of Caleb’s hands on my throat, saw Caleb’s face hovering over me as I fought for breath? Jordan had seen it too, more than once.
“It’s over, whatever it was, it’s done.” I placed a hand on his arm. The skin beneath my fingers was warm and the muscles trembled. He had my secrets now. The weight of them still bore down on my soul. Especially when he reached for me, then hesitated.
“The first time a man touched me after that, was you Jordan. From the moment you kissed me that night at the canning factory, I had new memories. After that, what he did to me didn’t matter as much.”
“I’m sorry, Rae.” He pulled his hat off and rubbed his head before settling it back. He kicked rocks around in the dirt. “I want to kill him. I want to choke the life out of him. I can’t tell you all the things I really want to do to him for what he did to you. You wouldn’t like that part of me, I spent a lot of years trying to bury that part of me…bury the part of me that comes from my father.”
That, I had expected.
“And when I look at you I want to make you forget him. But if I touch you right now, I’m so angry I’d be no better than him.”
“You aren’t him.” It was a simple statement, but no less true. I could never confuse the two men, no one could.
“No, I’m not.” He pulled me against his chest and looked down at me. “He’ll never touch you again.” It was more of a growl than a whisper.
“I know.” It was important for him that I understood. Just as it was important to me that he wasn’t ashamed to look at me, to touch me. I wasn’t dirty to him. We stood like that until the sun disappeared in the distance, me holding him as he trembled with rage. Right there, until he calmed and pressed his lips to my hair.
Apart we were both broken. Together we were whole.