“I was a fool. I trusted him because he wore nice clothes and had a nice smile and drove a nice car. I never thought—I never thought a popular, smart guy like him would stop the car in an empty parking lot at the edge of my neighborhood. I never thought he’d shove me down. Rip my dress. Rip my underwear. Rape me. I never thought—”
My voice breaks, and Ethan’s arms tighten around me. I’m trembling so badly that I can barely sit on his lap. Or at least I think it’s me until he puts one unsteady hand on my cheek and I realize that he’s the one who’s trembling.
I look up, surprised, and nearly recoil at the rage on his face. In his eyes. I’ve seen Ethan with a lot of different looks on his face in the last week—amusement, joy, concentration, disgust, annoyance, anger, happiness, peace—but I’ve never seen him anywhere close to displaying this kind of fury. His whole face is alight with it, his gaze burning with it. His whole body literally shaking with it.
He doesn’t say anything, but I get the impression that that’s because he can’t. That his anger is so great that the words just won’t form.
Guilt swamps me, joins all the rest of the emotions swimming around inside me. I’ve done this. I’ve brought this strong, beautiful man to the point where he’s all but incoherent with rage. It’s not a good sign, given that he’s considered by many to be one of the most articulate CEO’s in the world.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I’m so sorry. ”
He finds his voice then. “I already told you not to say that. You have nothing to be sorry for. ”
“I got in the car with him. I trusted him. ”
“There’s nothing wrong with trusting someone. ”
“But I trusted the wrong people all along. From the very beginning, every decision I made brought me closer to that moment. I could have stayed put at my local public high school—at least there I knew what I was getting. I could have chosen a better boyfriend, been less impressed with who Chad was and more focused on who he wasn’t. I could have gone out with my brother instead of to that stupid party—Miles had wanted to see a movie that night. And I could have been smarter and never gotten into that car.
“Everything that happened to me that night happened because I made bad choices. That’s on me, not on anybody else. I set the whole chain of events in motion. If I’d been smarter, none of it would have happened. ”
It’s my secret shame, my culpability in everything that happened that night and in what came after. I made the choices, no one else. I believed nice, rich boys who were born into luxury would never hurt me. Never force me. Never rape me.
I really had been a total
moron.
“No. ” It’s not until Ethan answers in a voice made rusty with too many emotions that I realize I’ve spoken the last out loud. “The only person to blame for what happened to you is the guy who raped you. And that Chad asshole, who set everything in motion. None of it was your fault. ”
I’ve heard those words before, from the policewoman who took my statement and from the counselor I talked to at college, years later. I’d never believed them.
I want to believe Ethan, want to bury myself in the strength of his conviction. In his unwavering belief in me. But I’ve only told him half the story. The rest…the rest is something I’ve never spoken about to anyone. If he knew, he would hate me as much as I hate myself.
“What happened to the guy?” Ethan asks. “Did you report him?”
“Yes. ” When he was finished, when he’d climbed off me and tried to drive me home as if nothing had happened, I freaked out. I jumped out of the car at the nearest red light, and though he hurled insults and abuse at me through the open car window, I refused to get back into his vehicle. Refused to go anywhere with him. When he pulled over and threatened to come after me, I ran. Up one alley and down the other, incoherent and lost and desperate to get away.
I still don’t know what would have happened if a cop car hadn’t been driving along the street at that particular moment and spotted me. They pulled over, got me into the back of their car. They were nice to me, I remember that much. I was shell-shocked, out of it, and they’d been kind. I told them what happened and they took me to the hospital for a bunch of tests I prefer not to remember, even to this day.
That’s when everything went bad. The hospital called my parents. My dad showed up and he was furious. Not that I’d been raped but that I’d gone to the police before I’d told him. He had a plan, he told me. To make the rich little bastard pay.
I hadn’t understood what he was talking about that night, but I soon learned. He sold me out, traded my silence for three million dollars in start-up money for his company. He threatened me, made me sign papers recanting my statement to the police and other papers that said I couldn’t talk about that night with anyone. He’d told me it was for the best, that it would protect my reputation, protect me.
Even then, I’d known he was full of shit. But I’d done it anyway. I’d signed those papers, even knowing it was wrong. Even knowing that it would destroy what little bit of my soul I had left. But I was too shattered—by what had happened with Brandon and by what I considered my parents’ betrayal—to do anything else. I had no fight left in me, no strength to do anything but end the arguments and the screaming matches and the threats that came at me from both sides.
I don’t tell Ethan any of this, though. How can I? How can I look this beautiful man in the eye and tell him my parents sold me out for three million dollars? Or, worse, that I let them?
No, he doesn’t need to know that. Nobody does. God knows a day doesn’t go by that I wish I didn’t know. Wish I didn’t remember.
“Did he go to jail?” Ethan asks, interrupting the silence that stretches between us.
“No. His parents…his parents made sure that didn’t happen. ” And so did mine.
“So you had to keep going to school with him?”
“Yeah. It was…unpleasant. ”
Because Brandon wasn’t one to slink away in shame. He told the whole school how he bagged me, how I begged for it. He turned Chad and all of their friends against me, and since they were the most popular guys in the school, it didn’t take long for everyone to turn away from me. For them to trip me and torment me and threaten me.