I gathered it was new for him. He preyed, because it got him off, but it ruined all of his plans when he wasn’t the victim’s first rodeo, didn’t it?
Because it wasn’t the blood he was after, but the fear.
It wasn’t the sex, but the power.
His eyes trailed down my neck and slowly down my arm, narrowing.
I don’t scream, because….
“Because screaming doesn’t help,” he murmured. “Does it?”
My heart thundered in my chest, but I remained frozen, staring up at him as he looked at my body and the bruises in the shapes of fingers wrapped around my upper arm. The scrapes on my legs and the blue and purple on my shoulders.
“Because you get tired of being the victim,” he said, like he was thinking out loud, “and it’s easier to just let it happen.”
He raised his eyes, meeting mine again, and my throat stretched painfully as his words burrowed into me.
He loosened his hold, but I didn’t run.
“To just pretend we’re in control of everything happening to us,” he told me.
He blinked a few times, his demeanor completely changed, a troubled set to his brow.
My chin trembled.
“Until you can’t remember who you were before you started lying even to yourself,” he added. “Until you can’t remember ever smiling when it didn’t fucking hurt.”
Tears filled my eyes, and I ground my teeth to keep my shit together.
Abuse can feel like love.
I remembered his words from lit class.
Starving people will eat anything.
His eyes fell down my body again, his head cocking and taking the purple and red on one side of my torso and the others on my thighs.
He didn’t have any marks that I could see, but there were other kinds of pain.
“Will is like that,” he said, his voice softening, somber now. “Isn’t he?”
Like a smile that doesn’t hurt. I nodded.
“Easy, normal, peaceful…” he told me. “The only thing in my life untouched by anything ugly. Nothing has tainted him. He’s the one thing that’s still beautiful and thinks the world is beautiful and believes people are beautiful and all that shit.”
Yeah. But I couldn’t say it out loud, because it was hard enough holding back the sob.
“You can’t take him away from me,” Damon told me, stepping back and letting me go.
And in that moment, I understood exactly what his problem was. He didn’t dislike me. He resented Will liking me so much.
One day of wearing his school tie, because I loved the way he made me feel that I had to have a piece of him with me every moment, was nothing compared to the years Damon had relied on Will to be his little beacon of hope that the world was still a pretty place.
“You know it won’t work anyway,” Damon pointed out. “His family is one of the wealthiest in the country, Emory. His life is so far beyond your understanding, and vice versa. You know you have no place in Will Grayson’s Homecoming picture.”
I dropped my eyes, slowly sinking down and picking up my soaked towel, holding it over my body.
“I know,” he continued. “Hurts to hear it, but it’s true, and you know it. And what’s more? It’s pointless, because you know how you are. Even I know how you are. The whole school knows. He won’t fit, because you’re committed to being miserable and you’ll just drag him down.”