Hades’s eyes followed my hand as it moved down my body, tracking it in a way that made me lose my train of thought. “In my world, angels dress exactly like that,” he argued.
My skin prickled, and desire flushed through me. His voice was pure sex. It might’ve distracted me had this subject matter not been hitting the core of me.
“This isn’t a joke,” I snapped. “And this isn’t something you can use your sexy voice to make go away. I’m sick of you putting me up on some kind of pedestal, sick of you making yourself into the enemy just because you have a few scars, a few marks on your soul.”
The liquid in his eyes turned to stone. “I have more than a few marks on my soul, Freya.”
“My uncle molested me when I was a kid,” I revealed, careful to keep my voice flat and emotionless, forcing down the telltale shake that meant tears weren’t too far away.
For a long, long time, I hadn’t been able to say that out loud. Not to anyone, not to my first therapist or my second. Certainly not to any boyfriends. I’d spent a great deal of time pretending that period of my life didn’t exist, though that was a difficult feat due to the consequences that came from it. Such a large, life-altering trauma shouldn’t be so easy to escape from, but I’d made an art out of shutting that part of my life away, locking it behind steel doors.
Eventually, I came to realize that unhealed trauma only got sharper and sharper the longer it festered, infesting everything healthy and beautiful in the present. So I got a third therapist, where I said it out loud for the first time. I’d choked the words up as if they were razor blades, my entire body quaking as I spoke, tears flowing uncontrollably. Similar things happened when I said it out loud after that too. It took years for me to be able to say the words without any evidence in my voice or on my face of what it had done to me. I’d healed somewhat, but I was nowhere near brave enough to slip it into any kind of conversation or talk openly about it on my channel. Which had made me feel like a fraud since my brand was all about honesty and openness, sharing things people were afraid to.
But this was too tightly entwined with all of my fragile wounds. It still made me feel dirty, unclean, ruined.
“It started when I was seven,” I continued, leaving for that faraway place I needed to go to when I spoke about this. My words sounded muffled in my head, like I was underwater. Hades was muddled in that same kind of way, too, his features blurred as if my mind was protecting me from seeing that information reflected on his face. There was no way I would’ve been able to continue if I truly processed the way he was looking at me.
“I didn’t tell anyone at first. He told me that it was something that everyone did but no one talked about.” My palms were clammy, and my heart was roaring in my ears. Panic was setting in by talking about this, reliving it. But I needed to. For Hades. Mostly for myself.
“I knew it was wrong,” I continued. “That this could not be something that everyone did. Certainly not my friends at school. Because if the same thing was happening to them, there was no way they could smile, laugh, go on with their lives. But I felt trapped. I didn’t know what to do, so I just ... let it happen.”
“You didn’t let it happen. He made it happen, there’s a fuckin’ difference,” Hades’s seethed.
I flinched at his voice, which penetrated through all of my layers. I’d never heard him sound so raw, so carnal before. I couldn’t acknowledge that, though. Not right now. Instead, I just nodded slowly.
“You’re right. As an adult who has gone through a lot of therapy, I’m aware that none of it was my fault, but I felt like it was at the time. I felt like I was dirty, wrong, weak. He made me feel that way. Until ... what he was doing got worse.”
I didn’t expand on what that meant because by the way the air felt, Hades knew exactly what I meant. And I also felt that if I went into further detail, I’d vomit all over the patio.
“That was then I started fighting him,” I rasped out. “Told him I’d tell if he didn’t stop. He kept threatening me, telling me that he’d kill me. I believed he would, too, but I also knew, in my young brain, that it wouldn’t be long until I’d want to be dead, so I told.”