“Are you sure you don’t want me to put a bandage on it?” Giselle asks.
I shake my head. “My mother always said wounds heal faster without a bandage.”
Besides, I’ve seen how it looks in the mirror, and I know it’s not that bad.
“And how did you get this one again?”
“From a tree branch.”
I lie down on the bed only to wince again as my back hurts. I turn on my side.
Giselle frowns. “And was that before or after your dress disappeared?”
“I told you. It was soaking wet because someone spilled wine on me, so I had to take it off.”
“You couldn’t just have put Mr. Scotsfeld’s coat over it?”
“No,” I answer.
“And that little accident is why the two of you came back looking so upset,” Giselle says. “Right.”
I let out a sigh. I don’t know why I bother hiding things from Giselle. I guess I want to protect her, but it’s no use. She may not be the smartest girl I know, but she can tell when I’m lying.
“Fine,” I say. “The cut is from a horsewhip.”
Giselle gasps. “A whip?”
“Gavin hit me because I showed up to the Ball.”
Well, that’s half the truth. Or the nicer part of it. I don’t want to tell Giselle that I was spanked, the memory of which still makes me want to cringe in embarrassment.
Physically, it didn’t hurt as much as that single blow of the whip. My bottom feels a little sore, but there are no welts, no cuts. Not even any heavy bruising. Except for that last slap, Gavin was fairly gentle, and my underwear protected me from the first few spanks.
It was humiliating, though.
I’d never been spanked in my whole life. Even when my father was drunk, he never spanked me. Even when my mother got mad at me for being too busy with homework to finish my chores, she never spanked me. The usual punishment I got was more chores. The worst? My mother slapped me once for losing one of a pair of earrings that she lent me. One of her nails even scratched my cheek. But she apologized earnestly for it afterward and bought me a new pair of earrings.
Nope. No spanking while I was growing up.
And yet now, as a grown-up, I just got spanked. By a man. Several times. While I was on all fours like an animal. Gagged. And handcuffed. And I was practically naked, too.
The worst part, though, was that it was done in front of a number of people- an old man who could silence even Gavin and who seemed to take pleasure in seeing others suffer, a guard with cold eyes, a fellow woman, a friend who could do nothing but watch me helplessly, and the man who tried to lay his filthy hands on me.
That memory, too, makes me want to cringe. Thank goodness I was able to fight back. I nearly escaped, too, only to be framed as the villain and punished.
My lips curl in anger as I recall that man’s lies. How dare he turn the tables? How dare he claim to be the victim when he was the one who hurt me first? Not only that, he even made himself out to be some hero while making me out to be a whore, smirking while I was drooling through that gag in some effort to make myself heard.
In vain.
In the end, everyone believed him.
It was upsetting when the old man believed him straight off the bat. He didn’t even give me a chance to air my side. What was more painful, though, was when Gavin also believed him, even though I was begging him not to.
How could he believe that I could seduce another man? How could he think I came to that party just to have sex with someone else?
I guess that just goes to show how little he really knows me, how little he thinks of me.
In spite of everything, I’m still the woman he bought at an auction for sex. How stupid of me to think that he’d ever see me as anything more.
“And to think you went through so much effort to go to the Ball,” Giselle says sadly. “Your gown was so beautiful, too.”
“I know.” I place my hand over hers. “Sylvia even helped us. But maybe it was a bad decision from the start. I shouldn’t have gone to the Ball. I should never have thought of going.”
Why did I? I should have known from personal experience that nothing good comes of these fancy parties.
Maybe Jan was right. Maybe I really did think I was Cinderella. I thought if I dressed up and went to a ball and spoke to my Prince Charming before the stroke of midnight, my life would be better. But I was wrong.
“So you didn’t get a chance to tell him about the baby?” Giselle asks me.