He blinked back more tears.
“That’s it. We’re all done.” She finally turned off the bright light, making the room seem dark and dingy in the sallow lighting. “Are you sure you don’t want me to call anybody?”
He shook his head.
Bowie would tell the girls. He had to. But not yet. He couldn’t handle the tears and the rage and the vows of revenge. He loved his roommates. They were the closest thing he had to family, but while they were fiercely loyal, they were also overwhelmingly emotional, and his nerves already felt like he’d dragged them over sandpaper.
They would be asleep when he got home, but if they weren’t, he’d tell them then. Of course, he would. The moment they saw him, they would demand to know who’d hurt him. But he at least wanted the drive home to pull himself together, to gather his thoughts. To just be. He didn’t want to be bombarded with questions yet. He wasn’t ready.
“I can take an Uber.” He looked down at his hospital gown and bare feet. “What do I do about my clothes?”
“I’ll bring you some sweats and flip-flops we keep on hand for cases…like yours. We don’t have underwear, but it will get you home fully covered.”
He just nodded.
As she left, presumably to gather his borrowed clothes, the nurse who assisted earlier entered the room, holding a bottle of water and a small cup full of pills of all shapes and sizes. He frowned at her. “What’s this?”
“Medications. To help prevent any potential infections.”
“I’m on PrEP.”
“These are for the other infections. Chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis. A breakdown of each one will be on your discharge instructions.”
His stomach lurched. That hadn’t even occurred to him. It should have. The bastard definitely hadn’t bothered with a condom. He hadn’t even bothered to take off his pants.
He took the cup and swallowed the pills dry before the gravity of her words could sink in. When she offered the water, he took it, too, guzzling down as much as his stomach would tolerate.
Katie/Karen returned with the promised sweats and flip-flops along with a toothbrush and other toiletries, removing his IV before pointing to the door in the corner. “You can shower in there if you like. Take all the time you need.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to tell them he just wanted to leave, but when he stood, reality crashed down on him like a ten story building.Hewas still all over him. Inside him. Bowie took the clothes and hurried to lock himself in the bathroom.
The water was scalding, but no matter how much he scrubbed, he could still feel him. He didn’t even care about the agony of his swollen face or his screaming muscles or the ache deep in his core that now seemed permanent. He just wanted to be clean, to be free of the feeling that he’d been marked somehow, tainted inside and out.
He knew he was sobbing, knew the nurses could probably hear him if they were still outside the door, but he couldn’t stop. Each time he closed his eyes, his memories closed in on him.
The sound of the door locking, the wayhe’dlooked at him when he’d barked at Bowie to undress. Bowie laughing at the absurdity of the abrupt request. The pain of the first blow from his meaty fist and how delayed the pain had been, how he hadn’t felt it until he was on his back on the floor looking up at him.
He’d told Bowie his name, but he refused to think about it. It was bad enough he’d had to say it to the detective with the taste of him still in his mouth. He had been deceptively strong, shoving thick fingers into Bowie’s mouth when he’d tried to scream.
It was when Bowie bit him that it all went fuzzy. The sight of his own blood had enraged him. That was when he’d flipped Bowie over, hit him in the back of the head so many times, driving his face into the tile floor until his vision began to go black at the edges. After that, his memories came in flashes. Being pinned down, half of his face crushed against the cold tile floor, the man’s sweat dripping onto his skin. It felt like it had gone on for hours.
He wrenched the tap to the off position, grabbing the toiletries the nurse had offered and squeezing the toothpaste directly into his mouth before scrubbing with the bristles until his mouth and gums bled.
Once he was dressed, the detective—Detective Hewitt—met him on his way out. “We have the evidence. We’ll send it for processing. We’ve also requested the elevator tapes, and we’ll bring the suspect in for questioning.”
“Great,” Bowie said, voice dull, pushing the buttons on his phone to order his Uber.
“You, uh… You did good tonight. We have a lot. We’ve got a good chance of nailing this guy.”
Bowie just stared at the man. He wasn’t sure what the expected response was supposed to be. Did he say thank you? Go get ‘em? Keep up the good work? He just wanted to sleep. He had a date with the Ativan he knew Odette kept in her bottom drawer. Two of those and maybe he could just be unconscious through the worst of it.
‘Cause that worked so well last time.
Once in the Uber, he texted the company director, Gillian. She’d set up the appointment. He refused to call it a date or even a meeting, not anymore. He started and erased his text ten times. He needed to tell her that her most recent patron was a rapist before anybody else got hurt, but he couldn’t figure out how to put that into a text message. It was all so…dramatic. So fake sounding. So impossible to comprehend that even he couldn’t accept it.
He settled for telling her he’d been in an accident and had gone to the hospital so he wouldn’t be at rehearsals tomorrow. He’d never missed a rehearsal in his life, not even when he had strep. She would understand. He asked to meet her at her office in the afternoon. If he had to explain, at least he could do it in person. Not that he wanted to have to look anybody in the eye and say what happened to him. Not again.
He dropped his head to the cool glass window, watching the city lights whiz past in a blur. This was his reality now. He would have to tell people what happened. Over and over again. And most people wouldn’t believe him and the ones who did would be awkward and weird about it. He knew because he’d been the one to hear about it, to feel awkward and uncomfortable. More than once. He had lived and worked and played with girls his whole life. He’d even held his friend Julia’s hand at the police station after a guy roofied her drink and they’d asked her increasingly invasive questions that sounded a lot like they thought it was her fault.
