There was a huge chance Vann was right too—I couldn’t make it upstairs on my own.
“Just… please, don’t touch me.” My voice was ragged and small, barely audible.
His voice broke too. “Dillon, you’re killing me.”
Fresh tears poured out of my eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t. Please don’t apologize.”
He shoved his door open and hurried around the front of his Jeep to open my door. I wished I was strong enough to ask him to carry me upstairs. I wished I could find the courage to touch him. To remember that he wasn’t the one that had hurt me.
But my body had locked down. When confronted with fight or flight, I’d chosen to freeze. My teeth chattered as my body surged with adrenaline and those groping, clawing, intrusive hands.
He ripped my dress off and tore my underwear away from me. He shoved my legs open and thrust inside me. Then he held my arms down as I weakly tried to fight back.
I gasped for breath and tried to sink to my knees. Vann scooped me up even while I cried out.
Minutes past as I fought for clarity, as I beat the demons back and tried to reemerge in the present.
When Vann was finally able to take my keys from me and open my apartment door, he deposited me on my sofa and hurried to the kitchen. I heard water running as I pulled my knees to my chest and rocked myself back and forth.
“Should I call someone?” he asked, hovering over me with a glass of water in one hand and a throw blanket in the other. “Ezra? Your mom? Vera?”
I shook my head. This was bad enough. I didn’t want to introduce anyone else to my secret shame.
“No,” I sniffled between sobs. “I’m fine.”
He was silent for a minute before saying. “No, you’re not, Dillon. You’re not fine. Something is seriously wrong.”
I cried harder. His words had hit with such precision, it was like they’d punctured my heart and ripped it open.
Tipping over on the couch, I stayed there sobbing, with my knees pulled up to my chest for a long time. Vann covered me with a blanket and took a seat at the other end of the couch.
“I’m here for you, Dillon. I’ll be right here. If you need anything let me know.”
I couldn’t find the words to thank him, but his presence was enough. It was soothing to know he wasn’t going to leave.
His presence was like a guard against the evil thoughts and memories from six years ago. He sat still and silent at the end of the couch, respecting my wish for him not to touch me, and slowly the broken pieces of my soul started to piece themselves back together again. My sobs became silent as the tears continued to fall, but my body shook and trembled less, and my heartbeat began to steady.
I hadn’t had a crying jag like that in a couple years. Not since my senior year of school.
My therapist would call this a relapse. And that was exactly what it felt like. All the careful work I’d trudged through to make the small steps toward healing undone and erased.
Two small steps forward, six hundred steps back. Right to that memory of that bedroom. Right to that drug-blurred night.
Eventually there were no tears left to cry. My eyes dried and my soul shriveled. I sat up and I turned toward Vann, tucking myself into the farthest corner of the couch.
He looked at me, eyes red and strained. There was despair there, fear I had never seen except when looking in the mirror.
“I was raped.” The words fell out of my mouth as an apology and an explanation. “Drugged. And then raped.”
Twenty-Two
Vann didn’t even flinch.I realized my reaction to Justin told more than my words ever could have. “Was it by that fucking asshole? I will go back and kill him if he touched you, Dillon. Say the fucking word.”
He was serious. The truth of his threat rang through the room. Another piece of my soul clicked back into place. I didn’t condone murder by any means, but Vann’s willingness to go that far for me helped restore some of my faith in humanity in a messed up kind of way.
“It wasn’t Justin,” I told him, fighting through the sick feeling curdling in my stomach. “It happened at his party though.”
