When he was done with me, I sat in a dripping heap of towels on the cold, tiled, bathroom floor. He threw my clothes at me and offered a smile. “If you tell anyone, I’ll make sure to tell Jase how hard your little pussy came for me. I felt it, you know, when you came." He yanked my hair back until my eyes met his. "You came so hard it milked my cock dry." He smiled then and chuckled down at me. "I also recorded it on Jase’s little camera; did you hear yourself moaning, Charlotte? If you want to come back I can teach you how to be a real woman…how to please a man. If not, this is me telling you, you will not ruin my son's life. He wouldn't want you now, anyway.” He walked out, laughing, the steam of the hot water chasing him out.
Dressing as fast as I could, I ran out of the bathroom and down the hallway into the kitchen. My throat gagged back more hot bile when I saw Mrs. Delaney sitting in her wheelchair next to the kitchen table. Cold, hard eyes blazed at me. Her head was trembling and her nostrils flared with loud, noisy breaths. “You’re disgusting; you pathetic piece of trash,” she growled, with the first words I hadeverheard her speak.
My shoes became concrete, and my skin felt like stone. I had just been victimized in a room a few feet away from someone who could have helped me—his wife. Did she not hear me scream? Couldn’t she have called the cops? Did she think I wanted that?
What the hell would Jase think?And then everything seemed to crumble and disintegrate around me, and I knew.I knewthere was never going back from there.
Running out the back door, I couldn’t even think a straight thought. My insides hurt; my thighs burned. But most of all, my eyes ached with the tears. I tore into my house, grabbed my purse, which had an extra set of Jase’s truck keys inside, and stole his damn truck to take myself to the hospital. I would not let him get away with raping me. My body moved, pushing itself through the motions of taking me someplace safe.
Hospital.
Police.
Help.
I didn’t remember the drive there. I have no idea how I came about slumped in the arms of a nurse in the middle of an emergency room in a hospital that was over twenty minutes away from my house, still clutching one of Jase’s old T-shirts.
Hysterical and terrified, I was taken to an examination room to wait for a physician to administer arapekit. The word suffocated me, cut off my oxygen, and my world turned black as I collapsed against the chairs and walls and whatever else I hit on my quick fall to meet the floor. The doctor watching over me held the police at bay, not allowing them to question me until she was finished.
Sometime later, when the sky outside the window was dark, I was awake enough for evidence to bepulled from me. Documents were signed. Questions were asked. Swabs of DNA were taken out of my private areas with long Q-tip looking things that scraped the Hell out of my insides. Urine was collected, and blood was taken. Everything was bagged and labeled in front of me. They offered me a morning after pill, and horrified by the chance of having a monster's baby grow inside of me, I took it.
I took it.
A pretty, dark-haired nurse held me until my trembling stopped.
"Miss Stone?" I looked up from behind the nurse's arms to the sight of an officer holding open a small memo pad. "Did you know the perpetrator of this attack?"
All I could do was nod.
The officer sighed and leaned at the edge of examination table I was on. "Can I have his name?"
"Michael Delaney," I said in a low voice.
The officer narrowed his eyes at me and folded his hands across his chest, rumpling his memo pad. "Really now? Judge Delaney?"
"Yes," I whispered, swallowing hard.
"Do you know false claims of sexual assault are punishable with jail time, Miss Stone?"
"I don't understand..."
"You don't understand? You're accusing a Supreme Court Justice of a felony, Miss Stone. Is there a chance you could be wrong about the identity or the actions...?"
"That's enough!" The doctor shouted over the questions. "I just examined her myself, Officer. There is physical evidence of an assault, andIwant to press charges on her behalf."
The doctor physically escorted the officer out into the hallway. "That line of questioning is just victimizing her all over again."
Female officers spoke to me about Penal Laws and Rape in the third degree since I was only seventeen, and Rape in the First degree since I said it was forced. They warned me about a long backlog of rape kits and how sometimes kits don’t get tested for years after the evidence is collected.
When I was escorted into the waiting area, my mother was standing with a scowl slashed across her bright red lips. I ran to her and threw my arms around her, but she didn’t hold me back. She just stood there, still and hard. “How could you make up a story like this? Is it attention that you need? First you accuse Owen of something he would never do, now Mr. Delaney?” My mother. My own mother physically shoved me into the passenger seat of Jase’s truck and then climbed into the driver’s seat. Without even a glance in my direction she said, “I want you out of my house by tomorrow.”
What?
Where the hell was I supposed to go?
In my wildest dreams, I had never thought about leaving that house. With all the shit that was said to me there, with all the times I had to stay in the tree house at night to hide from her and her drugged up friends, I never thought to leave. The only safe place I could think to go was to Joey’s mom, and he was gone. Mrs. Graley couldn’t lookme in the eyes without bursting into tears, remembering her son. I couldn’t go there.
“And Charlotte, don’t you ever come back.”
