“You really hit a sore spot there.” Logan tried to push a bit of hair out of my face, but I inched away from him. He sighed instead and sat down cross-legged on the floor next to me.
“I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings…” I mumbled, rubbing my still-moist eyes. It was frightening as well as disappointing—the idea that Neil was a man as well as a beast.
“He’s not evil, Selene. He’s just afraid of life. You have no idea what he’s been through,” Logan explained, and I stared at him, trying to suss out more. I had long felt that Neil probably experienced something terrible when he was a child, but no one would give me any concrete answers about it.
“So tell me, Logan. You, at least…” I begged. “Why won’t anyone help me understand?” I sobbed, and Logan looked shaken, horrified by the whole situation. Could he help me pin down exactly what had justhappened between me and his brother? To understand why he behaved the way he did?
“In his own way, Neil cares about you, Selene…” He paused, giving me a moment to absorb these words. A sudden moment of vertigo made me rub my forehead. My heart felt like it was going wild but I listened carefully as Logan continued to speak. “In his mind, he was just using you, but you know that’s not how it really was. He was never just using you. He only thinks that way because, for him, sex is about reducing women to objects. The way his brain works… It’s not like ours,” he added, searching my face for a reaction.
“Not like ours?” I whispered breathlessly. It was hard to speak; crying had taken all of my energy. Logan licked his lower lip and considered for a moment before continuing. The pause only made me feel more anxious because I knew that whatever I was about to find out, I wasn’t going to like it.
“No. There was a woman in the past who really damaged him. It wasn’t just a physical hurt; a lot of it was psychological. He was just a little kid when she… She…” He stopped and shook his head. “It isn’t for me to tell you this; it’d be disrespectful of him. He’ll tell you when he’s ready,” he said, and my spirit broke. Logan didn’t even need to continue, I realized. I pulled my knees up against my chest and wrapped my arms around them, saying nothing. Deep down, I think I had always known, but, until the very last minute, I’d tried to ignore the signs.
The dots connected. The world finally made sense.
The showers, the way he treated women like things, and his distrust of the entire human race.
All of it.
I had seen everything, but I had persistently pushed away every awful premonition, every guess, every unthinkable hypothesis, because I didn’t want to believe it.
He had been raped. By a woman.
Just imagining him, small and defenseless, fighting against that kind of monster, was unbearably painful. It was hard to breathe, and, all at once, I thought about the secret room, the one that was always kept locked. I thought about the newspapers in there that I’d managed to catch a glimpseof, talking about a “scandal.”
How long had Neil’s torment gone on? How old was he? Why had the article referred to children? Had it been some kind of group? What had really gone on?
I still had too many unresolved problems, too many unanswered questions.
Logan had done nothing but confirm a suspicion that I had long been suppressing deep down in my soul. This was not an unexpected discovery. Still, in the case of Neil, I knew there was still more concealed. Who knew what he had been forced to endure? I felt so stupid and insensitive.
Neil…
I wanted to run after him and hold him in my arms and comfort him, whispering to him that everything was going to be okay and that the world and the people in it still had good parts. And that I would prove it to him.
Logan sat next to me the whole time, watching me collapse.
Sadness fell over me like a shadow, my saliva tasted bitter in my mouth and I began staring off into the middle distance. It felt like I could see an apparition of the evil that a little boy was forced to live through, imposed on him by a mentally deranged woman.
Evil: There was no other way to define it.
It felt like time was suspended between our breaths, between our silent musings and unspoken questions…
***
Matt and Mia returned an hour later. They’d taken Chloe for a stroll around the town while I stayed with Logan.
By then, we were sitting out on the wooden benches on the porch. Neil, meanwhile, had vanished after our short but furious argument. I was hoping he’d come back because I wanted to apologize to him and clear the air.
“How are you feeling?” Logan asked. He was worried about me while all I could worry about was Neil.
He’d run away because I made him feelwrong. My hasty words had reopened a wound in him that no one could heal, least of all myself.
For a moment, I considered the immensity of his struggles, and Iwondered if I’d ever be strong enough to stand by his side.
Neil was afraid to form attachments to other people because he perceived them as a danger to him. That was why he’d tried so hard to push me away. He’d shown me the degenerate part of himself, intending to scare me off. After my accident, he had refused to visit me in Detroit on purpose. Neil didn’t want me deluding myself into thinking he might fall in love with me.
After all, how could he possibly believe in love after living through hell like he had?
