Bite marks dot my neck, my collarbones, and the slopes of my breasts. And my nipples…Jesus. I look like Bianca after breastfeeding for months.
Raw, swollen andchewed on.
Frankly, I look like someone beat the living hell out of me and left me to die in a ditch. My hair is a tangled mess, with bits of twigs and leaves still caught in it. Scratch marks crisscross my chest and body. God knows when those happened.
There’s blood on my inner thighs, and streaks of clear, dried fluid across my tummy and breasts.
It’s all soviolent, especially juxtaposed against the room I’m standing in.
There’s a reason my friends call me a Disney princess and Val makes jokes about me singing to woodland creatures. They all see me as a naive, innocent, sheltered girl.
They’re notwrong, per se. And my fondness for this room doesn’t exactly cast doubt on that opinion.
Pink walls. A fluffy pink and white throw rug. Gauzy pink curtains hanging down from the rail of my white four-poster bed.
And then, reflected in the mirror, in a pink frame complete with a legit cutout of a crown at the top, isme, in my current state.
Broken. Savaged.
Defiled.
Naked, battered and bruised, and covered in blood and cum.
For a second it’s all too much, and my eyes blur with hot tears as I shake on my legs, pressing my hand to the glass.
What the hell did I just do?
You’re not supposed to lose your virginity that way, not to a man likehim.
You’re not supposed tolikethings like that.
Brutality.
Humiliation.
Pain.
Being pushed to your breaking point, and then shoved right past it.
Part of me wants to scream and yell and break things. I want to smash this glass with its reflection of the perfect little princess doll, all smashed and broken. That part wants to beso freaking angrythat I went twenty-three years, barely having a boyfriend, hardly doing anything beyond groping and making out, and then being plunged headfirst into Vaughn’s madness.
Complete, unhinged,madness.
And yet, at the same time…
I take another shaky breath and close my eyes, pressing my fingers against the glass.
I’m not.
Angry, that is.
I want to be. I wantso badlyto hate Vaughn and the things he did to me. I want to call it assault, or rape, or something just as vile to match the vileness he inflicted on me.
So why didn’t you stop it?
I go still in the silence of the room, standing naked and broken as I lean my head on my hand against the mirror.
Because I could have. I could have stopped it atany point, and I damn well know it. Oh, I could use the excuse that it was the only way to save my dad, and now my brother and Val too.
