But she did.She finished it before she escaped.
She sits beside me, cautious and patient.“Do you know what triggered you yesterday?”
A shiver skids through me as my mind tumbles back to Jag’s mouth against mine and his dick pulsing in my fist.The heat of him.The hardness of him.And worse… Wanting him.
I can still taste his come.The wrongness of it.The craving for more.
Desiring a man isn’t conceivable.Not with the memory of Denver’s depravedlove, the stink of sweat and cruelty, and the pain… Christ, I’ll never forget that sickening, unbearable pain.
I don’t know where the line is between what I want and what was done to me.Every time I think about Jag, I relive Denver’s abuse.
So yeah.Kissing Jag, touching him, longing for him… All triggers.
Frankie isn’t asking for the gory details.Just an acknowledgment.So I give her a nod.
She nods back and sets the journal between us.
I don’t touch it.
“I wrote this to remember.”She strokes the cover.“And to forget.I wrote it because there were days when I needed to prove to myself that I existed in sequence.This happened, then this, then this.I wrote it because there were things I couldn’t say to anyone, but they needed to be said.”She swallows.“I wrote it because I was afraid if I didn’t, he’d win.”
Thehein our life doesn’t require a name.Even dead, he has one foot in the room.
I suppress a shiver.“Did you write about that day?”
There are so many I could be referencing but none more pivotal, haunting, or fatal than the day she killed Denver and I jumped off the cliff.
“Yeah, Wolf.I did.”
“You confessed to murder?”I whisper, horrified.“In writing?”
She gives a single nod.
“Bad idea, Frankieberry.If this fell in the wrong hands…”
She pushes it toward me, her eyes shimmering with trust.
Dammit.
I stare at the faded cover until it blurs, and I’m suddenly on the shower floor, the tile dark with icy water, my heart punching, punching, punching, trying to jailbreak my ribs.Then I see Dove’s silhouette crouched beside me, and I hear her whispered words.
You’re okay.I’m here.Breathing with you.Just breathing.
I feel the cancerous, unwieldy parts of me I need to amputate.Fear, rage, shame, and the one that’s growing harder to carry.My virginity.
That one belongs to Dove.But she deserves the whole story, not just the bits I’m willing to part with.
I return my attention to the book.The autobiography of a woman who murdered her captor and lived to write the ending.
Pinching the edge of the cover, I open it an inch, then another, and another, until the past rises out of the paper like breath on a cold day.
The first sentence I half-read speeds up my pulse.I close the book because if I don’t, I’ll fall into it and not sleep for a week.
“You don’t have to read it.”She touches my hand.“It’smystory.The stupid brave parts and the brutal parts.There are pages where I’m proud, when I was strong and fought hard and loved harder.There are pages where I’m rotten, when I was mean and reckless and made bargains with the devil.There’s grief, too.Constant, fathomless grief after we lost you on that cliff.”
My face numbs, and my fingers go cold.I want to apologize, but it’s far too late for that.
Maybe reading about the pain I caused them is a start.Perhaps experiencing my suicide through her eyes is the only mercy I can offer.
