Like I’m about to watch the world tilt on its axis and I’m trapped.
"Colt saw me laughing with him and immediately started toward us. I tried to warn him, to get him to move. But he didn't know Colt like I knew Colt." She's quiet for a moment. "I kept my distance after that. But I watched him all the time. He was so confident in who he was. Sweet in that odd, say-whatever-comes-to-mind kind of way." Her voice softens. "I was in love with him all through high school."
I feel tears forming, and I don't know what to do with them. So, I just stay still, try my best to breathe, and let her keep going.
“In our senior year, I asked him for tutoring. I even had to ask Colt for permission. There were others I could have asked, but it was the only way I could spend time with Michael. I even pretended to not get a lot of the answers so he had to tutor me longer. It could have taken a couple of weeks, but I milked it for well over three months. Just to see him every day. I dreaded the weekends until Monday when I would see that smile again.”
The room is very quiet.
She still doesn't know.
She is lying on my chest, telling me she loved me, and she still doesn't know. I am holding myself together by a thread, with tears I won't let fall.
"What happened to him?" I ask. My voice comes out a hell of a lot steadier than I thought it would.
"One day, Colt was at my house. He finished studying before I did and started roaming. He found my diary on my desk and read it. I wrote about Michael often. Like damn near every day, down to what I’d seen him eating at lunch. I was obsessed with him. Some entries were harmless, friendly. Others were extremely sexual in nature, things I'd daydreamed about. I don’t remember what he read specifically, but I tried to spin it, told him Michael meant nothing to me, that I was just fooling around with stories for English class." She pauses. "He told me we were going to play a prank on him. I tried to say no. But then he said something that still haunts me — that if I didn't do it, he would find Michael himself." A beat. "Sadly enough, it was safer to do what I did to him than to let Colt get his hands on him."
My tears have broken through. Luckily, she's still on my chest and can't see them. She pauses, like the next part will hurt to say out loud.
I know the fucking feeling.
"He told me to take Michael to his poolhouse at a certain time the night of his senior party and make out with him hard enough to make him —you know— in his pants." She stops for a beat. "He unraveled my hair. It was in braids that day, like they were this morning. He unraveled them one by one, ran his hands through it...like you did today. He told me how beautiful I was. I've never hated myself more than I did in that moment." Her voice drops. "I did what I was told to do. But kissing him, holding him — I don't regret that part. That was the only silverlining in the whole ugly night." A sad, quiet laugh. "Hell, I orgasmed before he did."
She lets out a sad laugh.
"The football team, some of them, and some of the cheerleaders were all there in the dark watching. They flipped on the lights. Laughed at him. Pointed. Once Colt was satisfied with how it all turned out, he made everyone leave. Then dragged me by the hair to the bedroom. He beat and raped me for enjoying it. I married him three weeks later because I deserved exactly who Colt was. I never deserved Michael. I didn't even deserve his kiss. I went to his house a few weeks later; I didn’t know what I wanted to say. I just knew I had to say something. But he and his sister had packed up and moved. They were just gone. I sat on the steps of their house and cried for like an hour because I knew I’d never see him again. I searched for him online, and nothing ever came of it."
She shakes her head and pulls in a deep breath.
“Anyway, today when you did what you did with my hair, it reminded me so much of Michael and that night, what happened with Colt afterwards. I think my mind was triggered, and the nightmare was the result of it all.”
"I'm sorry, I need—" I can't get the words out before I bolt upright and make it to the bathroom just in time. My knees hit the tile, and I vomit and heave and vomit again.
I don't know how long I'm there. Long enough for my eyes to water and my hands to stop shaking against the cold porcelain. Long enough to understand that my body has processed what my brain is still refusing to fully hold.
She protected me.
She walked into that pool house knowing what was waiting on the other side of it, knowing what Colt could do to herafterward, and she did it because the alternative was Colt finding me himself. She took what happened to her so that something worse wouldn't happen to me.
And then she married him.
And I spent ten years hating her for it.
I flush. Sit back against the wall with my knees up and my head back. I stare at the bathroom ceiling and breathe until my chest stops feeling like it's caving in.
I can’t go back to being Michael Bennett. I buried him ten years ago. But I can at least let my hatred for Blaire go completely.
Fuck...
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
BLAIRE
Bennet comes out of his bathroom with no color left in his cheeks, and I didn't expect that. I don't know why I told him all of it — I just needed to voice it somewhere, and he was the closest vessel. I didn't think it would land on him the way it clearly has.
He walks to the chair across from the bed, sits with his elbows on his knees, and his head hangs between his shoulders.
"I'm sorry I upset you, Bennet."
