Maybe.
“Her…” I said, wincing into the blue fabric of her shirt. “Her name was Kimberly Bennett, and she was about twenty. She was our neighbor’sdaughter and a babysitter. My mother was pregnant with Chloe, and she didn’t have much time to devote to Logan and me. We couldn’t stay home by ourselves. My mother saw an opportunity and asked Kim to come work for us.” I lifted my anguished face and looked at her. Selene looked back with an unspoken comprehension in her ocean eyes as well as a hint of compassion. And all at once, I turned back into my old self. My walls sprung up again, unscalable and too strong to let anyone through them to reach me.
I got to my feet, making her gasp, and shook her hands off me.
“Right from the beginning, I knew that there was something off about her. She was too friendly, sort of sly, and she was always trying to touch me in ways that felt inappropriate at my age. I didn’t like her frosty eyes or her overbearing attitude or the kind of games she started offering to play with me. They usually involved fondling, other forms of foreplay, and ‘sex education,’ which I had to pay the closest attention to or else I’d be punished. She hadn’t been there a month before she started taking it even further. One afternoon, while I was sitting on the couch watching cartoons, it happened: She raped me, like she done to several other kids. That…that was the start of all my issues.” My head was spinning as I confessed the truth to her, but I refused to let my state of mind show in my voice. I appreciated the bravery Babygirl had shown in hearing me out, but there was no way I was going to lose my composure.
I was the master of keeping my emotions inside.
At that point, Selene pressed a hand to her lips as if to stop herself from weeping. Me, I felt nothing. Just disgust for myself and for the whore who had used me.
“She threatened me,” I continued pitilessly, not softening anything. “She kept saying she was going to hurt Logan. My brother was my whole life; I couldn’t let her lay so much as a fucking finger on him! And so I went along with it. I did whatever she wanted. I couldn’t escape her orders…” I inhaled hard and yielded slightly as I fought against the memories.
“Neil,” she murmured, but I didn’t let her continue.
It was my turn to talk.
“Kim had been violated in the same way by her own father. She was deeply disturbed, and she wanted to put other people through what had happened to her…” I locked eyes with Selene, hers as crystalline as the sea.She was on the verge of tears. I decided to cut my confession off there and spare her the most disgusting parts. It had been hard enough for me to tell her that much. I didn’t want to scare her or rub her face in just how depraved and immoral people could be. I didn’t tell her about my various trauma-induced disorders, the most serious fallout from what had happened to me.
I was afraid I’d lose her completely if I told her everything.
Not only had I not yet accepted them myself, but I was also deeply ashamed of them.
And the realization of that shame triggered a burst of rage.
“You should want nothing to do with me now. I should make you sick!” I shouted at her, coming at her like a lunatic. She backed up flat against the kitchen island and shook her head before throwing out her arm defensively in my direction. I looked down at my trembling hands and took a pause.
I couldn’t figure out whether she was scared of me or simply felt bad for me and didn’t want me to see it.
“I don’t want your pity!” I accused anyway. “I hate women who try to get with me out of compassion. I don’t need that shit.” Telling her the truth had already dredged up my terror of being rejected by others, especially by her, and that turned me cold and remote. “I’ve made it this far on my own; I can keep going just fine.” The harshness that crept into my voice made her falter. Finally, she started to understand that the situation was more dire than she could possibly imagine, that I had been broken so completely that there was no redemption available for me.
“I don’t pity you. I just think you are…out of reach.” She gave me a troubled smile and cautiously moved closer to me, afraid of how I might react. I watched her like a caged animal, drawn to her flesh yet at the same time wary of her touch.
Then she tilted her head to one side; what was she trying to do?
“Did you tell me everything?” Even before the sound of her voice, her perfume reached me, hitting me like a punch to the face. Babygirl stood right in front of me and brushed her thumb against my lower lip. Her touch was soothing but not soothing enough.
“I told you everything you need to know,” I answered in an impenetrable tone.
What else did she want?
I had already laid myself too fucking bare for her, especially in the psychological sense.
She couldn’t expect anything more.
“You know, Neil…” Selene watched me as though I were the most beautiful man in the world, like she couldn’t wait to burn once more in the flames of my desires. “Now that I understand your past, or at least parts of it, I have some answers to all those questions I’ve had. And I won’t deny that I’m disturbed by them, but I want you to know that I would do anything for you. Except let you go; that, I won’t do.” She smiled tenderly at me, and her fingers, which had continued to caress my jaw, gave me a strange, heated feeling. It was a sensation that I couldn’t quite pinpoint, right there in the center of my chest.
“You don’t understand. I have too many problems to deal with and you…” I was trying to argue with her, to destroy the false hopes she had undoubtedly developed under the delusion that she understood me. But then she shook her head and took a tiny step forward to press her lips to mine.
“You are the one who doesn’t understand, Neil. I am addicted to you,” she whispered slowly, and I felt almost afraid of the yearning that I glimpsed in her eyes. “Just let me be with you. All I’m asking is that you take my hand and walk beside me, whatever paths we go down or wherever our destiny leads us…” She stroked the nape of my neck, and I stood, dumbfounded, listening to her. Her hot breath was as much an irresistible temptation as the breasts that pressed against my torso. I trembled with the desire to strip her, to lose myself in her, to let myself be engulfed by her tight walls. I wanted to move between them without fear of being thought wrong or perverse instead of what I was—a normal man with a visceral desire for a particular woman.
“I can’t, Selene.” I was dead set against changing my outlook. “Kim damaged me, I… I’m not capable of love, not the way you think of it. Love, for me, is something bad. Something that destroyed me before…” I rested my hand on her hip and tried to push her away from me. Her shirt, however, lifted slightly with the movement, allowing me to touch her and ruining any chance I had of resisting.
My fingers seemed to burn as they moved over her hot skin.
“I don’t want a love story, Neil.” She pushed back, looping her arms around my neck and standing up on her tiptoes. “I want you to be able to talk to me and share whatever you want only with me. Even if it’s wild, obscene sex… Whatever you want. I want to know you inside and out. I’m not asking you to love me or to be my man. I don’t want to become a couple,” she said clearly, and I was relieved. “I’m asking you for more. I want to be in the fight with you. I want to see you live and dream. I want to watch you destroy the gilded cage you’re trapped inside and take to the sky. I want to watch you demolish the past and build your future. I want to see you find a new light. I want to see you find yourself and discover the thing inside you that is worth fighting for. It doesn’t matter if there’s no place for me in that future…” She cupped my face in her hands, not allowing me to look away from her sincere, anguished eyes. “I just want you to get better. Let me be with you and take whatever you can give to me. I won’t ask any more of you than that,” she pleaded, and the tears she’d been keeping back for so long finally slipped down her cheeks. I caught them with my thumbs. I hated it when a woman cried, and I hated it even more when that woman was her.
“You promised you wouldn’t cry for me again,” I said as her feet sank back down to the earth, just like I hoped her fantasies would. Babygirl was dreaming too big. But I couldn’t just play the bastard again, no matter how strong the urge to drive her away might have been.
