“I really don’t think that you want to know,” I whisper. I’m really not sure that I can talk about it in detail without falling apart completely.
“I do. I want to know how often you were alone, and no one was there to help.”
I let out a bitter-sounding laugh as I sit up and face him. “My life was hell. I’ve never had anyone. Ever. There have only ever been a few people in my life that I cared about outside of my family, and they both turned out to be the fucking worst of them all. Every day, I hate myself for falling for them. For letting them hurt me in the way that they did.”
He stares at me for a long time, giving my leg another gentle squeeze to let me know that he’s listening. His eyes say that he’s here if I want to talk. Maybe it’s time that I tell someone who won’t just brush it off as my parents did.
“Junior year, I made a friend. She was new to school and didn’t know me. She didn’t know that I was an outcast, that I was the farthest thing from having a life inside that stupid school.”
“Amy, right?” Beckett asks, and I nod.
“My parents were so happy for me. I’d finally put myself out there and made a friend. I was happy for myself. You remember, obviously, since she came with me to everything. My parents wanted me to show her off like she was a trophy. A way for them to tell everyone that I was normal.”
I wipe away a tear that rolls down my face. I never realized how much this affected me still. This is one of the big reasons why I struggle to trust people.
“I caught her with Kaden,” I say, not beating around the bush. I take a deep, shaky breath. “I was willing to forgive her. I told her that I understood. As humans, we can’t help who we fall for. That both Kaden and I could be part of her life, me as a friend and him as whatever was growing between them. She laughed at me. Like, actually laughed in my face. She told me that she had no interest in me; she never did. She’d used me to get to Kaden. I don’t know how long they hooked up for, but I know that I never saw her around the house after we stopped being friends.”
“I’m sorry that you had to go through that. No one deserves to be treated that way,” he says, his thumb rubbing soothing patterns over the material of my sweats.
“That’s not even the worst. Carter was so much worse.”
“The boys’ friend, Carter?”
I nod my head. I can’t look at him as I tell this story. It hurt way too much. I’d never felt so low as I did after Carter happened to me.
“Senior year, Carter and I were paired together for a class project. He was on the basketball team, a little nerdy, and really cute. He’d never been mean to me, he’d never called me names as the other kids did. Instead, he’d make me laugh and smile, compliment me about little things like my smile, my eyes, my personality. We worked on the project for a few weeks, and for whatever reason, I let myself get close to him.”
Beckett scoots closer to me, and he wraps his arm around me. I don’t even realize how hard I am starting to cry until he wipes the tears away.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he whispers, pulling me flush against him.
“Yes, I do. I need someone to know,” I whisper, looking up at him. He looks back at me with sad eyes as he nods his head.
“We started hanging out a little bit after the project ended. We studied together, we went to the movies, and got ice cream. He was my firstrealkiss; he sat with me in the lunchroom. He wasn’t ashamed of me. He stood up for me when people would call me names.”
I close my eyes and clench my teeth. “I was falling for him fast and hard. I latched onto everything he gave me. I’d never had that kind of attention before. I’d never felt like I was worth something until him. Then one night, everything came crashing down. We’d been something for a few months. Basketball season was over, and he convinced me that he wanted to go to the nextstep with me. So we started working our way towards it. Making out, touching, taking clothes off, then one night it happened.”
I have to pause to breath. The tears are now falling fast and hard; it’s a surprise that I’m even coherent at this point. “He filmed us, without my consent, and he showed all his friends. By the next day, everyone had seen the video. They’d seen me. He laughed at me in the hall, in front of the whole school. He laughed at me and told me it was all a joke. That no one would ever be able to actually love the fat chick.”
I can’t even see when I finally manage to get all the words out. Beckett holds me close to him as I begin to sob into his chest. Carter was the only person I’d ever been with. Even now that I have lost weight, in college I could never let someone see me like that. Not when the last person had betrayed me so badly.
“He made a sex tape and sent it to people without your consent. Sloane, do you know how serious underage revenge porn is?” Beckett asks, his voice calm, his face holding the emotions of a million different things.
I shrug. “Nothing anyone could have done would ever stop the way I felt. It would have never changed the number of people who saw me at my most vulnerable, would have never stopped the names I was called, the way that I almost…” I trail off. All the memories are suddenly overwhelming me.
“Your dad could have done something.Iwould have done something.”
“Nothing would have happened, and I would have been worse off because then I would have been a snitch on top of everything.”
“Sloane…”
“It doesn’t matter, ok? It happened, it’s done. Teenagers are shitty, and some of us had it worse than others.”
I try to pull away from him; I’ve shared way too much. I shouldn’t have said anything. I opened up to him in a way that I told myself I’d never do again.
“Stop,” he gently commands, gripping my shoulders and forcing me to look at him. I try to calm myself down. It takes a few minutes, but the tears finally start to subside as I let him pull me into his arms. He doesn’t say anything, he just holds me. His arms wrap tightly around me, and I don’t hate it. Not like I should.
I know that he won’t hurt me. Not like they did, but I can’t let myself open up any more than I already have.
