Aura looked down at the sheet twisted in her hands. “I don’t want to be the woman who makes you cruel.”
“You aren’t.”
“I saw you that night. At The Sin Bin. I saw your face.”
“I was cruel before that.” My voice roughened. “I was cruel for months. That wasn’t you making me anything. That was me choosing the easiest way to bleed.”
She went still.
I reached for her slowly, giving her time to pull away. She didn’t. My fingers closed around her ankle over the sheet, warm and fragile beneath my palm.
“You need to tell me something,” I said.
Her eyes lifted to mine, wary now. “That sounds like a trap.”
“It’s not.”
“Men say that right before traps.”
“I deserve that.”
She swallowed. “What do you want to know?”
I rubbed my thumb once along the inside of her ankle. “You said the night at my apartment wasn’t the whole story. You said you gave me the CliffsNotes version.”
Her gaze dropped.
“I’m not asking for all of it right now,” I said before she could go somewhere I couldn’t reach. “I’m asking if there’s something I need to understand so I don’t keep stepping on wounds I can’t see.”
The rain filled the silence between us.
Aura pulled her ankle from my hand, not harshly, then hugged her knees beneath the sheet. Her braids fell forward, hiding part of her face.
“I don’t remember enough to give you the kind of story people expect,” she said.
I stayed still.
“I hate that part. People think trauma is linear if it’s real. Beginning, middle, end, villain, proof, trial, justice, inspirational survival arc.” Her mouth twisted. “Mine is lights and sound and pieces of my own body moving like it belonged to someone else because I was drugged. Mine is waking up with blank spaces and then having those blank spaces thrown back at me by people who were more comfortable making me a slut than admitting boys they knew were monsters.”
My hand curled into the sheet beside me.
She saw it and pointed at me. “No murder face.”
“I’m trying.”
“You are failing with enthusiasm.”
“That’s my brand.”
A tiny, broken smile touched her mouth, and I wanted to keep it alive with my hands.
Then it disappeared.
“I watched it,” she said.
The air left my lungs.
Her voice turned quieter. “The video. I watched it a few times. Not a lot. Enough.”
