“Without going into detail that neither of us need, my first sexual experience was not consensual, happened when I was too fuckin’ young to understand what was going on, and the fact that my uncle was the one doing the... shit, I wasn’t brave enough to stand up to him. To say no.” He ran his hand through his hair, looking anywhere but me.
My heart thumped between my ears, a dull roar. The beer I drank earlier tonight curdled in my stomach, and it took effort to keep from throwing up. Hearing the pain and shame in Cody’s voice was sickening.
“He did it more than once,” he continued. “Told me it was a secret, that I’d get in trouble if I told anyone.” He laughed, but it was a bitter, ugly sound. “Stupid kid that I was, I believed him.”
I stepped forward, intending on touching him, comforting him, doing anything to take the suffering, pain and self-hatred from his body. He was coated with it.
Cody stepped back from my touch. Recoiled. His rejection hit me in the chest, but I got it.
“You weren’t stupid,” I said. “You were a child. And he was a monster.” Tears blurred my vision, and I tried to force them from falling. I couldn’t be weak in the face of this. Couldn’t show him an emotion he might construe as pity.
“Ah, no, he was just a man,” he said. “One that has to die.”
My blood went cold. “What?”
“He ruined me, Lizzie,” Cody hissed, finally looking at me. “He ruined what I might’ve had with you. Stole it from me. Ripped me up inside so self-hatred is all I know. When I told my dad, you know what he did? He smacked me around and called me a faggot.” Another one of those cold laughs spilled from him. “My mom would’ve believed me. But it also would’ve broken her heart, I knew that even then. Was protecting her even then. My dad beat me so bad that it made her leave him. When she saw what he did to me, she ran. With me. As far away as she could get.” He looked away. “Here,” he murmured. “She wanted Amber to be a fresh start. Clean slate. Something good. I didn’t want to tarnish our good thing with the rancid truth, so I buried it. With the promise to myself that when I was older, stronger, I’d go back there. I’d find him, and I’d kill him.”
A tear rolled down my cheek. I couldn’t stop it. “Cody...” I stepped forward, but the way his body tensed made me pause. It wasn’t even tensing, it was a recoil. An emotional slap to the face and knife to the soul.
“You need to leave,” he said in that cold, disembodied voice.
“Leave?” I repeated, my voice shaking. “No. I’m not going anywhere.” Something told me if I left right then, I’d never see Cody again. It would be over in a scary, permanent way. “I can’t lose you.”
“You never really had me, Lizzie,” he countered. “Not all of me. I can’t give you that. fuck, you’re in fucking high school. This is not the kind of shit we should be dealing with. That you should be dealing with. We need to grow up. Both of us.” He stared at me. Like I was a stranger. “You need to leave.”
I knew him, so in that moment I knew nothing was going to change his mind. And he was right. We were too young for this intensity. He’d just told me something that he’d been hiding, his greatest shame. The secret had obviously been cutting him up from the inside out. And I didn’t know how to handle something like this. Even if I did, Cody was telling me he didn’t want my help. Even though I wanted to be there for him, maybe Cody could tackle his demons alone. Maybe he needed to focus on himself, because when we were together, all his thoughts, effort and love went to me. And how was he meant to repair what had been broken without time for himself?
But the selfish part of me didn’t care. I didn’t care about all of that. About all the possible repercussions. I just wanted my boyfriend. I wanted to undress and go to bed with him. Sleep with his arms around me. I wanted to find a way to fix his pain, show him that it didn’t make me love him any less. That it didn’t make him any less. But he wouldn’t believe me. It wouldn’t sink in. I didn’t have any experience with this kind of horror, and I had no idea how to help him. Worse, I was terrified I’d hurt him.
“I’m going to leave,” I whispered, tears streaming down my face, “even though I know this decision is going to be painful for the two of us. I hate that you’re forcing me to go. I don’t want to. I don’t want to be without you. I don’t want you to think horrible things about yourself that aren’t true. But I can’t control that. Just please, carry this with you.” I undid the heart necklace he’d bought me for Christmas. The one that caused him to take a month longer to finish his motorcycle than it should’ve.