The weight was too much for a man who was better than he wanted to be.
He had a darkness, yes, and that darkness was fucking magnetic, but it was only a shadow. Whereas mine had poisoned my whole soul black, James’ was just a lurking thing that pounced on any opportunity to show its teeth.
But it wasn’t him.
He wasn’t his darkness like I was mine, and maybe the story I would tell him could keep it that way.
Old words I’d locked down rattled in my chest as I clutched the sheet tighter around me with one hand and moved the shower curtain back with the other.
James didn’t look up as I widened the view of him, the slow grate of the curtain inching back. He was completely naked, but he didn’t seem to care and neither did I. The moment was too loaded to leave room to care.
Those ancient words tiptoed up my throat, each rising syllable like lava rocks crawling up, burning me from the inside out just like the memories they brought with them.
The memories stung. They scorched. They set me on fire at a young age and stood back to watch me burn… and burn I did.
“I was in gymnastics from age eight to fifteen,” I began, voice a thin murmur. Eyes on James’ lowered head, I filled my lungs wide and breathed out the fire.
“My coach didn’t start molesting me until I was twelve.”
His head snapped up. I forced my muscles in a desperate, whole body clench not to move back. The emotion in his eyes was like a goddamn shove. Shock, fury, and murder—fucking murder—all rounded his dark gold eyes so wide.
I swallowed down the satisfaction I got from his rage, grateful that it wasn’t sad pity filling out his stare instead.
I hated pity like I hated breathing. It was such a goddamn mockery. It said ‘I feel sorry for you’ and I didn’t need or want James to feel sorry for what happened to me. I wanted his dirty fucking wrath just like he was giving me.
“The first time he did it, I’d just landed wrong on my ankle doing my double back tuck, and he took me in the backroom where the gym kept all of their medical supplies. He was a trained EMT, so he usually took care of all the gymnasts’ injuries.”
I scoffed as a thought I’d wrestled with plenty of times before struggled past my lips. “I shouldn’t have fallen that day. He was spotting me.”
Flashing my eyes back to James, I said pointedly, “He let me fall so he could get me back there.”
Alone.
So fucking alone.
“He’d been the main coach since I started at that gym, so I trusted him completely and he knew that. This was the same fucking guy that held me when I cried my eyes out after I fell off the beam and got the wind knocked out of me, and the same guy who lifted me up on his shoulders to celebrate when I landed my first full back by myself.”
Coach Max had been there for so many of my highs and lows, patched me up for other minor injuries I’d gotten over the years. I never even thought twice about it when I went back there with him that day.
“He told me he needed me to take off my pants so he could check for other injuries, which I didn’t understand, but I did it anyway because he told me to. It was as simple as that to get me to listen to him...” I grabbed the inside of my cheek with my teeth and chewed the skin, biting into the pain and shaking my head. “And he knew it too.”
James stood still under the rushing shower, stare captivated on me as the honey of his eyes soured darker and more bitter with every word I spoke. The blacker they got, the closer to him I wanted to get. His anger pulled at my demons that chanted for it, anchoring me a step closer to the shower.
“That day and the next few times, he only touched me over my underwear, the entire time telling me it was totally normal for medical check ups.”
I squeezed my legs together like I could still feel his hand there, fingers probing, pretending to be gentle, pretending he couldn’t feel the tension in my body as he slipped his hand just below the band of my panties. All the while, his mouth spewed lie after ugly lie. Medical terms I didn’t understand. Tales of fear he’d weave if I didn’t let him properly heal my injury.
“When my ankle healed and he didn’t have that reason to keep me back there behind closed doors anymore, he started asking me about my period and if it had come yet. I was twelve andit hadn’t come yet. So he said he needed to check to see when it was coming.”
Disgust rolled through my voice just as it did my body. I’ll never get rid of that feeling. That fucking gnawing, sinking, freezing splash of guilt that consumed me head to toe when he first touched me like that.
My body knew it was wrong even if Coach Max was telling me it wasn’t.
That feeling was a cancer in my stomach that never healed. There wasn’t a radiation strong enough to tackle that feeling. It just grew and grew, making me sicker and madder until my entire body was inflamed with its sickness.
Its fire.
James’ thick frame of eyebrows darted down as his full lips parted open, but no words came out. In his eyes though, I saw it. The pain.