James looked like he was silently screaming in pain.
“I thought when I finally got my period that his ‘check ups’ would stop, but they didn’t,'' I continued, shallow breathing growing untamed as I watched the pain grow in his eyes. Bigger, meaner, louder. “They got more invasive and his lies started to sound more like threats. That if I told my mom about our monthly checkups, she’d be mad at me and pull me out of gymnastics. That if I told any of my friends, they would think I was lying for attention and wouldn’t be my friends anymore.”
I sucked down a deep breath, feeling the flames slash through the air in my lungs and dance in the wreckage it left.
I hadn’t said this story out loud to anyone since I told Demitri, and the fire was enjoying its freedom, relishing in the complete recollection of its birth.
I white-knuckled the sheet in my hands, pulling it as tight as I could to stop the onslaught of flames, but it was useless.These memories were their kindling, and I poorly held back a cry as they slunk past my wrists and shot out into my arms.
As the sorrows continued to drip over my lips, I was slowly and mercilessly engulfed in flames.
“I didn’t say anything… not for two years. I’d go back there once a month, and he’d make me strip down and put his fingers inside of me and jack off. Sometimes he’d make me touch him too,” I forced out, my voice dry and flat.
James never looked away from me, but his hands on the shower wall drew my gaze. They were fists, wound tightly so his knuckles bled white and shook with the need to lash out. The need for violence.
The need for vengeance on my behalf.
At the sight, my demons cheered a riotous applause, and I stumbled another step toward him.
“I couldn’t sleep. Wasn’t eating right, and I was losing too much weight to sustain the amount of exercise I was doing in classes.” My head shook back and forth while I kept a locked eye on James, holding onto his rage for dear-fucking life. “I was fainting all the time. In classes, out of classes.”
A cruel smile cracked my mouth in half, and a humorless, quivering laugh followed. “My mom thought that, instead of bringing me to a real doctor, Coach Max could help figure out what was wrong since he knew me so well.”
She practically put his fingers inside of me herself and never admitted it.
Mom just drank away the realization and shoved however many pills it took down her throat to forget all the bad her daughter had done.
“That went on until I was almost fifteen. Then one day, someone walked in on him with his fingers in me and his dick hanging out and…” My voice drifted as my mind did, back to that room, back to that exact moment where I thought things were going to get better. “I thought it was finally over. I prayed so fucking hard that it was over. I prayed,” I seethed, feeling the fire prick the backs of my eyes. “That’s how desperate I was for it to be over.”
James swallowed hard, and I watched his Adam’s apple move up and down beneath his wet skin like he knew what was coming next was bad but he was trying to swallow the idea down.
He must have been thinking behind those eyes that were now more black than gold that there was no way it could get worse. Right?
That’s what I thought at the time too.
“Instead, that guy that walked in made a deal to come back the next time and watch.”
The noise that came out of James next was nothing short of wounded, like my words had shot clean through his chest with a bullet made of poison. The poison infected every muscle in his body until he was shaking just like me, his massive body vibrating with too much dark energy to know what to do with.
I could feel it ebbing out of him, pressing into me because it knew I could take it. I felt his darkness so profoundly, like a blood transfusion pouring through my veins and sending me on a high so beautiful, it stung.
I wanted more of his darkness, and I knew I could take it, so I spit out the next searing fireball.
“The next time was the first time my coach raped me.”
“Scarlett,” his voice knifed through his silence and begged me to stop. Begged for it not to be true.
“The man who walked in on it stood in the corner and watched, jerking off,” I pushed on, needing him to hear every dirty detail of why I was the fucked up girl that I was.
Tugging at the skin of my bottom lip, I whispered, “I hadn’t even had my first kiss yet…”
James dropped his stare from mine for the first time since I began speaking, and it landed on my mouth. Through the squalls of black rage rolling in his eyes, something not quite so angry cracked through.
A yearning. A bright, desperate longing to go back in time and kiss me how any young woman should be kissed for her first time. Sweet and delicate, something to be cherished.
I honestly couldn’t even remember who my first kiss was now.
“Anyway,” I sunk my teeth over my thumb, biting on the nail for distraction. “It happened twice more before I told my brother. Jonathan knew something had been wrong with me for months, but I wouldn’t tell him what. I was so fucking terrified to say a word,” I breathed sharply. “I knew I would be in trouble and that people would talk and look at me differently and I just—”