Again, I stopped to breathe.
“I felt like… I did the bad thing and... I was mortified. Just fucking wrecked with guilt that I was a part of something I knew was wrong.”
My entire body trembled as I remembered the feeling, the god-awful shame. It was the heaviest downpour of chilling disgust I’d ever felt in my whole life. I made myself sick to my stomach with what I’d done, and the feeling never went away.
I woke up sick. I went to bed sick.
It was right around that time that the thought of dying first winked in my brain.
Still with my thumbnail in my mouth, I spoke through the relentless chewing. “But one night, Johnny woke me up from a night terror, and I fucking lost it and told him everything. Johnny told my dad the next morning even though I begged him not to, and my dad didn’t really know how to react.”
I laughed a pitiful laugh as I recalled my father’s dreary face as he heard the words that his precious little girl wasn’t so precious anymore.
Shaking my head with the memory, I said softly, “He wouldn’t look at me. I remember that.”
And I’d never forget it. How my favorite man in the world couldn’t even bear to look me in the eye.
My dad had never looked at me the same ever since.
“In the background, the T.V. was on and the news was up,” I kept going, ripping dead skin off my bottom lip and stared at nothing. “And I... remember pointing at the screen. It was him. The man who stood in the corner and got off while my coach raped me. He was on my T.V.”
As I dropped the first hint of just how fucked up my sob story was, I looked to James for his reaction.
His confusion did not disappoint.
“I started bawling and told my dad that the man on T.V. was one of the bad men and… big shocker, he didn’t believe me.”
Slow understanding began to form the jagged edges of James’ gaze to something soft again. Unmistakable sorrow lugged his eyebrows to a slant, and his darkness began to slip away, unable to hold onto the hard lines of his anger as they smoothed out.
Good.
The fire in my veins dwindled too, adjusting to a comforting warmth that it was working. The story turned toward its final notes and relief cut a sharp breath through my chest, and I choked down a small gasp. James watched me struggle, watched me try to breathe with such a pained expression, knowing there was nothing he could do to help.
“Everything changed after that in how he reacted. Then he was angry, calling me a liar, and everything Coach Max said would happen did. Literally, every bad thing Coach Max said would happen if I told anyone happened. My dad said there was no way the Governor of California was a sexual predator, especially since he had a daughter only a few years younger than me, and if I was making up that part of it, I had to be making up the rest too.”
My voice faded behind the lump that slid up my throat just as the vision of James in front of me blurred behind another round of worthless tears.
“A few years ago, my coach was arrested for doing the same shit to another girl,” I croaked out. “Except her parents believed her when she told them. He went to prison, and my parents never said a fucking word to me about it.”
“The governor?” James asked after a thick silence.
I blinked up at him, a heavy tear rolling down the side of my face.
“That’s whose house I burned down the day we met.”
James’ eyes followed the rogue tear as it fell, looking like he was struggling not to reach out and swipe it away.
“Governor Ricks had just been elected and thought he was un-fucking-touchable.” I shrugged a sad shrug. “Turned out he was right. My dad never brought it up again, and my mom just pulled me out of gymnastics like that would fix everything, but they never believed me. No one did except Johnny.”
Another fucking useless water petal slipped down the same cheek, and this time, James didn’t stop himself.
He reached through the small distance between us and caught my tear on his thumb, his touch way too fucking tender. The emotional ache in my body intensified and pushed out another tear on the other side, even as I tried to blink it away. James caught that one too, brushing his wet thumb beneath my eye in a gentle sweep.
The way he touched me… It was as if I was a snowflake, delicate as anything in his hands.
Maybe I was.
Maybe I was as fragile as his touch said I was, and maybe there was no changing that. Maybe if my parents had believed me back then like James had believed me tonight, I wouldn’t be so damn breakable.