She looks at me and then away. “I guess not. But just so you know. It wasn’t rape. We didn’t do that. They just did… Other stuff.”
“That’s still rape,” I say quietly, squeezing her hand. My head is spinning so hard I think I’ll be sick. “So you’d better tell me who did that to you, so I can take care of him.”
Them.
Fuck. She said ‘they.’
“You can’t,” she says, pulling her hand from mine. “I don’t want you to do anything. There’s nothing you can do. It was a long time ago, and it’s already been taken care of.”
“You told your dad?”
She doesn’t say anything.
Fuck. My heart freezes in my chest, and I remember my earlier suspicions. “It was your dad,” I say flatly.
“No,” she says quickly.
Too quickly. Too emphatically.
Who else would have access to her…Andnot be terrified of what Anthony Pomponio would do?
“Look, King,” she says, turning to face me at last. “I’m sorry that you got a wife who’s broken, who can’t give you the one thing you want, but I didn’t tell you that because I didn’t want you to know, or be mad, or get some vigilante scheme in your head. I wouldn’t have told you at all if I hadn’t freaked out like that and given it away. I would have just endured it like a good little wifey and kept my mouth shut. That’s how much I didn’t want you to know. So please, please respect my wishes and just drop it. I don’t want revenge. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to forget it happened and move on with my life.Please.”
I don’t know what to say to her. I can’t just forget it. I can’t drop it and let it go and pretend I don’t know. But it’s her body, her experience, and she’s right. I should respect her wishes, even if it feels wrong to the very core of my bones.
“Okay,” I say at last.
“Okay.”
I pick up my coffee. “You’renevergoing to want me to touch you?”
She shakes her head. “No, but I’ll do my duty to the family. I know we have to have a baby. I’ll get used to the idea, I promise. Or I’ll just get really drunk or something, so I don’t even feel it.”
“I’m not going to do that,” I say, taking a sip of the black coffee. I relish the sting on my tongue, the bitterness. I don’t want to remember what she tastes like if I never get to taste her again. It will only make it worse, knowing I had the smallest taste, a single small lick. It only makes me know what I didn’t have, what I can never have. What someone took from me, and the immensely more devastating thing they took from her.
I take her coffee and set it on the nightstand with mine. Then I take both her hands. “I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want, Eliza. Ever. No matter what. I don’t care what the families want, what they expect. You’re safe with me, and I’m going to prove that to you, no matter how long it takes. I want you to know that you can trust me.”
She looks up at me, her eyes all question and vulnerability. “Promise?”
“I promise.” I lean forward and kiss her forehead.
“What happens when they ask about a baby?” she whispers.
“We tell them we’re trying. And when that stops working, we can tell them you couldn’t get pregnant. As long as we’re married, the families are united. A baby would help solidify it, but even without one, they have us.” I squeeze her hands, and she nods, a tear sliding down her cheek.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
I turn off the light and slide into bed next to her. Instead of turning my back and staying on the far side, though, I pull her close. She tenses, and I curl my body around hers, kissing the back of her neck. “Can I just hold you?” I ask. “I don’t want anything else.”
“Okay,” she whispers, and I feel her begin to relax. I hold her gently, like a fragile thing, though I know she doesn’t want that. No one wants to be thought of that way. But the burn of my anger has cooled into something warm and fiercely protective, and I keep my arms around her, as if I can protect her from something that is long gone, something that only lives in her memory now.
I don’t know when I stopped thinking I would never care about this girl. Maybe it happened sometime during the week, when I was counting the freckles on her skin, watching with envy as she laughed at everyone’s jokes but mine, admiring the fearless way she dove into the water from a cliff. Or maybe it was tonight, when I saw inside her, saw the cracks in her armor that look so much like mine, even if the cause of our brokenness is so very different. I only know that I’ve failed already.
I’ve broken the vow I made to myself. I promised I wouldn’t let her love me, but I forgot to worry about my own stupid heart. My sister once told me that I’d make a good father because I want to protect people, to take care of them. I may never be a father, but the other part is true. I didn’t ask for it, but I’m cursed with an instinct that makes the life I’m bound to even more dangerous.
I know what it’s like to hurt, and when I see someone hurting, I want to take that hurt away. It binds me to them in some way, a way that has nothing to do with the vows I made to Eliza or the rings we put on each other’s fingers. I can’t help but care about what’s mine, and I will go to the ends of the earth to protect it. And the instinct isn’t just for family, for a girl I vowed to protect. It’s more than that. She found my weakness. When I know a girl is hurting, something primal inside me awakens, an instinct to protect her, to care for her, to heal her.
I know how dangerous that is not just because someone could take her from me, but because I won’t be able to protect her from all the hurts that come with being a made guy’s wife. I can’t promise her I’ll always be here. I wasn’t there to protect her in the past when she was hurt, and I can’t protect her from the effects of her past on her life now. The truth is, I can’t even promise I’ll protect her if I’m here. I’ve failed before. How could she trust me to take care of her when the last girl I was supposed to protect ended up dead?