He strokes the back of his hand down my cheek as he speaks. “It took me a long time to accept the flashbacks were memories. I think I knew deep down, but to admit it was like saying it out loud to myself. I knew I’d accepted her drink and flirted back. So I questioned myself, you know? Maybe I had gone with her and wanted it? I was the guy, after all. How does a woman even rape a man? Force him to have sex if he doesn’t want to? They’re the kinds of things I’m ashamed to admit I might have thought before it happened to me.”
“Oh, Reed...”
He catches my lips with his and sucks in a deep breath as he kisses me.
“I’m going to tell you everything. And then I need to have you again. I don’t want the last words we speak to each other tonight to be about the past. Okay?”
“Okay,” I breathe against his lips. My soul already feels like it’s being tortured knowing what he’s been through.
“The next day I woke up alone in a dingy hotel that I had no recollection of going to. I was naked with lipstick on my dick and a banging head that made me want to barf just by opening my eyes. I didn’t know where the fuck I was or how I got there. It wasn’t like those mornings when you have a drunken night and you wake up feeling rough. This was different. I was scared, Harls. I knew something wasn’t right. I could feel it. It was like my body had been steamrollered. And…” Reed clears his throat. “And Ihurt. In ways I never had before. In places that didn’t usually hurt after.”
I wrap my hand around the back of Reed’s head, pulling our foreheads together. “That should never have happened to you,” I choke out as a tear slides down my cheek.
“I know. At the time, I didn’t understand it. I got dressed and left. Caught the subway home in the same clothes from the night before. My parents were angry. They’d worried when I didn’t come home without calling. But Riley? She knew just by looking at me something was up. She refused to leave me alone until I told her. Then she wanted to go to the police, but I’d already gotten in the shower and scrubbed myself raw by that point. I didn’t think they’d believe me, anyway.Ididn’t believe me. I’d never heard of it happening to a guy before. I thought I must have been drunk and compliant, otherwise, how would it have worked?”
“It can happen, Reed.” I stroke my fingers along his cheek, my forehead still pressed against his. I don’t want to move away. I can’t move away. He’s speaking every word with his mouth so close to mine, and I wish I could swallow them all, make them disappear to where they can’t hurt him anymore.
“Riley wouldn’t let it go. She called Griffin. He’d been with his dad the night before and missed the drinks. But he was a resourceful bastard, even back then. He knew people. He got me an anonymous drugs test done within a few hours. They found traces of Viagra and Rohypnol in my system. She’d drugged me. Probably put it in my drink.”
Reed’s fingers flex against my waist where he’s holding me as I catch the gasp in my throat before it exits my lips.
She drugged him. She drugged him and raped him.
“I kept it a secret from my parents and got on with life. Made Riley and Griff swear to keep silent. I didn’t know who she was. All I had was a fake first name, a blurry memory of her, and a sheet of paper proving I had drugs in my system. That’s all. She paid the hotel in cash, and they had no camera footage. Griffin checked. Riley checked. They both tried. And I did nothing. I just wanted to forget it ever happened. I didn’t think anyone would really believe it. Why would they? Women can pick men up in bars for sex if they want to. They don’t need to drug ones over a decade younger than them.”
“That’s not how it works, though. You know that. She hurt you, Reed. She planned that and she—”
“I know, Angel.” He presses a kiss to my lips. “I know that now. But I was young, and I just wanted to ignore it. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of moving on. I was working for a record label. Just entry level stuff. That’s when I met Bea. She was at a concert for this big band we’d signed. I had a backstage pass around my neck, and she thought I was more important than I was. We started dating, then a couple of months later, she moved into the place I was renting. The next thing I know we’d argued about something, and she told me if she stayed, she wanted more commitment. She wanted to be engaged. I didn’t agree. I just didn’t correct her.”
A surge of jealousy rises in my gut as he talks about Bea. It’s stupid and irrational. I know he never loved her. He’s told me as much. That they were wrong for each other, and she only wanted to be with him when she thought he was moving up in the world and she could hitch a ride with him. But still, hearing him talk about her, knowing they lived together and were engaged. Knowing she was there for him, beingthatperson when he needed them most. Even though I didn’t know him then. It stings like salt in a wound.
“Harls.” He smiles at me, reading my face like a book.
“It wasn’t like that. I didn’t confide in her. She read texts from Riley on my phone and confronted me about it. I never told her. I didn’t want to. Partly because I wanted to pretend it never happened, and partly because I didn’t share things with her. Not things like that. Our relationship was never like that.”
“What happened when she found out?”
Reed’s eyes darken, and he looks away from me.
“Nothing. We carried on. She never mentioned it again. We broke up a few weeks later, and I moved with Riley and my parents to California.”
I assumed the move was to help Riley when I thought it was her who had been hurt. But now I know it wasn’t.
“If your parents didn’t know, then why did you all move?”
I don’t miss the way Reed’s eyes close and his brow tenses, a deep furrow running along the width of it as he draws in a deep breath. Whatever he’s about to say is hard for him. But nothing can be worse than what he’s just told me. Nothing is worse than the thought of someone hurting him.
“I was having thoughts... dark ones… about harming myself.”
Wrong.
His words smash into me like an axe to the heart, pulverizing it into a sludge that threatens to force its way out of my mouth as my stomach heaves.
Wrong. That is worse. So much worse.
“Griffin found me in time,” he says as I stare at him, my eyes hot and burning. “He talked me down off a ledge. Literally.”
My vision blurs and blood rushes in my ears as I search his eyes. “I can’t… I…”