Maybe I misread everything from her all these years. Every look, every word, every touch. Maybe we weren’t as close as I thought.
I wanted to ask her about it. We’d never had that talk like we’d agreed to, and I needed to know. Why had she run from me? And why hadn’t she told me about this scar when she was lucid?
If she hadn’t been medicated, would she have ever told me about it?
She probably didn’t remember that I knew.
And now that I thought about it, standing here, pretending I didn’t know who’d done this to her felt like another betrayal to Tessa.
A betrayal I needed to come clean with.
35
TESSA
My fingers hovered over his chest, just like they had that day I’d found his scars. The tattoos were gorgeous. An artful maze of elements flowing together, telling a new story, but beneath them, I knew every ridge, every line of the original chapter.
“No one else knows what’s under there, do they?” I asked softly.
“No.” Blake’s thumb traced the raised line along my collarbone, and something shifted in his expression—that familiar crease between his brows that always meant he was wrestling with something. “Tess, do you remember telling me about this?”
His question, its implications, stole the air from my lungs.
“What?”
“When you were sedated,” he said quietly, his gaze tentatively navigating from my left eye to my right, “you told me what happened that night.”
My head spun. The bathroom walls seemed to close in, steam suddenly too thick to breathe, and in the span of a few heartbeats, several emotions charged through my veins.
Panic.Pure, premium, grade-A panic. This was the secret I’d guarded for years, planned to take to my grave. I’d spent atremendous amount of energy hiding it from everyone, from the clothes I chose to the topics I avoided.
Every family gathering had this pulse, threatening to shatter the unbroken image my family had of me. Family dinners were a tug-of-war between the mundane in front of me and the horror in my head.Tess, can you pass the potatoes? He throws me on the bed. Tess, do you need a refill, dear? He rips my shirt. Tess, how is your semester going? He shoves his sweaty hand over my mouth, as if anyone could hear me scream over the bass of the music, thumping through my body like a warning. Fight. Fight. Fight.
Crashing right behind panic wasshamebecause I knew better. The mistakes I’d made that night that put me in his room, that gave him the ability to try and …
I was so much smarter than that. I’d seen enough news stories, thank you very much.
Which leads straight intoanger. Women shouldn’t have to be warned—constantly—about the dangers of men. Maybe, just fucking maybe, if police had—oh, I don’t know—arrested that guy, he’d have been deterred from doing it again. I bet he’d done it before and then did it again after. Based on his creepy letters, he was probably still doing it to this day, and how many women came forward, asking for help? Why would they bother? Where did it get me without some smoking gun?
In fact, last I researched, out of a thousand sexual assaults, it was estimated that only six resulted in the perpetrator being incarcerated. Six. Out of a thousand. If my math was right, that meant these assailants had a 99.4% chance of getting away with it scot-free. Why the hellwouldn’tsome asshole go around raping women? I really hoped those statistics were wrong.
And then the hardest emotion hit. Sadness. Less so for me. My attack was interrupted. I had the privilege of having accessto therapy. I got better. But my sadness was for the other victims who had it much worse than I ever did.
Which would then make me feel guilty. Why did I get away? Why did I get off so easily when others didn’t?
“Tess. Breathe.”
It wasn’t until this moment that I realized I was hyperventilating.
“Sit.”
He guided me to the toilet—seat down at least—and squatted in front of me while I had, well, whatever the hell this was.
“Head between your knees.”
I complied while he rubbed my back.
“I’m sorry,” Blake said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. I felt like it was a lie, pretending I didn’t know.”
