When the Heart Falls(75)

I want to say something snarky, but my mind is blank.

Then Duke backhands me.

Pain explodes in my cheekbone, and I fall back against the wall.

He steps closer, closer. I can smell him, and he becomes Rodney, and I can’t breathe and everything hurts.

"Don't you f*cking touch her," says Jenifer. She's up, fuming, the lamp in her hands now.

Duke turns around. "Or what?"

Jenifer freezes.

He laughs, because we are weak, both of us. We freeze when we should fight, allow abuse when we should stop it. He kicks me with those boots and pain breaks me in half.

I crumble to the ground, clutching my stomach, hoping he didn’t injure something critical in me. It feels like an iron rod is stuck between my ribs. It feels like I’m dying.

Duke steps on my arm, grinding it into the floor.

He smirks.

And Jenifer crushes his head with the lamp.

He falls down, all the way down. She hits him again. And again.

I reach for her. "Jenifer, stop.”

"I want him dead.” Her body is beaten, but she’s not, she fights, angry, hurt.

"I know.” I want Rodney dead too.

And then I see. Her, hooking up with guys she barely knows. Me, letting Rodney touch my body. Her, sleeping with guys she hates. Me, never fighting Rodney off. Her, never reporting the abuse. Me, never reporting Rodney.

I'm sorry. I should have been easier on you. But I understand now. I understand. We're the same.

"We have to go." I stand, the world spinning until it settles. I reach for her hand and pull her out. We call the cops, give them the address, tell them about the drugs, about the abuse. We don’t tell our names. We’re too scared about what could happen to us in a foreign country, but the drugs will be enough.

We leave before the cops come, but we hear them, and we know that Duke won’t be coming after us, won’t hurt Jenifer again. We go back to our dorm room, and I help Jenifer with her bruises even as my own are starting to show.

"You saved me.” Jenifer adjusts the ice pack on her head as I give her some pain pills I found at Duke’s. "Like before, with Trevor, you saved me."

"No." I shake my head, tears in my eyes. "This time, you saved me."

The drugs and exhaustion take their toll on her, and she falls asleep. Once I’m sure she won’t wake up, I go to Cade’s room. He’s going to flip when he sees my face, but it can’t be helped.

He turns to me, his eyes registering the bruise across my cheek, but I hold my hand out to stop him from talking. "Before you say anything, there's something I have to tell you."





WINTER DEVEAUX

CHAPTER 39





CADE RUSHES TOWARD me, his handsome face full of concern as his hand brushes so lightly over my cheek I’m not sure he even touches it. “Did Rodney do this to you?”

Of course that’s where his mind would go, and after I tell him my secret, he’s going to be even angrier. “No. I had a run-in with Jenifer’s boyfriend, but we handled it. He’s been arrested. He can’t hurt her, or me, again.” I give him the Readers’ Digest version of what happened, because I know he’s not going to be able to focus on anything else I say until he knows what happened. “But that’s not what I came to talk to you about.”

Walking to his bed, he checks over the rest of my body. When I flinch at his touch over my stomach, he pulls my shirt up and sees my other bruise. “Winter, this is bad. You need to see a doctor.”

I shake my head. “No doctors. I’m fine. It’s just a bruise.”

We sit on his bed facing each other. His jaw flexes, and I can tell he’s using all his willpower to not drag me to the hospital kicking and screaming. I appreciate the restraint since this conversation is hard enough.

My hands shake and something inside of me clenches in fear. This will change everything, this confession. My life will never be the same after this moment, and I don’t know what that means, what it will do to me, but I know I have to go through with it. It’s time to stop running from the past, because it’s not really the past, is it? Rodney can make me his victim whenever he wants—and so can scum like Rocco and Duke—if I live my life too scared to face this part of myself.

“Winter, did something else happen? Are you okay?” His muscles flex through his shirt, and I remember something my dad said about men, that they aren’t girlfriends, they don’t do well hearing problems just for the sake of hearing them. They want to take action, to do something. I know this is true about Cade, not that he doesn't listen to my problems, he does. But that he will want to take action, and that’s okay, because I’ve already decided I’m ready to take action, and I want him by my side when I do it.

First, though, he needs to know the truth, and I don’t even know where to start. “I’ve known Rodney most of my life. I don’t know if you knew that, but he grew up in the house next door to ours, and our parents were close friends. It was always assumed he and I would get together when we grew up, a romanticized notion that our parents encouraged. So when we were freshmen in high school and had our first winter formal, it was expected he’d ask me. We weren’t actually that close. He was already entrenched in the jock crowd, and I wasn’t exactly cheerleader material. I was the shy, quiet girl who had her nose buried in books, but I had a secret crush on him.”