Love Me (WITSEC #3)(67)
He stepped inside and shut the door. We stared at each other without saying anything for a moment and then he reached into the shower and turned it on.
When he pulled off his shirt, I asked, “What are you doing?”
He toed off his shoes and yanked off his socks. “You have the same look in your eyes as you did when we first met. You’re barely holding yourself together. You’re fighting so damn hard to stay strong, you’re not letting yourself feel what happened.”
I looked down. “Someone once told me, to survive something terrible you have to bury how it makes you feel. And after you get through it, when it’s safe, you can allow yourself to feel. The thing is, she didn’t survive to show me how to dig it back up.” I hadn’t thought about those words in a long time. It was one of the last things Shayla had said to me.
A finger came under my chin and made me look up. Colt had closed the distance between us, and his eyes bored into mine. “I can show you.” He grabbed the bottom of the Desert Stone T-shirt I was wearing that Keelan had luckily had in his Jeep. I lifted my arms and Colt removed the shirt. He helped strip me and finished taking off the rest of his clothes. We climbed into the shower together. I washed the smell of that interrogation room off of my skin and Colt helped me wash my hair, being careful of my stitches.
When I was clean, he pulled me to his chest, and we stood under the hot spray. Like I’d always done, I tried to bury my face in his chest. Right away, I learned that was a mistake when I put pressure on my hurt cheek. I had to settle with resting my forehead on him. His hand ran up and down my spine.
“You got through it, babe. You are safe,” he said. “I want you to take in a deep breath, and when you let it go, you stop holding everything back. Don’t be afraid of what’s going to rush to the surface. Just let it come. Whatever it is, I’ll be right here holding you. And even though it will be unbearable at first, know that it will ease. I promise, it will.”
Not trusting my voice, I nodded.
“Ready?” he asked.
He took that deep and long breath with me. When it was time to exhale, I almost didn’t. I was too afraid. Then I realized he was holding his breath, too.
I wrapped my arms around his waist and held him tightly as we exhaled together. Before the last of the air left my lungs, I mentally made myself let go. As Colt had said, it all rushed to the surface. Everything that had happened in that interrogation room, the terror of knowing what the sheriff had been about to do to me, the pain of him hurting me, the fear of what would happen next, the realization that I’d had no way out of that room, and the loss of hope that anyone would come to save me.
My eyes welled up and my tears mixed with the water pouring down on us. My body shuddered as I began to sob. Colt stopped rubbing my back to just hold me.
Letting myself feel all that had been like opening a gateway, because the next thing to consume me was everything that I’d endured on Halloween, then when the sheriff had ransacked my house, and when Gabe had attacked me at the mud run. Every bad thing that had happened back to when Jacob had drugged me came to the surface. I faced it. I faced it all because I trusted Colt when he said it would eventually get better and I knew he would hold me until it did.
I slept all day and didn’t drag myself out of Colt’s bed until around dinnertime. I was making my way down the hall, toward the living room, when I heard something strange.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Colt said.
“You need to know.” Was that Logan?
“I’d prefer to wait until our girlfriend is ready to tell us,” Keelan said.
“She’d probably prefer it this way,” Logan said. “It will take the pressure off of her.”
There was a clicking sound and I could hear Ian’s voice, but it was recorded.
“Interview of Shiloh McConnell—sole survivor—”
Panic surged through me and I rushed toward the sound of the recording. I stepped out from the hall and found my guys and Logan all sitting around the dining-room table. Logan was seated in the chair I usually sat in and placed in front of him on top of a tan folder was a voice recorder.
I went to stand behind the chair next to Keelan that was normally vacant and directly across from where Logan sat. “What are you doing?” My question was for all of them, but my full focus was on Logan. Hearing my voice come on the recorder, I lunged for it.
Logan scooped it up before I even got close to touching it and paused it. “They deserve to know.”
How dare he?
“I know,” I snarled. “But dammit, Logan! Why can’t I tell them in my own time? When I’m ready? I’m in therapy. I’m doing the work to do it. Why can’t I do it on my terms? What happened…what I went through—” My voice broke.
Logan shook his head. “They need to know. I understand it’s hard—”
“You don’t understand,” I barked. “You saw the aftermath. I had to live through it. I had to watch him kill them. I had to hear their screams and see their fear. I had to watch the life leave their eyes. I was stabbed, cut, beaten, and almost raped. I disfigured myself to get free.” I held up my wrists. “I fought to stay alive all while enduring the lowest level of hell. It broke me in a way where I will never be glued back together the same. So do not say you understand. You don’t. You want this for you. To get your way, and who cares what the cost is to me, right?” I shook my head. “What you’re doing won’t work, Logan. You need to realize that.”