Down and Out(88)

Her shout seems to echo in the quiet space, and the sudden outburst makes me flinch. She hiccups on a sob and wipes her face, saying almost inaudibly, “I don’t want you to know.”
My throat closes up at the pain and panic etched onto her face as dread settles like a heavy weight in the pit of my stomach. I don’t know what’s wrong, but it’s bad—really f*cking bad, and I’m terrified to find out what it is. For a moment all I can hear is the pounding of my heart as I slowly ask her, “Don’t want me to know what?”
Her lip quivers as her eyes burn into me, pleading with me. “Just let it go. Please, Declan, I’m begging you, just let it go.”
“You’re scaring me.” I take a step toward her, reaching up to wipe away her tears. She turns her head until I’m looking at her profile. A drop of moisture hits the trembling bottom lip she’s biting. It has my own eyes stinging as my heart breaks. “Let me touch you,” I beg, my voice strained. “Please. You have no idea how much it hurts that you’re not letting me.” I feel it on a soul-deep level, I swear. It’s like a dull ache that just won’t ease.                    
Her eyes clamp shut, making more tears spill down her ruddy cheeks.
I can’t f*cking take it anymore. I pull her to me and wrap my arms around her, thankful that she doesn’t try to push me off this time. A sob shakes her as I hold her as close to me as I can without cutting off her air supply. My hands skim her back, over the softest skin I’ve ever had the privilege of touching, while my eyes squeeze shut and I bury my face in her neck. I inhale her strawberry scented skin and hair greedily, like a drowning man who’s just come up for air.
“I love you. Nothing you tell me can change that, you hear? Nothing.”
She shakes her head and pulls back. “You don’t know that. You don’t know what I did.”
“Were you with someone else?” She said she hadn’t been, but even if she had, it wouldn’t change the way I feel. It’d just break my f*cking heart.
She frowns as I wipe away her tears. “No. I told you I haven’t been.”
“Good. I haven’t either.” Cupping her face in my hands, I kiss her forehead. “Now tell me why you’re crying, because I’m not going anywhere. I’m in it, Savannah.”
She shakes her head again. “I can’t. You’ll think I’m disgusting. You won’t want me anymore, I know it.”
“That could never happen. Now tell me what’s wrong.” My mind’s coming up with all these terrible scenarios and the harder she fights this, the worse it gets.
Inhaling a shuddering breath, she says, “Remember our first date? You thought I told you the worst things in my life to scare you off, and I said. . .”
“You said those weren’t the worst things,” I say numbly, my hands falling away from her as I remember our conversation.
The floor seems to tilt under me as I register the somber look on her face. It says everything I need to know, but some masochistic part of me still needs to hear her say it.
My lungs don’t seem to want to work, and my feet don’t seem to be able to move. Dazed, I blink slowly, almost imperceptibly, and catalogue every godforsaken breath that leaves me and every beat my stubborn heart insists on pumping, because I know they’re going to be my last. What Savannah is about to tell me will kill me, I’m sure of it.
“It was the last foster home I was in. The one who kicked me out when I turned eighteen.”
I don’t want to hear anymore. I can’t. I don’t think my psyche can handle it.
Clenching my jaw, I try to brace myself. It’s useless, I know. There’s no preparing yourself for something like this.
“The husband, he— he promised I could stay and finish out my senior year as long as I . . . did things for him.”
My eyes close as I fight through the all-consuming rage I feel seeping into every cell in my body. “What kinds of things?” I ask, very slowly and deliberately.
She shakes her head once more, biting her lip so hard she leaves teeth marks. “Declan, please.”
I swallow as my fists clench and release. “Tell me. I need to hear it.”
Licking her lips, she folds her arms over her chest. “It started off as pictures. He’d take me down to the basement with him, where I’d take off my clothes and he’d . . . tell me how to pose. But after a while, that wasn’t enough. He had to touch me, too.”
Her words punch a hole straight through my chest, and I’m left to bleed out while I struggle for breath. “Did he rape you?”
A single tear drips down her cheek as she looks away. “It’s not rape if I agreed to it.”
My chest heaves as I stare at her, but I don’t think I’m truly breathing. It feels like I’m suffocating. “The f*ck it’s not! He blackmailed you, Savannah. Jesus, you were seventeen! That alone is statutory rape.”
White-hot anger burns through me, singeing everything in its path and leaving harrowing sorrow in its wake. Something vital in me just died. I think it was what little innocence I had left.
I’m going to kill him. As God as my witness, I will track him down and I will end him.
Savannah shakes her head emphatically. “It wasn’t rape. It couldn’t have been. I—”
She cuts herself off abruptly and looks down at the floor.
“You what?” I ask, afraid to hear any more.
Her voice is tiny as she says, “I didn’t say no. I was young and stupid, and I honestly thought he’d keep his end of the deal. So every time he bent me over the couch and held me down, I let him.”