Hook Shot (Hoops #3)(89)

Remembering his response to Chase, I think this might be nearly as difficult for him as it is for me. I shift on the couch until I’m beside him and take his hand between mine, kissing his knuckle. “Yeah, I need to tell you.”

He nods and pulls me closer until my head is on his chest and his chin rests in my hair.

“I don’t want to do details tonight,” I say softly. “I shared the whole story, detail by painful detail, with my support group last week, and—”

“Support group?” he asks.

“You may not have noticed because it’s only for an hour every Thursday, but I’ve been attending a support group for . . . for, um, childhood sexual abuse survivors.”

His massive chest swells under my cheek with a lengthy inhale. The heartbeat in my ear surges, accelerates, thuds.

“Okay,” he says simply.

“My mother was never happy with me.” I shake my head against him. “I’m not really dark, but compared to the rest of my family I was. My hair was all wrong.”

“Your hair?” He runs a hand over the mass of it, kissing the crown. “What did she think was wrong with your hair?”

“It’s not like hers or Iris’s or Iris’s mom’s, or any of our family’s. It seems like such a small thing now, but growing up, it was a big deal. It made me feel like I wasn’t good enough.”

I shrug, a dismissive gesture that doesn’t come close to telling the story of how my mother rejected me in a million small ways before she rejected me in the greatest way possible. In the worst way possible.

“She had this boyfriend who . . .” I falter, my throat closing around the secrets, around the dark memories. My body is reluctant to release them, but I have to. I’m not holding onto this trauma. It’s holding onto me. It has me in a vise grip. I have to get it out to move on.

“Dammit,” I mutter, twisting my fingers in my lap.

“Baby, you don’t have to—”

“I want to,” I tell him, glancing up. “I need you to know.”

He stares down at me and passes a callused thumb over my lips. “Okay. Tell me.”

I nod and swallow, forcing myself to keep going. “She had a boyfriend.”

“What was his name?” Kenan demands before I can go any further. His hand is clenched into a tight fist on his knee.

“Ron Clemmons,” I reply in a hushed voice.

I want it behind me. I want it out in the open and left behind so I can run forward.

“He, um . . . he raped me when I was twelve.”

“He . . .” Kenan’s words get caught up in his throat like a jammed rifle. “Is he in jail? What happened to—”

“He’s in hell,” I interrupt, the words falling fast, sharp, heavy like a guillotine, quick to execute judgment. “We made sure.”

I meet the questions collecting in Kenan’s eyes, but he doesn’t ask how one “makes sure” someone goes to hell because I think he knows that is, believe it or not, the least important part of this story.

“When I told my mother what he’d done,” I continue, the hardness melting into a sorrow I’m not sure when or if I’ll ever be able to shed. “she didn’t believe me.”

A hollow laugh spills over my lips. “Or she did believe me, but didn’t care. Not enough to give him up.”

“You’re saying she stayed with that motherfucker?” Kenan demands, pulling back to stare at me. “After what he did to you, she stayed with him?”

“She chose him and sent me to live with MiMi.”

“That’s how you ended up living with MiMi?” Kenan’s voice rises, powered by outrage and fury and scorn. “What kind of woman does that? Baby, what the . . .”

He stands abruptly, prowling in tight circles like he’s caged and doesn’t have full use of the expensive apartment, only that tiny portion his feet outline in the carpet. His breathing changes, becoming erratic.

“Kenan,” I say gently, standing and approaching him. “It’s okay.”

“The hell it’s okay.” The words charge out of him like a battle cry, and murder and bloodlust seethe in the eyes looking down at me. “How could she choose that piece of shit over you? Over her own daughter, knowing that he . . .”

He slams his eyes shut maybe against images that for me are more than imaginations. They’re memories.

He shoves breath through his nostrils like a bull. Just this morsel of the dismay I’ve eaten all my life nauseates him, turns his stomach and sickens him. His fists open and clench compulsively at his sides. He can barely contain his rage on my behalf, and it makes me love him that much more.

I love him.

There is no more falling. There is no more choice or turning back. It’s done. I’m his in every way but one.

“I didn’t have trouble with sex,” I tell him, calm falling over me like a veil. “I needed to figure out why I’d always been able to have sex and feel nothing, until it made me sick that I felt nothing. I’d been detaching emotionally.”

“So you stopped having sex,” he says, searching my face.

“Yes, I had to figure it out. My counselor says our minds do that sometimes to protect us. We forget, compartmentalize, detach. Whatever mechanism it takes to survive, we do it, but then when it stops working, you have to deal with the shit you’ve hidden from yourself.”