Saugatuck Summer (Saugatuck, #1)(37)
“I don’t know why he bothered,” I said, strangely warmed up to the subject now and unwilling to stop until I’d gotten it all out. “He never got hard, not once in the whole time. He would just make me . . . squeeze that goddamn, clammy, disgusting thing until he finally got frustrated that he couldn’t get it up. Then he’d blame me. But he’d take me out fishing, buy me toys and treats, do all sorts of nice things for me. He called me his little buddy and I loved the attention, but it came with a price tag, you know? The one time I tried to passively resist by positioning myself in a way that he couldn’t grope me when he snuck into my room at night, he said, ‘Oh, I guess you don’t want to go fishing tomorrow, after all,’ and I just rolled over and let him do it. Never even considered telling. I guess those fishing trips and gifts were more important than refusing to do something I knew was wrong.”
“Topher—” Brendan was wearing a sympathetic but detached face. A therapist’s face. I’d spent a lot of time looking at exactly that sort of face since that summer. “It’s not uncommon for victims to cooperate with their abusers. Especially when they’re kids getting the first positive attention—or any attention, really—they’ve received in their entire lives. It’s why abusers often target neglected kids. They’ll go along, no matter how much it hurts or how much they hate what’s being done to them, or what they’re being forced to do.”
“I didn’t hate it.” Oh look, there were the tears. Weird, how sometimes I began crying while not actually feeling anything. My last therapist had called me on that all the time.
Something’s coming up, she’d say when I’d start blinking fast out of the blue. What is it?
I don’t know, I’d answer. Because I didn’t. I never did. I couldn’t even begin to name what was causing the tears or what emotion I was experiencing.
I wiped them away as they spilled from my lashes.
Brendan’s expression became even more gentle and sympathetic as he drew on his shirt. “It’s not uncommon to respond physically, either. Even to feel pleasure . . .”
“No. You don’t get it. I didn’t feel anything when he was touching me. It didn’t feel good. It didn’t hurt. There was just . . . nothing. I never felt anything when he had his hand on my dick.”
“Blocking out the memory of the sensations is a pretty typical response as well. Bad or good.”
“Couldya quit analyzing me, Professor?” I snapped. “I’ve been over all that with my shrink, thanks. I mean, who doesn’t feel anything when someone’s hand is on their junk?”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.” He bowed his head, bending over to pull on his socks. “That’s not who you need me to be for you right now. Guess I was just trying to distance myself.”
I shrugged. Whatever. This wasn’t about him. “Okay, look. I don’t know. Maybe I got hard. Maybe he hurt me. Maybe I came. Maybe he did other things to me that I can’t even remember. Worse things. Maybe it was all of the above. But I don’t remember feeling any of that. Just . . . nothing. All I remember is what he felt like when he made me touch that . . . that thing. I don’t know what he would have done if he had been able to get it up, but when he couldn’t, it was my fault, you know? My failure. I couldn’t even do the one thing he asked in exchange for all he did for me. I wasn’t his little buddy, then. I was that little nigger sissy-boy who was too useless to do even the one thing nigger sissy-boys are good for.”
“Oh, Topher.” His own eyes were wet now, and his face positively anguished. He was aching for me. Not pitying, just hurting because he cared and it hurt him to know this. More tears spilled down my face. When was the last time someone had cared enough about me to feel my pain?
“Where was your mother in all this?”
“She stayed with other relatives. I only saw her once or twice. Around the beginning of August, I don’t know, I-I-I think I must have started acting out or something. By that time I was really starting to hate Uncle Jim, and he wasn’t paying all that special attention to me anymore. Anyway, they decided I should go back to my mother. So, they called her one night and told her they would be dropping me off where she was staying—which they did. And then they drove off as I knocked on the door. No one answered. So I knocked again, louder, and there still wasn’t an answer. I was used to her being hungover, so I played in the yard for a while, probably until early afternoon. Tried to entertain myself, but I got lonely and I missed her and I wanted my momma and she knew I was coming, so why wasn’t she there? What would I do if she never came back? They’d left me on the doorstep like unwanted baggage, you know?”
Tears kept pouring down my cheeks, and Brendan looked ill again.
“So I started pounding on the door and screaming for her and no one came, so I went around to the back door of the trailer and pounded and screamed there, and finally her cousin’s ex-husband opened it, really angrily, and he was nude. She was rolling out of bed behind him, dragging a sheet around her. And there I was, sobbing, and he was yelling at me for waking them up and bawling on his doorstep. And she didn’t stop him. She just told me to hush and sat me down in front of the TV with a bowl of cereal, and went back to bed with him while I tried not to hear them f*cking in the next room.”