Chapter 7 Scarred pt II #2
Raspberry iced tea? She hadn’t expected that. “The tea sounds delicious, actually.” It would go well with the fruit, if she could make herself eat after telling her story.
Santino seemed to have the same idea, as he poured two glasses, handed her one, and pulled the fruit bowl to the nearest edge of the table.
He then proceeded to lift her onto his lap as he settled on the sofa, holding her against his still-bare chest but upright enough that she could effectively drink her tea.
The tea she nearly dropped with his bold movement. “Santino!”
He laughed openly, the smile on his face alarmingly innocent. Then he cut his laugh off and gave her hip a squeeze. “You finally used my name.”
She blinked. She had, hadn’t she? It’s okay.
He’d said some rather intimate and expectant things earlier.
He’d touched and kissed and even licked his way over more of her body than any of her two previous partners had bothered with.
“Well, that’s— I mean, we’re half-naked already. What’s the point in formalities?”
Santino chuckled. “Oh, I agree. It’s just nice to hear my name on your lips.” He leaned close and murmured into her ear, “I need you used to saying it if I want to get you to scream it.”
A shiver rolled through her and Reiko tipped her glass to her lips in a lame attempt to hide the response.
She was out of her depth with him in more ways than one.
The tea was nice. Cool against her overheating system.
A nearly perfect balance of refreshing and sweet, not too cloying.
The fruit flavor somehow tasted bright. And even though it was cold and still sweeter than she would usually go for, the drink helped relax her.
Helped her focus. It was a head-game, really, but it did the trick.
She lowered the glass on a quiet exhale. “Promise me one thing,” she said, forcing herself to seek out his gaze again. “Promise you’ll be honest with how you feel when you know the truth. About … everything.”
His smile faded. “Even if you don’t like my reaction?”
She attempted a smile of her own. “Especially if.”
Santino dipped his chin in a nod. “If it means that much to you. You have my word.”
She didn’t really want it. Not in the context they were about to be speaking of.
But she wasn’t so self-destructive not to recognize when hard news was necessary.
So, she prepared herself to walk away from the day with confusion and the strangest type of heartbreak, even as a part of her held on to the sliver of hope that he might surprise her one more time. And she unlocked the vault in her mind.
“The simple answer you’ve been asking for,” she began, her voice already a whisper, “is me.” Her fingers threaded together around the glass. “It was my own hand that caused the wound which resulted in that hideous scar.”
Santino tensed beneath her, his fingers digging into her hip and his chest expanding on a hard breath. “Your hand.” He didn’t phrase it like a question. “Bullshit. That scar’s at least a decade old. Who are you covering for? Why the hell would you be covering for them after all this time?”
Of course, he didn’t believe her. Her story only became less believable the deeper into it she went. That was why no one had ever fully believed her. Not even those who’d seen the provable pieces.
Tears threatened again but Reiko held them back, Santino’s controlled anger twisting into someone else’s angry yelling in her mind. “I’m not protecting anyone. I did it.”
“Reiko—”
She snapped her head around, finally meeting his scowl with her strained frown.
“I did it!” She gasped. “I was fourteen, na?ve, and desperate. I thought I knew better than I did and a lifetime of yearning had made me so needy for the one thing I could never earn any ordinary way that I thought it was my only choice.”
Santino plucked the tea glass from her hands before cupping her face again, the anger he’d briefly worn already replaced by a searching concern. “Desperate for what, baby? What the hell could have driven a fourteen-year-old girl to slice herself open like that?”
The first tear slipped from her eyes at his words.
He was at least still listening. She’d lost two therapists to disbelief by this point of the story already in years past. Her hands sought out his skin, his warmth and strength, and she found herself leaning into him.
The movement had his fingers sliding into her hair and brought their faces closer, but she didn’t care. She was only speaking for him, anyway.
“The scar I have now … is as much a result of what I did to myself that day, as what the doctors had to do once I was rushed to the hospital.” She paused to swallow, to pace herself, and noted the furrowing of Santino’s brow.
“They had to cut it wider or something, to see inside and investigate the depth of the damage I’d done.
My parents weren’t concerned with aesthetics, only making sure I had as few long-term health complications as possible.
This was the result.” Because in her parents’ minds, a large scar was not a long-term complication.
Or if it was, it was one she’d brought on herself.
“You’re telling me your parents took you to some backwater doctor who didn’t know how to do both?” He nearly growled the question.
Reiko blinked. In all her years, it had never occurred to her to wonder. “I … I suppose that’s possible. I was unconscious before the paramedics got to me, and out of it for most of the procedure. I only remember—”
“Most?”
“The anesthesia wore off before they were done.” That had been some of the worst pain, physically, she had ever endured. Made worse by the horrendous confusion, disorientation, and immediate sense of fear. She’d felt like she had woken up in Hell.
Santino locked his jaw, his nostrils flaring. He tugged her flush to him and pressed a hard kiss to her forehead. “Tell me the rest, beautiful. How did you get to that point to start with? And why are you so afraid to talk about it?”
Reiko let her eyes close and breathed in his scent. She did her best to consciously focus on the exciting newness of him and not the trauma he was asking about.
That didn’t stop the whispers. The remembered glares and barely disguised disgust. The sound of so many accusations.
Please don’t let him be another.
“You probably know this,” she finally said, “but my brother, Hiroto, is eight years younger than me.”
Santino hummed his acknowledgment as he dragged a hand up and down her spine in a soothing motion.
“It wasn’t until he was born that I finally realized exactly how unwanted I was.
” The words scraped from her and she curled her arms around him as best she could.
“My father had always been angry that his first-born was a girl, so once he finally got his son, I was pushed even more aside than I had been. Instead of being the disappointment, I became nothing. I wasn’t considered last. I simply wasn’t considered at all. ”
Years of memories flashed through her mind in a blur as she spoke the hard truth.
Learning her toys and ‘extra’ clothes had been tossed to make room for her baby brother, who was big enough to need his own room and so was being given hers.
Which meant the in-the-way little girl the Matsunagas didn’t want, but couldn’t get rid of without losing face, was relegated to the coat closet.
She had to make do with old, worn-down everything while Hiroto was gifted new at every turn.
She was to hide away when visitors came. She was to keep the house clean, her grades up, and herself tidy. She was never to speak or be heard unless there was an emergency.
When Hiroto turned five, and she thirteen, she was assigned as his nanny and protector moving forward.
Until someone came along for her, had been her mother’s words.
Reiko had been old enough to understand she was being treated unfairly.
Old enough to understand the feelings of pain and longing in her heart.
Not old enough to realize it wasn’t her fault, or that her parents were guilty of something terrible.
She shoved it all down as far as she could.
She needed to speak it, not walk through it.
But summarizing that neglect—that abuse—made it impossible not to relive to a degree.
It was almost a relief when she got to the punchline.
“It wasn’t until Hiroto started joining in on the abuse that I decided I couldn’t take it anymore,” she confessed.
“He was six. He was just a spoiled brat mimicking his father. But all I had ever wanted was for my family to be kind to me. To show me warmth and comfort. Watching them give those things to Hiroto, knowing they could and that they didn’t deem me worthy of them, pushed me too far. ”
Santino was nearly crushing her, the hand that had been rubbing her back long settled at the nape of her neck beneath her loosened bun. He turned his head just enough to press a comforting kiss to her temple. “Baby, are you saying—”
She knew what he was thinking. It was the accusation everyone lobbied at her.
As an adult, she even understood. But they were all wrong, and she couldn’t stand the thought of hearing the words from him.
That was why her tone sharpened just a bit when she cut him off.
“No. My family—everyone—will tell you that I tried to kill myself. But it’s not true.
” She pushed herself up until she could see his eyes again.
The pain reflected back at her sucked the anger from her chest and pulled another round of tears free. She gasped. “I never wanted to die.”
His expression morphed like she was looking in a mirror, and she wasn’t sure if the echo of pain was better or worse.
“I was just a stupid, desperate teenager,” she said, forcing herself to keep pushing the words out. “And I thought … if my parents were so upset about having a daughter, if my great sin was being female, then I would make myself not a female anymore.”
The sadness gave way to dawning understanding and mounting horror in Santino’s eyes.
Reiko licked her lips and kept talking, watching as that horror melted in an oddly comforting way to seething rage.
“I thought, if I wasn’t female anymore, they might care.
At least enough to give me a bed, good clothes, maybe a warm meal.
So, one day while they were working and Hiroto was parked in front of the television, I took a knife from the kitchen and climbed into the bathtub.
I was thinking that would contain the blood.
I was thinking I’d learned pain, because my father would strike me sometimes, and not eating or hydrating enough had consequences, and cramps were unpleasant.
So, I could handle some more.” Her voice was shaking as she pressed on but she couldn’t let herself stop, even as Santino sat them upright, his grip like iron and his jaw jumping with pressure from how tightly she could see him clenching his teeth.
“I took the knife,” she said, her arms tightening around him with the opportunity his movement had provided, “and I tried—in my inadequately educated way—to cut out my ovaries. Because I thought that was what I needed to do.”
“Fuck,” Santino bit out, the word snapping at the air as if it had ripped from him. He crushed her against him. “Fuck!” The hand at her neck wedged into her hair until he was cradling her head.
Reiko curled her arms around his neck and squeezed her eyes shut.
“It never even occurred to me I could have died,” she said, her voice choked.
It seemed impossible, in hindsight. But that was where she’d been back then.
That desperate, that broken, that stupid.
“I didn’t want to die. Everyone … everyone accuses me of attempting suicide, but I didn’t. I just wanted—”
He pressed a hard kiss to her shoulder and somehow her words faded.
“I believe you, beautiful. I believe you.” His voice was thicker than she’d heard it before, coarse with restrained and agitated emotion of his own.
“I’m going to fucking kill that scum-sucking bastard for putting you through that.
But I believe you, Reiko.” He dragged in a breath and his lips moved to her neck. “Fuck.”
His words rolled like crashing waves through her mind and her body went limp in his arms. The tension, the fear, the anxiety, the ever-present upset she always experienced when she thought back to those days—all of it poured from her eyes in a flood of tears she had no control over. All because of three words.
He believed her.