Chapter 6 Neil #3
“I am not afraid of you or of anyone who lives inside you.” Selene, stubborn as always, took one step forward and then another, eating up the distance between us.
“When you were here last time, when you marked yourself with the pen, you told me about the Boy…” she began, and I was immediately uncomfortable.
I hated words, especially when they were used like weapons against me.
“You told me that he let himself be raped, that he couldn’t stop the person from committing such an atrocity.
” The more she talked, the more I retreated, pulling back into my shell, a place where I felt safe and protected, and there was no need to expose myself.
“Enough,” I snapped, afraid.
There was an unknowable struggle going on inside of me.
“I told you that it wasn’t his fault, Neil. That it wasn’t your fault. And when I said we were both stained, do you remember that? I’d never judge you, Neil. You don’t have to be afraid of me. You aren’t the monster; whoever did that to you was the real mon—”
I covered my ears, making her words sound far away, and I sank back down on the kitchen stool in a daze. My body was weak; my legs could no longer bear the weight I had been carrying for so long.
“Enough,” I whispered weakly, but Selene advanced on me and reached out to hold my wrists in her little hands. Now I was the one looking up from below as she insinuated herself between my knees to get even closer to me.
“Stop hiding. I…I figured it out. I’ve known about what happened to you for a while,” she admitted tragically, leaving me shocked.
My world was crumbling around me; it felt like I was on stage in front of a crowd, naked.
The curtain had opened without warning, and I was not prepared.
I had no script to study, no lines memorized, and no scene to perform. The crowd just stared at me—at the cluster of scars on my left arm, at the rash around my genitals, and at my shattered heart, which I had tried to piece back together in any way that I could, just to keep on surviving.
I felt exposed, too exposed.
What was I supposed to say to her now?
I stared into the middle distance, incapable of speech, and Selene stroked first my face and then my hair.
“I know what happened to you, and I still accept you. There is no one in this world who is better for me than you. I wish you could see yourself through my eyes. I admire your strength so much; not everyone survives such intense trauma,” she murmured in that tooth-achingly sweet way of hers, and I surrendered, resting my head between her breasts.
Something ruptured inside me, and my walls began to crumble, little by little, until the urge to share some small part of me grew too strong to be denied.
She deserved that much.
After everything I’d put her through, she deserved to know me at least a little bit.
Then, she put her arms around me, and it seemed that I could feel her heart beating all over me.
Was she ready to know the truth?
Maybe.
“Her…” I said, wincing into the blue fabric of her shirt.
“Her name was Kimberly Bennett, and she was about twenty. She was our neighbor’s daughter and a babysitter.
My mother was pregnant with Chloe, and she didn’t have much time to devote to Logan and me.
We couldn’t stay home by ourselves. My mother saw an opportunity and asked Kim to come work for us.
” I lifted my anguished face and looked at her.
Selene looked back with an unspoken comprehension in her ocean eyes as well as a hint of compassion.
And all at once, I turned back into my old self.
My walls sprung up again, unscalable and too strong to let anyone through them to reach me.
I got to my feet, making her gasp, and shook her hands off me.
“Right from the beginning, I knew that there was something off about her. She was too friendly, sort of sly, and she was always trying to touch me in ways that felt inappropriate at my age. I didn’t like her frosty eyes or her overbearing attitude or the kind of games she started offering to play with me.
They usually involved fondling, other forms of foreplay, and ‘sex education,’ which I had to pay the closest attention to or else I’d be punished.
She hadn’t been there a month before she started taking it even further.
One afternoon, while I was sitting on the couch watching cartoons, it happened: She raped me, like she done to several other kids.
That…that was the start of all my issues.
” My head was spinning as I confessed the truth to her, but I refused to let my state of mind show in my voice.
I appreciated the bravery Babygirl had shown in hearing me out, but there was no way I was going to lose my composure.
I was the master of keeping my emotions inside.
At that point, Selene pressed a hand to her lips as if to stop herself from weeping. Me, I felt nothing. Just disgust for myself and for the whore who had used me.
“She threatened me,” I continued pitilessly, not softening anything.
“She kept saying she was going to hurt Logan. My brother was my whole life; I couldn’t let her lay so much as a fucking finger on him!
And so I went along with it. I did whatever she wanted.
I couldn’t escape her orders…” I inhaled hard and yielded slightly as I fought against the memories.
“Neil,” she murmured, but I didn’t let her continue.
It was my turn to talk.
“Kim had been violated in the same way by her own father. She was deeply disturbed, and she wanted to put other people through what had happened to her…” I locked eyes with Selene, hers as crystalline as the sea.
She was on the verge of tears. I decided to cut my confession off there and spare her the most disgusting parts.
It had been hard enough for me to tell her that much.
I didn’t want to scare her or rub her face in just how depraved and immoral people could be.
I didn’t tell her about my various trauma-induced disorders, the most serious fallout from what had happened to me.
I was afraid I’d lose her completely if I told her everything.
Not only had I not yet accepted them myself, but I was also deeply ashamed of them.
And the realization of that shame triggered a burst of rage.
“You should want nothing to do with me now. I should make you sick!” I shouted at her, coming at her like a lunatic. She backed up flat against the kitchen island and shook her head before throwing out her arm defensively in my direction. I looked down at my trembling hands and took a pause.
I couldn’t figure out whether she was scared of me or simply felt bad for me and didn’t want me to see it.
“I don’t want your pity!” I accused anyway.
“I hate women who try to get with me out of compassion. I don’t need that shit.
” Telling her the truth had already dredged up my terror of being rejected by others, especially by her, and that turned me cold and remote.
“I’ve made it this far on my own; I can keep going just fine.
” The harshness that crept into my voice made her falter.
Finally, she started to understand that the situation was more dire than she could possibly imagine, that I had been broken so completely that there was no redemption available for me.
“I don’t pity you. I just think you are…out of reach.” She gave me a troubled smile and cautiously moved closer to me, afraid of how I might react. I watched her like a caged animal, drawn to her flesh yet at the same time wary of her touch.
Then she tilted her head to one side; what was she trying to do?
“Did you tell me everything?” Even before the sound of her voice, her perfume reached me, hitting me like a punch to the face. Babygirl stood right in front of me and brushed her thumb against my lower lip. Her touch was soothing but not soothing enough.
“I told you everything you need to know,” I answered in an impenetrable tone.
What else did she want?
I had already laid myself too fucking bare for her, especially in the psychological sense.
She couldn’t expect anything more.
“You know, Neil…” Selene watched me as though I were the most beautiful man in the world, like she couldn’t wait to burn once more in the flames of my desires.
“Now that I understand your past, or at least parts of it, I have some answers to all those questions I’ve had.
And I won’t deny that I’m disturbed by them, but I want you to know that I would do anything for you.
Except let you go; that, I won’t do.” She smiled tenderly at me, and her fingers, which had continued to caress my jaw, gave me a strange, heated feeling.
It was a sensation that I couldn’t quite pinpoint, right there in the center of my chest.
“You don’t understand. I have too many problems to deal with and you…” I was trying to argue with her, to destroy the false hopes she had undoubtedly developed under the delusion that she understood me. But then she shook her head and took a tiny step forward to press her lips to mine.
“You are the one who doesn’t understand, Neil.
I am addicted to you,” she whispered slowly, and I felt almost afraid of the yearning that I glimpsed in her eyes.
“Just let me be with you. All I’m asking is that you take my hand and walk beside me, whatever paths we go down or wherever our destiny leads us…
” She stroked the nape of my neck, and I stood, dumbfounded, listening to her.
Her hot breath was as much an irresistible temptation as the breasts that pressed against my torso.
I trembled with the desire to strip her, to lose myself in her, to let myself be engulfed by her tight walls.
I wanted to move between them without fear of being thought wrong or perverse instead of what I was—a normal man with a visceral desire for a particular woman.