Twenty-One #2
“I’m admiring you,” he’d insisted. The whole thing was confusing, alternately terrifying and titillating.
She had liked kissing him, she had. But she hadn’t liked the other stuff, any of it.
He’d lifted her skirt and shoved his hand down her underpants with such force her knees buckled.
She’d grabbed his forearm to steady herself and he took that opportunity to slip a finger inside her.
“God, you’re so ready,” he said and she wanted to ask what he meant, but he was slobbering all over her face and between his tongue and the hand in her pants rummaging around like he was looking for a lost penny, she was so overwhelmed that she closed her eyes and tried to figure out what to do with her hands, which were now hanging limply at her sides.
“Kiss me back,” he said to her.
“What?”
He put his other hand on the back of her head and pulled her closer to his face and said, “Kiss me back. Like you were before.”
Whenever she would think about that day, she would mark this moment as the one when she could have stopped him.
Why hadn’t she stopped him? She would never forgive herself for not screaming or pushing or resisting.
If she’d given him a hard shove and run up the stairs, the thing that happened next never would have happened.
He pulled her underpants down and even though she pressed her knees together, he was able to get himself inside of her.
That’s how she remembered it, as dispassionately as possible.
A part of him went inside a part of her.
He pinned her against the wall for what felt like forever but was probably less than five minutes.
He’d extracted himself and grabbed a roll of paper towels and wiped himself off.
Then he’d raised a single paper towel streaked with blood and said, “I thought so. You’re a good girl, Honor. ”
Him using her given name in that moment was awful.
She was sad her cousin had attacked her, sad she would never want to look at him again, sad she wasn’t pure anymore.
But she was mostly sad that by calling her Honor his disdain became manifest. He hadn’t forced himself on her out of some kind of misplaced affection but out of contempt.
He’d taken her honor and made it into wordplay.
“Careful,” he said then, pinching her waist until it hurt. “Looks like you’ve had a few too many jelly beans.” He leaned close to her ear again. “Don’t be a little piggy.”
She never told a soul what happened. Jake brought the carton of Cokes upstairs.
She’d cried a little and fastened the front of her dress as best she could with a missing button.
She ran up to her aunt’s powder room and washed her face.
She couldn’t believe how normal she appeared.
Her lips were redder than usual. She had to redo her mussed ponytail.
But looking at her you wouldn’t know anything was different.
She walked through the kitchen, where her mother and aunts were putting pastries and cookies on a tray for tomorrow’s brunch.
Her aunt Millie looked at her and frowned. “Everything okay, Honey?”
“Sure,” she said breezily. On the kitchen table was a bowl full of Easter eggs dyed pink, green, blue, purple.
Only hours ago, she’d showed her youngest cousin how to write with a crayon so the words “Happy Easter” appeared on the side of the egg when it emerged from the dye.
It seemed an impossibility, something she couldn’t get her head around, how she had been a different girl, intact, when she’d dropped the egg into the vinegary solution.
“Look, Honey,” her cousin Linda said. “It worked!” Honey took the egg and brought it over to the sink.
She blotted the end where the dye had pooled with a napkin and slipped the egg into her pocket.
For the rest of the weekend and the following week, she kept the egg close.
Whenever she remembered, she’d pick up the pink egg from before and hold it until her breathing steadied.
She kept it until she got her period a week later, and when she did, she brought the egg to the backyard and threw it into the woods.
She couldn’t stand the smell of vinegar for the rest of her life.
On her wedding night, when Finn had gently tugged on the pretty white lace underpants she’d bought for her trousseau, she couldn’t help feeling queasy.
She panicked and started to cry. He was gentle and understanding and although it took a few nights to consummate their union, she was okay.
As the months passed, she didn’t start to enjoy the intimacy exactly, but she didn’t always dread it, either.
Then she lost the baby. In her head she knew the miscarriage didn’t have anything to do with what had happened to her in the basement with Jake, but in her heart she believed it did.
She couldn’t shake it, and every time Finn approached her in bed, she tensed up.
She loved being with him, but she never learned to love the intimacies of marriage.
She endured, of course she endured—it was her duty as a wife.
Their union was sanctified in the eyes of God and their community and opening herself to her husband and welcoming children was what she’d vowed to do.
But when Finn’s intimate advances stopped, she assumed they’d come to a mutually satisfying unspoken agreement.
She was relieved and giddy. She thought he was, too.
“Aren’t you going to read it?” Fern asked Honey, standing in her nightgown, holding the note.
“Later,” Honey said, in a voice so chilly Fern didn’t dare ask again. “Get your brother. We’re going to the lake.”