14. Kai #3
I shut it down. For now. Julia is still talking, and whatever is happening inside me has no right to become something she has to manage.
“There was a doorway from the bedroom where I could see part of the living room,” she says, her gaze no longer focused on anything in my office.
“There were toys on the floor. Kids’ things.
I remember these little toy bicycles for some reason.
I just stared at them because they gave me something to look at that wasn’t him.
” Her fingers tighten together. “That’s when I realized he probably had a wife and children. ”
My stomach turns.
“I remember thinking how stupid that was. Not what was happening to me. I was lying there thinking about whether his wife knew he brought women home.” Her laugh is small and completely devoid of humor. “That’s dissociation for you, I guess.”
“Yes,” I say quietly, but not too quiet for my voice to not sound my own. “It can be.”
She nods but still doesn’t look at me. “When he... when he entered me, he stopped for a second and said, ‘Fuck, you’re a virgin.’”
The pulse in my jaw continues to tick. I stop, trying to prevent it. Julia notices this time. Her eyes flick briefly toward my face before dropping again.
“He liked that,” she says. “I could tell.”
Every violent impulse I have spent my adult life learning to control arrives at once — my father’s face, Daniel Morris throwing bottles near his daughter, every man I grew up around who thought wanting something gave him the right to take it.
And now an anonymous, featureless man with brown hair and brown eyes whose name Julia still hasn’t given me, smiling because he discovered the woman beneath him had never been penetrated before he forced himself inside her.
Ghost does not want to discuss diagnostic terminology. Ghost wants blood.
Fucking find him and end him.
I unclench my hand before my fingernails break skin against my palm.
“He finished quickly,” Julia continues. “Then he drove me home.”
That makes me look at her. “He drove you home afterward?”
“Yeah.” Her mouth pulls slightly at one corner, but again there is nothing resembling amusement behind it. “That part almost felt worse in some ways. He barely spoke to me. He just wanted me out of the car as fast as possible, like I had become inconvenient once he got what he wanted.”
For a moment, I cannot trust myself to speak.
The silence stretches between us, but Julia doesn’t rush to fill it.
Good, because I need several seconds to make sure the voice that comes out of me belongs to her psychiatrist rather than the man imagining what it would feel like to put his hands around her attacker’s throat.
“When you talk about this,” I say eventually, keeping my tone deliberately gentle, “you keep looking away from me.”
Her shoulders shift. “I know.”
“And you’ve explained several of his choices by describing what you did or didn’t do.”
That gets her attention.
“I’m not blaming myself.” The response is immediate and defensive.
I believe that she believes it. “Maybe not consciously.”
Her eyes narrow slightly.
I hold her gaze.
“You told me getting into his car didn’t seem stupid at the time. You emphasized that you weren’t screaming. You told me you didn’t fight him and explained why before I ever suggested those things mattered.”
Julia becomes very still. Not dissociated. Ashamed. The realization makes anger flash through me all over again, this time directed at everyone who helped put that shame there.
“Did you report him?”
“No.”
“Why not?” The question is not an accusation, and I make damn sure my voice cannot be mistaken for one.
Julia exhales slowly and looks down at her hands. “I didn’t tell my parents.”
“Why?”
“Because by then I already knew what conversations about sex sounded like in my family.” She gives a small shrug, but tension draws her shoulders upward despite the attempt at casualness.
“My mother had spent years dealing with my father sleeping around, and by the time I was a teenager she sometimes talked to me like whatever he was must be inside me too.”
My jaw tightens again. “What do you mean?”
“She’d make comments. If I liked a boy, somehow the conversation would turn into whether I was sleeping with him.
If I went somewhere with friends, there were warnings about not needing sex to make boys like me.
Sometimes when she was really angry, she’d tell me I was just like my father or that I’d probably sleep around too.
” Julia’s fingers move restlessly against each other.
“I couldn’t go home and tell her I had been at a party, got into a man’s car, went into his house and then ended up in his bed.
I already knew what every part of that story sounded like when you removed everything I couldn’t explain. ”
“You said no.” Her eyes lift to mine. The words come out harder than I intend, so I soften my voice before continuing.
“You said no repeatedly. You were impaired enough that you couldn’t control your body properly, and he continued anyway.
Nothing about getting into his car, entering his house or knowing him changes what happened after you withdrew consent. ”
Her lips part slightly.
I can see her fighting the urge to look away again. “I know that now.”
“Did you know it then?”
“No.” The answer is almost immediate.
She looks down. “I told someone the next day. A girl I went to high school with. We weren’t best friends or anything, but I needed to tell somebody, and she was the person I thought would listen.”
I already know I’m going to hate this woman. “What did she say?”
Julia lets out a quiet breath through her nose. “She said it didn’t really sound like rape.”
There are sentences I encounter in this job often enough that I should no longer be surprised by them. I am still surprised. No, I am fucking raging.
“Why?”
“Because I knew him. Because I went inside willingly. Because he didn’t beat me or hold a knife to me.
I didn’t have bruises. I wasn’t tied down.
I didn’t scream or scratch him or run away afterward.
” Her voice gets quieter as she lists them, not because she believes those things now but because at eighteen she clearly did.
“She told me maybe I regretted it. Maybe I had been more drunk than I realized and changed my mind afterward. She said if I was really being raped, I would have fought.”
My fingers tighten around the pen I picked up at some point that now seems I don’t even remember doing it. I set it down before it snaps.
“She was wrong.” I blurt out too fast.
Julia looks at me. Completely and unambiguously. I don’t care whether saying it with this much certainty violates some therapeutic preference for allowing patients to reach conclusions themselves.
“She was wrong,” I repeat, slower this time. “Rape does not require a weapon. It does not require bruises, screaming or a stranger in a mask. You told him no. You were impaired. Your body’s inability to fight him does not turn what he did into consent.”
Her eyes become glossy, but she doesn’t cry. Something about that feels important.
“I know.” This time the words sound different.
Not defensive, but almost tired.
“I know now. It took a while.”
“How long?”
“A long time.” She adjusts one leg beneath the other, grounding herself more firmly into the chair before continuing. “I talked about it with therapists before. Not in this much detail every time, but enough. I had to, because for a while I kept reacting to men who looked like him.”
“What did he look like?”
Julia’s brow creases as though the question is almost absurd after everything else. “Plain.”
I wait.
“Brown hair. Brown eyes. Average height. Nothing distinctive enough to avoid.” There is something bleak in that description.
No scar. No tattoo. No mask. Nothing her brain could isolate as belonging only to him. Half the men she passes on any street could carry pieces of his face.
“For a while,” she continues, “if a man with brown hair and brown eyes got too close to me, my body reacted before I could remind myself he wasn’t the same person. I hated it.”
“Because it happened often?”
“Because I didn’t want him owning that much of the world.” The sentence hits me hard enough that I go still.
There she is. Not fragile. Not ruined. Not a woman permanently defined by what somebody took from her at eighteen.
Julia.
Little Ember.
“I couldn’t spend the rest of my life being afraid of every man who happened to look vaguely like him,” she says. “So I worked on it. A lot. That part is mostly gone now.”
Mostly — there are probably very few words I distrust more when she uses them. I let this one slide.
“What still triggers you?”
Her expression changes. She already knows the answer. “The word no.”
“I remain quiet.
“Not hearing someone say it randomly,” she clarifies. “It’s context. Sometimes during a movie, if someone says no and the other person keeps going, especially sexually, I can feel it immediately. My body remembers before my brain catches up.”
Her gaze drops briefly. “That’s the weird part. People assume masks would bother me, or knives, dark alleys, whatever. None of those things were there. He didn’t threaten me. He didn’t need to. There wasn’t anything cinematic about it.”
Her mouth tightens. “He just ignored me.”
The simplicity of that is somehow worse than every detail before it. No mattered. It mattered to Julia, it should have fucking mattered to him. He simply decided that what he wanted mattered more.
Something primal and furious moves through me again.
No — the word means something very specific to me too.
In my personal life, in bed, control has never meant taking what hasn’t been offered.
It means the opposite. Someone gives it to me deliberately, knowing exactly what I will do with it, and the moment she withdraws that permission, everything stops.
Immediately. There is no interpretation required, no negotiation, no fucking ambiguity.