Chapter 15
Carmine
Ican’t breathe. I need to get somewhere I can breathe.
Every single part of me is tense and hot.
My skin feels like it’s too tight for my body and I want to climb out of myself and go somewhere else.
Be someone else. I hate it here. In this place I’m in mentally.
I’m suddenly so incredibly small as I rush down the hallway and try to find a door.
A door to the stairs. Not the elevator, no, that can’t take me where I want to go.
I need some air. I need all of the air. My lungs feel like they’re burning as I rush up the stairs to the fourth floor and then even further. Going beyond where guests at the hotel are supposed to go.
Everything is too small. Too much. I can feel hands all around me, moving in closer to me. His hands. The hands of my father. Except they’re younger than they were when he died, and I’m younger too. Much younger, much smaller, and far weaker.
Still, I slam through the door to the rooftop like a grown man with strength and not a little boy.
It’s pouring outside. I don’t care. All I care about is sucking the fresh air into my lungs. It’s cold. It drips down from the sky onto my head and soaks down into my suit quickly. If my nose wasn’t already blocking up, I’m sure it’d smell remarkable.
I can’t focus on the rain though, in fact, I can’t focus on anything but taking one deep breath after the other as I try to will myself to settle down.
I can’t believe I said those words.
That word.
I’ve never actually said it out loud before. Now, I can’t take it back no matter how much I want to. It’s done, over with. Much like the act itself.
If I’m completely honest with myself, the word rape doesn’t even feel like it covers what happened. It feels like so much more somehow, and at the same time, less. Not enough. Like I’m making it all up and every image that is running through my brain is just a figment of my imagination.
I know it’s not. It can’t be. Still, I find myself at the edge of the rooftop, clinging to the cement wall and feeling the rough textured edges against my palm.
I press my hands harder against the top of the wall, because I need to know that I’m real.
That everything is real, and I’m not just a figment of a dream.
I won’t wake up and be back in that bed. Small and helpless.
I flinch as I hear the door I came through open and slam closed again.
“Carmine!” Soren calls out to me.
I shake my head. “Go away!” I shout back at him. Except it doesn’t come out of me as loud as I intended and my voice is thick with emotion that I can’t stand.
Tears stream down my face and I hope to God the rain hides it. I know it won’t. The rain can’t hide the fact that my eyes are red and my cheeks pink. The sound of the rain won’t hide the shakiness in my voice.
“Talk to me,” Soren insists as he stands behind me. I squeeze my eyes closed.
“This is your fault,” I tell him.
My voice carries through the rain and so do his steps as he moves even closer. I feel his hand against my arm.
“You’re soaking wet,” he comments. “Let’s go inside.”
I yank away from him. “Don’t touch me, no. I want to be out here.”
He pulls his hand away, but doesn’t leave me.
“Tell me what happened with your father,” he says quietly. Just loud enough for me to hear over the downpour. Our skin steams as the cold rain hits it, creating a slight cloud around our bodies.
A stabbing feeling overwhelms my chest. I clench my jaw and shake my head. “I can’t I—” I cut off and bite my own tongue so hard that I taste the iron of my blood.
“Why?” Soren asks.
Frustration continues to flood me just like the water that’s weighing my clothing down more and more with each second.
“Because…then it’ll be true, Soren,” I explain. “It can’t be true. It can’t.”
Soren steps just a little bit closer. I finally open my eyes to look at him. Lashes wet. My vision is blurry. I can still see him though, the outline of his rugged body and face. He’s soaking wet too. The rain bounces off his leather jacket in rapid pitter patters.
“You’re safe,” he assures me. “You’re safe, and I want to listen. I shouldn’t have said what I did back there…and I can’t take it back. Fuck, there’s so much I can’t take back but…I care about you, Carm.”
I take a shaky breath. “You don’t understand.”
He looks at me with his own pinkened eyes and nods his head. “I do. Maybe not entirely, but I get it.”
“How? How the fuck could you possibly get it?” I snap at him. More tears drip, drip, drip down my face and I taste the saltiness on my mouth. I struggle not to turn around and walk away. At the same time, my knees feel weak.
Soren’s own jaw shifts and he looks out to Greece.
“My uncle,” he starts, “Eivor, he…he tried with me.”
I blink at him and step a little closer. “Tried…what?” I ask, though I already know the answer. I need to hear it from him.
Soren’s hands are balled into fists. “It was after my parents died,” he explains slowly.
“At first it started with spending more time with me alone. Letting me smoke cigars, taking me for rides in the new cars he’d buy, letting me tag along to poker games.
It was all so exciting. I’d never gotten to do those things before. ”
I find myself listening intently. As I listen, images faded and suppressed tickle at the edge of my mind.
My father pressing his hand against my back and leading me into his study. The way he smelled of cigars and whiskey. The late-night chats about keeping things between the two of us. How no one would understand.
I try to brush those thoughts away, focus on listening to Soren.
“One night, he told me the only way I’d ever be a real man is if I learned what real men do,” Soren says, his voice growing angrier. “Apparently to him, that meant telling me to take my pants off and let him grope me.”
“Did he?” I ask, my hands shaking.
“No. My mother had taught me about ‘grown ups’ who want to touch you before I even started school... I ran out of the room after telling him if he touched me, I’d tell everyone.
He still looked at me too close for comfort after that though.
Rose too. I kept her safe, we slept in the same room until I could be certain she knew what to do if he tried. ” Soren’s throat bobs as he swallows.
My own father’s belt buckle clinking. His hot smelly body pressed too close to mine for comfort. The whispers telling me to be quiet. All those things come to the surface, and I can’t control the sound that escapes my throat and I look at the ground, trying to compose myself.
“It’s alright,” Soren comforts me, and reaches a hand out, but then changes his mind and pulls it back. His body seems to shiver with how badly he wants to reach to me, to have some sort of physical contact with me, but I just can’t. I can’t even handle my own skin right now, much less his.
“Fucking sick bastards,” I snarl. “Your uncle, my father.”
I shake my head. “Why? Why did any of this have to happen?” I lean against the wall.
It’s quiet for a very long moment. Soren doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything.
The rain has soaked through every single layer of my clothing, and for the first time in a long time, I’m cold.
My tongue is desperate for the taste of alcohol. Something to soothe the pain I’m feeling right now. An entire bottle down my throat. I want it more than I’ve ever wanted it.
I know I shouldn’t.
So, instead, I do the last thing I want to do. I open my mouth, and I speak.
“It started when I was five,” I mumble. Soren stays quiet and simply leans against the wall beside me, listening.
“At least, that’s when I can r-remember.
My father would come into me and Alessio’s room at night on the nights he was supposed to be gone.
He’d come home early, but after Mom was asleep.
When no one would question him or be looking after me.
Alessio could practically sleep through a tornado, but my father used the threat of waking him up to get me to stay quiet. ”
I suck in a deep breath, my chest aching, my head spinning. I don’t want to be saying any of this, but I am anyway. I cry harder, my words getting a bit less coherent.
“He held me down. Once a week I got to look forward to him forcing my clothing off, holding me down and fucking me. First it was just oral, but once I was big enough, he made it clear I needed to do what he wanted and it didn’t matter what I wanted.
Except…h-he told me I wanted it. That I deserved it.
That I was a disgusting freak who liked what he was doing to me, and so I’d never tell anyone. They’d know I wanted it.”
As I sob, I hear Soren beside me, a soft sound of him crying as well and I can’t stop myself from stepping closer to him, and putting my hand on his chest.
“I was so small. He was so big. I couldn’t do anything.”
“Of course you couldn’t. It d-doesn’t matter how big or small you were, Carmine, for fucks sake you were a kid,” Soren growls. “You didn’t deserve that.”
“Didn’t I?” I ask through tears. “Why…why would I come if I didn’t want it?”
“What?” he asks. I’m not sure if it’s because he didn’t hear me or he can’t believe it.
I squeeze my eyes closed and curl my fingers against Soren’s waterlogged shirt.
“When I got older… I got hard thinking about what he’d do to me, Soren,” I tell him, disgust in my voice. “I came when he did it. When he stopped…when he didn’t want me anymore, I felt…worthless.”
Suddenly, Soren grabs me by the face. “Look at me, Carm,” he demands, but I keep my eyes squeezed tight. “Look. At. Me.”
His voice is deep and dominant. I force my eyes open as I sniffle and look up at him, my face cradled between his large hands.
“Your body reacted out of fear and habit, okay?” he tells me. “It’s normal. I might be a messed-up fucker, but I know that much. You didn’t want it. He hurt you. Over and over again. He made you believe that your worth was tied to him and his perverted sexual fantasy.”