27. Mara
27
MARA
A ir leaves my mouth in a hurry when the faintest creak of the bathroom floor sounds through my ears. I’m not scared. Well, not for me. This is as big a deal for Ark as it is for me. I just have no clue why.
Does he know all the right things to say because he’s dealt with sexual abuse before or because I shared too many secrets while endeavoring to escape the clutches of a predator?
I’m terrified it could be a combination of both, but I can’t hide from the truth any longer. We must be honest if we want any chance of being a “we.”
With Ark’s wide and tormented eyes locked on my reflection in the vanity mirror, he brings the towel to my hair and carefully commences drying it. He sections off pieces and squeezes them with the towel before he scrunches the ends to encourage their natural waves.
It’s clear he’s done this before, and it piques my curiosity to a point I can’t hold back.
“You’ve d-done this before?”
His ghostlike grin frees me from the worry that I’ve made a mistake interrogating him while he’s comforting me.
“I have. Many times.” He shakes his head as if disgusted, but his tone is anything but. “My older sister was extremely demanding when we were younger, and seemingly blind to my assigned gender.” His smile dips. “I dried and brushed her hair every night for years.”
He rolls his eyes as I suspect he did anytime his sister demanded access to his hair-wrangling skills before he switches the towel for a brush. He drags the bristles through the knots his thorough drying caused, his brushstrokes neither painful nor angry.
He’s so deep in thought I assume our conversation is over, so I’m shocked when he says, “I stopped pretty much any type of nurturing when Karolina died. It seemed pointless.” Something in his eyes alters their coloring. They appear more blue now than green. “The reason for her strict shower routine no longer existed, so my skills were no longer needed.” He swallows harshly before he murmurs, “Or so I thought. Riley took up Karolina’s vacancy only a few short years later.”
I have so many questions, tons of them, but my intuition is begging for me to go slow. Since I’m trying to trust it as much as I am the man blocking the only exit of the bathroom with his bulky shoulders, I listen to its pleas.
“Riley is your s-sister?”
Unease flares through his eyes before he dips his chin.
“ The Riley Valentine? Or are we discussing a random Riley I’ve yet to m-meet?”
His fingertips tickle my nape when he gathers my hair in his hands so he can plait it. “ The Riley Valentine. Though we should probably stop saying it like that or she’ll get a big head.”
A puff of air escapes his lips when I murmur, “Too late.”
I’m so grateful that some of my stupor is lifting. Paarth’s attempted attack scared me, but I’ve faced far worse, so I don’t want it to waste the opportunity it’s presented me with.
I’ve learned more about Ark in the past ten minutes than I have in the past three weeks.
“She is quite the force,” Ark whispers as he ties an elastic at the bottom of my twisted locks. “She’ll need to be to survive this.” He sucks in a sharp breath, conscious he said too much, before he places the brush on the vanity and nudges his head to the hallway. “Come. It’s late. We should get you to bed.”
I don’t recognize my voice when I ask, “W-will you stay?”
Again, I’m not scared. I just have a feeling Ark shouldn’t be alone right now, and since I’m just as desperate for him to stay, why not kill two birds with one stone?
Ark freezes for the quickest second before his eyes shoot to the paper heart collage Tillie and I made last week.
Just knowing he’s concerned about his influence in her life eases my hesitation by a ton.
“Tillie is having a sleepover with a neighbor. She won’t be home until tomorrow afternoon.”
When he cranks his neck back, the worried gleam in his eyes shrinks the bathroom. “I should go. It will be safer if I go.”
He thinks he’s taking advantage of me.
I’m not close to reaching the same verdict.
“I d-disagree.” His hand shoots out to grip the doorframe when I whisper, “You will wash away his scent better than any bodywash will.”
“Mara…” His chest heaves as he drags in a shuddering breath. “Fuck…”
I’m diving deep, headfirst into dark waters, but for some reason, I feel more free now than ever.
Knowing his struggle, sensing how much he wants to protect me, and witnessing it only hours ago rewards me with more strength than I thought possible.
He fought for me.
He protected me.
He made me feel like I was worth something.
Now I want to do the same for him.
“Please.”
Rejection hits hard and fast when he murmurs, “I can’t.” The brutal sting is nowhere near as bad when he adds, “I can’t do touch. I don’t like to be touched…It’s… I…”
When he struggles to be honest about the reason he has a phobia of touch, I say, “It’s okay. I d-don’t need to touch you.” The invisible wings I’m attempting to fan out should wilt from the weakness of my reply, but they don’t. They expand to their full girth, meaning my voice is without a quiver when I address my needs for the first time. “I just want you to continue teaching me that fear isn’t the first emotion you should experience when you want someone to touch you.”
“Mar…” He’s so torn he can’t get my full name out, not even with its shortness. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t.” When his eyes sling back to Tillie’s bedroom door, I murmur, “You won’t hurt either of us.”
“How do you know that?” Sheer bewilderment colors his tone.
“A mother knows these things. They know wh-who to trust with their children and who to steer them clear of. It isn’t intuition, more that a mother knows. She knows who her children are safe with. I can’t put it simpler than that.”
The pain in his eyes triples as he thinks over my words, and then the truth smacks into me.
Oh god. His mother knew he was being hurt, and she did nothing to stop it.
Like all victims of abuse, Ark tries to shift the focus off himself. “Do you think she also knows the body is designed to endure more pain than anyone could comprehend?”
“Probably,” I reply, nodding. When his eyes squeeze tightly shut, like my confession pains him to hear, I push out, “Some say birth is the equivalent of breaking every bone in your body. If that isn’t proof of what one can endure, I don’t know what is.”
My throat tightens when he asks, “And you did that when you were…?”
“Fifteen,” I fill in, too exposed and raw to lie.
A low sound leaves him as some of his remorse shifts to anger. “Fifteen?”
I don’t want to add to the absolute agony in his eyes, but since I genuinely don’t believe they can harness more hurt, I nod.
“Fuck, Mara. You were just a kid.”
“I was,” I agree, stepping closer. The threads holding him together are as worn as mine. They’re mere seconds from snapping, but I tug on them ruefully instead of leaving the fragile frays untouched. “As were you when you were hurt.”
“Don’t,” Ark snaps out. “This isn’t about me. This is about that fuck”—he points to the door as if Dr. Babkin is on the other side—“and what he did to you that made you so scared you can’t speak without a stutter.”
The thread I mentioned earlier wholly unravels, and in all honesty, it’s freeing not having it flap between us anymore.
“He raped me,” I confess, stealing the air from Ark’s lungs. “The first time was when I was?—”
“ First? ” He’s enraged with anger, filled with hate, yet there’s something hauntingly beautiful about the protectiveness beaming from him. “He did it more than once?”
I look at my feet and then nod, the memories too hard to bring up without a dip in confidence.
Ark takes a moment to compose himself before asking, “Did you tell anyone? Did you report him to the medical board?”
Again, I nod. This one is weaker than my previous one.
My chest heaves for air when the softest touch lifts my chin. Ark stares at me after aligning our eyes. His spine is rigid and his jaw is tight, but there’s no hate in his eyes. No pity.
Not for me, anyway.
“You told?” His voice is a whisper, full of disbelief.
I nod before brushing away the tear the bob forced from my eye.
“Did it stop?”
I’m torn on how to reply. Speaking up saved me from Dr. Babkin for a couple of weeks, but it also thrust me into a nightmare far darker and more depraved.
Ark takes my silence as an outright denial. He bristles with anger, his fury hot enough to scald. “I’m going to track down that fuck and make him regret the day he laid eyes on you. I’m going to kill him.”
I follow him out of the bathroom and down the hallway, my strides remarkably strong for how hard I am shaking.
Ark grips the handle of my front door when I say, “It’s too late.” A shiver moves through me as flashbacks of my past rear their ugly heads. “He’s already d-dead.” I stray my eyes to the floor to hide the deceit in them before saying, “There’s no one left for you to punish… except me .”
“Punish you?” He spits the two words as if disgusted. “I don’t want to punish you, Mara.”
“You may not want to, but you are.”
“How?” he bites out.
“By not trusting me to do what is best for me and my daughter. By letting me believe my st-stutter makes me weak.” I fold my arms over my chest to ward off the chill rolling down my spine. “By taking what he did to me and using it against me.”
“That’s not what I am doing.” His voice quickens with fury. “I just found out, so how could I have already used it against you?”
“You knew,” I whisper, my chest rattling as I strive to hold back a sob. “You knew because a victim knows a victim.”
He tries to pfft off my underhanded claim that he is an abuse survivor. It rumbles in the back of his throat and tightens the firmness of his jaw, but not a waft leaves his lips when I stare at him, pleading for him to be truthful.
A relationship doesn’t need to be perfect.
It just needs to be honest.
Desperate for him to open up to me, I push past the barriers he is erecting between us. “Was it your mother?”
“No!” he denies in a hurry, the rebuttal cracking from his mouth like a whip.
My stomach gurgles when I say, “Your father?”
“No. It wasn’t anybody, so stop asking!”
His anger should scare me; it should have me backing away with my hands held in the air, but the nurturing side he pulled out of the trenches in the elevator only hours ago refuses to surrender. I need him as open and raw as me. I need his heart unguarded if I want any chance of infiltrating it.
“Intra-familiar sexual abuse?—”
My knees weaken when he shouts, “It wasn’t sexual.”
I’d give anything to hug him, to lessen his shakes with some form of contact, but I keep my hands at my side, rewarding him with the same respect he offered me only hours ago.
My dedication is rewarded tenfold when he mutters a short time later, “If she had to pick between maiming me and touching me, she mostly picked the former.”
Mostly? God.
I take a conscious breath to lessen the nerves in my voice before asking, “She?”
As Ark’s eyes float down the hallway, he breathes out so heavily his chest sinks. “My step-grandmother.” I learn this goes way deeper than the occasional whack on the bottom when he murmurs, “She hurt him as a child, so he hurt them.”
My lips quiver when I speak. “Your sisters?”
He nods almost robotically, and it breaks my heart. I was able to leave my abusive home because there was no one there to protect but myself, and I only built the courage when I found out I was pregnant with Tillie. I doubt I would have ever left if I had siblings, particularly a younger one. I struggled to leave my mother, and she was an adult.
“Ark… I’m s-so sorry.”
He shakes violently, but since the lid has been lifted on years of secrets, he can’t reseal it. “I didn’t know about any of it until just before Karolina couldn’t handle the shame he forced on her for a second longer. I assumed his mother hated me because he hated her. I had no clue he was hurting my sisters because she had hurt him. I swear to you, I didn’t know. I would have stopped it if I had known.” It is a fight not to wrap my arms around him and hold him tight when his voice dips with shame. “I should have known. It’s rare for the abused not to become abusers.”
“That isn’t true.” When he grunts as if he doesn’t believe me, I speak loud and clear. “The rate of abuse amongst individuals with a history is approximately s-six times higher than the base rate for abuse in the general population.” I talk even faster so he can’t interrupt me. “But that’s because those figures don’t include the choices?—”
“Choices? What choices? They take them all away.”
I allow his snapped comment to affect my vocal cords for only the quickest second. “Th-that’s the point I’m trying to make. They chose to abuse. They chose to act on their delusions. They chose to ignore consent and a person’s God-given right to give it. They chose, Ark. Just like we choose to do the opposite.” It hurt to hear him say he believes all survivors turn into abusers, but I know in my heart he doesn’t honestly believe I am capable of hurting Tillie. “We know the pain, so we would never…” My words fade to silence as my eyes slide to Tillie’s bedroom door. “I would never do that to her.”
I choke back a sob when Ark mutters my name in vain. “Mara… Fuck . That wasn’t what I meant. You would never hurt Tillie.” He steps closer, the honesty in his eyes bursting through the protective bubble into which I’m trying to fold myself. “I know that.”
He stops just before he reaches me when I reply, “Just like I know you would never harm her either.” I dance my eyes between his, the pain in them weakening with each bounce. “What happened to us doesn’t make us monsters, Ark. It makes us strong. We survived. We survived them.”
My eyes stop stinging with tears when Ark snatches up my wrist and pulls me into his chest. They stream down my cheeks and soak into his shirt until there are no more left to shed.