Chapter 38
Selena
By the time I got to the bathroom upstairs, I could hardly breathe, the panic was so sharp and heavy.
I raced in and made sure to lock both doors. I hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on. I didn’t want to see myself.
He had the video. He was threatening to make it public.
I couldn’t stand it. The world whirled. I felt out of control.
I had no power. Everyone would see my darkest shame.
Everyone would see, and I’d have no way to stop it.
Even if I could convince myself that I didn’t care about the faceless masses of the student body…
the Sinclairs. I tried to picture Cal’s face, and his father’s.
What about Brody? The very idea made me feel sick.
I dropped to my knees, knocking over half the contents on the counter over as I went. I tugged my top off; I was so hot that the struggle to breathe was sending me dizzy.
The world swam. I crawled across the floor, my hands landing on things that I’d knocked over.
A sharp pain sliced through my panic. I looked down to see Brody’s razor on the floor.
It was one of those old-fashioned ones. The kind you used after lathering your face up with a brush.
Blood ran across my hand. The pain allowed my first deep breath.
I grabbed the razor and scuttled back to lean against the wall beside the shower.
My phone vibrated on the floor. Brody was calling. I declined the call. I clutched the razor in a death grip. I didn’t want to fall back into bad habits, but the siren call of cutting through the panic with a clean, precise blade was overwhelming.
I needed this. I needed to be able to breathe.
Still, I hesitated. This felt like a failure. After all these weeks of taking better care of myself, I was failing.
A knock at the door had me jumping.
“Selena. What are you doing in there?” Brody? Why had he come looking for me already? I checked my watch. An hour had passed? How? Time stretched and had no meaning. The world had stopped turning, and I watched it from outside.
He banged on the door, the loud noise startling me.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
Then the murmur of conversation. Cal’s voice. Then Brody tried the handle of the door again.
“If you don’t let me in, heathen, this door is a goner.”
I couldn’t speak. I was too locked into a game of chicken with the mother of all panic attacks. If I looked away now, it would get me.
“Fine. I’m coming in,” Brody said finally, and then a loud thud vibrated the entire room. Once, twice.
I watched the door slam inward with the third thud. He’d kicked it in. The wood around the handle was all splintered. How strong is he?
He walked in, his eyes immediately zeroing in on me in the corner. He stilled, taking in the razor, the blood.
“Get everyone out of here,” he called over his shoulder to Cal, who lurked behind him. “Party’s over. Tell her friends she’ll call them tomorrow. Tell them she threw up and went to bed early.”
Cal looked at me a second, and I could barely meet his concerned eyes. Then he was going.
Brody closed the damaged door behind him and crossed the room to me.
“Don’t touch me!” I managed to wheeze out. “I can’t have anyone touch me.”
He stopped then nodded. “Fine. I won’t touch you.”
He sank onto the floor beside me and leaned on the same wall. Close, but not touching.
“So, what are we doing here?”
I shook my head. Words wouldn’t come. The panic attack was still too close.
“I’m not going to let you bleed, Selena. I won’t allow it.”
His words pissed me off, as they were surely designed to do.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” I breathed, greedily dragging in a lungful of air. “You don’t understand—I need something—” I didn’t have enough air to keep talking.
Brody considered me a moment and then lifted his shirt. He pulled it off and tossed it aside.
“Okay, you need to cut something. Cut me.”
I jerked my eyes to his. He wasn’t joking. His face was somber.
“What?”
“I won’t let you cut yourself, so you can cut me. Every line you want to cut into your own skin, cut it into mine.”
“What? No!”
“Yes,” Brody said with an ironlike stubbornness. He took my wrist and jerked it toward him, forcing the razor I held to his arm.
“Stop! I’m not going to hurt you!” I panted, fighting against him.
“Seeing you destroy yourself hurts me more than any little cut could,” he growled, and raked the razor across his arm.
I fell back, dropping the razor. Blood welled on Brody’s forearm. A long, jagged cut appearing.
I looked at him. He watched me defiantly.
“If you want me to watch you hurt yourself, then you can watch me, too. See how you like it.”
I crawled to the counter and grabbed tissues, returning to press them over the cut. The panic in my chest had lessened from a scream to a dull roar. I could breathe again.
I dabbed at the cut. “This is deep.”
Brody shrugged. “It’ll heal.”
He was quiet as I cleaned it. The past sat like a dark specter over us, unspoken yet ever present.
“You’ve never asked me about what happened,” I muttered after a moment. “I know that you know something did.”
“You never volunteered to tell me,” Brody replied, calm.
“I guess you’ve already figured it out.” I wrapped my arms around my knees and leaned back on the wall again. “The term ‘damaged goods’ isn’t that ambiguous.”
“I thought I made my feelings on that term known,” Brody said shortly in that uptight, controlling tone I’d grown to love. “But I’d like to hear, if you want to tell me…” he said slowly.
“It’s not pretty. It’s messy.”
Brody simply nodded and leaned back on the wall with me.
Was I really going to tell him? The locked box where I kept that horrible memory had split open when Preston threatened me, and everything was spilling out.
Maybe tomorrow I’d have the strength to stuff it back inside, but tonight, I just couldn’t.
Brody was seeing me at my weakest, and, in that moment, I needed to tell someone.
I needed someone to bear witness, so I could be sure I wasn’t crazy.
“I guess it’s obvious that I was assaulted.
Raped. It wasn’t here in Hade Harbor, though I met the guy here.
He was a local hotshot. Rich, connected.
He was pursuing Winter, but she was too smart to fall for his act.
He had a club up north. It was meant to be really exclusive.
I worked hard to get him to invite me. After my father died, everything was hard at home.
I thought maybe, if I had a rich boyfriend… ” I trailed off with a painful chuckle.
“You see, you’re not far off the mark when you call my mother a gold digger; you’ve just got the wrong Carmichael woman. You should call me that.”
I took a deep breath. My throat ached with the effort of holding back tears.
“So, I went along with him, grateful for the chance to spend time with him. That place—it doesn’t exist anymore, it burned down, but that place… will haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life.”
I studied the floor. “It wasn’t a date. He stopped pretending it was as soon as we got there. It was a punishment for Winter, because she ‘disrespected’ him and resisted his advances. So, he took her best friend there, drugged her, tied her up, and… there were three of them, I think, in the end.”
There was a soft snapping sound. I glanced over to see that Brody had broken his heavy-duty razor in half.
His face was impassive. “Go on, sweetheart. Get the poison out.” He tossed the broken pieces aside, then curled his hands into fists and closed his eyes. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“You look like you’re trying not to kill someone,” I said.
“Not you, sweetheart. Never you.”
I laughed. Somehow, despite what I’d just shared, he made me smile.
“They filmed it, I guess. They… well, I know you felt that mark on my arm. It’s a brand, if you’re wondering, and yes, it really fucking hurt. That’s the only lasting mark they left on my body. The rest are mine.”
“What happened to them? Are they out there somewhere?” Brody’s voice was low and lethal.
I shook my head. “There was an incident. The regulars at this place were either arrested or died in the fire. Trent definitely died.”
Brody dipped his head for a second.
“Well, that saves me a job there. As for the ones in jail, I’ll take care of it.”
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll take care of it. Don’t think about them again.”
I turned around to look at him. “What? Is that an order?”
He nodded. “A new rule.”
“You and your rules,” I sighed. “You know the worst part? The freezing. It’s so weak. When something reminds me of that place, or Trent, I just freeze. I can’t seem to stop it.”
“What about the cutting?” Brody asked.
“The cutting was bad at first. It was the only thing that broke me out of my panic. A way to take control back. I know it’s not pretty, but it helped me when I needed it. I don’t do it much anymore.”
“What about the drinking and partying?”
“Coping mechanisms I’ve had to figure out over time. Thanks to you, I’m doing pretty well with them. When I came back to Hade Harbor, I just wanted to disappear. Then I met you, and you didn’t let me.”
I leaned my chin on my knees. Inside, I tentatively prodded around my bleeding heart. It felt surprisingly okay. In fact, against all odds, I felt strangely light.
“You want to know something I hate?” I whispered to Brody.
He mirrored my pose, listening attentively. His whole body was attuned to me. He was listening with every single part of himself. As I talked haltingly, he spread cream on the cut on my hand and placed a long Band-Aid over it. Then he did the same for his cut.
No one had come and found me in the dark before, in the year I’d been suffering every day. I’d pushed most of them away, and then moved to California to avoid Winter, the only person who’d cared enough to try.
But this man, unexpected, unwanted, undeniable, had just pushed right in.
“Trent was the last person to—he’s the last person who was… inside me,” I admitted haltingly. That should be the most embarrassing, disgusting, and shameful thing I’d ever said, and yet, as soon as I said it, I realized how much it bothered me.
That knowledge was always there, in the back of my mind. It made me feel like a small part of my body still belonged to Trent. I hadn’t been able to take it back yet. I couldn’t do it on my own. Brody stroked the bandage over my cut, so tender.
Suddenly, without even thinking about it, I was moving. I pushed myself across Brody’s body, and he sat back and let me straddle him.
His arms went around my waist, and he looked up at me. His eyes were wet. I brushed the back of my hand across his eyelashes and found the tears caught there. Tears for me.
“I don’t want him to be the last person to have been inside me. I want to choose. I want to be the one to decide,” I whispered and slowly, purposefully rolled my hips.
He hardened quickly beneath my weight but made no move to advance things.
“Unless you don’t want to? I understand if you don’t—” I started.
Brody’s finger touched my lips, silencing me.
“Before you say something that breaks my fucking heart, just know that when it comes to you, my answer is yes.”
I put my hands to his face, cupping his cheeks. “Still?”
“Still,” he said. No hesitation. “If I ever neglect to make that clear, check for a pulse. It’s always yes—”
I cut off his words with a kiss. Holding his face captive, I leaned in and kissed him with everything I had.