Chapter 6 #5
“You know what I could do?” He caressed my chin with his thumb and gave me a sad smile. “I could tell you just how much of the sky you took away with you on the day you left, Tinkerbell. But that wouldn’t do anything to change the situation.”
Neil was so good at sowing chaos in my head with just a few cryptic words, and he was so good at seducing women in general. And yet…
Wait a minute.
He had called me Tinkerbell.
So I was still Tinkerbell to him? Like we’d never even parted? In that moment, he looked so sincere that it brought tears to my eyes.
“Do you remember when I told you that I only wanted to fly in your sky?” he continued, transporting me back in time. It happened in my room—my bathroom, specifically. And of course I remembered it. I remembered everything about the two of us.
“I wasn’t lying to you. I never lied to you.” He licked his bottom lip uncomfortably. I could see how hard it was for him to talk like this with me.
We were silent together for a few seconds, but I knew that moment of peace would be followed by something awful.
“But?” I prompted him because I knew he was about to tell me more.
Neil looked at my lips again with those voracious eyes that could bite so deep without ever touching me, and, for a moment, I had the sensation of him on my tongue. Stinging and masculine.
“But…I can’t.” He pulled back, away from me, and took with him the warmth he’d spread to me through that light touch.
His right hand shook slightly before raising up to rumple his hair.
He always did that when he was nervous.
“What do you mean you can’t? Why can’t you?” I threw up my hands in exasperation. He could have meant so many things: kissing me, touching me, getting close to me, telling me the truth.
“I just can’t, Selene. There’s no why.” He was starting to get pissed off; I could tell by the fluctuations in his voice and the way his whole body tensed up.
“We can’t make the same mistakes all over again.
You left because you wanted to leave. Do you understand me?
” he asked, getting in my face, and I took a step back.
Reasoning with Neil was impossible when he got angry like that.
His reaction to this conversation was starting to get dangerous, and, after what my father had told me, I was even more acutely aware that I needed to take care in my every word and action so I did not provoke him.
“And do you understand that you’re contradicting yourself? What is your actual problem? Are you afraid to give up the other women because you don’t have the guts to actually tell me that you want me?” I demanded, feigning like I fully understood the motivation behind his attitude.
Neil just glared furiously at me, though. I tried to back away, but he was faster and caught me by the arm. He loomed over me, making me feel about as big as an ant. I felt both hot and cold where his fingers were gripping me, and I tried uselessly to pull away.
“You’re hurting me,” I whispered, feeling tears bead on my eyelashes.
“Do you not understand that I would have enjoyed fucking you with Jennifer? I wanted to use you. Both of you. First one and then the other, or maybe at the same time. The only thing that mattered to me was feeling good,” he said with a dark power that made me tremble.
He was so close to me; I could feel the warmth of his breath.
The sense of awe mixed with dread was devastating.
Neil was dominating me once again, exerting his unstoppable power over me, and I tried to fight back, not even thinking about what I was saying.
“You’re sick in the head!” I shouted.
One sentence and the world went to pieces around us.
Immediately, I regretted it and tried to communicate that to him with a look because I didn’t even have the guts to take a breath, let alone speak.
Neil stared intensely at me, first surprised and then confused. He began to breathe noisily through his nose, hatred injected into his stare; his face transformed into a mask of pure fury. If he had looked at himself in the mirror, he never would have recognized himself in the grip of such rage.
“What did you say?” he demanded menacingly, though I knew he’d heard me perfectly well.
I continued to look fearfully at him, admitting my defeat.
I had lost the ability to form words—or even thoughts—by that point.
In that moment, all of my attention was drawn as if by a magnet to his grip on my arm, which was becoming increasingly hard and painful.
Neil looked into my eyes and saw the fear that, like a rapacious demon, had possessed every part of me.
In a moment of clarity, he released me and took a step back, scrubbing a hand over his face.
He began to babble nonsense, maybe at me, maybe at someone else who wasn’t there. And I truly understood then just how shadowed and tortured his soul really was, trapped inside a deceptively perfect body.
“Fuck!” he shouted abruptly, kicking a kitchen stool to the floor and making me jump. It occurred to me that I had just triggered a bomb that was primed for explosion.
“What’s going on in here?” Logan, drawn by the ruckus, burst through the front door and ran to me. He looked from my terrified face to his brother and said again, “Neil, what the hell’s going on?”
As he spoke, he tried to wrap an arm around my shoulders, but I pushed it off and freed myself from him as well.
All of a sudden, I felt confused and afraid.
“Ask this cunt!” He was railing against me with a previously undiscovered level of anger. Wasn’t I the one who should be feeling let down and outraged here?
“She told me I was sick in the head, did you hear that? Sick in the head!” he shouted and then bellowed a laugh full of scorn. “Fuck!” he yelled again, continuing to vent his anger on nearby objects and making me flinch away again.
I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to look. I didn’t want to see him. I tried to block out the powerful shouts, the violent movements, and the deafening noise. I covered my ears and began shaking like a leaf.
“Enough, now get out of here! You need to calm down!” Logan came to my defense, and I slowly opened my eyes.
“I didn’t even want to come here! Fuck all of you!” Neil spit instead, heading for the door. When he left, he slammed it violently behind him.
I remained curled up tightly on the floor even after he was gone, sobs shaking my shoulders and shivers running through my entire body. Tears slid down my cheeks, wetting my neck. I wiped them away with the back of my hands and kept weeping.
“Hey, Selene.” Logan’s gentle voice caught my attention, but I couldn’t look at him.
I tried to regulate my breathing. I’d never had a reaction like this before in my life. I was still traumatized from the accident, though, so everything was amplified for me.
“You really hit a sore spot there.” Logan tried to push a bit of hair out of my face, but I inched away from him. He sighed instead and sat down cross-legged on the floor next to me.
“I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings…” I mumbled, rubbing my still-moist eyes. It was frightening as well as disappointing—the idea that Neil was a man as well as a beast.
“He’s not evil, Selene. He’s just afraid of life. You have no idea what he’s been through,” Logan explained, and I stared at him, trying to suss out more. I had long felt that Neil probably experienced something terrible when he was a child, but no one would give me any concrete answers about it.
“So tell me, Logan. You, at least…” I begged. “Why won’t anyone help me understand?” I sobbed, and Logan looked shaken, horrified by the whole situation. Could he help me pin down exactly what had just happened between me and his brother? To understand why he behaved the way he did?
“In his own way, Neil cares about you, Selene…” He paused, giving me a moment to absorb these words.
A sudden moment of vertigo made me rub my forehead.
My heart felt like it was going wild but I listened carefully as Logan continued to speak.
“In his mind, he was just using you, but you know that’s not how it really was.
He was never just using you. He only thinks that way because, for him, sex is about reducing women to objects.
The way his brain works… It’s not like ours,” he added, searching my face for a reaction.
“Not like ours?” I whispered breathlessly. It was hard to speak; crying had taken all of my energy. Logan licked his lower lip and considered for a moment before continuing. The pause only made me feel more anxious because I knew that whatever I was about to find out, I wasn’t going to like it.
“No. There was a woman in the past who really damaged him. It wasn’t just a physical hurt; a lot of it was psychological.
He was just a little kid when she… She…” He stopped and shook his head.
“It isn’t for me to tell you this; it’d be disrespectful of him.
He’ll tell you when he’s ready,” he said, and my spirit broke.
Logan didn’t even need to continue, I realized.
I pulled my knees up against my chest and wrapped my arms around them, saying nothing.
Deep down, I think I had always known, but, until the very last minute, I’d tried to ignore the signs.
The dots connected. The world finally made sense.
The showers, the way he treated women like things, and his distrust of the entire human race.
All of it.
I had seen everything, but I had persistently pushed away every awful premonition, every guess, every unthinkable hypothesis, because I didn’t want to believe it.
He had been raped. By a woman.
Just imagining him, small and defenseless, fighting against that kind of monster, was unbearably painful.
It was hard to breathe, and, all at once, I thought about the secret room, the one that was always kept locked.
I thought about the newspapers in there that I’d managed to catch a glimpse of, talking about a “scandal.”