17 #3
She grabbed the uniform shirt. And her hands were shaking.
A fine, violent tremor she couldn’t control.
I saw it. I fucking saw it, and the sight was a hook in my gut.
The moment she realized I’d noticed, she spun away from me, the movement so swift and sharp it felt like a physical rejection.
I was left staring at the tense line of her back, at the bare skin between the twisted strap and the edge of her skirt, at the places my hands had just been and the places I no longer had the right to touch.
The room smelled of us. Coconut lotion and cheap detergent, the ozone scent of rain on her skin, and the thick, unmistakable perfume of sweat and sex.
It was the smell of my own addiction, proof that my body was a traitor with a long, detailed memory.
My knuckles throbbed where I’d connected with Maddox’s jaw.
My ribs burned where he’d landed a hit that would bruise deep by morning.
The pain was a clean, simple thing. I wished the rest of me could be so straightforward.
She bent to pick up her ripped panties from near the leg of the coffee table, then froze. Her shoulders hitched once, a silent, seismic sob she tried to strangle, but I heard it.
I stopped breathing. “Aura.”
“Don’t.” The word cracked, a dam breaking on a single syllable.
Every cruel, righteous thought in my head stumbled and died at the sound. She clutched her hand to her chest like it was a life preserver and let out a breath that shattered on the exhale. It wasn’t a cry. It was the sound of something vital breaking.
I had seen Aura be a lot of things. A razor blade. A fortress. A fucking queen on a hill of scorched earth. I had seen her weaponize her tears into contempt. I had never seen the weapon drop from her hands like this, leaving her empty and defenseless.
“Don’t be nice now,” she said to the wall, her voice thick and muffled. “I can’t handle you being nice after telling me to go.”
My jaw ached from clenching. “I’m not being nice.”
“You said my name.”
“That’s not nice.”
“It is from you.”
Fuck. The word was a bomb detonating silently in my chest. I looked away, but my shitty apartment offered no refuge.
The water stain on the ceiling, the crooked lamp, the scuffed floorboards, the coffee table sitting wrong in the middle of the room like a witness to our war.
It was all evidence in a trial where we were both guilty.
She dragged in another breath, and this one didn’t even try to become anger. It just dissolved into a wretched, honest truth. “I have been so lost.”
I shut my eyes. “Aura.”
“I have.” Her voice gained strength, the softness burning away into a desperate ember. “Since that night in your room. Since you looked at me like you finally saw the rotting core of me and told me you were done.”
My eyes flew open. “You made me beg.”
“I know.”
“You made me feel pathetic for wanting you.”
“I know.”
“Then you don’t get to cry because I finally stopped letting you carve that feeling into my bones.”
She turned. The tears weren’t gentle. They were furious, messy tracks through the remnants of her makeup, and she looked humiliated by them, betrayed by her own body’s weakness in front of me.
“I’m not crying because you stopped,” she shouted, the sound raw and ragged.
“I’m crying because I never meant to hurt you.
Not like that. Not in a way that stuck.”
A mean, hollow laugh escaped me. I needed its bitterness. “Could’ve fooled me. You had a real fucking knack for it.”
Her face contorted. “I was scared.”
“You’re always scared when the bill comes due, Aura. When you actually have to look at the damage.”
“Fuck you, Easton.”
“Yeah,” I snarled, taking a step forward. “We just did. And it was just as fucking toxic as the rest of this.”
She flinched. Actually flinched. And the spark of regret was so immediate, so acidic, it burned my throat. But I held my ground. She didn’t get to use her pain as a universal absolution. Not this time.
She wiped her face with a rough, angry hand, smearing black under her eye. “I deserved that.”
“Stop it,” I hissed. “Just stop. Don’t perform your guilt for me. Don’t tell me what you deserve so I have to be the asshole who agrees.”
Her mouth snapped shut. I saw the fight in her, the urge to lash out, to rebuild the walls. But for once, she didn’t. She just stood there, trembling with her purse clutched in her arms, waiting.
I leaned back against the arm of the couch, crossing my arms so tightly I felt my own heartbeat in my biceps and the complaint of every bruise Maddox had managed to leave.
“You said you were scared. Fine. The floor is yours. For once in your fucking life, give me the truth without making me bleed for every syllable. Say it. All of it.”
The rain was the only sound for a long moment. Then, a ragged inhale.
“I didn’t tell you about the video,” she began, her voice thin and serrated, “because saying it out loud… it doesn’t feel like remembering.
It feels like it’s happening again. And before you say that’s not fair to you, I know.
I know it isn’t. You deserved so much more than a set of rules with no key and a woman who had a panic attack every time you tried to turn on a light in any room I was in. ”
My blood went cold. I didn’t move.
Her fingers twisted in the fabric of her uniform shirt, clutching the black cotton like a lifeline. “The rules… they were never about you. Not at first. They were about him.”
The floor seemed to tilt. “Maddox told me some.”
“Maddox is alive because I told you to stop,” she whispered, her voice trembling.
“He was Darian’s friend? One of the friends?”
“Yes.” A tear tracked cleanly through the smudged mascara.
“He was one of the four.” She swiped at her cheek again, a harsh, angry gesture.
“The lights. The lights stayed on, Easton. That was his thing. He made sure of it. So, there was no doubt. No shadow to hide in. My face was in it. My body. Every part of me. My voice. And my name.” Her breath hitched, a terrible, ragged sound.
“He said my name. Thirty-seven times. I counted. On the video. Thirty-seven fucking times.”
The air left my lungs in a rush. My hands curled into fists so tight my short nails bit half-moons into my palms, the busted knuckles pulling against fresh gauze until pain flared clean and bright.
A white-hot, homicidal rage, purer and more focused than anything I’d ever felt, narrowed my world to a single, burning point: Darian Colton’s face.
I wanted to find it and erase it. Permanently.
She saw the intent in my eyes and shook her head violently. “No. Don’t. Don’t you dare make this about your anger. I’m not telling you so you can play avenger. I’m telling you so you understand.”
“This rage is the only thing holding me together right now,” I ground out, my voice barely recognizable.
“He said it like he was labeling a specimen,” she continued, her own voice flattening into something horrifically detached.
“So, everyone watching would know exactly whose body they were dissecting. And they did. Oh, they fucking did. I was either a slut who’d asked for it, or a liar trying to cover her tracks.
I was never the girl who was date raped.
I was the entertainment. My body was the show.
He didn’t just… video me. He packaged it.
He distributed it. He turned my trust, my name, into a punchline for the whole school. ”
Bile rose in my throat. The room wasn’t tilting anymore; it was spinning. I could hear the ragged, animal sound of my own breathing.
Her tears fell silently now, but her words were cold, precise, like she was reciting a clinical report of her own murder.
“So, I built a fortress. No lights. Because the last time a boy wanted to see me, the whole world got a front-row seat. No naked bodies. Because mine had already been picked apart by a committee of peers. No names. Because he stole mine and made it the title of my own humiliation.”
I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth until I tasted the coppery tang of blood. It was a better taste than the ash of her words.
Then she looked at me, and the clinical detachment shattered, leaving her face a ruin of pure sorrow. “And then you came along.”
My heart stopped.
“You came along,” she repeated, her voice softening into something unbearably vulnerable. “And you didn’t push. You listened. You made the rules feel like mine, not a challenge to break. You made me feel… safe. And that terrified me more than anything.”
A broken laugh escaped me. “Safe was worse?”
“Yes.” The word was a sob. “Safe meant I had something to lose. Something that mattered. And I was so fucking broken, Easton, I only knew how to love things by ruining them first, before they could ruin me.”
“You lost something,” I said, the words like gravel.
“I lost you.”
It was an arrow through a crack in my armor I didn’t know existed. I pushed off the couch, not toward her, but away, needing space from the magnetic pull of her pain. “Don’t do that shit.”
“I did.”
“No.” I whirled, pointing a finger at her, my control fraying. “You don’t get to stand here after a year of making me question my own sanity and act like you’re the only ghost at this funeral. You knew I was hurt.”
“I know you were hurt.”
“You don’t know shit.” The shout echoed in the small room.
She flinched, and whatever satisfaction I thought the truth might bring turned to ash.
“You knew I was mad. You knew I was loud. You knew I wore my heartbreak like a fucking badge because I didn’t know how else to carry it.
But you don’t know what it did to me. To feel so sure of what we were in the dark, and have you look at me in the light like I was a delusional fan. You made my love feel like a symptom.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, the words soaked in tears.