18 #2
“He told me he would give me anything except forgiveness,” I said, and the words scraped on the way out. “That’s what I wanted. After all of it, after finally telling him about Darian and the video and the date rape, after telling him I loved him, that’s what I wanted. I wanted him to forgive me.”
Bliss’s eyes filled again. “Oh, Ay.”
“He didn’t say it to punish me.” I wiped beneath my nose with the back of my wrist, then made a face because I was still apparently capable of vanity during emotional collapse.
Charm immediately handed me a tissue from somewhere inside her cardigan like a sad fairy godmother.
“He meant it. He loves me. He said he still loves me, and he was so angry it didn’t even feel clean anymore. ”
Charm’s face tightened like the line had cut her too.
“He said he had love and anger and no forgiveness.” I stared down at the tissue in my hand. “So we ended it. As clean as Easton and I can end anything, I guess.”
Bliss shook her head quickly. “That doesn’t sound clean.”
“It wasn’t. It was just quiet at the end.”
The three of us stood in the rain beside my car, holding a silence too large for the parking lot. Somewhere inside the building, a baby cried through thin walls. A car passed along the street behind us, tires slicing through water, headlights sliding across Charm’s face before disappearing.
Charm spoke first. “So you told him?”
I knew what she meant, and my chest pulled tight.
“Enough.”
Bliss’s fingers tightened around mine. “Enough as in Darian, or enough as in the truth?”
I looked at her.
She didn’t look away. Neither did Charm.
That was the difference that night. They weren’t reaching for the lock. They were standing beside the door and letting me decide whether it opened.
“I told him about Darian and the video, about Maddox, Iver, and Jerod, and enough of what all four of them did for him to understand why the rules existed before he ever touched me.”
Charm’s eyes glistened. “Did you tell him why nothing happened to them?”
“No.” I rubbed the tissue between my fingers until it started to shred.
“Not every detail. We were already angry, and he was bleeding and furious. Handing him every piece of me while he looked ready to tear the world open wouldn’t have helped.
I told him enough to understand that the video made me visible while the men who raped me kept moving through life untouched. ”
Bliss pressed one hand to her mouth.
Charm’s chin trembled once before she lifted it. “That’s enough for tonight.”
“I think so.” My laugh came out quiet and ruined. “He looked like he wanted to tear the world apart.”
“He did that at The Sin Bin,” Bliss said, then winced. “Sorry. Bad timing.”
“No.” I shook my head. “That’s part of why I told him to stop making that face. I didn’t want to become another reason he destroyed himself.”
Charm looked toward the building again. “That boy has been destroying himself with or without your permission.”
“I know.”
Bliss’s voice softened. “Did you tell him you loved him?”
The answer sat beneath my ribs and pulsed.
“Yes.”
Neither of them spoke.
I looked down at our hands. Bliss held one of mine. Charm had taken the other, her fingers cool from the rain and steady around mine.
“I told him I loved him, and it didn’t fix anything.”
Bliss swallowed. “Love doesn’t always fix it right away.”
“No, B. It didn’t matter.”
Charm squeezed my hand. “That isn’t the same thing.”
“It felt the same.”
“I know,” she said. “But it isn’t.”
My eyes burned again, and I was so tired of crying I could have screamed.
“He didn’t say my trauma didn’t matter. He didn’t.
I need to be fair about that before my hurt turns him into a villain inside my head.
He listened. He looked sick. He looked like every word was cutting him.
But then he said love wasn’t enough to save the part of him I ruined. ”
Bliss made a small, wounded sound.
“And he’s right.” I forced the words out because they were ugly, true, and mine. “I can be traumatized and still have hurt him. I can have reasons and still have done damage. He can love me and still not forgive me tonight.”
Charm stepped closer until her shoulder pressed against mine. “That is a very emotionally mature sentence, and I hate it for all of us.”
“I’d like to return it.”
“Receipt denied,” Bliss whispered.
I laughed again, and this time it broke into a sob halfway through.
Both of them moved at once.
Bliss wrapped herself around my front. Charm folded around my back. I stood pinned between them in the rain, my cheek against Bliss’s hoodie and Charm’s hand smoothing over my braids, and for the first time since Hockey House, I let myself be held without trying to earn it by being funny first.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Bliss shook her head against mine. “We are too.”
“I shouldn’t have thrown Cade and Ryan in your faces.”
Charm’s laugh was wet against my shoulder. “Ryan deserved a little collateral damage for existing that hot and inconvenient.”
Bliss sniffed. “Cade didn’t, but he would accept friendly fire for me.”
“Cade would accept a bullet for you and then apologize for bleeding on your shoes,” I muttered.
“That’s romance,” Bliss said.
“That’s a sanitation issue,” Charm replied.
I squeezed them both because the banter hurt in the best way. It felt like finding a light on inside a house I thought I had burned down.
Bliss pulled back just enough to cup my face. “Listen to me, and don’t make a joke until I’m done or I’ll bite you.”
“That is aggressive affection.”
“I learned from the best.” Her thumb wiped beneath my eye with heartbreaking gentleness.
“We knew what happened to you, and we still forgot that knowing isn’t the same as protecting you in the moment.
We got scared of watching you hurt him because we knew you’d hate yourself for it later.
We didn’t stop to remember you were also reacting to months of him hurting you. That was our failure, not yours.”
Charm’s hand settled between my shoulder blades. “You deserved your girls at your side. You deserved us saying, yes, Easton is hurt, and yes, Aura is hurt too. We made it feel like your pain needed to be tidier so everyone else could handle it.”
My throat worked around the lump there. “I was cruel.”
“You were,” Bliss said.
I blinked.
Charm nodded. “You were very mean. Spectacularly dressed, but mean.”
A strangled sound escaped me. “This is your comfort?”
“Yes,” Bliss said. “We are not going to lie to you. You were cruel, Easton was cruel, everyone in that house acted like a bag of knives with college credits, and we still love you.”
Charm’s mouth softened. “You don’t have to be innocent to be ours.”
That one landed so deeply I couldn’t breathe for a second.