Chapter 41
Dakota
“Your brother?” Mason asked quietly, a measure of restraint in his tone.
I nodded, shame and disgust pouring over my tongue and down my throat like acid.
“And he…?”
Another nod.
“Just once?”
“For four years.”
Mason’s fingers tightened on me for a moment, his entire body rigid.
He was barely breathing, just holding me firmly, steadily.
I was too afraid to pull back, to look at his face now.
I couldn’t even imagine what he must be thinking.
My fingers curled in the wet cotton of his t-shirt as I clung to him tighter, more tears tipping over my lashes, mixing with the bathwater on my cheeks.
Anthony was my half brother, older by three and a half years.
God, I loved him.
I loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone in my whole entire life. He was the first person who ever made me really feel chosen. Safe. Precious.
And then he ruined it.
I was fourteen when he took my virginity. He was eighteen.
Back then, I told myself it wasn’t wrong if I wanted it. If it felt good. If he smiled at me like I was the only thing that mattered.
Now, I knew that was wrong.
Stupid. Naive. Starving for affection.
The bath water was still sloshing around me and Mason, my face hidden in his chest, my tears adding to the wetness of his t-shirt.
Thinking about what I’d done made me feel sick to my stomach, giving me a twist in my gut that I wasn’t sure I could articulate to anyone else.
Because…fuck. I never actually did anything to stop him. So what did that make me?
Worse, I fucking begged him.
I swallowed hard, nausea rising in my throat.
The summer between middle school and high school, when my life was shouting and slammed doors, the sharp edge of hunger and anger, and Anthony was my shelter.
When he was the only gentle thing in my life.
I clung to him, because even poison can look like medicine when it’s the only thing keeping you alive.
And I wanted him to take my virginity, to be the first person to know me like that.
He told me it would be better if I did it with him—he’d be nicer and safer than the other high school boys. He’d make it feel good.
I believed him. Fuck, I believed him.
I didn’t fully understand how wrong it was then.
I know that now.
I’m constantly tormented by how much I know that now.
Without saying another word, Mason moved, reversing our positions, laying down fully in the tub now, his head resting on the edge, and laid my tired body on top of his.
All Mason’s clothes were still on, and the hem of his t-shirt floated loosely in the water.
Quiet cries and sobs kept escaping me, my shoulders shaking and my vision blurry.
I leaned back against him, feeling his clothes on my bare skin, his arms looped around my stomach, my hair swirling around us.
Disgust twisted in my gut, shame heating my chest, hatred clawing my throat.
“I’m so sorry. For everything,” Mason said, his voice strained and close to my ear. “I won’t stay under too long.”
Then he slipped below the surface of the water, his spine flat to the bottom of the tub. I didn’t stop him.
Laying on top of him, I could still keep my head above the water.
I tilted my head back to submerge just my ears, listening to my own shaky breathing, tears slipping down the sides of my face now, tracking over my temples and dissolving into the bath.
My relationship with Anthony hadn’t been strictly sexual; sometimes he actually felt like an older brother. He teased me with the sole purpose of annoying me, or he took me out to get fast food, or he stole shit from my room when he came over.
But at some point, I started feeling really weird about it. Ashamed.
Because he didn’t act like my brother most of the time.
My friends in high school would talk about boys they had crushes on, boys they’d kissed, boys they’d let touch their chest or between their legs, boys they wanted to give handjobs to, and I started to realize that I couldn’t tell them I’d been doing all those things with my brother for years.
It made me quiet. Made me pull back. Made me feel like an outsider. Made me never want to speak another word ever again.
Like I was carrying around this huge secret with me all the time, and the weight of it was slowly crushing me.
Mason’s arms remained around me while awful memories flooded my brain, never letting go of me.
Hating myself more and more each time it happened, not knowing how to stop it, praying every night that I’d wake up with a different life, crying every day in the bathroom at school.
The water was quiet around my face, nothing but the hollow rush of air in and out of my lungs filling my ears.
The first time I really tried to pull away from Anthony when I was sixteen, he didn’t yell.
He vanished. He stayed at college, didn’t ever visit me.
Days, weekends, weeks—gone. I felt like I couldn’t breathe without him, and he knew it.
He made sure I learned that lesson every time I tried to fight.
He reminded me how I had nothing without him.
All my emotions were dangerous; all my emotions scared him.
He thought if I got too upset, I would tell someone. Tell our father. I should’ve. I wish I had told someone about you back when it mattered.
My fingers skimmed the surface of the water and I closed my eyelids, feeling more tightness in my chest as a fresh wave of sobs came on, convulsing in my lungs.
I don’t want to be this person.
I wish all that stuff didn’t happen to me. I wish I turned out differently.
I hate myself. I hate everything I’ve ever done.
I hate that I’m still doing it.
Mason brushed the pads of his fingers lightly over my skin, not to provoke any reaction from my body, but to tell me he was still here. He still had me. Even though he was underwater and we weren’t speaking and I couldn’t quite hold myself together, he wasn’t leaving me.
He could hold me like this. He could handle these parts of me.
My darkest, most fragile pieces.
Some nights when I was younger, I dreamed the only way I could escape Anthony was by dying, and the worst parts of me fantasized about him being the one to do it.
Fantasized about my last breath at his hands.
Those dark thoughts twisted me up so badly I could hardly function at all.
I didn’t eat, didn’t talk, didn’t sleep, didn’t do anything.
I was sinking, drowning, dying right in front of everyone’s eyes.
But nobody noticed. Nobody cared.
Anthony ended things when I turned eighteen, just like he said he wouldn’t. Maybe he thought it would be too hard to control me once I moved out and went to college.
Either way, it made me spiral.
Hearing his name around my family after that was agony. Everything was agony.
I almost failed every single one of my classes during my freshman year of college, because I was too depressed to do anything other than stay in my bed.
I didn’t want to talk to anyone, because I didn’t know what to say.
I was so anxious about the possibility of seeing him over Christmas break, when I’d be kicked out of the dorm and sent back to my childhood home.
He was all I could think about. Seeing him, not seeing him, hating myself for letting him have so much power over me.
Eventually I reconnected with Mila, and she saved my life. I didn’t tell her everything, but I didn’t need to. She understood that I couldn’t talk about all the things plaguing me, and I needed that understanding so badly.
I needed a person, and I found that in her.
But the memories never left me.
I’m sick, rotting from the inside out. Anyone who gets too close can see it.
I turned over onto my stomach and took a final inhale.
Then I slid down, my face sinking under the warm water, my cheek pressing to the hard plane of Mason’s chest, the rest of the world slipping away.
I curled my body up smaller against his own, clinging to him as I held my breath and squeezed my eyes shut, his t-shirt gripped in my fist. His arms locked around me without hesitation, his hand cradling the back of my head like we belonged here together in this underwater silence, in this almost-death.
No more questions.
No more escape.
Just the two of us in the water, our hearts beating against each other’s ribs.
And I’d chosen it this time, chosen to follow him into this world of silence below the surface. The hand that was cradling my head now was the same one that roughly shoved it down earlier. It was comforting and dangerous at the same time. I was trapped, but held.
Every time Anthony was done with me, I had to take a shower. I cried silently into the hot water, filling my lungs with steam, scrubbing my skin raw, hating myself for never stopping him. I didn’t want tell anyone about it because I needed him and I didn’t always hate what he did to me.
Because he made it feel good. He was the one to teach me how to come.
And when my body was responding to him like that, how was my brain supposed to react? How was I supposed to be a victim when some part of me liked it? Even if I’d wanted to tell someone, how could I tell them that?
It was a secret that’d crushed me and crushed me and crushed me. For years. Until I couldn’t breathe without choking on it.
Until I was nothing.
Less than nothing.
But now, my eyes were closed and my thoughts were empty. Down here, nothing was real.
Only Mason. Only us.
Being underwater was like erasing everything. There was no past, no pain, no trauma. Just the pressure of the water, constant and close. Just Mason’s body anchoring mine.
It felt like we could stay under forever, like air was an afterthought.
There was something beautiful and devastating about it.
The water, which comforted me now, would still kill me in the end, and hadn’t my life always been like that?
Hadn’t I always craved my own demise? Hadn’t I always loved the things that were dangerous in excess?
Finding peace in the same water that I’d eventually drown in.
Even as my lungs started to burn, I pressed into Mason harder, burying my face in his chest, holding tight to his body, not wanting to give up this moment.
I wished he could be the one to save me. I wished it so much my hands shook.
I didn’t want to resurface. Didn’t want to have all the awful noise come rushing back.
Didn’t want to remember all the ways Mason and I could never last together.
All I wanted was the weight of the water holding us together, pushing away every inch of space, washing away the darkness that corroded our relationship above the surface.
As if he could sense me needing air, Mason adjusted his grip.
I shook my head, silently begging him to keep me down.
Once we resurfaced, time would start again, our countdown ticking closer to our inevitable end, and I just wanted to pretend for a little bit longer.
Hold me tighter. Take me.
Kill me.
Do it now, just like this. It can be gentle like this. I won’t fight you.
Please.
But he didn’t listen to what I wanted, sliding us both above the surface, keeping me held to him. We were facing each other now, and I couldn’t avoid his eyes searching mine.
Tears slid endlessly down my face, my breaths shaky and broken.
Part of me was afraid he would ask questions, but another part of me wished he would, just so I could get everything out. I was so tired of carrying it all by myself. But if he started asking questions, he might start learning the truth, might finally become disgusted by me.
When the silence stretched on too long and my throat was too tight, I spoke.
“Do you want to ask me anything?”
He shook his head. “You can tell me whatever you want.”
“So you’re not going to force me to this time? What happened to that?” I bit out, angry tears now stinging my eyes, my face getting warm. “Is this too real for you? Too much?”
“Nothing about you will ever be too much for me. Ever, Dakota.”
“But you don’t know the truth.” You don’t know that I never stopped him, that I begged him, too, that I wanted it, too. I let it destroy my life, and nobody forced me.
“There’s no truth you could give right now that would shock me, or disgust me, or make me think differently of you.” He looked deep into my eyes, his irises brown and bottomless. “I don’t flinch with you. I want all of it.”
“No, you—”
“Yes,” he cut me off firmly. “I do. You can push me away, but I’ll come back. Always.”
I wish that was a good thing.
Being with you is slowly destroying me, but being without you somehow feels even worse.
A sob broke free of my lips and I slumped forward against his chest. The water was starting to cool.
“Please don’t hurt me extra just because you can,” I cried, a lump swelling in my throat. “In the end, please let me leave you.”
“No.” His voice was sharp.
“When this is over—”
“It won’t be over, Dakota. It won’t.”
But even as he said it, I could hear the agony in his voice. His arms wrapped around me tighter, like he could already feel me slipping away. Like maybe if he held me tight enough he could protect me from himself.
But it would never work that way.
I didn’t fight him when he stood up and lifted me dripping out of the bath, when he wrapped me in a towel and carried me to his bed, when he laid me down on his soft comforter. He brought me one of his t-shirts, and a pair of his underwear. He brushed my hair and I braided it.
As much I wanted someone who could handle my messiness, who wouldn’t be pushed away, I knew in the back of my mind that I couldn’t do this with him forever. If I let him, he would kill me.
I shoved those thoughts away, rolling onto my side, under the blankets.
Mason laid behind me, tucking my body into the cradle of his own.
I’d leave in the morning. Not now. Not when I needed this more than I needed air.
I could have tonight.
Tonight to pretend that I’d ever be able to survive him.