Desire & Secrets -Libby
Eleven
Istill trembled when Finn’s mouth met mine, but fear was no longer involved. This time, it was all about him.
The moment our lips reconnected, my hands instinctively slid to the back of his shirt.
His stubble grazed my cheek, and I leaned into it, a low, unguarded moan escaping me.
My nails pressed through the fabric on his back, and I pulled until there was no remaining distance between us, until I could feel the separate beats of his heart, until my next breath came as an afterthought.
His thigh pressed harder between my legs, and I rocked against it, my hips moving with a will of their own, chasing friction through layers of fabric, unconcerned with what that honesty revealed.
Heat flooded my abdomen, low and insistent, and I made a sound against his mouth that I’d have been embarrassed by under any other sky.
His hand slid under my shirt. Rough palms, calloused fingers spread wide across my back, moving upward with deliberate intent. I arched into his touch, and his other hand found the hem of my shirt and pulled upward—impatient, hungry.
I lifted my arms and helped him.
I wanted his hands on bare skin, his mouth on my throat, and his body against mine—an immediate feeling that was entirely mine, one that would crowd out everything else until the dead things circling below were just noise.
I also understood what he would find. Both things were true at once.
I lifted my arms anyway, and the fabric came away, and the cool night air landed across bare skin—
And everything stopped.
His hands froze on my shoulders. His breathing halted. His entire body went rigid against mine, and the shirt hung forgotten from his fingers. I opened my eyes.
Finn stared at my torso.
The scars.
Jagged white lines of stab wounds crossed my left ribs, one still slightly puckered where the blade slid deepest, the skin pulling taut with each breath like a half-closed mouth.
Lower, just above my hip, six cigarette burns formed a neat, deliberate row.
The spacing between them was even. Careful, whoever made them had paused between each one, had waited for the right moment, had continued.
His thumbs rested over the worst of them.
Each one memorized. Every patch of skin that sat differently from the skin around it.
I’d had years. Long enough that certain nights still returned the smell without warning: the searing hiss of contact, my voice muffled by a hand pressed hard over my mouth, and the silence that followed when I stopped making noise because I accepted that making noise made it worse.
For one suspended second, two realities coexisted: His warmth still enveloped me, the undeniable pressure of his desire against my stomach, and the lingering ache between my legs.
Simultaneously, the dread I’d carried since the first time someone undressed me and fell silent in the same way, years ago, returned.
I watched his face transform.
The hunger vanished from his eyes, replaced by a sudden, definitive closure. His nostrils flared. The hands still resting on my skin trembled—not from passion, but from a different, starker emotion.
The fury wasn’t directed at me. I knew that unequivocally.
Yet, it inflicted its damage.
I recognized that shift: hunger morphing into something else, desire into careful pain.
I had witnessed it on every face that had come close enough to discover what lay beneath my clothes.
The pattern was always the same: the wanting ceased, the questions began, and I became a problem to be solved rather than a person to be touched.
My arms fell. I moved to cross them over my chest, to conceal what his eyes had already consumed, to push everything back into the darkness where I kept it contained—but his hands remained on my skin, now gentle, so tentative that my throat constricted, silencing any words I might have uttered.
“Libby.” His voice emerged rough. “Who the—”
The heat drained from me like a fading light. My stomach clenched. Shame climbed my throat and flushed my face, hotter than any burn, and my skin—the same skin that had arched into his hands thirty seconds prior—now demanded to be covered, removed entirely from his gaze.
I shoved his chest. Tears pressed hard behind my eyes; I needed to move before they fell—before they confirmed what I already understood: this, right here, would hurt worse than anything before.
The knife and burns had come from someone who sought to take something from me.
But this—watching desire drain from Finn’s eyes, replaced by something careful and assessing—came from someone I had actually wanted, and that distinction made the exposure unbearable.
“Don’t,” my voice fractured. “Just don’t.”
His hands withdrew.
The shirt slipped from his fingers, landing on the ground between us.
Cold air filled the space his body had occupied.
I grabbed the shirt, pulling it on in one motion, my arms shaking.
I faced the skyline. Below us, the dead moved in slow, indifferent circuits; the city sat dark to every horizon.
On this roof, the only distance I could put between myself and him was the six inches I had just created. I kept my eyes on the buildings.
I pulled my knees to my chest, wrapping both arms around them.
The wind swept across the rooftop, carrying with it the sounds from below—that low, restless, shuffling hunger that now ran continuously beneath everything, the ambient sound of what the world had become.
Finn sat beside me, close but not touching. His breathing was still uneven, not yet fully recovered. I sensed his choice not to speak, and the weight of that silence pressed harder than any question he might have asked.
My chin dropped to my knees. My eyes burned, and I held them open, letting the cold air do what it could. I was folded into myself on a dead man’s couch, on a rooftop above a dead city, and the things scraping at the walls below were the least of what was killing me.
It lived here, pressed into my skin: six circles above my hip and lines across my side, a record of someone else’s choices written permanently into skin I couldn’t leave behind or explain away to someone standing close enough to read it.
I carried it through every room I’d ever tried to start over in, visible to every person who’d ever gotten near enough to matter.
He looked at me with pity.
What remained was the wind, the sounds below, and the knowledge that Finn now understood the secret that followed me through every door I opened, through every version of my life I’d tried to build on the other side of it.
It had followed me here, too.
It always followed.
We sat there for a long time. Neither of us spoke. Neither of us touched.
I tugged my coat up around my shoulders, drawing my knees tighter against my chest.
I stared out at the skyline: dark buildings against a darker sky. No lights. No movement. Just the husk of a city that had stopped breathing.
I waited for him to ask the careful questions that would signal the end.
But he just sat there, breathing beside me.
His silence wasn’t pity. It was…waiting.
And in that stillness, I decided something.
If this were the end, if the dead below were all that was left of tomorrow, perhaps the truth deserved to be spoken out loud at least once.
Not the official story, but the real one.
I didn’t look at Finn when I started talking. My courage had limits.
“I met John when I was twenty.”
My voice came as if leaving a voicemail for someone I didn’t know.
“He was older, confident. He had a way of making you believe he’d figured out the world, and that you were lucky he’d let you in on the secret.
” A short, sharp breath escaped me—not quite a laugh.
“I thought that meant wisdom. Turns out it just meant he’d had more time to learn how to hide what he really was. ”
The wind pulled at my hair. I tucked it back with shaking fingers and continued.
“We moved fast. By the time I turned twenty-two, we were married, and Lily was on the way.”
“Before… before Lily, I told myself there were no signs. Maybe there weren’t. Or more likely, I’d already been trained not to see them. He raised his voice once in a while—slammed a door, was quiet in a way that made the house feel smaller—but nothing I would have called wrong or dangerous.”
I swallowed. The next part lived somewhere deeper, uglier than anything I’d let myself speak in years.
“After Lily arrived, he lost interest in me, physically.” The words came out with clinical precision, as if I could manage the damage if I managed the delivery.
“He said I’d gotten fat. Made comments about how I looked like a grown woman now—they were odd things that I didn’t understand at the time. ”
I paused, drew a breath that shuddered.
“Sex became nothing but pain. And then it stopped being consensual.”
Neither of us moved.
I kept going. If I stopped now, I’d never start again.
“He’d escalate every time. Like whatever he’d done before stopped being enough, so he had to push further. Toward the end, he started cutting me. Burning me. He told me I owed him this—that enduring it owed him something, and he’d never explained.”
My hand drifted without thought to my left side, fingers hovering over the fabric above the scars beneath without making contact.
“He cut deep sometimes. Deep enough that he had to stitch me up himself afterward. He was a veterinarian—” A sound escaped me—something that wasn’t a laugh.
Something darker and emptier than that. “He was good enough to keep me out of an emergency room, where people would ask questions he didn’t want me to answer.
He understood where to cut, so the marks would never show above a collar or past a sleeve.
Every scar on my body sits below the neckline.
He calculated it. Designed it so I could walk through the world looking whole while I rotted underneath. ”
Silence. Just the wind, the dead below, and the man beside me—listening without moving.
I took a breath. Held it. Let it go.
“The night I killed him.”
I’d braced myself for Finn to flinch. To stiffen, to put a little more distance between his body and mine.
He didn’t move.
“The law thinks it’s straightforward,” I said. “Self-defense. Clean and uncomplicated. Because that’s what I let them believe.”
I closed my eyes.
“But the truth—the truth that no one knows—”
My voice dropped to a whisper. The words I’d never spoken aloud to another living soul climbed up my throat.
“I came home from the store and heard him.”
A long pause followed as I struggled to gather my thoughts.
“I heard him in the study. With Lily.”
I couldn’t articulate it plainly. I knew the words, their shape, their specific ugliness, but somewhere between knowing and speaking, my body made its own decision.
It didn’t matter.
Beside me, Finn went absolutely still. I heard his breathing change: a slow, controlled inhale through his nose.
He understood.
The ensuing silence held more horror than any words could have conveyed, and I pressed on before my courage bled out entirely.
“I put her to bed.” My voice had gone dead, mechanical, reciting facts from a careful distance. If I allowed myself to return to what I’d found in that room, I’d never find my way back out again. “I made sure she’d be alright. I tucked her in, I closed her door—and then I walked into the study.”
My hands pressed flat against my knees, pushing down hard enough to hurt.
“I picked up the fire poker.”
A beat of silence. Long and absolute.
“And I beat him to death.”
The words left me, and I released them. No softening. No justification. No carefully constructed legal framework to make them palatable to either of us.
“It wasn’t self-defense. Not the way I told them.
” My voice remained level, which surprised me.
“He wasn’t coming at me. He wasn’t threatening me in that moment.
He sat in his chair, and I walked up to him and hit him…
again… and again until he stopped moving, and then I hit him some more.
Until my arms gave out. Until I didn’t recognize him anymore. ”
My chin dropped to my knees. Tears ran freely now—hot and silent, streaming down cheeks numb from the wind.
“When I called the police, I showed them the scars. Told them he’d been hurting me for years, that I’d finally broken.
And other women came forward—women he’d apparently been seeing behind my back—who corroborated everything.
He’d been doing the same things to them.
The same burns. The same hidden cruelty—it was like a method he’d perfected on other bodies. ”
I exhaled, shaky and raw.
“I went to trial. I came out not guilty.”
Those last two words should have sounded like freedom.
They never had. The jury acquitted a victim who killed her abuser in a desperate act of survival.
That version of me was true, and she deserved to walk free.
But she wasn’t all of me. The person in that room wasn’t just a victim fighting back.
She was something colder. Something that heard a sound from behind a closed door and simply decided.
I kept my head down. Tears dropped onto my knees and soaked into the fabric.
“Nobody knows.” The words were a raw whisper, stripped to their stark truth. “Not my lawyer, not my mother, not Lily. Nobody alive but me.”
A small, ragged breath.
“And now, you.”
The wind snatched the words the moment I released them. The city stretched out, gutted and silent in every direction.
I had said it. All of it.
I’d carried it alone since the night it happened. It had woven itself into my posture, my sleep, the way I answered simple questions—so thoroughly threaded through the ordinary fabric of my days that I could no longer separate it, no longer remember a version of myself it hadn’t already altered.
Now Finn held part of it.
But he hadn’t moved away.
That mattered.