I turned, and felt the impact of my back hit him with resounding, utter silence. There was no pretty frame of mind I could put around red slashes and blue-black bruises. Perversely, it looked worse now than it had felt at the time. I’d gone into a kind of cloud-like space, floated away on endorphins and fear until the pain looked blurry and dark, like the earth beneath an airplane.
However it had felt then, it looked awful now. I’d stared at the marks in the mirror, looking over my shoulder. He’d turned me into some sort of abstract painting, something that could hang on a metropolitan museum with the title “A Dark Love” written on a little white placard. It was the most angry, meaningful, caring thing any person had ever done to me, but I could never tell Hennessey that. He wouldn’t understand. It was just another secret to take to my grave.
“Do you still want me?” I wouldn’t blame him for turning me away.
The air stirred behind me. I felt his heat at my back.
He dropped a kiss on my bare shoulder. “This was done to you. It wasn’t your fault. You know that. Don’t you?”
I shook my head. A lump formed in my throat, barring any words. But that was just as well. What I had to say couldn’t fit into the accepted language of a woman. A survivor not a victim, they said. As if the word mattered, when I could feel the lingering wounds with every breath I took. They may have been done to me, but they were a part of me now. Taken into my skin, my soul. My outside finally matched what was inside—that was the gift Carlos gave me.
Hennessey ran his fingers down my arms, feather light. “Let me in,” he murmured. “Let me in.”
I knew what he wanted. To take care of me, to comfort me. To control me. The same thing Carlos had wanted. They weren’t so different, and with a sigh, I closed my eyes and sank into him. My head rested on his chest, cradled by the hard muscles of a man who worked more than he rested.
His musk enveloped me like a lullaby. Put your fears to sleep. And in his arms, I found acceptance for my outward hideousness, if not the inside. He pressed kisses along my temple and down my hairline. He kissed the skin below my ear and continued until he found the seam of my neck and my shoulder. A sensitive place, one smooth and free of any bruises or whip marks.
“You’re beautiful,” he murmured.
I had to close my eyes, because he didn’t know. Didn’t really see me. I wanted to blurt it out, suddenly, when keeping the secret had been my entire life’s work. I’d gone to see therapists and entered the academy, constantly moving, striving, running away from the truth. No one had ever hurt me, but that was a lie I told myself.
Turning in his arms, I faced him. The unadulterated sorrow in his face struck me like a lash. I’d done this to him, some way and somehow, and I was about to make it worse. The hotel’s A/C rained down cold air, raising goose bumps on my flesh. I was naked, brutally so. It was fitting, because I felt so exposed. Raw. Split open. Primed for a confession I’d barely even acknowledged to myself.
“I turned my father in. For murder. For rape. A bunch of other charges.”
“I know,” he said simply.
“He’s there for life. I don’t really know how he escaped the death penalty.”
“You did the right thing.”
“Did I?” I laughed and the sound was hollow. “My own father. My own flesh and blood. How can you trust me if I’d turn on my own family?”
“I trust you.”
I shook my head. He didn’t understand. “I didn’t turn him in because I just figured out he had killed someone. I suspected all along.”
His expression didn’t change. “You were a child.”
“Yes. A child.”
I closed my eyes as the truth flayed me open, more brutally than Carlos’s whip had ever done. What do you remember? I remembered my father hurting me, and every time I’d told myself he hadn’t, it had been a lie.
“He molested me from the time I was six years old.”
Hennessey sucked in a breath. I felt his shock. I felt my shock, at the truth I’d barely acknowledged in my own mind.
This will be our little secret, okay?
This was what my father had meant. Not the murders, the other children that he’d thought were a secret anyway. He’d meant his abuse of me. That would be our little secret, and until this moment, I’d never told anyone. How obedient. I’d never even admitted it to myself.
I kept going. Couldn’t stop now. “Until I was eight. Then I guess I was too old for him. I don’t know. He just stopped coming. And you know what the crazy part is?”
He did know. I could see the painful knowledge in his eyes. He would have studied enough victim psychology to understand how the mind works, especially one so young.
“I missed it,” I whispered. “I missed him coming to see me. Even though it hurt. Even though I knew it was wrong. How fucked up is that?”