Avery sent Teresa a look that pretty much flew right over her head. “You’re hiding up here,” Teresa said.
My lips twitched, and the movement kind of hurt. When I looked in the mirror earlier, a faint bruise was forming on my jaw, and my lower lip was cut near the right corner. “Is it that obvious?”
She shrugged. “Kind of.”
I drew in a deep breath. Since I wasn’t going to be able to hide up here, I needed to woman up. Doing so sucked. “I’m sorry, guys. I know I’ve lied to you all, and I really don’t have a good reason for doing so.”
Teresa cocked her head to the side as Avery hovered by the edge of the bed, her slim fingers fiddling with the bracelet along her left wrist. “So . . . you’re not from around Shepherdstown, are you?”
Mortified, I shook my head. I hadn’t felt this way since I was six years old and had thrown bubble gum in the hair of a girl who was about to go onstage before me. I hadn’t meant to toss it in the mass of brown curls, but Mom had been standing by the front of the stage and when she’d realized I still had gum in my mouth, she had gotten a crazy stage mom look on her face and I’d panicked.
“I’d been at Shepherd since I was eighteen, and to be honest, it does feel like my only home,” I said, glancing at Teresa. She was watching me closely. “I know that doesn’t justify lying, but I just . . . I never thought of here as home, at least for a long time.”
Teresa nodded slowly. “But what about when you said you went to visit family for break? From what I gathered earlier, you haven’t been back here in years.”
“I didn’t go home.” My cheeks heated. “I’d checked into a hotel that time.”
Her brows pinched.
Avery’s eyes widened with sympathy. “Oh, Calla . . .”
“I know it sounds stupid. I honestly only did it because I wanted to get away for a little bit, and it was really the only option. It was kind of cool, really. And I know what I said about my mom being dead is freaking terrible and you guys probably think I’m a horrible person.”
“Actually, no, we don’t.” Teresa twisted toward me as she straightened out the leg that had been injured first by dancing and then again when her roommate’s boyfriend had pushed her, effectively ending Teresa’s dreams of dancing professionally for an elite ballet school. “Calla, I don’t know all your reasons for not telling us about your mom and your life here, but from what we’ve learned the last couple of hours, I get why you didn’t want to.”
“We totally get it,” Avery agreed, and I felt a tiny bit of hope flare in my chest.
Teresa nudged my knee with hers. “But I hope you know that whatever your background is or whatever, we aren’t going to judge you. You can be up front with us.”
“Trust us on that,” Avery added. “We are the last people to judge you.”
My gaze bounced between the two, and they were giving each other a look I didn’t fully understand. Then Avery moved to sit on the other side of me. Nervously, she tucked a strand of red hair back behind her ear.
Then she took a deep breath I could hear, looked at Teresa one more time, and then her gaze settled on me. Muscles in my stomach clenched, and I knew she was about to tell me something major. It was written all over her somewhat pale face. “When I was younger, I’d gone to a party that an older guy at school was throwing at his house. He was cute and I flirted with him, but things got out of hand. It really was bad.”
Oh God no. Part of me already knew where this was heading, and I reached over, wrapping my hand around hers, and squeezed.
She pressed her lips together, and I could tell what she was about to say was hard—harder than anything I’d ever had to admit to. “He raped me,” Avery said quietly, so softly I could barely hear it, but I did, and in response, my chest squeezed. “I did the right thing. At first. I told my parents and I told the police, but his parents and mine were country club buddies, and they offered my parents a whole lot of money if I kept quiet. Plus there had been a picture of me earlier that night sitting in his lap and I had drank. My parents had been more worried about what people would say about me instead of what was done to me, so I agreed. I took the money and it ate at me, Calla. I felt like shit for it.”
Tears pricked at my eyes as she pulled her hand free and slowly took off her bracelet. She turned her wrist up, and I sucked in a breath I immediately wished I hadn’t. I saw the scar. I knew what it meant.
Avery smiled faintly. “That’s not the worst part. Because I didn’t press charges, the guy continued doing what he did to me.”
“Oh my God,” I breathed, wanting to hug her. “Honey, it’s not your fault. You didn’t make him do those things to you or to anyone else.”
“I know.” The smile became a little firmer. “I know, but I did carry some responsibility in that. And the reason why I’m telling you this is because I went years without telling anyone what happened to me and when I met Cam, it took a lot for me to open up and tell him the truth. I almost lost him because I didn’t.” She drew in another breath. “The point? I’m ashamed that I tried to take my own life and that I caved to my parents, but I’ve gotten to a point—with therapy—that I get why I did those things and they don’t make me a bad person or less of a friend to people if I don’t open up or whatever.”
“No,” I whispered, blinking back tears. “You’re not a bad person.”
Teresa cleared her throat and when she spoke, her voice was thick, and when I looked at her, I tensed up all over again. “When I was in high school, my boyfriend hit me. More than once. A lot of times, actually.”
Oh God.
I couldn’t believe it. Teresa never came across as someone who would stay in an abusive relationship, but as soon as that thought finished I realized how judgie that was.
“I was young, but that really isn’t the greatest excuse for being with a guy who hit me,” she said, following my thoughts. “I kept it to myself and I hid it. I made up stories whenever the bruises were visible, but one year, right before Thanksgiving, my mom saw me and there was no hiding what was happening any longer. The thing was, the worst part wasn’t that I was in the abusive relationship, but what it did to my brother. He lost it, Calla. He drove over to my boyfriend’s house. Cam confronted him and . . . and they got into it. Cam beat him so badly that the guy ended up in the hospital and my brother got arrested.”
“Holy crap,” I gasped, wide-eyed.
Teresa nodded. “Cam got into a lot of trouble, and I lived with the what-ifs for a long time. What if I didn’t stay with him? What if I told someone? Would Cam have ended up almost losing everything? And he did lose a lot. A semester of school. He was off the soccer team, and he also had to deal with the shit he’d done. I carried a lot of guilt because of that. Even to this day, I have regret.”
“I’m sure Cam doesn’t blame you,” I said.
“He doesn’t.” It was Avery who answered. “He never did.”
Teresa’s smile was wobbly. “That’s because my brother is pretty damn awesome.”
I reached over and squeezed her hand, feeling the tears really start to well up in my eyes.
Avery pressed in against my side. “So is Jase. He’s also pretty awesome.”
A weak laugh bubbled up.
“And he had secrets. Really big and really important ones—secrets I can’t elaborate on, because they’re his business, but I was in the dark for a long time and when he let me in, I got why he’d kept some things to himself.” Emotion poured into Teresa’s beautiful face as she went on. “The whole point of this, Calla, is all of us have things we’ve lied about and things we’re ashamed of, and things we wished we talked to someone about a long time before we did.”
“But telling someone, fessing up about everything . . .” Avery smiled again when I looked at her. She squeezed my hand back, and I realized that through me, all of us were connected in that moment. “Not to sound completely cliché and cheesy as hell, but it changes everything.”
“Especially when you tell your friends,” Teresa added softly.
Pressing my lips together, I nodded a couple of times, and I wasn’t sure exactly what I was agreeing with. Probably everything, and maybe a half a minute passed before I found whatever it was that had given me the ability to tell Jax that didn’t involve tequila.
I told them about Mom—for real. The way she was before and the way she was now and I told them what had caused the change. The fire. I told them about Kevin and Tommy, and my dad, who gave up on all of us. And I told them about the scars, all of them, and I did so weeping like a baby that just had tossed its binky to the floor and no one would pick it up for her. Actually, we all were having a major festival of the sob, but there was something cleansing in opening up and sharing with them after they’d shared private and powerful stories with me. There was also something cleansing in the tears.
By the time I was finished, the three of us had our arms around each other and I finally felt like what Jax had believed—that I was brave, because that took a lot for me to tell them. It didn’t matter that Jax knew, and these girls understood that it didn’t matter how many times you told someone: It might get a little easier, but it is still hard.
And as we held each other, I realized something so important then. It was kind of sad that it took twenty-one years to really realize it, but family wasn’t just blood and DNA. Family went way beyond that. Just like with Clyde, even though I wasn’t related to Teresa or Avery, they were my family.
And just as important, even with my eyes all puffy and tears streaming down my face, I felt what Jax had said about me, something I’d felt when I’d stripped down for Jax.
I felt brave.
Sniffling, Teresa pulled back and she wiped under her eyes with the sides of her forefingers. “Now that we got all that covered, whose ass do we got to kick to keep you out of your mom’s mess?”