“Stop it.” The walls seemed to shake with the vehemence of his shout.
“Why? You are jealous, aren’t you?” What demon had crawled inside her and taken over her soul?
“You’re demeaning yourself, Max.”
“I’m demeaning you.” It was the demon of guilt, and it had her firmly in its grip, forcing her to lash out.
“Think about what you’re doing.”
“I’m tired of thinking about it. I want to forget about everything for a little while. I want to take control of my life again.”
“Fucking some faceless cowboy isn’t going to put you back in control.”
“Maybe not, but it beats hanging around here.” And it sure beat lying alone in the dark with the haunting vision of Jules’s dead face.
“You’re acting out against what those men did to you the night I died.”
Max laughed harshly. “Oh, so now you think you were a psychiatrist in your former life.” She grabbed her black high heels from beneath the bed and slipped them on. “Well, it doesn’t work. Those bastards don’t mean a damn thing.”
She listened to the words as if someone else had said them, was horrified to find they’d come from her mouth. They’d killed Cameron. And that meant everything.
“We’re talking about the rape, not the murder,” he whispered, dismissing his own demise just that easily. “And they changed everything about you when they raped you. When they beat you. Left you for dead.”
She heard the tears clog his insubstantial throat. She said nothing. She couldn’t as chills raced across her flesh. Not true, Cameron. She’d been changed long before that ever happened. It was nothing more than another random bad act. She clamped her teeth together so the words wouldn’t slip out.
“Why do you refuse to admit that what they did drove you into your self-imposed isolation?”
Attack mode. Safety mode. Where she felt most comfortable. “Why do you always come back to that? I’m sick of hearing it.” And scared to death of it.
“Because you won’t talk about it,” his voice softened.
She smelled his peppermint breath against her cheek and swallowed past the lump in her throat.
“You can’t hide from it forever, Max.”
She grabbed her purse, rummaged through it, and after finding her keys and license, dumped it back on the floor next to the chair. She took several long, deep, fortifying breaths. Her anger grew as the oxygen filled her. Anger, so much better than fear. She turned on him almost gladly. “All right, you want to talk about it. Fine. You want the truth. Fine. But you won’t like it, Cameron.” She smiled what she hoped was a particularly nasty smile. “I haven’t been protecting myself. I’ve been protecting you.”
Choked-off laughter. “Right, Max. See if you can explain that one so a normal ghost can understand it.”
She pushed the lapels of her jacket back, fisted her hands her on her hips, the keys digging into her palm, and glared in his general direction. “We’ll see how much you can take. The truth is I didn’t feel a damn thing that night. They raped me. So what? I’d had sex with too many men and too many times.” The truth of it shamed her. She said it anyway, almost believing it hurt him more than it hurt her. “They were just three more. You were dead, and quite frankly, I didn’t give a damn what they did to me. I was sort of hoping they’d put me out of my misery.”
The pitiful truth had been locked away inside her all this time. If he’d really wanted to know, he’d have found it long ago. She advanced, backed him into the corner, his phosphorescence squashed into a dull red against the dirty, white walls.
“Max, don’t—”
She stabbed a finger. “Don’t you dare ‘Max’ me. You asked. I’m answering. Now shut up.” She took a deep breath, stiffened her spine, and wondered if he realized she didn’t want to hear it anymore than he did. But he’d pushed too hard for her to stop now.
“Do you know why they almost beat me to death?” She waited a heartbeat. “Because I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t scream or beg or plead. I just lay there. And they couldn’t stand it. They kept saying over and over, ‘scream, bitch, scream.’ But really,” she shrugged, splaying a hand in the air, “what was there to scream about? You were dead, and they only did what a hundred other guys have done.”
Cameron cried in that darkened corner her room. She steeled herself against the sound. “I even felt like that with you sometimes. Alone. Voided. I never told you. I was ashamed. Because I loved you. I really did. But you were so right when you said I don’t know how to make love. I never have. Sex is about power and control and getting what you want. It isn’t about making love. There’s always someone on top and the other person’s on the bottom. That’s the irrevocable lesson I learned that night, Cameron. I’d really known it all along, but they beat it into me so I’d never forget.”