“Thank you.”
The silence stretches. I think Mattie might be waiting for me to speak. He’s trying so hard to take his cues from me, to make sure I’m comfortable and feel safe and—God, I don’t think anyone’s ever treated me with so much patience. No one has ever had to. I’m an adult. I’m my own responsibility to exist without being loved and accepted by other people. That’s how I’ve gotten by all these years. But it feels good, I think, to know that I can still be loved anyway. It feels good, and it also scares me. I’m waiting for the moment Mattie changes his mind.
“I want to make a statement,” I tell him. “A recording. Post it onto socials.”
His eyes shine with—pride, maybe? Some fear, I think, for me. “Do you want to talk to the team about it first?”
It’s shitty we have to keep up the bullshit of our fake relationship. Though I’m starting to wonder if it’s actually that fake at this point. “No. I’ll say what happened. They’ll deal.”
Mattie grabs his phone. I sit on the sofa. He tells me when he hits record. I’m not inside of myself when I start to talk. I hear my voice, distantly, as if it belongs to someone else as I describe what happened.
“I made a huge mistake when I decided to have sex with Briggs. I was hurting Mattie. I shouldn’t have. Briggs and I came over to my place. I changed my mind.” I start to freeze again as I get closer to having to say the actual words. Mattie’s watching for a moment in my silence before he moves closer to me, holding up the camera still, but sitting next to me in the frame, holding my hand. His comfort brings me back into my body enough to speak again.
I can’t say the word, the r-word, the one that still makes me feel sick. “When I changed my mind, he assaulted me. I acted in self-defense. I know that a lot of you won’t believe me,” I say. “But, well, that’s the truth.”
Mattie ends the video. His hand is still in mine. “That was brave. You shouldn’t have had to do this in the first place, but I admire you.”
When he puts up the video on social, I was right: there’s instant backlash, an onslaught of people calling me a liar, saying it’s convenient that I would say this now after Briggs called me out. Mattie’s dragged into this, too. People accuse Mattie of being the doting boyfriend too na?ve to see how harmful I am. Refusing to acknowledge that I cheated on him. Blink twice if you need help Mattie a comment reads. The way they’re treating me is all right. It’s what I expected. But Matt? I don’t think I can take it, people treating him like shit because of me.
“I wish there were a way to prove it,” Mattie says.
There is a way, I realize. The security camera is still installed. It’s supposed to show the living room, the couch. I hadn’t thought of it. I haven’t been able to do much thinking at all. I nudge Matt and point up, at the corner. The camera is so small that it isn’t surprising he didn’t notice it.
He doesn’t get angry for not mentioning the cam before now. There’s some hesitant hope on his face. “How do you get access to the footage?”
“It’s downloadable.”
We end up on my laptop, checking out the files on the security company’s website. There’s a lot of rewinding. It’s painful to see me over the past two days, frozen—Matt moving backward in triple speed, cleaning and going back and forth with trays of meals. He’s been taking care of me more than I’ve realized. I squeeze his hand, and he looks at me, surprised, before he threads his fingers through mine. He goes back to concentrating on the recording.
And then the door opens, me on the couch—Briggs walking backward, toward me. The fight. Him pulling off my jeans.
Matt presses pause. He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Are you okay?” he asks me, voice low. Pissed. He’s actually pissed off, I realize, watching this.
“I will be,” I tell him.
“You could press charges with this.”
“Yeah. I know.”
But I already feel exhausted at the thought. Exhausted, thinking about the many months and maybe even years I’ll be forced to confront this over and over again, speaking about it publicly when I can barely talk to Matt about it without freezing, when I can’t even think about it without feeling like I’ve left my body. My words would feel slow and heavy as I think not only about Briggs, but about the different men who have assaulted me throughout my life. My father, who knew what was happening, but just didn’t care—who let me be abused, if it meant money for his films. I can’t press charges. I can’t deal with the media frenzy this would become. Dealing with strangers’ opinions on what happened. Saying that I’m lying for attention, or that I deserved to be raped. That I probably wanted it, because I’m such a slut. I wouldn’t survive that.
I don’t know how to explain any of this to Mattie. I land on saying, “I don’t want to.”
It’s a testament to him that he only bites his lip. He doesn’t ask why, and he doesn’t argue. “Okay. It’s your choice.”
“But I do want to send a copy to Briggs. Show him I’ve got proof. I could put this out to the entire world. I’ll tell him to say what really happened. Not that I was—” I swallow. “But that he attacked me first, and I fought back.”
“Do you think he’ll do it?”
“If not, I’ll tell him I’m going to post the recording.”
I don’t think that I’d really be able to do it, and I don’t think Matt believes me, either, but he nods. I text Briggs a copy of the footage, cut and edited for the thirty-second fight. I tell him what I expect. I want the post up within the hour. He doesn’t respond. Mattie and I wait together, not speaking much. Lost in our own thoughts, him running a hand through my hair.
I’ve figured out that there are cycles. Repeating patterns that began when I was seven years old, patterns I haven’t been able to escape. I’ve been through this cycle before. These memories will become old nightmares, stored away in my body, something I’ll push deep down. After a while, life will feel like it has returned to normal. My normal, anyway. The normal where I never really felt safe. Waiting for the next attack.
“Have you ever had a therapist?” Mattie asks.
I snort. “My therapist would need a therapist just to deal with me.”
“It might help, you know?” he says. “I don’t want to pressure you into anything, but—”
“Then why bring it up?”
His hand pauses, before he continues. “You don’t have to see one if you don’t want to.”
A few more seconds of silence. “Sorry for snapping.”
“It’s okay.”