I want to caress his face, but the angles of his bone structure suddenly appear too sharp, too untouchable. So I place my palm on the warm skin of his forearm, where it rests alongside my thigh. “I’ll tell you. I promise. But what will happen to my education and Leo—?”
“Leopold is neither here nor there. This isn’t a student-teacher conference.” He shifts, grips the hem of my skirt, and shoves it up my thighs until it sits just below my panties.
I keep my knees together, but I don’t fight him.
“This is you and me, Ivory.” His fingers slide beneath the gathered fabric, tracing the hidden bend between my legs and hips. “We’re just a man and a woman, sharing an intimate moment of honesty.”
I like the sound of that almost as much as the soothing touch of his fingers. A silent caesura stretches between us, during which time isn’t counted or weighed. Eventually, his caresses calm me enough to speak.
“Freshman year, I was desperate for friends, desperate to fit in, and offered to help some of the kids with their homework.” Sweat slicks my hands, and I clasp them over the crease of my clenched bare thighs. “Only the boys took me up on the help. Prescott and his friends. At some point in that first year, my tutoring turned into me doing their homework for them.”
“And what I saw in the car?”
“They touched and kissed and took things I didn’t want to give.”
Emeric rises, his hands raking through his hair as a violent symphony clashes and vibrates in his eyes.
“They took things…” He drops his arms and flexes his fists at his sides. “Explain that.”
I tell him how I threatened to stop helping them, how they offered to pay me if I continued, and how badly I needed the income to keep my house. By the time I get to the part about them taking more than the homework, Emeric is pacing a furious track through the room.
If he’s going to burn off steam, he has the space to do it. I mean, it’s the biggest bedroom I’ve ever seen, with nothing on the floor to trip him up. For a guy, he’s surprisingly tidy.
And for a girl who’s in a cage with a pacing lion, I feel strangely detached. Liberated even.
Finally voicing these things is freeing, and he absorbs every word like he’s living it, feeling it. Yes, he’s angry, but he hasn’t once directed it at me. He cares enough to be angry for me.
He stops before me, his face as red as his swollen knuckles. “You told them no?”
Directing my eyes to his Doc Martens, I nod. “For a while.”
“Define a while.”
“The first couple of years.”
“They raped you. For years.” His scathing voice rolls into bellow. “Look at me!”
My gaze jumps to his. The horror etching his face makes my heart pound so hard it hurts.
How do I explain these embarrassing things when I’m not even sure about any of it? “I don’t know.”
“There’s no I-don’t-know’s about it, Ivory.” He grips the back of his neck with both hands and paces in a tight circle. “You were either willing or you weren’t. Which is it?”
“Sometimes, I feel trapped by circumstance. Sometimes, I’m held down. Other times, I just let it happen.”
“You just let it happen,” he echoes with venom. “Bullshit!”
The roar of his shout hitches my shoulders. He spins and slams his fist into the wall, wrenching a gasp from my throat.
I leap from the bed, shoving my skirt down as I cautiously approach his back. “Emeric.”
He punches another hole, and another, his arms flexing and contracting with the impact as dust and sheet rock explode around him.
“Emeric, stop!”
Breathing heavily, he braces a forearm on the wall, rests his brow on his arm, and angles his head to look at me. “Which one of those fuckers took your virginity?”
“No one at Le Moyne.” I step closer, within arm’s reach. “I was already…” Used. Ruined.
He reaches out and drags me against him, pinning me between his heaving chest and the wall.
Blood and dust cover the knuckles of the hand he lifts to gently caress my cheek. “There’s more you haven’t told me.”
More men who take. More truth to share. I’ll tell him everything, because he hasn’t pushed me away, hasn’t once looked at me with repulsion.
He drops his forehead to mine, fingers resting against my cheek, and says quietly, “I want to whip you for being so damn uninformed about rape.”
But I’m learning the differences, as well as who to trust and when to ask for help. I always thought the safest place to go was in my head, that no one could hurt me there. But standing between a busted wall and the fuming man who destroyed it, I’ve never felt safer.
I hold his hand against my face and meet his passionate gaze. “I trust you.”
All my disgusting secrets have finally caught up with me. But for the first time in my life, I don’t have to face them alone.
My self-control is a goddamn joke, and the unflappable part of my brain is lost beneath chilling images of Ivory cornered, hurt, and alone. My hands shake as I teeter on the verge of manic brutality, consumed with the kind of throbbing headache that can only be comforted by bloodshed.