Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
“I warned you,” he growls, lifting a beer bottle and walking toward me. “Now, you’re going to do more than plead, you’re going to scream.”
I don’t realize I’m shoving Bohdi.
I don’t realize I’m screaming.
Not until his body is off mine and I’m scrambling off the couch and running toward the bathroom, tears rolling down my cheeks, hands shaking.
I slam and lock the door before falling to the ground.
I sob, angrily, full of so much hurt and pain.
I’m never going to be able to enjoy this.
I’m never going to feel okay.
I’m broken.
I’m so incredibly broken.
I clutch my lower stomach as the memories keep tormenting my brain, swimming around over and over, refusing to leave.
God, I wish someone would make them leave.
“Merleigh.”
Bohdi’s voice trails through the door as he knocks quietly.
I don’t answer, I just sob.
“I’m here,” he says, and I hear shuffling and a thump as he sits down on the outside of the door. “I’m not leaving. I won’t leave you.”
Those words bring me a little relief and also a wave of sobs that wrack my body.
Bohdi sits on the other side of that door, silently, until the sobs subside. I know he’s there, I just know he’s still there. Finally, when I calm down enough to lift myself off the floor and press my back to the door, I speak.
The words come out, they just come out.
I’m so tired of keeping them inside.
“I can’t have children,” I say, my voice scratchy.
Bohdi shifts on the other side of the door, and I know he’s still there.
Still with me.
Always with me.
“I got raped with ... a bottle. The man was a monster, a cruel and sadistic monster. The more I begged him to stop, the more he hurt me ...”
My voice hitches.
“The bottle broke ... He didn’t stop. He kept going, even through my agonized screams. It was the huge amounts of blood that eventually made him stop. He disappeared out of there and I was left to bleed to death. Only, I didn’t. Cova found me and she called an ambulance. I was taken to the hospital, under the strict eye of Bryant. He made sure I told them I was raped by a stranger. They believed him. I was so messed up I had to go right into surgery, and because of the damage, they sterilized me.”
Bohdi makes a sound on the other side of the door, a sound that breaks my heart.
“He took so much from me, but my ability to have children, to have a family, to bring something into this world after all the pain ... that is gone. It’s gone. I’ll never have a family ...”
I take a staggering breath, clutching my chest.
“When you touched me, those memories came flooding back. All of the horror I experienced, it was right there again. I’m broken, Bohdi. I’ve never been touched by a man with a kind hand, and I’m terrified I’m always going to hate it, always going to wish it away. I’m ... just so broken.”
“Open the door, Merleigh.”
Bohdi’s voice is strained, but I hear him stand on the other side. I reach up and open the door, shifting just enough so that he can get in.
He steps around, looking down at me on the floor, with my tear-streaked face and my broken soul, and he leans down and lifts me into his arms. He carries me to my bedroom, and when we’re there, he gently places me on one side of the bed. My head hits the pillow, and I feel a moment of comfort. He sits next to me, looking down, our bodies so close.
He moves a strand of tear-soaked hair from my eyes.
“You’ll become a mother. He might have taken your ability to have your own children, but you’ll be a mother, Merleigh. You’ll be a mother to a child who has nothing, who is born into this world without a love that you have so much of. That’s how you’ll be. That’s who you’ll be. You’ll be the woman who fills that baby with so much love it’ll never remember a day it lived without it.”
Oh, god.
Tears burst forth again.
“And you’re not broken. You have lived through things nobody in this world should ever have to fuckin’ live through. But you’re not broken. You just need time. You just need understand. I’m goin’ to give that to you, because I’d never hurt you, and I’d never take something you didn’t want. Not fuckin’ ever.”
The tears get heavier and I croak. “Will you stay with me, Bohdi?”
He doesn’t answer, he simply stands, shrugs his jacket off, kicks his boots off, and climbs into to bed beside me.
Then he carefully pulls me into his arms.
And his fingers stroke over my skin in the gentlest way.
And he shows me that he’s going to teach me how it feels to be touched with love.