Total pages in book: 140
Estimated words: 129207 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 646(@200wpm)___ 517(@250wpm)___ 431(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 129207 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 646(@200wpm)___ 517(@250wpm)___ 431(@300wpm)
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” he tells me. “You did nothing wrong.”
“I should have told you a long time ago.”
“It’s your story, Rae. Your body. You didn’t have to tell me anything you weren’t ready to share.”
I nod. “I’m ready to talk about it.”
“Are you sure?”
“No. But I want to. I want you to know who I am now and why I fought so hard to push you away. You were hurting too. You deserve to know.”
He drops his face into the curve of my neck and gently brushes his lips across my skin, preparing for the worst. His hand stops rubbing my back, and instead, curls right around me, holding me to his chest. “Okay, Rae. Start from the beginning.”
I swallow over the lump in my chest and find his other hand, lacing it through mine and bridging it between us, needing it like a security blanket. “It started around the time of your first release.”
“ ‘Hypothetically Yours,’ ” he confirms.
I nod and go on. “It was after Mom died and Dad was drunk all the time. He’d started taking notice of me. It was a lingering glance here and there, enough to make me uncomfortable but not enough to have thought anything more of it. Until the comments started. It was around the time I wanted to take our relationship a little more seriously, and so I started dressing a little more provocatively, hoping you’d notice. Shorter skirts, tighter tops, stuff like that, and he noticed, and more than that, he assumed I was doing it for him. That I was strutting around the house trying to tease him, begging him for something he couldn’t give me.”
Ezra takes a shaky breath, his hold tightening around me, and I try to ignore it, knowing if I linger on his brokenness, I won’t be able to continue. “He would call me a whore a lot. That was his favorite. Dirty little whore. It was humiliating, but it would always happen in private. In the kitchen, or when he passed me on the stairs. It was always the same, but that’s as far as it went. He never did anything around you guys, never even looked at me, but I could sense he wanted to.”
A shiver sails down my spine, but I keep going, knowing Ezra’s got me, and I’ll never have to face that bastard ever again. “The first time he touched me, I was sixteen. I’d gotten home from school and was rummaging through the fridge when he came up behind me and put his hand up my skirt. From that day, I started wearing pants. I threw out every skirt or dress I had.”
“We left when you were sixteen.”
I nod as my whole body shakes. “I knew it was going to happen. It wasn’t a matter of if, it was when. I knew it that day in the diner when you told me that you were leaving, and I wouldn’t be coming. I knew it when you got on the plane, and I knew it after I walked home and slept in the garden, too afraid to go inside.”
“Rae—”
I shake my head, needing to get it out. “It was that night. He was up waiting for me. You hadn’t even been gone a day,” I tell him, tears rolling down my cheeks and soaking into his shirt. “I stayed outside as long as I could, and assuming he’d gone to bed, I crept in. I was dirty from spending hours in Mom’s old garden bed, and I was already so broken after you left, I needed my bed. So I unlocked the front door, but I didn’t even make it to the stairs before he was on me. He chased me up the stairs, laughing about how you and Axel weren’t there to protect me anymore. He caught my ankle and pulled me down. I shattered my nose against the step, and as he pinned me down and crushed my head against the carpet, he stole my innocence and brutally ripped through my virginity. He took everything I’d always wanted to give you.”
Ezra stays silent, but I know he’s feeling it all. It’s in his shallow breaths, in the way he keeps turning his face into the curve of my neck, in the way his fingers unknowingly bite into my skin.
“That night was excruciating. Afterward, I locked myself in my room while blood gushed from my broken nose. I couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t move, could barely breathe, and I sat in the bottom of my closet and wept until morning.”
I swallow over the lump in my throat. “I refused to shower there and did what I could to wash the blood off my face and chest and took a change of clothes to school. I showered in the locker room before anyone noticed, and before school had even started, I was sent to the nurse, who called an ambulance. I begged her not to, and when my father was called to pick me up, he was furious, and that night, I was punished even worse for raising suspicions.”