What He Never Knew (What He Doesn't Know, #3)(2)

But I shook that thought away, because it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway.

I did what was right.

I took all the proper steps.

I didn’t shower and I went to the music director and I told her my story.

I showed her the bruises and relived every torturous moment while she pressed her lips together with a sympathetic bend in her brows, nodding as I replayed the assault.

And then, she grabbed my hand, squeezed it, and told me it was best to keep this between us.

This.

As if this was referring to something like a little white lie I was keeping from my roommate, or to something I’d walked in and witnessed her doing wrong. Let’s just keep this between us, Dr. Chores had said. These are strong allegations, and you will have a lot of rough years ahead if you follow through with them. Go home tonight and think about what you’re saying, and more importantly, about who you’re saying it about.”

Because my wolf wasn’t a wolf in the eyes of Bramlock University.

In their eyes, he was a god.

He was a piano legend, a blessing to our music program. Thank God he’d wanted to retire in Florida, they’d say, since that was where our university was. And how could it possibly be that such an accomplished man with so much respect could ever do something as horrendous as rape his student?

As the water started to run cold, I felt the soreness from my wolf between my legs. That’s something else they don’t tell you about in those stupid rape pamphlets. No one tells you that, when you’re a virgin, rape doesn’t just feel like an invasion. It feels like you’re being ripped from the inside out, like your assaulter is splitting you in half. And I guess, in a way, he had. Half of who I used to be was still there, somewhere, but the other half?

I didn’t even know who she’d become.

My eyes watered, the dream I’d have of giving myself to a man I loved one day shattered like a fragile tea cup thrown carelessly against a cement wall. I curled in on myself, as if I could shelter myself now, as if I could protect what damaged goods still remained.

As if anyone would want them, even if I could.

That soreness between my legs was enough to drive me insane, that constant reminder of who had been there. I didn’t want to look, didn’t want to touch, didn’t want any more proof of what had happened. Instead, I deftly reached out a hand to shut off the spout. I pressed my back against the cold tile wall and slid down until I sat again, my knees against my chest, my hands in my wet, wild, and curly hair.

I didn’t know what I expected.

All the words they say make it sound so easy. You get assaulted? You tell someone — and everything will be okay. But if there was one thing my father taught me before he died it was that actions speak louder than words. And the actions when it came to rape cases were loud and clear.

The victim was rarely believed. When she was, she rarely won in court. When she did, the attacker rarely got a sentence. When he did, he rarely served it all.

The truth was there was no winning — not when you’d been raped. Not when the first man to ever touch you did so without asking permission, without kissing you first, without telling you he loved you.

On that cold, wet, tile floor of my dorm room shower, I realized my home had been full of monsters all along. I’d just never seen them before. And now that I had, there was no going back.

I was the girl who cried wolf.

But I vowed to myself that I would not be the girl who let the wolf win.





Reese



My boots crunched the old, dirty snow with every step I took down Charlie’s parents’ driveway toward my car. My hands were shoved in my pockets, eyes on my feet, but my head was still inside that house.

My heart was still inside that house.

I’d long surrendered to the fact that I was a masochist. What other man in his right mind would keep contact with a woman and her family after she blatantly rejected him? Charlie had been my best friend’s little sister when I was younger, but she’d always been something more. We both knew it. And when life had brought me back here — back to Pittsburgh and back to her — I thought we’d finally have our chance.

It didn’t matter to me that she was married, not when I saw how miserable she was. But I was the stupid, selfish, cocky son-of-a-bitch who went after a married woman thinking there was no way she couldn’t choose me.

It turned out, her husband wasn’t going to let her go without a fight.

And fight we did, Cameron and I. For months, we fought for that woman’s love, for her heart, and in the end, he won.

Right then and there, I should have let go.

I should have moved to a different city, or a different state altogether. I should have blocked them out of every facet of my life — starting with Charlie. But instead, I watched her from a distance at the school we both worked at, wishing she was mine, wishing there was someway to change her mind.

I would never act on it, of course, and I’d made that vow to both myself and to her. I loved her, and because I loved her, I respected her decision. If Cameron was who she wanted, if he was who made her happy, then that was all that mattered to me.

At least, it was… until I noticed Charlie’s stomach rounding, growing, and heard those two words from her lips.

I’m pregnant.

My stomach sank at the memory, and it slid all the way down to the icy driveway when I added in the news I’d received today. Because as hard as the hit was when I found out she was pregnant, it never could have measured up to what I would feel when she told me the child wasn’t mine.