returned to school. I felt as if I’d hear the bell ring at any moment, the sounds of the students’ laughter echoing through the halls as they spilled from their classrooms, slamming lockers and shouting over one another.
I navigated my way down one dark hall and then another. Most of my soreness was now replaced with a constant state of ‘uncomfortable’ that I felt in each and every step.
The towering locker system looked very much like rows of silent soldiers lining every open section of wall from the floor to the ceiling. When I reached the closet-turned-darkroom that Mr. Johnson had built for his photography class, I used the knife from my boot to flip the flimsy latch.
When I was sure the room was light-tight, I turned on the safe light and went to work pulling the negatives from my camera and filling the trays with processing chemicals. It took longer than I thought, but when I was done, twelve black-and-white photos hung on clothespins on the drying line across the room, each one a different angle of the same subject.
Me.
Looking at them made me feel as if not even a second had passed, let alone a few weeks. I was right there again. I closed my eyes to fight off the intruding memories, but they wouldn’t relent.
Again, I felt every blow, every bit of force he used when he pushed himself into me. I felt a sudden panic rise in my chest that radiated down my body to my toes.
I was afraid to leave the apartment in those first couple of weeks, not just because Owen was out there somewhere, but because I didn’t want anyone to see me. I’d called Reggie and told him I was violently ill and didn’t want to get the rest of the guys sick so he slipped invoices and receipts under the door of the apartment for me to organize at home until the bruising on my face faded.
When I did make it back to work, I’d heard that all the Fletchers were spending the rest of the summer at their cabin up in Jackson Hole.
Owen would be gone until Jake came back.
I could breathe for the first time in weeks.
The smell of the chemicals in the small space, mixed with the heat of the non air-conditioned room, must have been too much for my fragile state of being. I grabbed an empty mop bucket from the corner and threw up the contents of my stomach until nothing was left, and I was just dry heaving.
I’d come to develop the pictures knowing in advance how I would feel. I knew what my reaction would be. I didn’t want to remember what happened. I didn’t want to acknowledge it at all. But, this wasn’t for me. This was for him. I would be strong for him. I had to show him everything. He needed to know.
I barely had the strength to hold my camera when I took them. My wrists had shaken under its seemingly enormous weight. That shake could almost be seen within the photos themselves, causing fuzz around the edges instead of solid lines.
I saw so much more in them than I’d expected to.
In the first, I was staring straight ahead, as if I was looking at someone else’s reflection. I held the camera down by my side so I could capture all of my naked body. Every bruise, every bit of dried blood, every swell and scratch was picked up by the camera’s lens and magnified in the truthful light and shadow of the black and white image. The next was similar. In that one, my body was turned as if I looked over my own shoulder at the spreading bloodstains under the skin that covered my ribs. The next was similar, just slightly different.
And the next one.
And the next one.
And the next one.
Each was a haunted, battered version of me, taken from a different angle.
In the very last one, I was on the floor with my legs spread out in front of me. My knees were pushed open as wide I could make them go. I was wincing from the pain of the position, but the camera I’d raised above my head in both hands had captured my determination to take the photo.
This photo wasn’t taken to document what Owen had done. This one I had taken for me. Fresh wounds mixed with old scars. A portrait of my life in pain. Proof that I had been beaten, but I wasn’t broken.
They couldn’t fucking break me.
My photos reminded me of my favorite painting by an unknown artist. It depicted a woman lying naked with a huge red scar running down the length of her body. Her mouth was open, like she was screaming. Just like her, my photos represented my abusers ill-fated attempt to cut me open and gut out my secrets. She’d been cut but not opened.
Just like me.
I looked at the line hung with square images of my battered body, my blackened eyes and my swollen mouth spread in a wince, and realized: all of this was a consequence.
I was a consequence.
These photos were just one side of my story. There was a cause behind the consequence. I imagined the moment one day when there would be similar photographs of that cause, of the man who made this misery for me.
That became my hope.
I took a photo folder from the cubby behind the safelight and placed my dry pictures inside. I spent extra time cleaning the dark room and putting away the chemicals so there wouldn’t any trace of my presence left behind.
As I walked away from the school grounds, an idea came to me. Maybe, the woman in the scar painting wasn’t screaming in pain. Maybe, she was laughing.
Maybe, she, too, was plotting her revenge.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I STOOD ON THE VERY TOP of the Matlacha Pass on a day with no clouds. The only visible reminder of the nightmare from five weeks earlier when my life changed forever once again was a small, bright red scar on my lower lip. I found myself wanting to spend more time in the sun than I had in the past. I relished the feel of a sunburn now. It was just enough discomfort to remind me that I was still alive and to kill the numbness that threatened to take over every day that Jake was away.
I let myself sit in the blazing heat, my eyes closed and my face turned upward to the sky. I watched the colors move around and dance behind my eyelids while I imagined what it would be like when he returned.
I’d spent the last few weeks planning my tattoo sleeve and pinning cities on the map on Jake’s laptop of where I wanted him to take me. The day before, I’d even bought a sundress. It was green and strapless and stopped mid-thigh. I didn’t have the nerve to wear it in public. In addition to my scars, the bruises on my inner thighs hadn’t quite healed all the way. Wearing the dress had become my goal.
Maybe, I would wear it on the day Coral Pines disappeared in the rearview mirror of Jake’s bike.
I watched a tourist boy try to pull up a massive grouper that he wasn’t prepared for or even skilled enough to catch. The boy was a teenager and a very small one at that. I guessed he couldn’t have been more than fourteen. After more than twenty minutes of battling his catch, he finally reeled in the enormous fish just enough to break the surface of the water, exposing the full figure of what looked to be a forty pound catch. He didn’t have time to celebrate. The second the creature’s tail lifted off the top of the water, the tip of the boy’s rod broke from his pole, and his line snapped, sending him backwards on his ass to the sidewalk and the grouper back home to the river floor with a free meal of Spanish mackerel in its belly.
I imagined I was that boy. I had something so massive and wonderful just within reach. I was starting to believe my line was ready to snap just like his did.
I missed Jake.
It had been weeks since he left. I was starting to lose faith that he would come back to me. I tried to be strong, to believe in him in the same way he seemed to believe in me. I knew how he felt about Owen, even before he’d done what he had to me. I knew how strongly he’d react when he heard what had happened, but I wasn’t sure how he’d feel about me once he knew. As difficult as it was for me, I had to believe we could make it through. After all, he was the one who’d taught me to trust him with my pain. I just hoped that he would trust me with his.
I didn’t know how I would find the words, so I decided I’d speak through my pictures instead.
The moment the afternoon storm clouds chose to block out the sun before delivering their usual torrent, I felt him. Even before I saw him.
I was still on my bench but had just shifted my focus from the tourists to the weather when the awareness of him washed over me. My skin prickled with anticipation, and my heart fluttered in ways I wasn’t used to at all. I smoothed my hair with my hands as I stood and walked off the bridge, hoping that when I got back to the apartment, he would be there, and that the feeling wasn’t just some misguided intuition.
I had only taken a single step when I saw him. He stood at the bottom of the bridge in all his black leather glory.
Jake.
I tried to walk and not run toward him, but as I got closer, I couldn’t help picking up my pace. By the time I was halfway to where he was, I’d broken into a full-on sprint. I flung myself into his arms and wrapped my legs around his waist. His smell was intoxicating—leather and sweat and pure testosterone. I couldn’t help running my hands through his hair and taking a deep breath so I could take him all in.
I molested him this way for a while before I realized how stiff he was. His arms hadn’t come around me. His lips never touched my face. When I finally pulled back, I realized his gaze was as hard as stone and focused sternly on his feet.
I didn’t know what he would be like after he finished a kill. Honestly, I had been through so much of my own shit that I hadn’t spent any time thinking about it, either. Now, I realized that he’d been through something incredibly dark while he was gone. Maybe, he just needed to ease back into the reality of his other life.
I touched his chin with my fingers and raised his face. His beautiful blue eyes met mine, but they were cold and distant. I softly ran my lips over his, giving him time to react to my nearness. But when he stayed stiff and still even after all that, I knew there was something more happening.
“Jake?”
He took a step back and my feet met the ground.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. Now, I was confused. What could have happened to make him this cold to me when he’d been so hot and affectionate before he left?
He shuffled his feet and pinched the bridge of his nose before he spoke. His words were horrifying. “I’m just going to ask you this once, Abby.” His voice sounded shaky and gravely, and his nickname for me went noticeably unused.
I nodded. I would answer whatever he needed. Of course, I would. “Okay.”
“Did you, or did you not, fuck Owen Fletcher while I was gone?”
My stomach turned sick, my arms so heavy I wasn’t sure my frame would support them. They hung limply by side as I tried to form a coherent thought.
“What?” It was all I could manage.
“I asked you if you fucked Owen Fletcher.” He said it through gritted teeth, with his fists clenched at his side, his steel face blushing slightly. I could see his jaw clench and his pulse beating quickly within his temple.
“I know what you asked me.” I tried to sound angry, but it didn’t work. My own voice sounded foreign to me. I heard a higher-pitched, more terrified version of myself. “I want to know why you would even think to ask me that.”
“Because a reliable source said that he saw you go under the fucking bridge with Owen right after I left, and when he went to find Owen, that prick had your fucking underwear in his pocket and was bragging about how you finally gave it up to him.”
As soon as he said it, I lost all hope for what could have been. The accusing look in his eye. The cold, hard stare burning a hole right through me. The way I felt like a slut under his gaze, even though I hadn’t done a single thing to deserve such a look. What I believed Jake and I had didn’t really exist after all. His look told me that. He’d heard a fucking rumor from some ignorant asshole friend of Owen’s—like the rumors I hear every day—and he assumed it was true. He believed I was capable of betraying him so easily. I felt my walls going up. I was building it, brick by fucking brick. The old Abby was being put back into place. Part of me was heartbroken about it, but part of me couldn’t help but feel relieved. Deep inside, no matter how much faith I let myself have in Jake, somehow I’d known this moment would come eventually.
I just didn’t think it would’ve come so soon.
“So that’s what you really think of me?” I said in almost a whisper, sinking down to the curb of the sidewalk.
Pelicans dove behind us for live bait in the fisherman's buckets. Children laughed hysterically when they pulled up pin fish on their lines. People buzzed by on scooters, the inexperienced drivers spinning past us without so much as a glance in our direction. It was like we weren’t even there, like none of it was really happening. All around us, life was still going on. But inside, it felt as though my heart had just stopped. It stood as still as Jake did.
“Just answer the fucking question.” His voice was angry, but there was something pleading about it, too. He wanted the truth but only on his terms. He wanted me to tell him that I hadn’t done anything and that he had nothing to worry about. He wanted me to tell him it would all be okay.
But, beneath that, he doubted me. He doubted us. He questioned it even though I had freely given him all of me.
Every broken part of me was his.
Somehow he thought that after what we’d had together the night he left, I could run to the nearest bed —Owen Fletcher’s bed — and dive right in.
It dawned on me then why this was so significant. Why I couldn’t just tell him it hadn’t happened and move on.
I had been questioned by people my entire life.
Nobody had ever believed my word as the truth. No matter what happened to me—even the most unthinkable things. When I’d told anyone about them, nobody had ever trusted that what I was saying wasn’t a lie.
I’d thought Jake was different than everyone else. I thought what we had was actual trust.
I was wrong.
The clouds released the first of the afternoon rain, soft at first then harder, until sheets poured between us. Tourists screeched and scattered for shelter. Jake and I just stood there and stared at one another, the water dripping off of us as if it wasn’t happening, either.
“Abby, just tell me!” He was frustrated now. His forehead was furrowed, and his eyes looked hurt and concerned, but his voice sounded like pure vinegar.
“I would never do that to you.”
“Wouldn’t you?” I couldn’t believe he would ask me that, after everything I’d shared with him.
The rain concealed my tears. I looked down at my boots to compose myself.
“You can believe whatever you want,” I told him.
“I want to believe the truth,” Jake said.
But, it was the truth. Whether he believed it or not.
“No, you don’t. You heard a rumor, and you immediately believed that I fucked Owen.” I shook my head. “You doubt me. I let my walls down with you. I showed you how much you meant to me. I told you things I’ve never told anyone else.” My voice cracked. “I showed you my scars.”
He would be the last person to see them.
“Doesn’t matter, though. A few minutes after you ride back into town, you accuse me of screwing someone else. You don’t know me like I thought you did. You’re not who I thought you were.” I didn’t wait for him to answer. I just started walking past him, toward the apartment.
“Bee.” He grabbed my elbow. I looked up at him so I could see his beautiful sapphire blue eyes for what I imagined was going to be one last time. His lips were tight and his grip on my arm was even tighter.
I shook him off and kept on walking.
I was glad for the rain now, to cover my tears so Jake couldn’t see them. He didn’t deserve my tears. He didn’t deserve my pain, or the faith that I’d placed in him.
I heard his boots on the gravel trailing behind me.
“Bee!” he yelled.
Each time he said it, it felt like he was stabbing me one more time, letting me bleed out and suffer a slow, agonizing death. When I couldn't take anymore, when I needed the torture to be over, I stopped walking and turned to face him. I steadied my gaze and looked him right in the eye.
In that moment, it wasn’t red that I saw. It was blue. Radiant blue, like the color of his eyes. I don’t remember the look on his face. I just remember the beautiful color blue clouding my vision.
Before I could say anything, he jumped in. “You were my only reason to come back here.”
“Well, ain’t nothing holding you here now.”
I turned and started to run. I had no destination in mind. I just needed to get away from the hurt. But, it traveled with me.