Eighteen
THAT NIGHT, WINDOWS open, I lay in bed watching the pom-pom curtains flutter in the breeze, with my heart gusting around inside my body like a kite.
The rookie. I’d kissed the rookie. Very well. In a coat closet.
I might have expected some mixed feelings on kissing, given how long and how hard I’d avoided it.
But I had none.
I felt thrilled. I felt enchanted.
Nobody could have been more surprised than me.
So this was what it was like. This was how I could feel.
I’d thought for so long that I’d lost all capacity to feel all these good things.
Do I have to describe what Heath Thompson did to me on the night I turned sixteen? Do I have to lay out all those details?
Let’s just agree that it was bad—very bad. So bad that “bad” isn’t even a bad enough word. So bad that it left a black vortex at the center of my heart that I’d spent every day since trying not to look at, or think about, or get too close to for fear I’d fall in and disappear. So bad that I closed off my heart entirely—I never went on another date, or kissed anyone, or even had a romantic thought for ten solid years.
Until now.
Until the rookie.
Who had given me something undeniably good.
I would have told you I was fine before. I was fine. I was functioning, I was strong. I paid taxes and changed the oil in my car and bought organic eggs at the farmers’ market. I was a self-defense instructor, for Pete’s sake. Some people get derailed by trauma. Some people are crushed by it and never recover. I get it. I understand. But I was lucky. It took so many years I could barely tell it was happening, but I was able to put my life back together. I was able to finish high school, go to college, and make a living helping people.
I’d wanted to die for so many years.
But I didn’t die. I survived.
More than that, I thrived.
Before the awards ceremony, I would have told you I was completely recovered.
Until Heath Thompson showed up on that stage and dared to touch me—and then we both found out exactly how strong I’d become.
Maybe too strong for my own good.
It had felt like self-sabotage in the aftermath. I had been so worried, as I drove across the country alone, that I was at the beginning of the end. And maybe it was the end of something. But it was a beginning, too. One with the potential to make things better—or possibly so much worse.
But so far so good. I had kissed Owen—in a no-holds-barred, full-body kind of way, and it had been good.
All violence is bad, of course, but what Heath Thompson had done to me was an attack on love itself. It took one of the best parts of being human and ruined it.
I’d gladly given up all hope of love for a guarantee of never having to relive even a part of that memory again.
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