“I made sure it couldn’t happen again,” I said bitterly. “And no. Not really. Talking about it—” I swallowed. “I never wanted to.”
“Does Rex know?” Indy demanded.
“Not until recently.”
Stone frowned. “Rex knows everything.”
“He knew I’d been attacked. But he never pushed me to talk about it.”
“Why not?” Giulia growled, sitting up straighter, her affront on my behalf touching.
I plucked at my lower lip. “Rex is…” How did I explain this? “Rex treats me like an equal. He always has. He expects me to come to him with things, and while he’ll amend his behavior, he won’t push me.”
“Do you want to be pushed?”
“No, Tiffany, I don’t.” The answer was resolute. “He knows me too well,” I said sheepishly.
“How does he amend his behavior?”
My cheeks turned pink before they blanched. “I never do oral.” I reached up and rubbed my nape, nerves hitting me when I thought about the conversation with Rex where we’d discussed this. “Grizzly, he… he made me. Dog, too. I can’t handle that.” Not yet.
“You have sex?”
“Only with Rex,” I admitted. “And only on my terms.”
Tiffany nodded. “You like to be in control?”
“Not like a Domme or anything.” I shot her a sheepish glance. “I don’t dress up like Catwoman.”
“Shame, you have the ass for it,” Giulia retorted.
I had no idea why that broke my tension but it did. I saw she was grinning so I grinned back at her.
“Who is this Catwoman?”
Lily answered Amara, “A character from Batman.”
“Why is this funny?” Amara asked.
“I’ll explain it later,” Lily promised.
“Tak.”
“Do you wish Rex punished them on your behalf?” Tiffany prompted me.
“No!” I bit off, and it was the first time my voice had sharpened, gotten louder, and it made a couple of them jump. “If he knew, he’d have killed them, and if he had killed them, he’d be in jail. I couldn’t stand that. I need him,” I rasped, then repeated, “I need him. I just can’t always deal with that need.”
Tiffany studied me but I didn’t feel like a bug on a slide so that was something. All my other shrinks had made me feel like I was subhuman.
“So, at the time, you must have hidden it? Didn’t he figure it out? We all know how smart Rex is, Rachel.”
Having to explain it was hard, but I could sense they were disappointed in Rex, and there was no need to be. It wasn’t his fault I was a damn good actress when I chose to be.
“I think, at the time, he knew something had happened, but I don’t think he knew what. I-I was always busy. I stopped hanging out with him.
“He approached me afterward, about two months later, two months of my avoiding him, and ducking and diving out of his way, to ask if I wanted to break up with him.” My mouth wobbled at the memory. “I said yes.”
“Did he expect that?”
“No. I think he thought he was bringing things to a head. H-He’s… I know he loves me. I’ve always loved him.” I swallowed. “It hurts not being with him, but it hurts being with him too.”
“How did you avoid him for two months?” Indy asked, her voice soft. Empathetic.
“I worked three jobs, and then Mom had Rain to stop Axel from breaking up with her, and she never looked after him so I had him to watch as well.” I rubbed my brow, thinking back to those times. “I had school and everything, and he knew I wanted to go to college. I-I think he thought letting me go was the best thing to do.”
“Knowing Rex, though, he didn’t let you go entirely?” Stone asked.
“I’m not sure.” I shrugged. “I know when I left for college, he had a brother watching over me.”
“Sounds like him,” Indy said with a nod.
“I left for Brown a year late because of Rain, and that was when Axel really stepped up. My mom devastated him when she left, so everything fell to me. I think Rex had a word with him because suddenly, the start of the next year, I was in college.”
That was how Wynter had been born.
When I realized what he’d done for me, the arrangements he’d made on my behalf, I’d thanked him.
It had been heaven.
And hell.
“Shouldn’t Rex have asked you?” Alessa queried. “Shouldn’t he have—” She shook her head. “I do not mean to judge, but Maverick would not let me not answer.”
“Cruz wouldn’t either,” Indy agreed.
“Steel neither.”
“Nyx definitely wouldn’t have.”
Lodestar grunted and for the first time spoke, “Look, we get it. You all have boss ass men who’d die and kill for you. But that’s not the point, is it? Sometimes we don’t need men to fight our fucking battles for us. We need them to have our backs, but we want them to stand at our sides and let us make our own decisions.”
“Doesn’t seem like he did that. Just seems as if he maneuvered shit around to facilitate her—”
“And what’s wrong with that, Stone? You’re all fired up because he didn’t demand to know what was going on with her, but maybe he knew that’d fucking break her. Maybe he knew that he had to have her back, had to make shit happen. Had to make things right for her so she could move on.
“That sounds like a fucking hero to me. Someone who knows his woman was hurt but also knows that placing her on a pedestal wouldn’t do dick. His woman wasn’t a victim. She was a fucking survivor, and he made sure that happened and all of that with no expectations on his side.
“Men need patting on the head for doing the fucking dishes and Rex made sure she got to college after they split up.
“He cared for her, just in a different way. He fixed things just like your men do for you, but how he did it was tailored to Rachel.” She sat back. “You can’t judge a man for protecting his woman as an equal. I’d want my man to do that. I don’t want him to go to war for me. I want him to go to war with me.”
Her shrug was nonchalant, but she’d somehow managed to sum up exactly how I felt.
Silence fell, settling into the cracks until Tiffany asked, “Is that how you feel, Rachel? You don’t want Rex to ‘save’ you?”
When all eyes turned on me, I could feel the heat crawling over my skin as if it were bugs.
“For someone who had no interest in being a mom, mine taught me a lot of lessons. You can depend on no one but yourself. W-When Dog and Grizzly, when—”
“When they raped you,” Tiffany said calmly. “There’s no shame here, Rachel. And any shame belongs on them, not you.”
Nodding, I reasoned, “I determined that I’d do everything in my power to never feel so powerless again. I wanted to be in a position of strength. I knew if they did tell anyone, they’d let the MC know that I was a whore. That I’d come onto them. That I was like my mom and that I wanted to be dicked down so I’d get myself an Old Man.” A shudder wracked me. “I knew I’d be painted in a bad light. I knew it.