It shouldn’t hurt, right? I never agreed to go to his house tonight. He never even asked. Just another guy making you feel obligated to show him how grateful you are for his attention.
I pumped some shampoo into my hand from the dispenser on the wall and washed my hair, trying to hurry. I still had to make dinner, do homework, and I’d promised my grandma we’d watch a movie in her room tonight.
And I still wanted to get to the gazebo tonight to get some work done.
Will could come to me. If he found me.
I rinsed my hair and conditioned, pumping some soap into my hand and scrubbing the pool off my body. But I stopped, feeling the nubs on my legs.
Maybe I should shave again. I mean, if he found me, I…
Then I shook my head and stood up straight. For Christ’s sake. Get it together.
I finished washing and ducked my head under the water again, rinsing the conditioner out of my hair as I stared ahead.
But then a shadow moved on the other side of the shower curtain, and I froze.
It stopped, standing there, the dark form looming just outside.
My heart skipped a beat. Only the emergency lighting remained on since there wasn’t supposed to be anyone staying after school for any sports or band today, so I blinked as if that would clear my vision.
Shit, I needed my glasses. I could see okay without them, but I was nearsighted.
“Hello?” I called out. “Who is that?”
Forgetting to turn off the shower, I reached over and grabbed my towel, holding it up to my body.
“Martin?” I said.
The shadow peeled back the curtain slowly, and a lump swelled in my throat as Damon Torrance stepped into the shower with me.
“What the hell?” I barked.
But he just came closer, closing the curtain and approaching me with a towel around his waist, his smile coming into view.
“Martin?” he repeated. “Why would your brother be stalking the girls’ locker room?”
“Why are you?”
I backed into the wall, the shower spilling over my shoulders and drenching the towel I clasped to my body.
He shrugged. “Practice just ended. I needed a shower.”
“The team isn’t practicing tonight.” I shoved him in the chest, pushing him away. “You’ve been here. Were you waiting for me?”
But he just came right back in, pinning me to the wall. “Shhh…”
He stroked my hair, pressing his body into mine as he breathed down on me.
My knees started to tremble, and I clenched my thighs, suddenly feeling like I was going to wet myself.
I jerked away, pushing at him with one hand and holding my towel with the other. “What do you want?”
He pinned my wrist to the wall at my side as he smiled down. “I want to know what he sees in you. Maybe I’ll see it, too.”
My stomach twisted into a knot. I’d rather fucking die.
I looked up into his black eyes and smelled that shit he smoked, a scream lodged in my throat.
Just scream.
Scream.
There was no one here to hear me, and even if there were, Martin Scott wouldn’t believe me. I was going to pay for this either way.
“Get out,” I gritted through my teeth. “Get the hell away from me!”
“I thought you’d have more fight,” he said, studying me. “You’re kind of disappointing.”
What, you can only get hard if I’m scared?
I was scared.
“Leave.” I glared up into his eyes and then slapped him, but he shot out for my hands, trying to get a hold of them as I fought.
My towel fell, and he caught both my wrists, bending my arms at the elbows and holding my hands between our chests, using his weight to keep them pinned.
“Leave!” I growled.
“Then scream,” he demanded instead.
I locked my jaw, pretending I was tough, but I was breathing a mile a minute.
He looked into my eyes, the water falling over both of us as he searched my face. “Why don’t you scream?”
You wouldn’t understand.
I gathered it was new for him. He preyed, because it got him off, but it ruined all of his plans when he wasn’t the victim’s first rodeo, didn’t it?
Because it wasn’t the blood he was after, but the fear.
It wasn’t the sex, but the power.
His eyes trailed down my neck and slowly down my arm, narrowing.
I don’t scream, because….
“Because screaming doesn’t help,” he murmured. “Does it?”
My heart thundered in my chest, but I remained frozen, staring up at him as he looked at my body and the bruises in the shapes of fingers wrapped around my upper arm. The scrapes on my legs and the blue and purple on my shoulders.
“Because you get tired of being the victim,” he said, like he was thinking out loud, “and it’s easier to just let it happen.”
He raised his eyes, meeting mine again, and my throat stretched painfully as his words burrowed into me.
He loosened his hold, but I didn’t run.
“To just pretend we’re in control of everything happening to us,” he told me.
He blinked a few times, his demeanor completely changed, a troubled set to his brow.
My chin trembled.
“Until you can’t remember who you were before you started lying even to yourself,” he added. “Until you can’t remember ever smiling when it didn’t fucking hurt.”
Tears filled my eyes, and I ground my teeth to keep my shit together.
Abuse can feel like love.
I remembered his words from lit class.
Starving people will eat anything.
His eyes fell down my body again, his head cocking and taking the purple and red on one side of my torso and the others on my thighs.
He didn’t have any marks that I could see, but there were other kinds of pain.
“Will is like that,” he said, his voice softening, somber now. “Isn’t he?”
Like a smile that doesn’t hurt. I nodded.
“Easy, normal, peaceful…” he told me. “The only thing in my life untouched by anything ugly. Nothing has tainted him. He’s the one thing that’s still beautiful and thinks the world is beautiful and believes people are beautiful and all that shit.”
Yeah. But I couldn’t say it out loud, because it was hard enough holding back the sob.
“You can’t take him away from me,” Damon told me, stepping back and letting me go.
And in that moment, I understood exactly what his problem was. He didn’t dislike me. He resented Will liking me so much.
One day of wearing his school tie, because I loved the way he made me feel that I had to have a piece of him with me every moment, was nothing compared to the years Damon had relied on Will to be his little beacon of hope that the world was still a pretty place.
“You know it won’t work anyway,” Damon pointed out. “His family is one of the wealthiest in the country, Emory. His life is so far beyond your understanding, and vice versa. You know you have no place in Will Grayson’s Homecoming picture.”
I dropped my eyes, slowly sinking down and picking up my soaked towel, holding it over my body.
“I know,” he continued. “Hurts to hear it, but it’s true, and you know it. And what’s more? It’s pointless, because you know how you are. Even I know how you are. The whole school knows. He won’t fit, because you’re committed to being miserable and you’ll just drag him down.”