Is she serious? My heart revs. I take her other cheek in my palm until I’m cradling her face and staring into her eyes. “You don’t have to be afraid. Go ahead and fall as hard as you want. I’ll catch you.”
“It’s not that simple.” She presses her lips together like she’s fighting not to let those tears roll down her cheeks. “You don’t know…”
“Then tell me.”
Mandy looks torn. “You may not look at me the same after you know the whole truth.”
Is she talking about Barclay? Is she going to divulge the details about their affair? Has she decided to give us a chance? “Yes, I will.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t.”
The self-defeat in her tone hurts. “You can tell me anything, baby. As long as we’re communicating, it’s going to be fine. What do you need to talk about?”
“We shouldn’t go any farther until you know what happened with Barclay. And if you can’t forgive me, I’ll understand.”
I can’t imagine why she thinks the story will make a damn bit of difference to me. But the look on her face says she’s terrified it will.
“I just appreciate the truth.” I guide her to sit on the mattress, then sink down beside her. “Go ahead.”
She wrings her hands and takes a deep breath. “I always had a thing for Barclay Reed. I think I was…ten, maybe, when I first thought about him romantically. That sounds silly, but I mean in a first-crush, teen-heartthrob kind of way. I had pictures of him. I envisioned what it would be like for him to look at me like that. I imagined him kissing me. But I had no expectations until I turned thirteen.”
“Thirteen?” My eyes bulge.
“Oh, nothing happened then,” she assures me. “Except…he looked at me. Just once. But that’s all it took for me to be convinced I was in love and we were fated to be together.”
I want to kill the bastard all over again for ogling a child. “Exactly how did he look at you?”
“Like a woman. That summer I was spending a few weeks with Harlow, as I usually did. The Saturday before I flew home, she and I were hanging by the pool. He sauntered into the backyard and said something; I don’t even remember what. I just remember standing on the deck, getting ready to dive in again, when he pinned me with this gaze. I shivered, despite how hot the day was. The bottom of my feet were burning, but I was frozen by his stare. My cheeks got hot. My stomach fluttered. He scanned me from head to toe. I knew exactly what he was thinking.”
“You were a girl.”
She nodded. “But I didn’t feel like one. And I didn’t want him to see me as one.”
“Then what?”
“Nothing that summer or the one afterward. The summer before I turned sixteen…that’s when everything changed.”
Just like Griff suggested. I feel myself get even tenser. “Did he seduce you then?”
“Yes…and no. We had sex.” She licks her lips. “But I was the one who initiated it.”
Is she kidding?
She jerks her stare down to her hands. “You look horrified. I don’t blame you. When I say it now, I am, too. But you have to understand. I’d been completely obsessed with him for fully a third of my very short life. I couldn’t imagine ever feeling differently about him. Back then, I was convinced I loved him and that he would love me too if he just knew how I felt. It was dumb and naive—”
“It doesn’t matter. He took advantage of you. You were a child, and he was a grown-ass man who should have said no.”
“That’s what my therapist always says. And you’re both right. As an adult I see that, but that night I saw an opportunity to be with him and I took it.”
So did he. I grind my teeth together. “What happened?”
“Stephen, Dad, and I were supposed to go camping for the week with Barclay, Harlow, and Griff. We’d done it the summer before and had a great time. But Griff never showed. He and a bunch of college buddies ended up in Mexico instead. Harlow got sick the night before we left, throwing up everywhere. My dad suggested cancelling everything, but Barclay insisted we still go. When Harlow got better, Linda could drive her up to the site, no problem. So the rest of us went. Everything was fine the first day, but as night fell, Stephen started throwing up, and we thought he’d caught what Harlow had. Then he started running a fever, too, and complaining about excruciating abdominal pain. My dad panicked and drove Stephen to the nearest hospital—and just in time. He had an emergency appendectomy an hour later.”
“That left you and Barclay alone.”
She nods, a heart-rending mixture of guilt and shame wrenches her soft face. “It was too dark to pack up the campsite and head down the winding mountain road, so Barclay told my dad we’d leave at first light. I was so thrilled. Worried about my brother, yes. But I was determined to make the most of my time with Barclay. We had dinner, but we didn’t talk. We eye-fucked.”
I’m furious. Mandy was just a kid. Yeah, maybe she’d been developing a woman’s body, but she had visions of Barclay being a romantic hero. The asshole should have been a responsible adult, not a predatory lech grooming her to be his underage sex partner.
“Amanda…” I don’t know what she’s planning to say next, but I want it to stop. “You don’t have to tell me anymore.”
“I do. Everyone blames Barclay for what happened. But I had a hand in it. I can’t deny that.”
“You didn’t know any better.”
“I didn’t stop to think about the future or the consequences or anything like that, true. But I was pretty sure I knew what would happen when I lunged at him and pressed my lips to his.”
I want to block this out, but she seems compelled to tell me. I can only guess it’s because she’s trying to gauge whether we have a future. And she won’t trust any assurance I give her until she’s spilled all the gory details.
“He kissed you back?”
She nods. “From the second our lips met, it was on. We climbed into the tent, and my clothes were off two minutes later. I helped him get me naked.”
There’s the self-blame in her voice again, and I’m so angry that I’m struggling to keep my temper in check. “Look, I know where you’re going with this. If you think he only had sex with you because you encouraged it, you’re wrong. From what I’ve heard of this guy, it was just a matter of time before he hit on you. Stop blaming yourself. He’s the one who took advantage of your eagerness and naiveté.”
“I wasn’t so naive that I didn’t know we were going to have sex. In fact, that’s what I wanted.” She frowns. “I just didn’t expect it to be so rushed and to hurt so much.”
That pisses me off even more. I don’t want details but… “Did he just jump on you and shove his way inside you?”
She flushes and looks down. “More or less. And I did everything he told me to since I figured he knew what he was doing, but it wasn’t as if we’d planned anything. Except…” She frowns. “He had condoms. So…yeah.”
“He was prepared, then. Why else would he have brought them on a camping trip with his buddy and their kids unless he had a plan?” Granted, he couldn’t have plotted Stephen’s appendicitis, but he may have been cooking up something else in the hopes of getting Amanda alone. “It wasn’t your fault, Mandy. Even if you thought you wanted to have sex with him that night, you were too young to understand everything that would follow.”