Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 121755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Gabe didn’t say anything, he just stared at me, the rage back in his eyes.
I couldn’t help him with that until he had it all, so I set about giving him the last of it.
“In the end, Christian was so humiliated, after he explained things to a judge, who wasn’t super thrilled by his shit, and he paid his consequences, which included a stint in juvie, his parents had to move him to another school. My friends made sure everyone at that school knew he was bad news, so he didn’t have much fun there, either.”
Gabe remained silent.
“Jen was the ringleader of that,” I said sadly. “She really had my back when all of that went down. I still appreciate it, and her being so strong for me is part of why I’m so incredibly bummed she was weak for Sheldon, and she ended up where she did.”
Somehow (I knew how, because Gabe was that guy), he managed to remain incensed and still tuck my hair behind my ear affectionately.
I kept going in order to be done with it.
“Mom encouraged me to push the sexual assault thing, so I didn’t back down. I don’t know what the different definitions of sexual assault are, but the cops said that exposing a woman without her consent, photographing her and disseminating those photos is a version of it. At my age, it was also producing and distributing child pornography. Christian was also underage. He was still pretty fucked.”
“Good,” Gabe grunted.
Yes, it was good.
“In the end, his parents had no choice but to come to terms with what he did, and they made him write me an apology. He did. I read it. It read like someone was making him write it. But he did it.”
“You know all of this is only making me want to be certain he isn’t still pulling this kind of shit, right?”
I sighed.
Then I nodded.
“Denise,” he said.
Oh God.
He was going to tell me.
My stomach clenched.
“Denise?” I whispered.
When I said her name, everything about him changed, and it was not a good change.
Not in the slightest.
“Sweet, fuck, so sweet,” he whispered back.
My stomach twisted.
“Your first love?” I guessed.
He nodded. “I was twenty-four, out of college, out of the academy, already a couple of years on patrol. She wasn’t a knockout, like you, but she was really fuckin’ pretty.”
He thought I was a knockout?
“The guy before me, her boyfriend, he was no good.”
Oh no.
It didn’t take a genius to put together how he woke up that morning, and his reaction to Christian’s antics, that this was going to be extreme.
Therefore, slowly, I closed my eyes to prepare for what I was about to get.
“Lots of manipulation, lots of control,” Gabe said, and I opened my eyes. “Said shit about her body, what she’d eat, what she’d wear, wore her down. Made her question herself. Then made her feel small. Forced distance between her and her friends, even her family. He did this so he had her on her own with no one there to tell her he was bad news, and she needed to get shot of him. No one there to contradict all the shit he was planting in her head.”
“What happened then?” I asked when he said no more.
“When he hit her the first time, she felt she’d burned her bridges because they had his number and they’d all told her she should get shot of him. She thought she had no one to go to, but it still tweaked her enough, she left him. He sweet-talked her back. It happened again, and he sweet-talked her back again.”
I knew all about that, even if my story wasn’t nearly as dire.
“She was in the cycle,” I deduced morosely.
“Yeah, so when she said no to sex when he wanted it, and he just took it anyway, the first time she was scared and alarmed. But since it kept happening, it just became what happened, until she didn’t bother saying no, but she didn’t want it, so their sex life wasn’t about sex at all. It was repeated rape.”
Since this tale of woe just got worse and worse, until it became the very worst that could happen to a woman, I swallowed down the urge to vomit and whispered, “Oh, Gabe.”
“She was young. They got together when she was seventeen. He was just eighteen. Fucks with my head to understand a guy that young could be so good at pulling that shit.”
It fucked with my head too, and I was a woman who knew that shit could start even before that age (thanks, Christian).
Gabe kept going.
“In the end, he beat her so bad, he put her in the hospital. Next day, he was gone, and her dad was there. He told her she had two choices, leave that fuck or he was shipping her to stay with her aunt and uncle in Alaska. By that time, she was twenty-one. Her father didn’t have the right to give her that ultimatum, but he saw his daughter in the hospital, he was done with that guy’s shit and his daughter eating it. Her dad being there for her, something broke through, and she chose leaving her boyfriend as well as going to Alaska. She was there a year before she came back. He was with another woman when she returned. What she didn’t know was, she wasn’t in the clear.”