Wave after wave of heat surged through my body.
I reached for Dean, begging,
“Dean, take me away, please……”
He looked down at me. “Rebecca, playing the victim won't work.”
I started thrashing on the floor, rolling wildly. My shirt buttons popped open, exposing bare skin.
My mind went blank.
The next second, my hands moved on their own and latched around Miles's ankle.
My chest pressed against his leg.
The room erupted in jeers.
“Oh, this little kitten's really in heat, throwing herself at him like that!”
Dean stared at me. His eyes shifted from ice-cold to disbelief, then to pure rage.
“Crash!”
He hurled his glass into the floor.
“Rebecca! You're absolutely disgusting!”
Dean shot to his feet, yanked me up by the arm, and slapped me across the face.
My cheek swelled instantly.
“Whore!”
He didn't stop. One slap after another, ten in a row.
People around us were laughing, egging him on, whistling.
“Is that it? Any man will do for you?
I looked at his contorted face, and my chest ached so badly it burned.
He dragged me out of the private room and threw me onto the couch in the room next door.
The door didn't close all the way. I could still hear the laughter outside.
I fought through the nausea and the shame. “Not here. Close the door……please……”
He didn't listen.
He got rougher.
I tried to hold back the sounds in my throat. But the drug had control of my body, and they slipped out anyway, one after another.
It went quiet outside the door for a moment. Then someone laughed, low and knowing.
I turned my head and through the gap in the door saw shadows shifting.
They were listening.
My tears finally broke loose.
“Why……why are you doing this to me……”
Consciousness blurred, and memories flooded in like a tide.
Dean and I had once been the couple everyone envied.
Years ago, my parents had been Good Samaritans. They stopped a kidnapper snatching a child off the street and saved the kid. The man escaped in the chaos. No one imagined he'd come back for revenge.
They mistook Dean's sister, Juliana, for me.
What happened next was unspeakable. Juliana was brutalized beyond anything human, left in a permanent vegetative state.
Not long after, my family went bankrupt. Both my parents died in a car accident.
Everything we owned was sold off. The only thing I refused to give up was the house I'd grown up in.
I knelt before Dean.
He looked at me the way you look at an enemy.
“Sure. I'll take out a loan to get the house back for you. You stay by my side.”
“Every time I take you, I'll pay you ten thousand dollars.”
I agreed.
I agreed to everything.
I pulled myself out of the memory. My lower back felt like it was about to snap.
He was gritting his teeth, each time harder than the last.
“You want to know why I treat you like this? You still have the nerve to ask?”
“My sister had just gotten into Berkeley. Just gotten engaged to her boyfriend. Her whole future was wide open. Your parents and their hero act destroyed her entire life. And you're asking me why?”
By the end, his voice was shaking too.
When he finally opened the door and walked out, the others were already gone. Gwendolen had been sent home by her driver at some point.
He brought me back to the Henson residence.
That night, he used me over and over until I passed out.
Then he picked me up and dropped me into the bathtub.
When I woke, it was already light out.
Dean was holding a washcloth, scrubbing my lips over and over, until the skin split raw.
