Authors: A. M. Hudson
I slept with Jase, and that was bad, yeah, but this . . . well, at least I didn’t
knowingly
carry the lie from beginning to end.
***
“
Ara?” Arthur called as I passed at full human speed on the stairwell. “Where are you going?”
“
To find David.”
“
He’s in his new room. Is everything all right?”
My fists clenched tighter by my sides. “No.”
“
Ara, wait?” he called, but I didn’t wait. I marched step by step to the third floor and turned the corner, seeing David by the window outside his room; he stood in casual clothes with his hands in his pockets, his troubled gaze on the yard below. The afternoon sun lit his face, making his hair glow with those golden tones I’d always loved, and it just made the pain go so much deeper. He’d turn and look at me, maybe hear what I had to say, but his eyes would never smile at me again. I’d never see love there again.
He laid something on the windowsill, looking up in shock when he saw me coming. “Ara?”
“
You asshole!” I lashed out to slap him across the face, but he spun and grabbed my wrist before contact, hooking his foot under my ankle to flip me onto the floor at his feet.
“
What are you doing, Ara?”
“
Let go of me.” I wriggled out of his grip. “I'm so mad at you. You looked me in the eye, and you lied to me.”
He stood back, his eyes shrinking, focusing then smiling as realisation flooded through him. “Hurts, doesn't it?”
I hugged my knee to my chest. “Yes.”
“
Good. I'm glad they told you. I'm glad it’s out now, and it couldn’t have come at better time.”
“
Why?”
“
Because you deserve to suffer. What I did was a long time ago. I never even knew you then, so you have no right to comment. But what you did, well—” He shook his head. “You pretty much deserve to burn in hell, you worthless little whore.”
I looked up quickly into his icy green eyes. “How can you say that to me?”
“
Easy. I have absolutely no care anymore for how you feel.” He jammed his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels. “It’s rather liberating, really.”
I made myself smaller.
“
Oh, get up.” He dragged me to stand. “Don't sit there and wallow in it. No one’s going to care.”
I jerked my arm from his grip. “That’s where you’re wrong. People do care about me, David. Some of them care no matter what mistakes I’ve made.”
“
Guess they’re the fools then, aren't they?”
“
No.” I turned away. “They’re ones
worthy
of my love in return.”
“
Didn’t know that was possible,” he scoffed.
My footsteps halted. I spun slowly around and marched back up to him. “You know what? You’re a jerk, and the truth is, I
do
have a right to be hurt about what you did to Emily—”
“
To
Emily?” he cut in. “You mean
with
Emily.”
“
No. I mean
to
. Because I don’t think it was consensual. The way she talked about it—”
“
What did she say?” He grabbed my arm.
“
Why would you ask that?” I peeled his fingers off me. “If it was mutual, then—”
“
So you think I raped her?”
“
Not raped her.” I held his gaze. “I know you, and despite you having been this monster in your past,
I
would never label
you
something horrid. But I don’t believe she wanted to do it wholeheartedly. And I don’t believe you cared all that much.”
“
Well, I don’t really care what
you think
.” He gazed out the window again, severing the conversation.
“
It’s not my
opinion
that matters here, David. It’s the
facts
. You used her. You took her virginity so you could control her.”
“
Perhaps I did. So what?”
“
Had you told me you slept with her before we started dating, I would have been okay with it. I
would have
,” I repeated when he grunted. “Had you told me you forced her so you could make her do whatever you wanted. . .” I took a few steps away from him. “I would’ve avoided you like the plague.”
He looked up at me.
“
You’re sick,” I added, my lip lifting in disgust. “And everything you’ve done—the way you’ve acted since I told you the truth about Jason and I, has only proven to me that nothing about that monster you were back then has really changed. And a part of me, David—” I looked him in the eye for a very long moment, “—is glad you broke it off with me, because I can’t stand to look at you now.”
“
Get back here, Ara!” he yelled as I walked away. “Ara!”
“
Just leave me alone,” I muttered. “Don’t ever talk to me again.”
“
No.” He grabbed my arm and spun me around. “It doesn’t end like this. You don’t get to walk away and think whatever you want about me.”
“
Why?” I tired to pull free but he wouldn't let me. “Because you want the upper hand?”
“
You swore to me, Ara, that you would love me no matter what; that you would not look at the things I’d done in my past and judge me—”
“
And you swore to love and honour me, too, David. But as soon as that love was tested, as soon as I told you one of
my
dark truths, you threw that in my face. You didn’t even
try
to understand. In fact, you’re going as far as to have me punished for it. But what do I get to do? How do I get to free
my
self from the anger I feel for the lies
you
told
me
—repeatedly? I never looked you in the eye and told you I hadn’t slept with Jason. I—”
“
No, worse, you just kept it from me—”
“
I didn’t keep it from you,” I yelled, shocking David a bit. “I didn’t know it’d happened. And if I had, I would’ve told you immediately after.”
“
No, you wouldn’t. You didn’t. You went to the lighthouse. You took your problems there, and you were careless. You let yourself fall, and I don’t think it was an accident. I think you—”
“
What? Jumped?” I laughed like that was ludicrous.
“
I wouldn’t have saved you, you know,” he said quietly, looking out the window again. “If I’d known then, I would have drowned you myself.”
“
So, I can’t comment on you sleeping with Emily, but it’s okay for you to say you’d kill me—it’s okay for you to hurt me, torture me because I had another man inside me?”
“
Not just another man, Ara! My own brother—someone I’ve hated all my life. How could you? How could you stand the feel of him between your legs? How could you—”
“
He’s not as repulsive to me as he is to you.”
“
Clearly.”
“
You know what?” I threw my hands up. “What’s done is done. I can’t undo it, and I don’t have to put up with you being an asshole to me. I did wrong. Yes. I deserve to lose my marriage. Yes. But I do not deserve to have you in my face reminding me of that mistake every day.”
“
So you admit it?” he asked. “It was a mistake.”
“
God, what is your problem? Do you really think I lay awake at night reliving it like some fantasy I wish I could repeat?”
“
I’m not sure
what
you do.”
“
Then you clearly don’t know me very well.”
“
As recent events would indicate.”
I let the silence hang for a second. But I always let him have the last word. And it just wasn’t good enough anymore. “I won’t be the victim, you know?”
“
What’s
that
supposed to mean?”
“
It means I won’t put up with you taking your anger out on me anymore.”
“
No one said you had to.” He graced me with some eye contact then. “But you can’t expect me to be civil to you.”
“
Actually, I can,” I said, for once feeling strong enough to stand up to him. “You don’t have to love me. Hell, you don’t even have to like me, but you
will
respect me.”
“
Well, then let me rephrase that.” He stepped into my territorial bubble, his height suddenly intimidating. “If you think, for one second, that I’m going to be anything but cruel to you, do anything but torture you for the rest of my days, you’ve got a lot of learning to do. And since the only way you ever learn, Ara-Rose, is the hard way—” He smiled malevolently. “I’m going to enjoy this.”
“
Wow,” I said, taking another step back. “I had no idea just how deep your darkness went. You’re like a spiteful little girl. And I know it’s because you’re hurt.” I shrugged. “I get that. But what you’re showing me right now, David, is that you still love m—”
“
Love?” He slowly cupped both my arms and walked me back toward the wall. “Is it love when a man lies awake in his bed at night, comforted by the horrid acts he could perform on a girl’s body? Is it love when he finds himself standing over her with a dagger in his hand while she’s sleeping? Is it love when he contemplates throwing her to a pack of rabid prisoners and watching them defile her—”
“
Like you did to Pepper?” I spat.
His eyes widened, the contents of his stomach seeming to come up in his throat until he swallowed them down, gripping my arms so tight my fingers went numb.
I tried to count backward in my head, to go back in time and just stop myself from saying that. I’d wanted to hurt him, but the pain I saw eat his soul then just wasn’t worth it. It was childish and stupid. “I’m sorry, David. I shouldn’t have said that.”
He was frozen, though, his fingers locked onto my arms like a cursed statue.
“
David, please. You’re hurting me.”
My back pressed more firmly into the wall with each second passing, the plaster dipping under my weight, but he didn’t back down. The anger in him was growing—flashes of Pepper’s suffering flickering in his thoughts for me to see. I closed my eyes, turning my head to block them out, but they were there, and they were too real: her golden hair, turned almost orange with blood, her face mashed into the dirt floor under her naked body, her eyes catching David’s as the fat, dirty man pinning her down entered her, tearing her so deeply she screamed for her beloved. But he just stood there, pinned back by the guards, frozen by a veil of knowledge mixed with shock that he couldn’t lift—couldn’t escape long enough to find some common sense and free her.
The man entered her again, but she looked away this time, ashamed, hiding her face. She knew David wouldn’t help her. She didn’t care that he clearly couldn't, all she knew was that he
wouldn’t
. And she hated him then.
She dug her fingernails into the earth and just held her breath—lying there and letting them punish her, crying only his name and the sobbing remnant of the word ‘why.’
As the replay stopped and the rushing of wind in my ears and the echo of her haunted screams died down, the day around me returned. I looked up at David, seeing tears in his eyes for the first time since he learned what I did to betray him.
“
You know
nothing
of what Pepper suffered,” he said in an eerily calm voice, and let go of my arms, pulling me up off the wall just a little first.
“
Dav—” I started, but he walked away, ignoring me. Fear kept me where I stood, fighting the voice in my head that told me to run after him. Everything I said—
everything
—was the hurt in me talking. And I regretted it deeply, all of it. Especially saying I would never have loved him if I’d known what he did to Emily. I didn’t mean that. I felt it at the time, but I didn’t really mean it.