I forced her to talk to me.

I hadn’t realized how badly I’d been needing answers about her till now, and the fact that my instincts were too late had me fucking enraged with myself. I was usually good at this. If I was missing information I needed, I gauged it fast and found some way to get it.

Of course, that was in my work life, and I had Sara confused with something I merely wanted.

I wanted to know about her. I wanted to understand why those dark looks clouded over. They happened rarely, and for barely a few seconds, but I had seen them in her eyes, and I wanted to know why. The problem was that I thought I only wanted it, so for the sake of avoiding indulgence, I didn’t press for the answers.

Of course, I was realizing now that understanding Sara was more than just a want at this point.

“You really need to know this?” Sara whispered.

We were closing in on one in the morning, but I wasn’t backing down. I had brought her back to my house, and she had insisted on sleeping. As cruel as it was, I refused to let her. I knew she wasn’t sleepy – she was avoiding my questions about her past the way she had steadily been for days now.

“I need to know,” I confirmed, showing no mercy to the pleading tears in her eyes as she sat at the edge of my bed. “I don’t enjoy feeling like I can’t protect you. The more you tell me, the better I know how to keep someone from hurting you. So talk.”

“You first. Who was that woman in the green dress?” she asked, glaring up at me. “She seemed a bit possessive of your attention.”

“That was Madeline,” I said. “I met her five years ago while I was out with Emmett one night. I don’t know where he found her. He generally collects new friends throughout the night.”

“And you two have slept together?” she asked.

“Twice,” I answered. “She’s just a woman I’ve slept with before, Sara. Your issue with her should be solely with the fact that she crossed the line in conversation today. You have no reason to feel threatened by any woman I’ve had a history with, no matter how long or brief.”

“No? Tell me why not,” Sara said. Her tears had stopped an hour ago, but her dark eyes were still wet, and I found myself unable to say no to them.

“I care about you more than I’ve ever cared about another woman. That’s your answer.”

“That’s hard to believe,” she murmured as she stood up and made a beeline for the bathroom. I clenched my jaw as I followed her in.

“Why?” I asked. “What reason have I given you to doubt that I care for you?”

“None,” she answered remorselessly. “I just don’t know you. I don’t know anything about you,” she said, angrily dabbing a tissue at her eyes as her voice started to waver. “I’m obviously feeling things for you. You don’t make it easy for me to avoid that, but I want to keep myself at least a little protected from you. Explaining my past to you is just me volunteering to knock down whatever’s left of my wall, and I don’t know if that’s worth it for you, Julian. Not when this little thing here will be done before I know it.”

My heart processed her words before I did, because I had barely a warning before my pulse started hammering.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. She shot me daggers over my tone.

“Are you really going to pretend whatever’s going on between us is something you’re willing to invest your time in?” she demanded. “Look at you. Look at who you are. You don’t do this kind of thing. You don’t have girlfriends. There’s a good portion of your life you haven’t revealed to your own best friend. You’re guarded, and I get it. It’s the best way to get work done. We’ve both employed that method of living. We both know what it’s like, so why are you asking me to expose myself for you when you’d never do the same for anyone else, let alone me?”

Fair point.

In fact, everything she said was so fucking dead on it pissed me off. It only intensified my need to know about her. If she was that much like me, then the work was a distraction from something deep and dark, and I needed to know.

“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know about me if you tell me about you.”

The offer was out before I could change my mind. But she still didn’t bite.

“You won’t want to look at me let alone talk to me after I’m done,” she said. My chest felt hot as I heard her voice falter, and watched her eyes mist with fresh tears.

“You know that isn’t true. I can’t stop looking at you. That’s been the problem since the night we met.”

I watched the storm of clashing emotions flicker in her eyes.

“Fine. If you’re so convinced of that, let me go right ahead. I stayed at June Magazine for almost ten years, despite how they treated me, because I was convinced no other company would ever hire me. My mom was convinced June neglected my background check because I was hired directly out of my internship. I was arrested in college, Julian. Can you guess what the charges were?” she asked heatedly, her voice quivering. A tear fell from the corner of her eyes as she shook her head. “It was prostitution. Would you like to run now?” she hissed, her wild eyes flitting all over my expression.

I looked stunned.

I knew I did. I hadn’t moved a muscle on my face, but I could tell from the way Sara’s tears were falling now that my eyes had given me away. It felt like a dagger had splintered into my heart as I watched her cover her face and crumple to the ground, letting everything out. Every tear, every cry, every shudder. She was sobbing uncontrollably at my feet, and I knew how much it had to hurt for her. Like me, she lived to repress and control. She found her way to bury her past, and she stuck to it, no matter how unhealthy or draining it was. Whatever it took, it was better than letting the emotions swallow her the way they were doing now.

“Look at me,” I said, lifting her chin to face me. I was on the floor with her now, and I had no idea what I was about to say. But instead of measuring my every word carefully, I for once let them come out as they pleased. “Look at me, Sara. You see me. You know I’m not going anywhere. I’m right here, and all I want is to know that I can fix the way you feel. I can’t stand it when you’re unhappy, and I’m going to have you smiling by the end of this night, I promise you that. I just need you to talk to me first, Sara. Please.”

She shook her head and cried, but she let me kiss her, and though it took another few minutes, she brought her knees to her chest and forced herself to breathe. Another minute of silence, and she finally started leading in.

“The scar I have... you know what I’m talking about.”

“The one Turner mentioned the night at the pool,” I nodded.

“That one. You saw it when you were helping me come down from my panic attack.”

“Yes.”

“I usually have it covered with makeup. It’s in the shape of an ‘F’ because the girls at school wanted to burn the word ‘freak’ on me with their cigarettes.”

I felt my nails dig into my palm but I didn’t let on to my fury. I knew she’d stop talking to soothe me. She had that need to completely take care of me. I noticed it awhile ago, in everything from the way she fucked me to the way she calmed me down around the Roths. I loved it. But I wasn’t interested in that selfish pleasure tonight.

“You were bullied?” I asked.

“From the start. But what did I expect,” she murmured, staring blankly down at the floor. “My dad… he moved us to Texas on a whim. After his mom died, he wanted to leave London, and he picked this little town where one of his travel buddies from forever ago lived. I was already different when we got there – I looked different. I talked different. My dad had an accent, my mom was too nervous to speak to other moms. I was an easy target. But it got so much worse when my dad decided to represent his friend in an assault case. Some bar fight. The defendant was popular around town – he was the high school football coach, and he had a kid in my grade. Also well liked. Also popular.” She drew in a deep, trembling breath. “So everyone made my life miserable from that point on. And it got that much worse after my dad won.”

Her teary eyes peered up at me as I gently pulled her legs away from her chest, wrapping them around my midsection as I lifted her onto my lap.

“Go on,” I said as I found the scar on her arm. It was disguised well, but I saw it now, and we both gazed down at it for a moment.

“It took a couple days for them to finish the F,” she mumbled. “The girls would corner me in the bathroom. One time, they even snuck some boys in to keep me restrained while they burned me. I remembered crying, but I didn’t make a sound because I felt like that was validation for them. I was just thinking of how to get myself out of the place.” She smiled a little. “I fantasized about getaways a lot. That’s where the motorcycle thing came in. But that wasn’t realistic, obviously, so I just worked to graduate early and start completely anew in college. I already knew where I wanted to go that we could afford, and I knew what sorority I wanted to join. I knew how I would dress and act so I didn’t seem different again, like an outcast again. I had dreamt of going to prom since I was a little girl, and wearing that big, poufy dress. But since that clearly wasn’t going to happen, I told myself I’d go to frat parties, and mixers, and I’d have that perfect all-American teen life in college.”

“Did you?” I frowned. I wanted to believe the pain ended in high school, but I remembered the cloud that cast over her eyes when she mentioned college at the gas station. “You said you rode the back of a motorcycle with your best friend in college.”

“Ashleigh,” Sara breathed. The sound of the name drained the color from her cheeks. “Ash is what we called her. She was my big. I got into the sorority I wanted, I got all the friends I wanted, and I got her as my big sister, which seemed like winning the jackpot at the time. She was this insanely popular, Barbie-like girl who everyone adored on campus, and the fact that she took me under her wing was like a dream. We were inseparable from the second we met, and suddenly, just a summer after all that torture in high school, I had everything I ever wanted. I had this built in family with my sisters, and I had this girl who would drive me around, take me out, be a shoulder to cry on. I was seventeen, and she was like a god to me. She had me wrapped around her pinky so hard I didn’t question anything she asked of me.”

I brushed away the hair that fell into Sara’s face as she looked down. Her eyes refused to look at me, even after I cupped her jaw and brought them back to me.

“What did she ask of you?”

“She had me…” She breathed for a moment. “She had me perform favors,” she finally muttered, peering at me for a reaction I didn’t give. “For guys in the frat we were paired with. I knew I didn’t feel right, but I didn’t really understand what was happening. I was so desperate to believe these girls were my friends. I didn’t have coffee dates, or sleepovers, or parties back in high school, and I had all of that with these girls. They helped me study, they met me after class, they defended me to the death if anyone was even a little rude to me at a party. So I was so confused. I was…” Sara shook her head in awe of herself. “So fucking stupid.”

“You were seventeen,” I said, wiping her tears. “The kids in high school, they were blatant villains. You knew to run from them. But these girls were different. They acted like friends to play into your vulnerability, and what they did to you was heinous.”

“That wasn’t even the worst part,” Sara whispered, staring up toward the ceiling. “Ash convinced me she needed money. Something about her family being in trouble. She reminded me of all the times she drove me, or paid for me, or did whatever for me. And she guilted me into saying yes to something disgusting, because she said I’d be screwed if I didn’t do it. That college could be as bad as it was in high school. Worse maybe.”

I wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed her as she struggled to get the words out.

“It’s okay. Take your time,” I said. But she sped on, as if wanting to get the bad taste out of her mouth.

“They found someone – some man who would pay a lot of money to sleep with me. They told me he was one of our friend’s older cousins, but when I got to the motel, the man was so much older, and from somewhere else. He said he found Ash online. I remember feeling so betrayed, and I remember how annoyed he got that I cried in front of him.”

She cried again, and this time I lifted her off the floor to carry her to my bed. She let out a sigh of comfort when I laid her down and pressed my lips to her forehead, but she didn’t let me kiss her.

“I need you to know that I didn’t have sex with that man. Okay?”

“Okay,” I whispered. “It’s okay, Sara.”

“One of my sisters called the cops. I told her before we left about what Ash and the other older girls were asking me to do, and I begged her to call the cops. I didn’t think she would, but she did. I felt so disgusting for being naked when they found me. I had already tried touching that man. It honestly felt like the cops came at the last possible second. But I thank God for them anyway, and I thank God for the girl who called them for me. I wasn’t even mad at her for being like everyone else and ignoring me after the incident.”

“Because you called the cops?”

“Yes. Ash and the girls were arrested. Their names were in the paper, and mine got taken out when they realized I was a minor. They dropped the charges on me when they realized what was happening, and the kids at school thought that was unfair. They blamed me for everything – said I was asking for it with the way I dressed, the way I wore makeup. They had already saved the article that came out with my name in it. It’s still archived online. I tried to have it taken down, but someone put it back up, even after I transferred thousands of miles away. And it just feels like this nagging reminder that I was once this… little thing that existed solely for sex. It makes me feel dirty and disgusting and guilty for wanting sex. Especially the way that I want it. A part of me feels like I should be repenting still.”

“Do you feel guilty about what we’ve done in the past few weeks?” I asked, my chest tight in anticipation of her answer that I’d unknowingly hurt her. That she’d partially hated herself every time we slept together. But with her hands cupping my jaw, she studied my eyes and shook her head.

“No,” she said with a breath of awe. It was as if she had realized her answer that very second. The crystal sound of her whisper pierced the quiet of the room as she went on. “All I feel is good around you. I feel like I’m doing something a little wilder and crazier than I’m used to, but I don’t ever feel bad about it. Not with you. I don’t feel guilty about anything between us, and it makes me feel like I’m actually free around you. Like I’m really acting like myself instead of the girl I forced myself to be. I was just trying to make it up to myself and my parents for what I did when I was seventeen.”

“That was ten years ago, Sara. It wasn’t your fault, nor should you feel guilty about what you want. You’re not defined by what those girls did to you. You can’t keep blaming yourself.”

“I pushed it to the back of my head for awhile,” she insisted softly. “I didn’t even think about it much while I was at June Magazine. I was so overworked, but I think I liked it. I was always exhausted, too busy to do too much drinking, definitely no dating, and it made me feel like I had successfully transformed into someone new. Someone not filthy and reckless. My mother was proud of me. Everything seemed okay.”

“Until you quit.”

“Yes.” Her eyes were drier, calmer now as they traveled over my face. “I took your job offer because I wanted to be near you. I’m not even going to lie about it at this point. But since I’ve started, I’ve felt just… better about myself. Like I’m allowed to enjoy the things I used to feel guilty about, and like I’m the one in control now.”

She pulled me closer by my shirt till I lowered my weight onto her. I felt the heavy chains around my chest lift the second she smiled.

“You make me feel… happy,” she murmured. She paused. “Like I’ve never felt before in my life,” she exhaled. But then she swallowed hastily, looking apologetic. “And I know that’s a lot for you to hear right now, so you don’t have to say anything. Just nod or say one word to acknowledge you heard it, and we’ll move on. Just say ‘okay.’”

“How about ‘same’?” I asked as she blinked with confusion at me. “I feel the same.”

I watched that little smile on her mouth break into a grin.

“But I want to make sure you stay happy,” I whispered, kissing her curved lips. “I’m not going to let anyone hurt you again. I promise you that. Okay?”

She breathed out slow, steady now, and closed her eyes.

“Okay.”