I was fall-down drunk the night it happened. The night Damon — well, you’ll see.

My eighteenth birthday. I’d been at the Grill, eating and sneaking beers on the side with Chase and the rest of the football boys. I think they pitied me in the aftermath of the accident, took me under their protection and made sure I was “taken care of,” in a way.

Chase had driven me home around eleven after we’d all stopped at the football field and had some more to drink. It had started raining while we were lying on the grass, drinking and passing around a joint that made my head spin every time I took a drag.

The porch light had been the only one still on, and I’d tried to unlock the front door as quietly as possible, but ended up making about the same amount of noise as a feral cat stuck in a trashcan. Suddenly, the door opened from the inside, yanked unceremoniously, and I fell flat on my face beside two bare feet. I watched, mesmerized, as droplets of water began sliding off my rain-soaked arm and dripping on to the floor, puddling beneath me.

“Fuck,” I muttered, my cheek buzzing from where it had hit polished wood. It’d hurt once the alcohol in my system burned up. I grabbed at the floor with clumsy fingers, trying to get up, when I was hoisted to my feet.

Damon was bleary-eyed as he glared at me as though he’d been sleeping. He was still wearing his police-issued shirt and pants, and the tan-colored clothes were wrinkled, adding to that “slept in” look.

“What do we have here,” he said, but it wasn’t really a question. He sighed, resting his forehead against the door momentarily. “A drowned rat. A drunk rat.”

I giggled. He slammed the door shut, circling me as I stood and dripped all over the floor.

“Are you… stoned?” he asked, grabbing my chin, forcing my eyes to meet his.

“No, Sheriff!” I replied, mock-saluting him. I dissolved into another pile of giggles because suddenly, everything was so fucking funny. I heard him mutter Jesus Christ under his breath.

“If your mother saw you—”

“Yeah, she’s not going to see me,” I cut him off, sobering a little. The giggles were gone, replaced by an intense sadness, a loneliness inside me that stretched as wide and as empty as the prairie surrounding us. The feeling sucker punched me in the gut, and I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering.

“Cassie—”

“She’s dead already,” I said. I started to cry. Big, heaving sobs and fat tears that rolled down my cheeks, mixing in with the rain and blurring my already less-than-stellar vision.

“Cassie.” Softer this time. Sympathetic. Arms went around me, even though I was soaked from the rain and probably smelled like stale beer. I rested my ear against his chest, and it was almost like somebody loved me for a moment. I closed my eyes, melting into Damon’s chest, listening to his heartbeat evenly under flesh and bone.

“Hey,” he said, leaning back a little. He tipped my face up with his finger. “We’ll get through this. It’s going to work out. Okay?”

I shook my head, utterly miserable. “Not okay. It’s not okay.”

“Cassie, stop,” he said quietly, his arms stiffening around me so I couldn’t breathe. “Stop.” I was a chatty drunk, an emotional drunk, and I didn’t heed the warning signs that signaled his turning mood.

“We have to turn her off,” I whispered against his chest. “We have to let her die.”

His fingers squeezed into my arms; the first time Damon ever left bruises on me.

“Shut up!” he yelled, and now he was really angry. He shoved me away from him and my back hit the kitchen counter.

“Don’t you ever talk like that,” he said, blue eyes ablaze, a finger in my face. “You don’t just give up on your own mother. Do you know how many people don’t even have a mother? And you just want to let yours die?”

I stared at the floor, my hands gripping the counter behind me. I despised confrontation. I hated yelling. I hated the fact that I wanted my mother to hurry up and get better or hurry up and die.

My heart started to race. An uneasy feeling started to drip into my veins and spread like wildfire through my body. Something very bad was about to happen, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was, or how to stop it.

I tried to walk past him to the stairs, but he blocked me. Blue eyes stared me down as a hand shot out and pressed me back against the counter.

“Damon—” I started.

A hand went over my mouth, another at my tank top pulling it down so that my breast was exposed. The sudden cold air on my flesh shocked me out of my stupor, and I slapped him across the face as hard as I could, pulling my top back up to cover myself. Something flashed in Damon’s eyes — anger?

We stared off for a moment. I was stone cold sober in the space of about thirty seconds. In my head, above the drunken chatter and buzz, there was a realization: We can never go back from this.

“I heard what you said about me,” he said, his sudden neutral tone disarming. The flip of a switch. The edge of a blade. There you are.

“What?” I edged to the side, thinking that if I could just keep him talking long enough, he’d calm down.

“When you found Karen. In my car, after. You were on the phone to that friend of yours. I heard what you said.”

My stomach twisted painfully. “What?” I repeated. Somewhere in the edges of my consciousness, a thought gnawed at me, a memory. I’d joked about the hot new sheriff to one of my friends. Anything to break up the ugly silence that had punctuated the days after Karen’s body was found.

Damon stepped forward without warning, his hips trapping me against the counter.

“I was sixteen!” I said, pushing at his chest. “I was joking!”

He shook his head, one hand around my throat as he dragged me to the ground and trapped me underneath him. “And now you’re eighteen. And I’m not joking.”

I tried to fight him, to get him off me, but it didn’t matter. He was stronger. He’d always been stronger than me.

It hurt. I remember it hurting.

I remember begging him to stop.

I remember him ignoring me.

I’m sorry, Damon said to me after. He kissed me on the cheek. Hugged me tightly, so tightly I heard my neck crack from the pressure. I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. I was too busy trying to breathe.

While I was still on the floor, too terrified to move, he got up and sat at the kitchen table, right next to my head. After a few minutes, he picked me up, cradled me to his chest like a baby, and put me in his car.

I’d thought that maybe he was going to kill me. I was terrified. I kept looking at the gun on his hip, the shiny silver metal glinting each time we passed under a streetlight. We drove all the way to Tonopah and into a drive-thru in complete silence.

A cheeseburger and fries, and a little kid’s toy for me on the side of my meal. I was shaking, my entire body having some kind of fit, and I threw the bag of food back in his face, punching him for effect.

He broke my nose for that.

He won, in the end. Made me eat every single bite of that meal, choked down, washed down forcefully with the giant Pepsi he’d ordered for me. It was his way of apologizing, I realized much later. His way of trying to make things right between us. A fucking kid’s fast-food meal. I’m sorry for raping you, have this collectible action figurine.

When I’d finished eating, he drove home. We sat in the driveway for a long time, the engine idling as the pain between my thighs grew hotter and more fierce, bruises blossoming across my skin as the stupor in my brain increased. A large Pepsi, filled with fucking sleeping tablets. The bitterness at the back of my throat. I tried to hold onto the dashboard of the car while Damon put his head in his hands and cried.

The next morning, I woke up in my bed. He’d put me there, my thighs and the mattress underneath me still damp from whatever else he’d done while I was drugged and unconscious.

I took the Volvo — the car Damon drove when he had a day off and his patrol car was needed — and I drove all the way to fucking Reno. I didn’t stop for food. I didn’t stop to pee. I drove and drove and when I got there, I flirted for a moment with the possibility that I had gotten away.

He found me, of course. He was five minutes behind me the entire time. The GPS system in the car was synced with his cell phone. He’d already anticipated that I’d flee after what he’d done.

The second time, a few nights later, I barely resisted. I fought him at first, sure. But once he had me pinned, I just kind of gave up and let him do what he wanted.

I think I disappointed him, in a way.

I think he liked it better when I was fighting him the entire time.

A couple months later and I’d become entirely complicit. You could even say I was eager. Twisted, sure, but in my own sick way, I’d quickly come to enjoy the attention I’d been starving for all these months.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re disappointed in me, aren’t you? I was supposed to be different. I was supposed to get out and make something of myself.

Yeah, and Leo was supposed to, too, but look at how that turned out.

Look at what he went and did.

By the time summer of 2015 rolled around, I’d finally snapped to my senses. I’d seen my reflection in the window one afternoon, naked and panting, Damon behind me, and I had been horrified. It was like I was waking up for the first time since that night and really seeing what I was doing. What we were doing.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” I’d said to him. “This is wrong.” Mom was home by then, packed away in the den, her breathing machine hissing in the quiet of the night.

He’d just laughed. A sound that was pure reflex. A sound that contained no joy.

The same way my laugh sounds now.

“I mean it,” I’d said, my palms slick with sweat, my voice unsteady. “We can’t do this. Even without all the other fucked-up stuff, I don’t love you. I don’t even like you.”

He gave me this look, and it made me feel so fucking cold inside. The way snow looks upon a field of flowers every winter and says, ‘I will smother you from the sun’s rays until I destroy you.’

“You’ll learn,” he’d said, his voice far too calm for all that fury that raged in his eyes.

“To what? To love you?”

He chuckled bitterly. “No. You’ll learn that it doesn’t matter if you love somebody or not. They’ll still love you. I’ll still love you.”