Page 81 of Lie with Me
“Hey.” I try to smile, but the sentiment is empty. I’m too upset to even fake it.
“Are you okay?” she asks meekly.
Am I okay?She was the one sexually assaulted, tortured, and mutilated, and she’s asking ifI’m okay.
I choke back the emotion. “It takes more than losing a few pints of blood to get rid of me.” I slide my hand across the sheet and link our fingers together. Tears instantly well in Tara’s eyes as she takes in the bandages wrapped around both of my wrists.
“I’m so sorry.” She apologizes distraughtly. “I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault.” She starts to sob, and I nearly lose my mind.
“Tara, there’s nothing to be sorry about and nothing is your fault.” I scoot closer to her and rest my forehead against hers.
“People keep telling me that, but I don’t believe it.” She sniffles. I take her face in my hand as gently as possible and drop kisses near the corner of her eye, tasting the salty tears that are staining her skin.
“Majority opinion rules.”
She gazes back at me like she wishes that were true. “Besides, if anyone should be apologizing, it’s me.”
“For what?” She creases her eyebrows causing that cute little wrinkle to pop out right between them.
“For Slade. Tara, I had no idea. He was one of my closest friends, and I had no idea the man he was.”
“He wanted it that way,” she divulges.
I search her weathered face; I have so many questions and she has all the answers. “What . . . What did he say to you?” I regret asking it immediately, but I need to know. I need to know what was going through his mind during his final moments of life.
“He was so angry.” Her voice strains.
“What did he say to you exactly?”
Tears roll freely down her cheeks. “I asked him why, and he told me because he needed to. Because pain and suffering are the only things that got him off. He said he was a different person when he saved you. That he was trying to hide who he really was and that when you grow up around monsters, it was inevitable you become one.’”
My eyes widen. I didn’t expect . . . any of that. Things so deep. So disturbing. I knew about Slade’s shitty upbringing. At least as much as he would reveal. He never went very far into detail, just a lot of offhanded comments about how his father was a drug dealing, womanizing scumbag who would beat up on him and his mom. That’s where the scar on his eye came from. When he was twelve, he stood up to his father, and in return, his father sliced him up with a scalding hot fireplace poker. The scar on his eye isn’t the only one from that night. Half of his back is disfigured with slashes. I remember the first time I saw them. We were bunkmates, and he pulled off his shirt to shower. I’d never seen anything like it. Twenty raised, angry white lines stared back at me. I didn’t ask at first, and Slade didn’t offer an explanation. He just grabbed his towel guardedly and left the room. It wasn’t until close to a year later did he finally tell me what happened. Did he finally warm up to me at all. Like I said, he was always a loner, and now, I finally know why. I’m positive it’s why he attacked Tara the way he did. Pent-up hostility and trauma from his past.
“I wish I was there. I will always regret not being there. Not protecting you.”
“You did protect me.”
“How?” I ask confused.
She reaches under her pillow and pulls out my pocket watch. “I had it with me the whole time. You were with me the whole time.” She places it in my palm and then moves her hand down to my bandaged wrist. “I will always regret that any of this happened.”
What a predicament. Both feeling the same way for different reasons.
“Can I tell you a secret?” I ask, clutching my watch.
She nods faintly.
“You were with me the whole time, too.” I recall seeing her face and hearing her laugh and smelling her skin as I drifted in and out of consciousness. She’s the only thing that forced me to hang on. Love is truly a strange and powerful thing. One I barely believed in until Tara took over my life. “You have been a part of me since the moment I met you.”
Tara smiles sadly. “What do we do now?”
“We move forward. Together. If I have learned anything in my thirty-three years, it’s that the past helps shape who you are, but it never defines you. You should always follow your dreams, and life’s definitely too short not to have sex or eat chocolate cake.”
I actually get a tiny little giggle out of her. I promised I would make her laugh as much as I make her come. And I plan to keep that promise, as long as she’ll let me.
I’m optimistic there’s hope for us yet. . . .
I WAIT IN THE TINYinterrogation room with my leg bouncing compulsively.
