Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 123579 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 618(@200wpm)___ 494(@250wpm)___ 412(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 123579 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 618(@200wpm)___ 494(@250wpm)___ 412(@300wpm)
For a few moments, I know she’s not with me. I know she’s lost in a place she needs for herself at least a little longer. And then she invites me in with her words.
“I had a shoot in LA.” Her voice is as soft and wistful as a sigh, barely there. “I had an early flight to catch. I woke up and I was…there was blood in my sheets. So much…”
I feel her muscles tightening as her story unfolds, and I rub her arms, hoping to soothe her.
“I had no one to call.” I can hear in her voice that she’s been transported back to that morning, to the fear and panic. It’s there, woven into her words. “I…I hadn’t seen a doctor. Only took a test. I called the closest thing I could think of. My therapist. She was a rape counselor, but she lived not too far away. She came and got me and took me to a hospital, but it was too late.”
Sofie takes the corner of the sheet to wipe at her tears, sniffing quietly.
“I don’t know how they found out. My medical records were private. They got it wrong. I did have a D&C, but it wasn’t an abortion. It was a miscarriage.”
She shivers despite the shared warmth of our bodies.
“And I wanted that baby. I wanted it for myself. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Who knows what I would have done in the end, but when I lost it, I wanted it. I do know that.”
She quakes with the cries wrenched from her. I feel every heave and every rough sob, not just the motion and sound of it vibrating through my muscle and bone, but I feel it in the places unseen. I feel it in my soul, and I know it’s because Sofie and I are connected by something that goes beyond sex, beyond friendship. We are connected by love. I know I can’t experience this hurt as deeply as she does, but I feel it with her. I’m attuned to every motion, every tear, every sigh. An intimacy that transcends flesh and blood tangles us together, so I know when she finally falls asleep. And I know it’s not only because this day has left her spent, exhausted, but because here with me, sharing these hurts with me that she’s never shared with anyone before, she found some measure of peace.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Sofie
I jackknife to sit upright, confused by my surroundings. I dreamed of that night again. The night that severed me from the innocence of my mind and body. Sleep transported me back to my bedroom after the prom. I was wrapped in my fluffy robe, my spine, a pipeline for rivulets of water dripping from the hair hanging in tangled clumps around my neck. Icy water pooled at the small of my back. My fingertips puckered from the shower. My nails, broken from the fight, folded into my palms. My skin, scalded neon pink from all the scrubbing. But the scrubbing couldn’t reach the shame. Nothing could.
But I’m not there anymore.
I’m not slumped on the floor in the bedroom where I hosted sleepovers for the popular girls growing up. I’m in bed, and it’s not the pink and white four-poster in my parent’s Park Avenue house. The headboard is quilted and tufted at my back. I’m not in my fluffy robe. I’m naked, and a thickly muscled thigh brushes up against my hip.
The room’s bulky shapes clarify as my eyes grow accustomed to the predawn light. A huge lump next to me rises and falls only slightly under the covers, the sound of breath drawn and expelled the only noise in the otherwise quiet room. My hand wanders a few experimental inches until I encounter the warm, hard slope of a naked shoulder. I slide my fingers into the hair at his nape, the strands cool and silky.
Bishop.
My relief is so deep and profound tears sting my eyes, and I have to catch a sob in my hand before it wakes him.
He’s here. Oh, God, he’s here. Thank God.
While I slept I was trapped in a montage of memories from that night fifteen years ago. I’m not sure how much of it was a fictional scene my subconscious cobbled together from scraps in my head, and how much of it was real. But the other part, the part where Trevor gathered me close—cold, naked, catatonic—and brought me to bed, that was real. The part where I unlocked the cell where guilt and shame held my past prisoner, and I told Trevor all the things no one else knows—that was real. The part where I fell asleep experiencing something I, by reason of my shitty week, had no reason to feel—peace—that was real. And everything real was because of the man asleep beside me.