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“Fuck.” David breathed in harshly, leaning back against the loveseat, his hands running over his face. “I know. You’re right.”
“I don’t want you focusing on my drinking. It ended long ago and that part of the story is just one small part in the journey from point A to point B. Nothing more, nothing less,” she told him, dismissing her near-alcoholism with a shrug of her shoulders. “All right?”
He nodded, but the thought of her drinking every night while alone in their house still annihilated him, and he didn’t think he’d be forgetting that any time soon.
She went on. “Losing Spook was my ‘get my shit together moment’. I cut back from one bottle of wine a night to one glass, which led to some other changes—eating better, sleeping better, things like that. Then, when I sold the house and moved into my apartment, I thought exercising would be a good idea so I signed up for a yoga class, but …” she trailed off, making a face. “I learned really quickly that wearing yoga pants was the only part of the class that I actually enjoyed, so I quit that.
“Next, I decided to give swimming a try, so I bought a bathing suit, a cap, and goggles, then got a limited membership at a local gym so I could swim laps. I remembered liking to swim when I was really young, but the second I got in the water that morning to swim my first lap, I felt … uncomfortable. Almost to the point of anxiety.
“I swam for like half an hour, hoping it would go away, but when I got out it was worse, which didn’t make any sense. I dried off and quickly got dressed, not even bothering to take a shower first, then left. Later, I wondered if showering would’ve changed anything, but as I was driving to my apartment, with the smell of chlorine surrounding me in the car …”
She stopped to take a drink of wine. Despite her steady voice, David could see her hands were shaking a little.
“I’m not sure how to describe it,” she went on, “but all of a sudden I was a child, standing in the shallow end of my Uncle Carter’s pool.”
Her voice dropped a notch. “Carter was sitting on the steps that led down into the water, holding me tightly between his legs, his erection pressing into my back.
“I was wearing my favorite bathing suit. It was the one with pink flowers on it and a ruffled skirt that made me feel like a princess and the crotch had been pushed aside so he could shove two of his fingers inside me.”
Chapter 46
David grabbed his glass of wine off the coffee table and drained it in two swallows. In the background, “Landslide” was playing softly.
“I didn’t know it at the time,” Paige continued, “but I was having my first flashback and it was like a memory, but not like a memory I remembered, if that makes any sense. And it was such a fucked-up memory, that I didn’t think it could possibly be real … but at the same time the details were so vivid and clear that it didn’t seem like it could be fake, either.
“And there were so many details: the warmth of the water, the song playing on the portable radio, the sound of a neighbor’s lawnmower, and the overwhelming smell of chlorine.
“There were also things I knew, but couldn’t see. I knew I’d just turned six years old. I knew my mother was lying on a lounge chair behind me on the patio, asleep in the sun. I knew the hand covering most of my face was to keep me quiet, and would make it very hard for me to breathe if I struggled. And I knew that what was happening wasn’t happening for the first time.
“I knew all these things almost instantaneously. It was like information saturation, and as quickly as it happened, it was over and I was back in my car. The scary part is that I was driving when this happened, but it happened so fast—literally lasting only seconds—that nothing bad happened. You know, like crashing into another car, or running over a pedestrian.
“But once it was over, I felt sick, like I was going to throw up. My entire body was shaking and I couldn’t make it stop. I had to pull over in a parking lot because I was such a mess. I sat there in my car—for who knows how long—shaking and trying to figure out what had just happened.”
David’s eyes were burning and he blinked several times. He was dangerously close to crying as he pictured a six-year-old Paige in her favorite swimsuit in a pool with a pedophile. Her uncle. With his fucking hand covering her face, his fucking fingers inside her, and his hard dick pressed against her narrow back. All while her mother snoozed on a lounge chair a few feet away soaking up some rays, which added an extra layer of horror to an already horrific situation.
For a moment, he wondered if he was going to actually be able to listen to her story. He knew he’d said he wanted this, but maybe reading it was the way to go, so he wouldn’t have to hear her sweet voice tell him these appalling things. But then he thought about Paige having gone through these appalling things and knew he couldn’t chickenshit his way out of this; he had to hear it.
And she probably needed to be able to tell it to him.
“Are you okay?” she asked quietly, seeing his struggle.
He didn’t know how to answer that. Every hair on his body felt like it was standing on end, and at the same time, his skin felt too tight. “Um … not really,” he admitted, forcing himself to look at her. “Could you come sit with me? I just feel like I need to have you near me right now.”
She immediately got up and came over to the loveseat, but instead of sitting where she could face him, like he thought she would, she curled up behind him. “How’s this? Better?”
David nodded.
His hair was up tonight and she put her hand to the man bun. “Do you mind if I take this down?”
Her request surprised him. “Go ahead.”
She carefully freed his hair and tossed the elastic tie onto the coffee table, only to have Sputnik launch himself off David’s lap to pounce on it and bat it to the floor with a paw. He immediately followed it down and began playing with it, now using both paws to toss it into the air and then chase it out of the living room.
“Shit. You’re probably not going to get that back,” Paige murmured, as Sputnik disappeared down the hall, out of sight.
“Probably not,” he agreed. “Thankfully, I have another hundred at home.”
The brief moment of levity helped David relax a little, and when he felt her fingers gently running through his hair, he relaxed even more, leaning back into her more as she continued with her story.
