Page 97 of Unmanageable

“He was so sweet,” she whispers, frowning. “He remembered how I took my coffee, he walked me to my car, he was always respectful. I never thought… I never thought that was even possible with someone like him. You expect the bad guys to actually look like bad guys, right?”

She sighs, like she’s disappointed in herself for not seeing it earlier.

“The next morning,” she whispers, her eyes fixed on my collarbone, refusing to look up. “I got up before he woke up. I walked down to the CVS on the corner and bought a Plan B pill. I took it with a bottle of lukewarm water in the parking lot.”

She pauses.

“Then I went to work and sent him a text message telling him we were done and that he could leave my things on the porch. I never saw him again. I never told anyone. Or… well… I never told them the actual words—I couldn’t—but Ivy and Dean aren’t stupid. They knew something terrible had happened, and they never pushed me to say it out loud, but they knew.”

She lets out a bitter sound, her forehead dropping lower.

“So I kept rationalizing it. I told myself I was overreacting by breaking up with him. I thought, if it was really that bad, I would have screamed. I mean I would have made him stop. The fact that I just let it happen meant that I wanted it. It meant it was just something stupid that I allowed to happen.”

She stops. The room goes entirely quiet again, the only sound the rattling of the old plastic heater by the window.

“I didn’t fight,” she whispers, a single tear spilling over her eyelashes. “I’m supposed to be this aggressive, fearless person who handles everything, and I just… I let it happen because I was too scared to admit that this could happen to me. I was too scared to admit that I couldn’t stop it.”

“I know all the right terms,” she continues. “I’ve sat on a therapist’s couch and had them explain the biology of trauma to me. I know what a freeze response is. I know, intellectually, in my head, that it was assault.”

She pauses, her fingers twisting tighter into my shirt, dragging her knuckles hard against my chest.

“But then there’s always this tiny, horrible voice in the back of my mind that asks, but what if it wasn’t? What if he just woke up reaching for his girlfriend and didn’t realize I was still asleep? What if he thought I was initiating it in my sleep? I keep trying to find a way to make him innocent, because if he’s innocent, then it means it didn’t happen.”

I stare down at the crown of her head, the words pressing hard against the back of my own teeth. I want to tell her to stop tearing herself apart, to tell her that any guy who doesn’t check for an actual, conscious answer knows exactly what he’s doing.

But I force my mouth to stay shut. She doesn’t need me to give her a lecture on consent right now. She knows the definitions. She needs to drag the ugliest, darkest parts of the doubt out into the air where she can finally look at them.

“And,” she whispers, “if it wasn’t that bad, if it wasn’t actually rape… then what the hell have I been doing for the last years?”

She pulls back just an inch, not enough to leave my arms, but enough that she can look blindly toward my shoulder, her jaw set in a hard, tight line.

“I’m not broken, Finn. I know I’m not. I’ve done the work. I do my job, I built a life, and I don’t let it rule me. But if I misread it, if I’m just overreacting to a terrible, clumsy misunderstanding… then I’ve spent the past few years carrying around this massive, suffocating weight for absolutely nothing. It means I’ve been feeling sorry for myself over a lie. It means the nightmares, the panic, the way I couldn’t let anyone touch me for a year—that it was all just me being weak.”

“Scottie.”

I don’t wait for her to look up. I reach down, wrap my arms under her armpits, and hoist her straight off the floor.

She lets out a small, startled gasp as I pull her onto my lap, her back settling against my chest as I wrap my arms tightly around her shoulders, holding her against me like a shield.

“Listen to me,” I say. “Look at my hand, Scottie.”

She doesn’t move, her whole body tense in my embrace.

“Look at it,” I repeat.

“I’ve been in fifty different ice fights since I was fifteen years old,” I tell her. “I’ve had guys three hundred pounds try to take my head off with sticks. And do you know what happens when the shock hits you? Your brain doesn’t think. It doesn’t debate. It just does whatever it needs to do to keep you alive until the whistle blows. That’s it.”

I squeeze her a little tighter, holding her against my chest so she has to feel the truth of what I’m saying.

“You didn’t ‘let’ him do anything, Scottie. Silence isn’t consent, and being frozen doesn’t mean you wanted it. It just means your brain was trying to protect you. You survived it. You got out of the room, you took care of yourself, and you cut him out like a tumor. That is the smartest, toughest thing you could have done.”

Scottie stays still for five long seconds, her breath catching in her throat, her body a tight, frozen knot against my chest.

Then, all at once, her face crumbles.

She lets out a deep, ragged sob that goes straight through my ribs, her entire frame collapsing into me as she turns around in my arms, burying her face into the crook of my neck.

“I don’t—I don’t even know why I’m crying,” she chokes out. “I promise I’m fine, Cash. I’m over it. I’ve gone to therapy, I’ve worked through it, I’m entirely functional. It’s just… hearing it out loud, it’s so stupid.”