AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter 12
“Why don’t you sleep on it?” Bobbi asked. “We can go to the police tomorrow. Or after—”
“No.”
“Ali—”
Ali gritted her teeth. “Mom, I don’t understand how many times I need to say it for you to get it. There’s nothing to report.”
She shook her head as she imagined returning to the police station. My name is Alison Whitaker. I knowingly got in a car with a rapist who was drunk and who nearly attacked me a week earlier. I offered to drive him home because I felt sorry for him. He did what he did to me, and I had no idea any of it happened until days later. I’d like to file a police report that will sit in a filing cabinet for all eternity.
“How about some tea?”
Ali hardly ever saw her mother drink tea, so she wasn’t sure why suddenly Bobbi believed some steeped, dry herbs were the cure-all.
“She doesn’t need tea,” her grandmother hissed. “Get her a drink.”
Ali didn’t need anything apart from silence. “I’m going to bed.”
Bobbi frowned. “What about dinner?”
“I’m not hungry.”
She slid open the screen door, stepping into the house, rubbing her side. The ache on the right was still there, and Ali wished she could brush it away. Because now she knew the fractured rib didn’t come from the airbag or the seatbelt. It came from Graham slamming her against the hood of her car, another piece of that night Ali had been carrying around against her will.
“It could’ve been worse,” she whispered to herself, but the extra reassuring nod she tried to give herself was anything but.
What would that have felt like? She wondered. There had been pushing, groping, grabbing. There was the disgusting feel of him pressed against her ass. There was the blood that came when Graham pushed his hand so hard against her face, her teeth cut into her own cheek. There was crying and snot and screams into the dark, quiet night of the street, which had more empty lots than houses.
But she got a taste of it—of Graham’s dirty, sweaty hands prying her thighs open, of his fingers clawing their way inside of her. It tasted of shame, guilt, disgust, and more than anything, so much regret.
She closed the door to her room, sitting on the bed.
You were nice to him.
You tried to look out for him.
He was violent, and you still offered to drive him home.
You didn’t leave as soon as he got out of the car. She recalled that moment, the empathy she couldn’t ignore in her bones when Graham slumped his shoulders and made his way toward the dark, empty house alone.
The sleeping pills John had given to her caught Ali’s eye from their place on the nightstand. It had been days of hardly any sleep, and what little she did get was full of what nightmares were made of.
He fooled me.Ali shuddered as she laid down, pulling the duvet over her head. Cornell was right all along.
A painful pout captured her mouth. Cornell.
That was the one thing she wanted in the silence—him beside her. Just there. Like any other normal day.
A whimper escaped Ali’s mouth as she felt it all over again—the brokenness that captured him, the unsure, enormous amount of energy in his body as he sat on the bench beside her. She heard the way her name sounded coming from his mouth—endlessly heartbroken, clouded by pity. And his face. God, his face.
As if it all wasn’t enough already—Graham, the car accident, the uncertainty swallowing her head—Cornell’s face had to be the worst of it all. It was the way he looked at her, how he saw her. There wasn’t relief that she escaped. There wasn’t comfort knowing it could have been worse.
I didn’t feel like a victim until he looked at me like one.
Ali tugged the duvet down her face so that she could see the fading light of a long day through the window. She clung to it—as she had when the flash of light spooked and sobered Graham up enough to pause. The light got her away, but not soon enough.
Rubbing her arm, Ali knew she had left pieces of herself back in the shadows.
