Authors: Denise Townsend
Hours had gone by and they were tying off the last of the garbage bags.
“Want a water?” Fen asked, as River ran her forearm over her sweaty forehead.
“Yes, please. I’ll start loading the bags to take to the dump.”
Fen headed to the back of the store, where she had a little refrigerator stocked with water and milk for her coffee. River carefully picked up two of the glass-filled trash bags and headed towards her old jeep, parked behind her shop.
When she walked back to the front to get another two bags, Rick was waiting.
“You fucking cunt!” the teenager said, launching out of his car. His face was a snarling mask of rage that River recognized. Trevor had worn a mask just like that when he cut and burned her. Only when he was choking her that night, did Trevor start to smile. That’s when she’d realized he’d enjoyed every minute, and that her death would be some sort of climax for him.
They are fucking psycho
, River realized. The thought galvanized her, and she refused to run away as he barreled towards her.
Bracing herself for a blow that never came, River slowly opened her eyes only to have her vision filled by Fen’s broad shoulders. The selkie was standing between her and her attacker, but when she looked around Fen she saw Rick dangling a few feet in the air, held up by Leo’s strong arms.
Despite his precarious position, Rick kept yelling at River.
“Fucking get the cops on me like I’m some sort of criminal? You’re the fucking criminal, you and your retarded animal of a brother.”
“Shut it, Rick,” Leo warned, trying to get a firmer grip on the boy, but Rick was fighting like a trapped animal.
Fen took care of the situation by stepping forward and hitting Rick hard, but precisely, in the stomach. River was stunned by the almost surgical strike, as Rick went limp in Leo’s arms, crumpling to the sidewalk.
The wail of sirens sounded in the distance, undoubtedly summoned by one of the many passersby gawking at the spectacle.
River kept her distance from Rick, refusing to flinch when the boy raised his head so his now watering eyes met her.
“He’s in the ground,” Rick said, still barely able to speak from Fen’s blow. “And you’re out at bars, laughing it up with friends…”
So that’s what set him off, River realized. He must have seen us out last night. It’s my having a life that enrages him…
River didn’t move any closer to Rick, but she did keep her eyes on him.
“Trevor tried to kill me, Rick. You have to understand that. You know what he did to me.”
The look Rick gave her was so full of hate that she shivered.
“You deserve everything you got then, and you’ll deserve what you get now,” Rick said, then spat weakly at her.
Sheriff White was lucky she got there when she did, because Fen looked ready to show Rick exactly who did deserve what, and Leo was obviously more than willing to help.
Chapter Fifteen
River was silent on the walk home, although Fen could sense the emotional storm raging inside of her.
When they were inside her house, she took off her light spring jacket, checking her phone as she did so.
“Tyrone texted. He took Jason out on patrol with him, so he wasn’t around when they brought in Rick. He’ll drop him off tonight when his shift ends.”
Instead of putting the phone down when she’d read the text to Fen, River kept staring at it. Fen felt her emotions coalesce into that tremendous guilt that weighed her down, and fat tears welled up in her eyes.
“River, lass, tell me what’s wrong,” Fen said, taking the phone away from her before leading her to her couch. The truth was that the selkie had expected such a moment. River had made such quick progress that she was bound to have a relapse, plummeting right back to square one despite what they’d achieved. It was a normal part of the process in recovering from trauma, and Fen hoped that the ghost of Trevor could finally be exorcised from River’s life tonight.
“I’ve just so fucked this up,” River said, obviously trying her best not to cry. “The whole point of all of this was to keep Jason safe, and look what I’ve done.”
“River, you didn’t…”
“I get, now, that Trevor was a monster. I even get that he was good at being a monster, or good at hiding it, I mean. But still. I should have known better.”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw my mother do this over and over again. My father did it too, but we weren’t dependent on him the way we were on my mom.”
“Do what, River?”
“Exactly what I just did. Let these idiots, these creeps, into her life. Into our lives. That’s what she never got: that whomever she dated, we were stuck with them too. All the losers she brought home, she brought to our home. So I should have known better.”
Fen shifted River around so that he could meet her eyes.
“Known better than to have done what, exactly?” Fen asked.
“To ever have dated a guy like Trevor,” she replied, refusing to meet the selkie’s gaze.
“But, River, we’ve already talked about how you couldn’t have known Trevor was the way he was. In fact, he probably looked like the perfect package, to the whole town.”
“Still,” she said stubbornly. “I should have known.”
Fen sampled her emotions, trying to use them to understand what was really going through River’s head. After all, she’d felt like she finally believed the truth of what she’d told Rick—that his brother had been a monster. But here she was, apparently back at square one in terms of mistakenly taking responsibility for someone else’s actions.
So he delved deep into what she was feeling. Uppermost was that overwhelming guilt, yes. But underneath that guilt, much more deeply rooted, was fear. And underlying that fear, shame.
“This isn’t just about Jason is it, River?” Fen asked quietly.
Her response was immediate. A flurry of words accompanied by a little explosion of anger.
“Of course it is, Fen,” she snapped. “I’m supposed to protect him.”
“But you were the one who was attacked,” the selkie said gently.
River shifted looking uncomfortable. Fen knew they were at the heart of the woman’s trauma now. It was a place she didn’t want to go, but she had to.
“Take off your shirt,” Fen asked of her, knowing she’d refuse.
“No.”
“Please, River.”
“Why?”
“Because you keep making what happened to you about everyone else. And yes, other people were affected. But you were the one who Trevor attacked. You were the one who was in the hospital for…how long?”
River looked down at her hand, lying in her lap. “Three weeks.”
“Please, take off your shirt.”
Finally she did.
In the bright light of River’s sunlit living room, Fen could see all the scars he’d caressed and kissed in their harsh reality. They didn’t make River any less attractive, but they did speak of the trauma she’d endured.
The trauma she was determined to ignore.
“What’s this one from?” Fen asked, running his thumb over a roughly circular scar, decorating her ribcage on her right side.
“My rib. I was kicked. It broke and pierced the skin.” River’s voice was eerily robotic, flat and emotionless as if she were reporting on something that had nothing to do with her.
Fen kept himself from wincing, and also carefully kept his own emotions–which were boiling with rage–thoroughly behind his shields.
“And this?” This time Fen’s gentle thumb found the discolored patch of skin on her belly, right below her navel.
“From a skin graft. There was a burned patch.”
Fen noted River’s language–and how she never mentioned Trevor or his culpability. One might think she’d done these things to herself, rather than had them done to her.
Stroking his fingertips down the long slashes that crisscrossed her stomach, Fen asked about them next.
River wouldn’t answer. Instead, she stared down at Fen’s fingers where they gently caressed her, as if she were very far away—in another time, another place.
“River?” Fen prompted, despite feeling her fear and shame rising to overtake her guilt.
The girl had to face her demons, or they would continue to rule her life.
“X marks the spot,” she said finally in a hoarse whisper.
“What spot?” Fen asked, even though he dreaded the answer.
“Trevor enjoyed what he was doing. It made him…excited. When he’d beaten me so badly I couldn’t move anymore, he showed me how much he enjoyed what he was doing.”
“Did he rape you?”
“No. But he masturbated on me.”
Fen didn’t stop stroking River’s scarred belly, although if she’d been able to see his eyes, she would have seen the rage that sparked in his ebony gaze.
“It was like he wanted to be distant,” River mused. “I think if he’d raped me it would have made more sense actually. It would have been a story I could understand—I didn’t let him have me, so he took what he wanted.”
“I don’t think someone like Trevor ever makes sense,” Fen warned. But River was in her own world.
And it was a dangerous one. Fen had purposely ripped off the bandages, so River could see the wound underneath. But while Fen knew this was an important first step for her, he also knew its risks.
So Fen carefully used his own empathy like a wedge, inserting a cushion between her and her own emotions, to buoy her. He basically kept her floating, at a distance, so that she could look, and poke and prod what she found inside of herself without spiraling downward into her own trauma.
Kept safe by Fen, River did exactly as he’d hoped she’d do, and looked closely.
“But maybe it did make sense. Maybe that’s what he’d wanted from the beginning. We never had sex, did I tell you that?”
Fen shook his head. He also moved so that they both could lie down on River’s sofa together. His touches to her multiple scars were ceaseless, meanwhile letting her know that whatever had been done to her body didn’t faze him in the least. She was River, not some amalgamation of her trauma.
“I thought it was odd that he never tried, although we really didn’t date long at all. We certainly fooled around. But I don’t think he ever really got an erection. In case you didn’t notice, I’m pretty forward with my lovers, so I’m used to making the first move. I definitely reached for him a couple of times. He’d bat my hand away pretty quickly, but I could tell there hadn’t been much to grab at anyway.”
Fen’s warm palm made long, lazy strokes over River’s ribcage. His lips were near her temple, and he kissed the delicate shell of her ear as he asked softly, “Do you think he needed your pain?”
“Yes,” she said, twisting her neck up so she could see Fen’s expression. He kept it carefully neutral—focused on listening to her, without judgment.
“I think he engineered situations, hoping he could get mad at me. Looking back, he did little things to piss me off. Like he would show up late for dates, or not call or whatever. But to be honest, I wasn’t that into him. And I’m so independent, and my life’s always so busy. Half the time I’d have forgotten that we had plans, and he’d try to get into this big fight about something I didn’t even care about. So he’d be trying to fight, and I’d sort of be ignoring him, or I’d make an excuse to hang up or go do something somewhere else. Or Jason would show up, and suddenly things were cool.
“But yeah, I never let him get really angry until that night he flipped out in his car. I actually argued with him that night about Paris. He was so adamant we go that weekend, and I thought it was so crazy he couldn’t understand what I was saying about my responsibilities. So I told him no, and I told him why and we ended up arguing. I didn’t walk away, and Jason wasn’t around to see why we were shouting.”
“And Trevor flipped out?”
“Oh, yeah. But looking back, I can see now that it was like I flipped a switch, and as much as he lit up with anger I think he also just lit up. Like I’d made his day, in a sick way.
“I just wanted him to understand that I wasn’t saying what he was accusing me of. He thought I didn’t appreciate him and was rejecting his generosity. I would love to go to Paris, are you kidding me? But I couldn’t go that weekend. That’s all I was saying. ‘Give me a month, dude. I just need a month.’ But the more I tried to explain, the more he accused me of things.”
“He wanted you to get mad.”
“Exactly. And I did. I told him that because of the way he was behaving, I wasn’t sure if I wanted anything to do with him, let alone go to Paris.”
“And he went nuts?”
“Yeah. We were in a restaurant parking lot, or he might have attacked me then. Instead he just raged. It was scary, but to be honest, it was so crazy part of me thought it was kind of funny. I was watching a grown man throw a temper tantrum, for Christ’s sake.
“And that helped me get my own control back. What I’d said about changing my mind about him hadn’t been an idle threat, and seeing him beating on his steering wheel while calling me names and holding his breath only made me see the truth about him. He was good at hiding it, at acting normal, but all that privilege had affected him. I’m too Cajun for that shit,” River joked, and Fen not only chuckled but also kissed her cheek lingeringly.