Violated (8 page)

No, he had to go home. Even if it meant having to be with Victor.
God! Why is this happening?

He thought about leaving the room, going to one of the hotel lounges or the restaurant. At least until the flight. But people would be there—people who would wonder what was wrong with him, sitting there staring blankly at the carpet. He’d have to face that in the airport, but… not yet.

Go to the police? The thought terrified him. The only thing that could be worse than what Victor had just done to him would be to
tell everyone
about it. No, what he needed was for it to go away. To get it out of his head, dump a bottle of bleach in one ear and slosh it around in his brain for a few hours.

One thing he knew for certain—he couldn’t go back to that bed. Even if he could find a patch that wasn’t soaked in piss to lie down on, he just… couldn’t. He stayed in the bathroom, seated on the closed lid of the toilet, until daylight seeped under the bottom of the door. When he finally ventured out, pale gray light filtered through the vertical slats covering the hotel room windows. Not yet dawn, but that cold, sickly light that preceded it.

Victor was still asleep in his bed, breathing quietly. The thought
I could kill him now
flashed through Derek’s mind. But no. That wasn’t going to happen. He didn’t know what would happen. He couldn’t think about the future. He couldn’t think about the past—
God, not the past!
And there was nothing in the present but cold emptiness. He couldn’t think clearly; he couldn’t think at all.

The sight of the man in the bed made him nauseous. Sick to the core. Perhaps it was best that he’d vomited all he could.

Derek found his clothes and dressed quietly, then sat in one of the hotel armchairs by the window, his legs and arms tucked in as though he were cold. He had no idea whether he was or not. He sat and listened to the icy silence before morning, staring at Victor and waiting. He didn’t know what he was waiting for, exactly. Eventually Victor would wake up. Eventually he would open his eyes and see the man who’d been his best friend for over twenty years. Would he see the damage he’d done? Would he call Derek his bitch? Throw him down, rip him open, and finish destroying him? Tell everyone at work, so they could laugh and sneer and draw lots for who would get to ride the faggot next?

There, I’ve thought about the future. Bravo. The first step on the road to recovery.

The gray light turned pink. Then Derek jerked painfully as the alarm clock on the bed table went off.

It was 6:00 a.m. Time to go home.

Victor snarled and rolled over, reached an arm out, and flailed at the clock until he found the button to shut it up. Then he stretched and farted. He lay there a minute, scratching his chest, and then slowly opened his eyes. He peered over at Derek’s empty bed. Then he sat up groggily.

“You in the bathroom?” he called out. The door was open and the light was off, but maybe he thought Derek was sitting on the toilet in the dark.

Derek couldn’t answer. He watched silently as Victor stood up, looked around the room, and finally saw him. Victor started.

“Jesus! You scared the shit outta me!” When Derek still said nothing, he frowned, “Why are you acting all weird?”

Christ! Is it possible he doesn’t remember?

Derek looked back at him, but he couldn’t force himself to speak.

“I gotta take a dump,” Victor muttered and turned away to go into the bathroom.

Derek listened to the man do his business with the door open and then shower. It wasn’t until he heard the sound of the spray that Derek was able to make himself move from where he’d sat for the last hour or so. His legs were numb when he unfolded them, and he had to walk off the pins and needles for a minute. Then he went to his suitcase and found a clean shirt. The one he was wearing reeked of sweat.

They had to get to the airport soon. But first he’d have to endure breakfast and a cab ride. Then he’d have to sit beside Victor on the plane.

He
has
to remember! He’s full of shit if he says he doesn’t
.

The problem was, Victor didn’t say one word about it, either way. When he came out of the bathroom, stark naked as he toweled off, he acted as if everything was exactly as it had been yesterday—as if they were still best buds, as if he was the same straight, crude bastard he’d always been. If he noticed Derek’s robotic behavior as he packed up his suitcase, Victor didn’t say a word about it.

He talked about the flight, about the shitty time they’d had there, about being slightly hungover. It was almost enough to convince Derek that Victor didn’t remember anything from last night—it had all happened during some kind of drunken blackout.

Except for one thing.

During all this, Derek’s sheets and blankets were lying on the bed, shoved down toward the bottom in a heap when he’d gotten up to go into the bathroom. The sheet underneath was clearly visible, soaked with piss that hadn’t quite dried yet and a faint brownish smear of what might have been blood, where his ass had dragged across it. Victor had to see it. But he didn’t rag on Derek for pissing the bed or ask him what the fuck had happened.

He didn’t say a word about it.

R
USS
WAS
having trouble with the interview.

Liz Sutton seemed oddly calm as she sat across from Russ at the police station. She sipped her coffee and talked about her garden, about needing to prune the holly bushes near the front porch before they grew so tall they obscured the view, about a new antifungal spray she wanted to try on the roses this year. And only occasionally did she drop in a detail about the day her husband’s younger brother raped her.

“You told us he—Owen—was drunk,” Officer Chavez said. She was the third person at the table, his partner, and she had a lot more experience working rape cases than he did.

Mrs. Sutton was a sweetheart. But ever since Russ had learned about what… the motherfucker whose name he could no longer even
think
without going into a rage… had done to his sister, he’d been driven by a desire to
do something
. Anything! But he had no idea what he could do to help Shannon. She didn’t even seem to want his help. At this point she probably didn’t need it.

“Yes,” Mrs. Sutton replied.

“Was he drunk when he arrived at your house?”

“Oh no.” She shook her head. “He’d already been staying with us for three or four days, I think.”

“You don’t remember, exactly?”

The elderly woman frowned, a crease appearing between her eyebrows. This had been the problem since the interview began. Her memory of events was vague and disjointed, further complicated by the fact that the rape had occurred five years ago. She hadn’t dared report it until after Mr. Sutton passed away.

“I suppose,” Mrs. Sutton said thoughtfully, “it was four. He showed up on Christmas Eve and stayed until Sunday. Christmas was on a Thursday that year, wasn’t it?”

“In 2009?” Chavez asked. She glanced at her notes. “No, that would have been a Friday.”

“Oh. Then I suppose he was only there three days. He definitely didn’t arrive until Christmas Eve. So that would have been Thursday night. And he left Sunday afternoon.”

Russ found all the waffling on details frustrating, but Officer Chavez seemed to have endless patience. She calmly made a note on her pad.

“So the incident occurred on the day after Christmas? On Saturday afternoon?”

Mrs. Sutton thought about that for a moment. “Yes, I suppose that’s right.”

“At about two o’clock?”

Mrs. Sutton said uncertainly, “I… It must have been about that time. I was doing dishes after lunch, and we’d eaten just after noon. I remember George calling me into the bedroom….”

Chavez’s eyes flicked to Russ’s for just a second, though her expression remained neutral. George wasn’t the name of Mrs. Sutton’s brother-in-law. It was the name of her deceased husband. Until now Russ had thought the husband was out somewhere when the rape occurred. “George called you in?” Chavez asked. “Your husband?”

“Yes.”

“What did he want?”

Mrs. Sutton looked mortified. “Well… what does any husband want with his wife in the bedroom?”

“You said earlier that
Owen
was in the bedroom,” Chavez reminded her gently.

“Well, yes. He was.”

“With George?”

“Yes.”

“Had they both been drinking?”

“They were
still
drinking. There was a bottle of rum….”

“Did George want to have sex with you? In front of his brother?”

The woman frowned and looked down at the table in front of her. She opened her mouth to respond but put a hand to her lips, as if to prevent herself from speaking. Instead, she nodded.

“Did that happen?”

“I told him no. I told him it was… disgusting….” She paused to take another sip of her coffee, her hand trembling as she raised the cup to her mouth.

Russ felt ill. This woman reminded him of a teacher he’d once had in elementary school—prim and proper, a woman who’d somehow herded a class of unruly eight-year-olds without ever raising her voice. He struggled to force the image of taciturn Miss McConnell being confronted by naked men looking for a threesome out of his head. Chavez simply took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Mrs. Sutton, you’ve been telling us that Owen forced himself upon you.”

“That’s right. He did.”

“Did your husband
also
force himself on you?”

“Well… I suppose,” Mrs. Sutton admitted, her eyebrows arched in surprise. “But that’s not
rape
. He was my husband.”

A
FTER
THE
interview, Chavez suggested they take a late lunch downtown.

“Why am I thinking the DA’s not gonna bother with this one?” Russ asked, once they’d relocated to Luigi’s a few blocks down the road. Frankly, he wasn’t sure there was much to go on. Not five years after the incident.

Chavez shrugged. “It’s technically within the statute of limitations.” A sexual assault charge could be prosecuted in New Hampshire up to six years after the incident if the victim was over the age of eighteen. But she shook her head. They both knew it wasn’t likely with no evidence, especially when it involved a spouse.

They were sitting in the back of the pub, well away from other customers, but they still had to curb the discussion as the college kid waiting on them brought out their burgers. The guy was cute, and Chavez gave him a vaguely flirtatious smile. But his eyes seemed fixed on Russ. When he’d gone, Chavez muttered, “Is everyone around here gay?”

Russ tried not to smile as he picked up a fry and nibbled on it. “He’s too young for my tastes.”

“He’s legal and breathing,” Chavez replied. She was an attractive woman, in an understated way, but she never wore makeup—on or off the job, as far as Russ could tell—and she kept her hair short. A lot of the guys at the station were convinced she was a lesbian.

“It was a threesome,” she said. For a second Russ was afraid she was talking about herself, him, and the cute waiter. Then he realized she was simply getting back to the subject. “And despite what she says, hardly anyone is going to believe she was forced into it.”

Russ felt a surge of protectiveness for the shy widow who’d blushed whenever she’d been forced to use words like “penis” in her statement. “She told her husband she didn’t want to do it.”

“Wives have been telling their husbands no since the beginning of time. Nobody cares.” Chavez laughed bitterly. “Oh, sure. It’s illegal
now
for a man to force his wife into sex, but only since 1991. You wanna know how often that actually goes anywhere when it’s reported? And by her own admission, she didn’t fight back. She just lay there and let both men do what they wanted.”

“They were drunk and her husband had struck her in the past. She was terrified.”

Chavez took a bite of her burger, chewed, and swallowed. “Nobody cares, Russ.”

“I care!”

Chavez hesitated, her hand in the process of reaching for another fry. “Yeah,” she agreed. “So do I.”

T
HE
TRIP
home had been a waking nightmare. All through breakfast, the cab ride to the airport, and the interminable wait at the airport gate, Victor tried to make small talk and joke around as if nothing had happened between them. Derek had been unable to play the game. He’d stared resolutely at his plate, at his hands, at his carry-on bag—anything to avoid looking at Victor. When he’d absolutely had to, he’d responded with grunts or one-word answers. On the plane he’d been forced to sit with his shoulder and upper arm pressed against the man. Victor was so massive, no amount of shifting in his seat could free Derek from bodily contact. The feel of their shared body heat was nauseating, and the cologne he’d always disliked now smelled like the stench of rot and decay to him.

And then there had been the burning. Derek’s asshole had felt as if it were on fire the entire time he’d been forced to endure the company of his rapist. Every time he moved, he imagined how inflamed and torn up he must be down there. Was he still bleeding? He’d been wondering all morning if he was walking around with an obvious, dark wet spot on the seat of his pants. So far, every time he’d been able to reach back and check without being noticed, it had been dry. He wondered if he would end up with scabs or, worse, scar tissue. Would it always hurt, every time he had to shit?

How could men ever think this feels good?

He knew Tim liked it. But the thought of that simply depressed him. It was yet another thing about his fiancé he couldn’t make sense of.

By the time the plane landed at Manchester Airport, Derek could no longer stand to be in Victor’s company one more minute. Victor called for a cab, but Derek told him, “Go ahead. Tim’s coming to pick me up.”

He was afraid Victor would argue with him, try to convince him to call Tim and tell him not to bother. But Victor just shrugged and mumbled, “Suit yourself.”