Page 161 of Break Away
“I didn’t tell you about the video,” she began, her voice thin and serrated, “because saying it out loud… it doesn’t feel like remembering. It feels like it’s happening again. And before you say that’s not fair to you, I know. I know it isn’t. You deserved so much more than a set of rules with no key and a woman who had a panic attack every time you tried to turn on a light in any room I was in.”
My blood went cold. I didn’t move.
Her fingers twisted in the fabric of her uniform shirt, clutching the black cotton like a lifeline. “The rules… they were never about you. Not at first. They were about him.”
The floor seemed to tilt. “Maddox told me some.”
“Maddox is alive because I told you to stop,” she whispered, her voice trembling.
“He was Darian’s friend? One of the friends?”
“Yes.” A tear tracked cleanly through the smudged mascara. “He was one of the four.” She swiped at her cheek again, a harsh, angry gesture. “The lights. The lights stayed on,Easton. That was his thing. He made sure of it. So, there was no doubt. No shadow to hide in. My face was in it. My body. Every part of me. My voice. And my name.” Her breath hitched, a terrible, ragged sound. “He said my name. Thirty-seven times. I counted. On the video. Thirty-seven fucking times.”
The air left my lungs in a rush. My hands curled into fists so tight my short nails bit half-moons into my palms, the busted knuckles pulling against fresh gauze until pain flared clean and bright. A white-hot, homicidal rage, purer and more focused than anything I’d ever felt, narrowed my world to a single, burning point: Darian Colton’s face. I wanted to find it and erase it. Permanently.
She saw the intent in my eyes and shook her head violently. “No. Don’t. Don’t you dare make this about your anger. I’m not telling you so you can play avenger. I’m telling you so you understand.”
“This rage is the only thing holding me together right now,” I ground out, my voice barely recognizable.
“He said it like he was labeling a specimen,” she continued, her own voice flattening into something horrifically detached. “So, everyone watching would know exactly whose body they were dissecting. And they did. Oh, they fucking did. I was either a slut who’d asked for it, or a liar trying to cover her tracks. I was never the girl who was date raped. I was the entertainment. My body was the show. He didn’t just… video me. He packaged it. He distributed it. He turned my trust, my name, into a punchline for the whole school.”
Bile rose in my throat. The room wasn’t tilting anymore; it was spinning. I could hear the ragged, animal sound of my own breathing.
Her tears fell silently now, but her words were cold, precise, like she was reciting a clinical report of her own murder. “So, I built a fortress. No lights. Because the last time a boywanted to see me, the whole world got a front-row seat. No naked bodies. Because mine had already been picked apart by a committee of peers. No names. Because he stole mine and made it the title of my own humiliation.”
I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth until I tasted the coppery tang of blood. It was a better taste than the ash of her words.
Then she looked at me, and the clinical detachment shattered, leaving her face a ruin of pure sorrow. “And then you came along.”
My heart stopped.
“You came along,” she repeated, her voice softening into something unbearably vulnerable. “And you didn’t push. You listened. You made the rules feel like mine, not a challenge to break. You made me feel… safe. And that terrified me more than anything.”
A broken laugh escaped me. “Safe was worse?”
“Yes.” The word was a sob. “Safe meant I had something to lose. Something that mattered. And I was so fucking broken, Easton, I only knew how to love things by ruining them first, before they could ruin me.”
“You lost something,” I said, the words like gravel.
“I lost you.”
It was an arrow through a crack in my armor I didn’t know existed. I pushed off the couch, not toward her, but away, needing space from the magnetic pull of her pain. “Don’t do that shit.”
“I did.”
“No.” I whirled, pointing a finger at her, my control fraying. “You don’t get to stand here after a year of making me question my own sanity and act like you’re the only ghost at this funeral. You knew I was hurt.”
“I know you were hurt.”
“You don’t know shit.” The shout echoed in the small room. She flinched, and whatever satisfaction I thought the truth might bring turned to ash. “You knew I was mad. You knew I was loud. You knew I wore my heartbreak like a fucking badge because I didn’t know how else to carry it. But you don’t know what it did to me. To feel so sure of what we were in the dark, and have you look at me in the light like I was a delusional fan. You made my love feel like a symptom.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, the words soaked in tears.
“Stop saying that,” I roared, advancing a step. She stood her ground, a miracle in itself. “Stop wielding your sorry like it’s a magic wand that gets to erase the scars. It doesn’t touch the damage, Aura. It just salts the wound.”
I was close to her now. Close enough to see the individual tear tracks, to smell the salt and sex on her skin. Her breath hitched, but she didn’t retreat. She never retreated from me in spaces like this. That was the sickest part of our whole twisted dance.
“You knew I was safe,” I said, my voice dropping to a low, dangerous rasp.
