Page 150 of Chasing Hope

Blinking away and out of my mind, I see I’m on the toilet. That’s right, I’m on autopilot. You have to use the bathroom after sex so you don’t get a UTI.

The words come out of me rote, devoid of emotion. “I was raped.”

Carter’s head rears back. “What?”

“I-I was raped,” I repeat.

I’ve never been so certain of something. That feeling, that indescribable feeling of having someone move over you when you don’t want it—I remember now.

I need to hold on to this feeling.

I can’t forget again.

I can’t allow myself to forget what happened to me.

“I was raped,” I repeat once more.

This time as I say it, nausea swirls in my stomach. Turning, I dispose of the contents in my stomach as the floating head man comes into my mind, the face of the monster who raped me.

Who forced himself upon me from such a young age.

No…it can’t be.

Not him.

Anyone but him.

No, please no, I beg in my mind. But the image is as clear as a photo, undeniable. Then there’s another.

This time, I’m watching myself, watching him grunt in my ear as he slaps his hand over my mouth and tells me to be a good girl and take it. He moves over me while I remain motionless, my eyes wide, tears streaming down my cheeks and over his hand. I’m not moving, not breathing. I’m trying to be as still as possible so he will get off me quicker.

I see it all.

I seehim.

“No!” I cry out before more vomit comes up.

Carter lays his hand on my back and I flinch so violently, screaming at his touch, that he steps away, cursing under his breath as I sob into the toilet bowl.

Not him, not him, not him.

But the truth spirals through my mind, the little girl that I locked away pouring all her sorrows into my adult body, letting me know just how much she’s been suffering alone in the darkness of my mind.

He raped me, she whispers.

I don’t want it to be him. I’m all but begging my mind to switch the face, to make it someone else, to make it someone who isn’t going to destroy me from the inside out, but I can’t. The image is clear, his face contorted in the pleasure of my misery.

It’s all so fucking clear.

And then it starts to make sense.Everythingstarts to make sense.

The bladder infections, how I wet the bed until I was thirteen, the reason why I had internal cuts and couldn’t sit down sometimes. The way he refused to bathe me when I was youngerbecause it was “inappropriate” in his eyes, the way I could never hug him, the way my body would curl in on itself and not touch his skin.

It all makes so much fucking sense.

I was raped.

For the next coming months, I’ll remember every single night he crept into my room when he was in the house. I’ll remember the way he took me shopping the day after to make up for his guilt. I’ll remember the way he could only seem to touch me inappropriately, never innocently, because he didn’t see a little girl, he saw someone he wanted. I’ll remember the way he sat next to me at the dinner table if he was in the house and stroke my leg. I’ll remember the favoritism he’d show me over Caleb.