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“Rookie mistake.” He chuckled.
“Says the fella who never skipped a day of school in his life,” I shot back with a laugh. “I have it on good authority that you were a fair bit of a swat in your younger days, Darren Lynch.”
“Hmm,” he mused, and then stopped a few headstones up. “This is hers.”
I didn’t want to look at it, but I forced myself to read the name Young in a similar bold font to one on my family’s plot.
Anxiety thrummed inside of me, making me feel faint because I shouldn’t have come over here. I wanted to run, to hide, to shed my skin like a reptile and escape the evidence of the worst day of my life.
Because my worst day was her last day.
“She was a good friend,” Darren said, placing the flowers on Caoimhe’s grave. “She was an all-round good person, period.”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t agree?”
I momentarily panicked when Darren picked up on my reservation. “I didn’t say that.”
“It’s not about what you said,” he replied. “It’s about what you didn’t say.”
For a moment, I held my breath and wondered if he knew. But when he said, “The way she died hurt the people she loved but, in the moment, she couldn’t see a way past her pain.”
“So, you believe her?” I trailed my tongue over my bottom lip, feeling nervous. “You believe he did that to her?”
“I believe something happened,” he replied carefully. “And I believe he’s responsible for that something.”
“You got over it when it happened to you,” I blurted out, balling my hands into fists at my sides to hide my tremors. “If you could go back in time and Caoimhe was standing here in front of you, what would you say? What advice would you give her?”
“If Caoimhe was here, I would tell her that what happened to her doesn’t define her.” Darren looked me dead in the eyes when he said, “It defines him. He’s the monster in the story. The shame is on his doorstep.” He reached up and stroked his jaw before saying, “And I would tell her that it’s never too late to disclose.” His eyes burned with sincerity. “Never.”
“He wouldn’t have gotten prison time even if she had stuck around to prosecute him,” I heard myself whisper. “Everyone believed him.”
“I didn’t believe him.”
“No?”
“No,” Darren replied, shoving his hands into his coat pockets. “And from personal experience, I can honestly say that living with a secret like that eating away at your soul is a much worse fate than disclosing and having people not believe you.” He sighed heavily before adding, “The right people will listen, and they’ll believe.”
“I’m his age now, Darren,” I strangled out. “I’m almost the exact same age he was when he did that to her and I’m responsible for my actions. I know the difference between right and wrong, and I would never do that to anyone, so why the fuck would he?”
“Because he’s evil, Gibs,” he said gently. “Some people are just plain evil.”
“What happened to you in that home,” I choked out. “Do you think it has anything to do with you turning out—”
“You cannot be turned gay or decide to be gay, Gibsie. You are born gay,” Darren cut me off and said, clearly having some psychic ability to read my mind. “Being raped by another man was not a deciding factor in my sexual preference, nor had it any dominion over my sexual orientation, because I was born this way.”
“Oh.”
“But it can cause to you to physically recoil and withdraw from intimate situations with a partner.”
“Even women?”
“Trauma sees no genders,” he explained calmly. “It’s an instinctive thing.”
“Like the back-of-your-mind kind of thing?”
“Exactly,” he agreed. “It’s your subconsciouses way of alerting your body to danger, even when you might not be in any.”
