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He stood behind his desk in gray lounge pants and no shirt, sorting through some papers.
“You’re not going to fix them?” he suggested.
I tapped the glass with my fingers, staring up at the hodgepodge he’d made of the books.
“I’m considering it.”
I heard his quiet chuckle. “Maybe you no longer need to be soothed,” he suggested. “Or maybe you found something else equally effective.”
“Cocky,” I shot back, teasing.
But actually, he had a point. A few weeks ago, those books, sitting there out of order, some facing the wrong way, had driven me bananas, and I could not concentrate on a damn thing until I’d gotten them sorted.
Now it just kind of bugged me. I still felt the pull, but there was something else in the room tugging at me, too.
“It’s such a strange feeling,” I mused. “Suddenly abandoning a habit I’ve had for seven years. I feel more peace now than I ever had doing it, though.”
“Seven years?” he repeated. “I thought you started when your parents died five years ago.”
I let out a breath and closed my eyes. “Shit,” I whispered under my breath, not loud enough for him to hear.
I’d forgotten that he didn’t know.
“Easton?” he prompted, clearly waiting for an answer.
I swirled the glass in a circle, watching the brown liquid coat the inside. “Yeah, that story was never in the media, was it?”
In his Googling, he wouldn’t have come across it, because my family had kept it under tight wraps.
“What story?”
I took a deep breath and set the glass down on the floor, tucking my hands behind my head as I started.
“I wasn’t always the sophisticated, capable, and charming woman you see now,” I joked.
He walked around the desk, leaning against the front of it and staring down at me.
“No?” He played along.
I looked up at him and, after steeling myself, opened up to him. “When I was sixteen, I was very naive and sheltered,” I told him. “I didn’t know how to make decisions or question anything. I had never even been on a date, and if my parents had had their way, I never would’ve been.”
I stared ahead at the bookcase, remembering my perfect white house and my perfect pink bedroom and my perfect, strict schedule posted on the refrigerator.
“I was a twenty-four-hour tennis player, and the only people I spoke to were my family, newscasters, and my coach, Chase Stiles.” I looked at Tyler. “He was twenty-six at the time.”
His expression turned guarded. “Chase Stiles? Am I going to like where this is going?”
I gave him a soothing smile and continued.
“He was so devoted to me,” I admitted. “Always encouraging me and spending so much more time working with me than what he was paid for. He would buy me things, and I liked it, because I thought he was the only one who cared about who I was on the inside. He asked me about my interests outside of tennis.”
Tyler stayed quiet, and I hesitated, feeling my stomach knot as the old fear started to surface.
But I forced it out, keeping my eyes downcast. “I didn’t see it as wrong when he started buying me outfits.” I went on. “Tight shorts and sports bras to train in. And I didn’t think it was such a big deal when he took pictures of me posing in the outfits he’d bought.”
“Easton,” Tyler inched out, apprehension thick in his voice. He didn’t like where this was going.
I swallowed through the tightness in my throat, still not meeting his eyes. “But then he started getting familiar,” I explained, chewing on my bottom lip. “Patting me on the behind when I did well or hugging me for too long.” I blinked, pushing away the shame I felt creep up. “A couple of times he came into the locker room while I was showering, pretending it was an accident.”
At the time, I’d felt like it was my fault. Like I was enticing him, or that what he was doing was normal. We’d spent a lot of time together. Training, traveling… We were close, so maybe he was just a really good friend or someone, like my parents, whom I should trust to never hurt me.
“I didn’t tell anyone what was going on, and I didn’t confront Chase about any of it,” I told Tyler. “I just started getting more stressed, and I became angry. Very angry,” I added.
“I started refusing his gifts,” I continued. “And I threw fits when my mother would try to leave me alone with him on the court. After a while, I finally broke down and told them about his behavior.”
“Did he force himself on you?” Tyler bit out, his voice turning angry.
I shook my head. “No. But the behavior was escalating,” I explained. “My parents fired him, but they didn’t press charges. They didn’t want America’s next tennis darling tainted with a scandal forever preserved in the newspapers.”
I looked at Tyler and could see his fists balled up under his arms.
“And then, on top of that,” he deduced, “you lost your parents and your sister two years later. That’s a lot for a young person to go through.”
I nodded. “It was.”
Chase’s abuse, and my parents’ and sister’s deaths, had almost killed me five years ago. I dove into a world of turning chaos into order and building such a tough outer shell that nothing bad could hurt me again.
It wasn’t until recently that I’d realized, looking up at Tyler, that my shell protected me from all the good stuff, too.
“I started arranging and counting things as a coping mechanism, a way to have consistency,” I told him. “To know what I could count on. Awareness of my surroundings, everything in its place…” I went on. “I didn’t like surprises.”
