She bites her lip, picking at the hem of her t-shirt. Her eyes sketch over my face. “I…I don’t think it was just the concussion.”
I shift my body towards her, so our legs are almost touching. She’s usually so reserved. I’m desperate for any hint of what’s going on in her head.
“I…I think I’ve been in survival mode for nearly a decade.” She says in a whisper.
“Tell,” I say hoarsely.
She frowns, tucking her hair behind her ear. “The last two years have been about survival. Trying to feed myself, find someplace safe to live, get out of the shelter. I could never fully relax knowing that he was looking for me. Then during my marriage…I couldn’t rest. Not my brain, not my body. I was always analyzing, trying to figure out what might set him off. Is the house clean? Did I iron his shirts? Will he like the supper I made? Then when he was home…”
She trails off, and I reach out to stroke the top of her bare foot. “Tell,” I urge her again. “I can take your pain, Holly. I’ve lived through my own hell. I don’t want to compare trauma, but you need to know nothing you can say will change the way I feel about you.”
“Tell…me,” I beg again, dropping my hand back to her foot. I desperately want that little connection with her. You’d think I had a handful of breast, the way my dick is standing at attention.
Her eyes are on my fingers, a flush coloring her throat. A surge of satisfaction travels through me. I knew there was a possibility, fuck, a likelihood that she wouldn’t ever respond to me, so to see her reaction now sends fresh energy into me. “Holly…tell.”
“W…When” she stammers, still watching my hand, “he was home, I had to be on guard.” She wets her lips, eyes darting to mine before falling away again. “I couldn’t predict when things might go bad. Sometimes it was before supper and ran all night. Sometimes he was calm. And sometimes at night…” She trails off, either not able or not wanting to finish that sentence. Maybe it would be smart to drop the subject, let her retreat. But I can’t. So I let that hideous, nauseating word come out of my mouth instead, wanting to spare her that pain.
“Rape.”
Her breath stutters, and her eyes fly to mine.
“Sometimes at night he’d rape you.”I sign. She swallows repeatedly, then, oh so slowly, nods her head. Even though I suspected, I work harder than I’ve ever worked in my life to school my features, not showing her the rage coursing through my body.
I know it in my gut. If she sees it, I’ll lose her. She doesn’t trust me enough yet to know I’m a different kind of beast from her husband, one that’s hers to command. So I’ll hide it. I’ll wait.
“It never starts out bad, does it? My dad didn’t start in on us until I was about six.”I drop to the floor, sliding forward until I’m sitting right next to her, facing her. If I turn my head just a little, I can rest my chin on those cute thighs of hers. “I think it was losing his job that finally set him off.”
“What do you mean? Why would that set him off?” Her breathing’s evened out, now that we’re not talking about her, so the words come out quiet, but clear.
“I don’t know for sure, but I think that when he had money, he’d head out with his friends and spend his anger on the streets.”I pause, thinking of those days. “He’d come home with split lips, and bruised knuckles, and go straight to sleep. So when the money stopped, he was stuck at home, and all that anger got directed at us.”
“Did he hurt you a lot?” Her words are soft. “Or was it mainly your mom?”
“First…Mom.” I can almost her her screams, his shouts. “Then he’d move on to me if he was still feeling energetic. He’d beat her until she stopped moving.”I remember lying against her chest, reassured by her breath brushing my cheek, telling me she was still alive.
Tears well in Holly’s eyes, spilling over to drip down her cheek. I reach over to wipe at them gently. She leans into my touch and I want to shout at that small sign of trust.
“Brent would do that too,” she says tightly. “I learned to stay down. If I stopped reacting. Stopped screaming, then he’d walk away.”
“Smart…girl.”
She laughs wetly, leaning out of my reach and rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands. She looks like she’d like to get up and leave, so I change the subject quickly.
“Holly,” I say, wanting her eyes back on me. “How did you learn to sign? You said you knew someone who was deaf?”
“Ah…there was a little girl in my second-grade class, Robyn. She was hearing impaired. She wore hearing aids and could read lips some, but…I didn’t have very many friends, so I tried to learn as much as I could. She became my best friend.”
“More,” I ask her with a smile. I want more of her stories, more of everything.
Her eyes are hazy, unfocused as she travels to the past. “We muddled along in elementary school. Then in Junior High and High School I took ASL as an elective. Then there were classes in the community. I got pretty good. I loved it.”
“Love…what…part?”
“I loved feeling like we had a secret language. Robyn and I could talk across a crowded cafeteria, or at a football game. Not that I went to many of those.” She says with a rueful grin. “It just felt like something special. But maybe you don’t feel that way about it.”
ASL has mostly felt like a tool, a way to cope, but when I think about it, she’s right.“Actually, I do…sometimes anyway. All the guys learned when we were teenagers, mainly through books and videos from the library, so our gang could pass messages anywhere, as long as we were in sight of one another. It came in handy more than once. But sometimes it’s frustrating to have to use it.”
“What’s w…I mean, what happened?” She flushes at her slip.
