“You could have… not taken care of it.”
“Feel like it happened partly ’cause of me. ’Cause I embarrassed him. Anyway, he woulda done that to you if he could. And no one gets to keep breathing if they have hurting you in their head.”
I should be a little scared. That he’s saying that kind of thing so bluntly. But he’s right about the world being different than it was.
And it makes me feel safe rather than scared.
I squeeze his large biceps before I start rubbing his arm again. “Maybe I shouldn’t take the whole thing so personally. I feel terrible for Poppy, but… It’s more like it feels what happened to her really happened to all of us. I’m not sure if I can explain.”
“I get it. Doing what you do… Nell does a good job setting boundaries, but y’all are still walking a line every night.” Hepauses. Then asks in a different tone, “That ever happen to you before?”
“Not like that. Not out of the blue by force like that. Early on, I would sometimes bring a guy upstairs who ended up being rougher than he should’ve been, but I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing the signs and I don’t choose men like that anymore. Plus most of the guys are careful because they don’t want Nell to banish them. It really doesn’t happen as often as it might.”
“Was it… hard? When you first started?”
I shrug and shift positions. “I… don’t know. Not like you’re thinking. I was completely desperate when Nell found me. I didn’t have any friends or family at Impact, so I was trying to make it on my own. But I couldn’t. There was no way. I was way more under threat back then than I’ve been since I’ve started working for Nell. I was mostly glad that I had food and shelter and some measure of protection. And the customers… well, a lot of them aren’t that bad.” I tilt my head to smile up him. “And some of them I actually like.”
His eyes are smiling, but his voice growls slightly when he asks, “Some?”
“Well, one.”
He gives a funny little nod. “Okay. Good.”
I giggle. Then I remember what happened to Poppy earlier and I feel guilty.
With a sigh, I tuck my head against Cade, pleased when he wraps an arm around me and scoots me closer.
We lie in silence for a few minutes. Then I hear myself saying, “Did you know that male ducks are all little rapists?”
He gives a slight jerk, clearly surprised by the comment. “What now?”
“Male ducks. They go around raping female ducks all the time. The females will run away and fight back or do whatever they can to stop it from happening, but the males still forcethemselves on them. Sometimes they’ll gang up and all go at a female at the same time. Sometimes they end up killing the female. They’re a bunch of little feathered rapists. They’ve been doing it for so long that the female ducks’ reproductive systems have adapted. They have a supercomplex vaginal tract that can stop sperm from getting through, and they can relax their muscles to let it through only if they want to. So they don’t have to reproduce with every male duck who rapes them. So they can still choose their mates.”
I’m staring up at the ceiling now the way Cade was earlier. Something heavy has settled in my chest. “I don’t know why I thought of that.”
“I do.” Cade reaches down to find and hold my hand.
“Yeah.” Emotion is shuddering in my throat and behind my eyes, but there are no tears. There never are anymore. “We can’t control what happens to us. And the weaker we are the less we can control. If Impact taught us anything, it’s that.”
I don’t know why I’m saying this, why I trust this man enough to verbalize something so deep.
“We have to live with what happens to us, but we can still hold on to whatever small bits of power remain to us. They can’t take everything. Female ducks refuse to relinquish the one power they have left. They get to decide who fathers their offspring. And maybe we can do the same thing, even as we grapple to stay alive in this hellscape. We can still hold on to something—a core part of who we are. Our souls. Or something.”
Cade makes a gruff sound in his throat. A very slight shudder runs through him. Then he says, “Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.”
I’m too emotional now. I’m not used to it, and I don’t know what to do with it. So I give my head a little shake and ask, “What did you do before Impact?”
Cade must know I’m intentionally changing the subject, but he goes along with it. Maybe he needs to talk about somethinglighter too. “I was in the Navy for ten years. Then I came back home to run our hardware store.”
“Your hardware store? You owned it?”
“Yeah. It was my family’s store, and I took it over when my dad retired. Nothing special. Just a small-town hardware store.”
“Did you like it?”
“Sure, I did. I could help people. I was part of the community. It got decent business, so it never felt like a struggle to keep going. I’d’ve been happy to do it for the rest of my life.”
“Where was it? Around here?”
