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I knew the word.

I had known it since I was about fourteen years old, when a teacher with kind eyes had stood at the front of a classroom and made all of us say it out loud so we understood it better. I had used it professionally and I had written it on charts. I had sat with women in curtained bays at three in the morning and held their hands while they tried to make their mouths shape it. And I had never once, not for a single second, thought it was a hard word to understand. Because of course, I had also endured it before ever setting foot in Ashlock.

So, it shouldn’t have taken me until nearly midnight, sitting on the edge of a rented bed with my knees pulled up, to try to make sense of it.

Assault.

I said it in the dark of that apartment. Out loud, in a small, quiet voice, the way you might read a word off a page in a language you were still learning.

And I waited for it to hit me. The problem was…

It never did.

That was the part I had never been able to explain, not then and not since. It sat there in the air of that room and refused to attach itself to what had happened, the way a magnet refuses the wrong metal. Clinically speaking, it was the right word for a man who had held my wrists against a wall and put his thumb in my mouth and told me to be good for him.

And some traitorous part of me heard it and thought, close… but not quite. The next thing I asked myself was why, quickly followed by,

What was wrong with me?

Was it because he hadn’t hurt me? Was it a different type of fear that fueled the rush I secretly felt in the moment? Was it because from the very start I had been dangerously attracted to him?

Were all these things really enough to convince myself that what he did wasn’t as bad as others would no doubt view it?

I had no answers to any of these questions that plagued me. I was left only with the way I felt afterward and the shocking knowledge that I wanted to touch myself because of it.

I turned the lamp on, because the dark was only making it worse.

The bruise at my neck had come up while I drove home. But that was the thing about bruises, they took their time and arrived hours after the fact. When you have already told yourself that you’re fine.

I had driven home in a tank top with my coat buttoned up to the throat, because my scrub top had left that infirmary in a murderer’s fist. I signed for a replacement set out of the supply closet before I went, and nobody asked me a single thing about it.

I turned my wrists over in the lamplight and looked at them closely for the first time, finding nothing.

Not a mark. Not a thumbprint. Not even a shadow or one broken vessel to show for it. He had held both of my wrists in one large hand for the length of the whole thing, and I had fought him with everything I had. Yet it meant nothing. He hadn’t moved an inch, and even after all of it, he hadn’t left any indication that he had ever touched me.

Nothing but the bite.

One I couldn’t stop touching, or looking at in the mirror, some sick side of me viewing it as my own souvenir. The purple mark in the perfect shape of his teeth, proving that it had actually happened.

I pressed my thumb into it again. It was tender, yet I did it anyway, as if it connected me back to the moment his lips had been there. I sat in a rented bedroom at midnight pressing on a bruise a murderer had left in my skin, and my stomach dropped away from me in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with fear.

But it had everything to do with a craving.

“Stop it, Anna,” I told myself out loud and got up to take a shower, hoping this would help. One I stood under for too long as I waited to cry. Because crying seemed like the next logical step. The thing a woman does in the shower after a day like that. And I would know, as I’d had many of them before.

Yet nothing came.

What came instead was something else. Something entirely different… something wrong and shameful.

I had put my hand flat on the tile to steady myself, and the memory arrived hard and fast. A wall against my shoulder blades. His mouth at my throat. The sound he had made when he breathed me in. Like a man who had been hungry for a very long time.

Which was why my other hand had already started to move. One I caught just before I could cross that line.

“Jesus, what is wrong with you!” I scolded myself, stopping my hand before it could reach the area he hadn’t reached. Then I turned the water off so fast I nearly slipped.

I stood dripping on the mat in a bathroom I had only just gotten used to, asking myself what the hell I was doing. Why I hadn’t grabbed my go bag already and done what I did best.

Why was I still here?