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The sounds of him being sick seemed to do something to Melinda—unfreeze her somehow. Automatically, she walked to the bathroom, grabbing a towel along the way. She waited until Liosh had finished being sick and offered it to him.
He took it and nodded at her gratefully. She noticed that his eyes were red. Had he been…crying? Or were his eyes watering just a consequence of him being violently ill like that?
Melinda didn’t know and she felt too cold inside to care. She watched as he rinsed his mouth out at the sink and blotted his face on the towel she had given him.
“Thank you,” he said and his deep voice was shaken. “What…what was that?” He nodded at the laptop screen, where the video had mercifully come to an end. “Why did he treat her that way? Was it real? Should we call the authorities and ask them to try and find her?”
Melinda shook her head.
“That was…just porn,” she said flatly. “I warned you, didn’t I, that you might run into it on the Internet?”
“That was human pornography?” He looked at her disbelievingly. “You mean humans masturbate to that? But it’s sick! And wrong! He was hurting her.”
“I know,” Melinda said. She still felt far away and cold—detached from her own body. Mechanically, she went to the loveseat and closed the laptop. Then she sat down, thinking nothing in particular. Most especially not thinking of the night after her Junior Prom with Jason Sykes…
Liosh came and sat beside her.
“Surely this kind of thing has to be outside the norm,” he said, his deep voice still sounding shaken. “Shouldn’t we notify someone to take it down?”
Melinda gave a humorless laugh.
“You’d have to take down half the Internet if you did that,” she told the big Kindred. “That video wasn’t that unusual, you know. It’s just another part of rape culture.”
“Rape culture?” Liosh sounded more horrified than ever. He took Melli by the arms and stared down into her face. “I don’t understand this, Melinda. How could any male make a vid about…about raping a female and how could other males be aroused by it? What’s wrong with your people?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t know. I don’t know why men want to do that. I don’t know why Jason Sykes did it to me.”
“What?” Liosh’s pale blue eyes got even wider. “What are you talking about? Someone hurt you like that? Who was it?” His eyes narrowed in murderous rage. “I’ll fucking kill him.”
The big Kindred’s anger seemed to break through to Melli in a way nothing else could have. She jerked away from him, her breath tearing in her chest.
“It was a long time ago. I shouldn’t have said anything about it. I don’t know why I did!” she cried, wrapping her arms around herself. “I’m sorry, Liosh. Please…please forget I said anything. Please.”
“Melinda, you’re shaking.” His voice was gentler now and his eyes had gone from murderous to concerned. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said automatically. But then the years of therapy she’d undergone came back and she whispered, “No. No, I…” She shook her head, trying to rid it of the awful images she’d seen. “I’ll be okay in a minute. That video just…just triggered me.”
“Triggered you?” Liosh sounded confused.
“It sent me back to a bad time…a dark place in my past,” Melli explained. “To the time I was…was raped,” she finished in a voice so low she could barely hear it herself.
Liosh was silent for a long moment, as though trying to think what to say. At last he asked,
“Is this what you meant when you said you were ‘broken’? Is this why you think you can’t bond with me? Do you believe I would hurt you like that?”
“No—no of course not.” Melli shook her head. After seeing his violent reaction to the awful rape video, she could never think such a thing about the big Kindred. He had been triggered too, in a way—he had cried and puked when he saw it and now he was apparently disgusted with all human-kind.
Not that Melli blamed him. She was pretty disgusted with it herself, sometimes.
“Melinda…” Liosh reached for her hand tentatively. “Please…talk to me. Do you want to tell me what happened to you?” His eyes were filled with pain. “It will be…difficult to hear, but I will hear it if you need to tell it.”
Melli looked down at their hands—his so much bigger, enclosing hers gently, keeping her safe.
“I don’t really want to tell it,” she said at last. “But…but I think I need to. So you can understand why we can’t…can’t ever be together.”
“Tell me,” he said gently.
So Melli told.
Twenty
“I was fat in high school,” she started. “I mean, plus-sized, or whatever you want to call it. More than I am now. And the other kids—Amanda Brannigan and her friends—used to tease me about it. At the same time, everything in my home seemed wrong. My dad was distant and my poor mom was trying to hold things together for me and Jodi, but it was clear she and my dad were having a bad time of it.” She sighed and shook her head. “I just wanted to be loved, you know? I just wanted to be cared for by someone who mattered.”
