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Worse, he didn’t publish every one of them. He only put up the passages that made it seem ambiguous – like I had been some screwed up consulting party. Missing were the diary entries in which Owen detailed how he knew he was wrong, and that he knew I was scared. Missing were the letters in which he told me he couldn’t sleep at night, and prayed to someday be free of his sins. All that was blasted on social media for the world to see was the delusion. The side of Owen’s sick brain that believed I wanted it.
“I don’t know how many women I’ll have to go through to forget every inch of your beautiful body.”
“I met your mother at the same age you were when you met me, and as rotten and perverse as that sounds, I can’t help but see it as fate.”
“You gave me the best pleasure of my life. I still hear the way your sweet lips moaned my name.”
I was physically nauseous. Owen was the most disgraceful, humiliating part of my past, and somehow, Ethan managed to edit the memories to make me feel even more shameful. Locked in the bathroom, I refused to let anyone in. I was broken. Unfixable. All the foul, nasty demons of my past were now up for public viewing, and it made me feel as if my clothes had been torn off, my body spit on and dragged through the mud. My stomach hurt from crying, which I continued to do despite the lack of tears. I’d used them up. They were all gone, replaced by a dry heaving that had me clutching the toilet every fifteen minutes, prompting Aria’s pleading to turn into screaming, frantic tears outside the door.
It wasn’t even as if Ethan stopped there.
Of course not.
He had to go after Liam, too, so joining the pictures of Owen’s letters was a video that couldn’t have come from anyone but Jenna. The quality was shockingly clear, coming from her phone as she made her way up the stairs to the upper mezzanine of the VIP area of Liam’s Halloween party. Apparently, I had been too shocked to notice that night that she’d captured the first few seconds of me straddling Liam, my body fully naked, his dick still inside me.
“With Daddy Owen no longer in her life, Sasha has moved onto her stepbrother, Liam. If you think he looks familiar, you’re right!” Providing jovial commentary was Ethan, as if he thought himself some kind of gossip reporter. “That’s MMA fighter Liam Cage, set to rematch Damon Walsh on March Fifth. Maybe Walsh is onto something about the skeletons in Liam’s closet, because it takes one twisted individual to fuck a girl like Sasha Blakely. Then again, she might just be a serial step-offender!”
I didn’t have to look long to see that the media following Liam had pounced on this story.
“LIAM CAGE/STEPSISTER SEX TAPE LEAKS!”
“LIAM CAGE DATING ‘SERIAL STEP-OFFENDER’!”
I saw that and Jenna’s link to our video on a porn site and vomited, my throat raw and my eyes burning. In the random moments of clarity I experienced sitting up on the wall, I tried to bring myself to my feet, knowing well that only Aria pounded outside the door because A.J was busy containing Liam. I had heard glass breaking, things crashing downstairs. I had heard both Liam and A.J in a shouting match, but I paid little attention to it as it happened because I was still lost in a downward spiral, reading the vitriol off my phone.
“Move over.”
Finally, I heard Liam’s voice outside and Aria’s heels scraping the floor as she scrambled aside. Terror burst from my lips as I then heard an explosion – Liam kicking open the door. I expected to see him foaming at the mouth, halfway maniacal, but all I saw was a look of calm and strength I knew he was putting on just for me, because I noticed the wetness in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I whimpered, refusing to look at him.
“Don’t apologize. You have nothing to apologize about,” he said soothingly, despite the faintest trembling in his voice. Despite the weight of my heart, I felt light as a feather as he scooped me up off the floor and brought me out into the bedroom. I somewhat heard Aria softly urging me to sleep and relax, promising me everything would be okay. She’d get her father on this, all his best lawyers – “everything will be fine.”
I absorbed none of her words as Liam laid me in bed. He lay with me too, and for hours upon hours, he kept his arms wrapped around me. Every time I burst into tears, he held me tighter, kissing the top of my head and whispering for me not to worry. “I’ll get it removed. I’ll make sure he can’t post anything again. And we’ll take it from there,” he said, so bizarrely calm.
But the few times I nearly dozed off from exhaustion, I heard Liam
inhale deeply. Raggedly. I felt his muscles tense and his body shake in the absolute fury I knew he was forcing himself to hold in while I was awake. Because the moment I stirred, he flipped the impossible switch, swiftly returning to his role my impenetrable savior, murmuring comfort in my ear and breaking my heart as I realized that he sacrificed for me down to his every breath and movement.
I stared out into the pitch black.
“You don’t deserve this.”
I said it out of nowhere. It was past three in the morning and the only light that came through the window was a sliver of moon. But through the dark, I convinced myself I saw clearly.
“Liam.”
“I’m here.”
I wasn’t sure if I was numb or calm as I stared at the wall. “I don’t want to be your burden anymore.” He said nothing, so I went on. “You can’t see it because you love me,” I whispered. “You love me so much you’ll do anything for me, even though all the signs point to the fact that you shouldn’t. If it weren’t for me, Liam, you’d be Superman. You’d have no weaknesses in this whole world.” Still, there was silence from him. A teardrop swelled from the corner of my eye and spilled over the bridge of my nose as I pieced together the thoughts that had plagued me for the past hour. “I’m a far way from being okay, Liam. I feel disgust for myself like it’s a disease, and I don’t want you to catch it. You owe it to yourself to see what your new chapter is like without me.”
Liam held onto his absolute silence. Were it not for his embrace, I’d have questioned that he were still behind me.
“Go to sleep, Sasha,” he murmured when he finally spoke.
“Liam – ”
“We’ll talk in the morning. Let yourself rest for now.”
