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Grace
Howintheworld did I manage to bring all of my stuff to campus inside one duffel bag and two rollaway suitcases? Pressing down on my folded clothes to force as much air out of them as possible, it hits me that I’m about to pack up the sum total of everything I own.
All of my summer clothes, my stuffed animals, framed family photos that weren’t stored in the cloud or on my phone. Every single baby picture my mother took of me, gone. Cremated in the housefire that swept through my childhood home. Blackened ruins that will officially fall into my hands on my eighteenth birthday.
But first, I have to graduate.
In four hours’ time, I’ll be accepting my high school diploma, and taking a step toward adulthood, toward freedom. Or, in my case, the freedom to consent to all forms of submission.
“Can you help me get this closed?” Jasmine asks, wrestling with her suitcase, too.
I abandon my own packing struggles to sit on top of her case so she can drag the zipper all the way around. Neither of us could relax enough to sleep for more than a handful of hours last night, so we decided we’d finish packing our things at the crack of dawn.
“Thanks,” she says. “Want help with yours?”
“Please.”
Once our shoes and clothes are out of our closets and safely stowed away, we move on to the wall hangings, and then our books. Technically we have until the middle of next week to pack up and move our stuff out of the dorms. But Jasmine wants to get home so she can start preparing for her upcoming trip to Germany, and I’m eager to return to Aidan’s house.
“When do you guys fly out?” I ask her.
“A week from today.” Jasmine’s mom is an anthropology professor at Brookstone University in Providence. Ever since Jas was little, her mom insisted on taking her only child on research excursions as a way of encouraging Jas to be well-rounded.
She lays a stack of paperbacks in the box we’ve marked, Donate.
“You know you’re welcome to come with us,” she says. “My mom says the Berlin apartment has three bedrooms.”
Ever since the night of our Giselle performance, Jasmine has been wary of Aidan. I could tell she sensed the tension between us at the spa, and then later, when he dropped us off at the dorms.
When he kissed my foot...
Pleasure trills down my spine at the memory of being cradled in his palm. My feet can do impressive things, but they take a beating in the process. I have blisters and callouses that I asked the nail tech not to file away completely, knowing I’d have to build them up again.
My feet are not what I’d consider beautiful, and yet Aidan wanted to kiss one. I had never felt more treasured or turned on.
The second I got back to my dorm that night, Jasmine asked me, “Are you fucking your uncle?”
And my heart just about stopped.
“He’s not my uncle,” I reminded her.
“Really?” She crossed her arms. “That’s how you want to play this?”
I sat down on my bed. “It’s not what you think.”
“If it’s not what I think, then you shouldn’t have to keep it a secret.”
“No, I mean it is what you think, but it’s...something else.” I glanced down at my freshly painted toenails. “He doesn’t touch me.”
“I literally just watched him kiss your foot.”
I flinched, my face warming. “You were watching us?”
“Hell yes, I was watching you, Grace. I’m worried about you, and I can’t believe you would keep something like this from me.”
I thought about the things I’ve kept from her over the years about my father’s rages. Things I didn’t want to burden her with.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I just haven’t wanted to talk about it.”
