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ChapterThirteen
TATI
Tali taughtme how to step outside of myself.
It was a technique she’d employed when she was in pain and she was often in pain—mentally, physically, emotionally. She had plenty of reasons to want to step outside of herself, to take her mind somewhere else, somewhere where the pain didn’t exist.
We hid it from my parents, the way she would poke me with a needle to induce the pain I was practicing getting away from. I didn’t have anything to escape otherwise, not the way she did. It was probably why she’d never thought to warn me, that while you could escape it in the moment… afterward, your body still remembered.
The ache, the terror, the chaos, the outrage … it was burned into you, just lying dormant.
Or maybe it was just me.
Maybe she hadn’t known.
Tali wasn’t tuning out a violent assault—not from outside her body at least. She was her own aggressor and she could never get away from herself. My assailant wasn’t present, except for the immutable traces lingering in my peripheral.
Not vivid, at least.
Thank God for blunted edges.
“Are you okay?”
I blinked, realizing Maite was there in my living room with me, standing next to where I’d parked myself on the couch.
There were two pills in her hand, and I took them without asking what they were before I swallowed, chasing them with a deep gulp of water from the glass she offered with her other hand.
No, I wasn’t fucking okay.
How could I be?
Still, I nodded, glancing away as I fortified the lie. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
“You know it’s okay if you’renotthough, right?” she asked, her pretty face pulled into a deep, contemplative expression that made me smile.
Bless her, for trying.
“I don’t want tonotbe okay, so I’m going to fake it instead.”
She frowned, taking a seat next to me. “I really don’t think it works like that.”
“It works however I say it does,” I declared, not caring how insane it probably sounded. “Does the swelling look any better now?”
Maite looked at me, really examining instead of just telling me what I wanted to hear. “Some. Just a little, but… you still look like you’ve been in a cage fight.”
I smirked.
I was okay with that comparison because I may as well have.
It had been three days, or maybe five, or maybe a week since I let Kev into my house to wait out the storm. I hadn’t at first, but I did remember that now.
Remembered talking to my mother.
Him overhearing and attacking me.
Dragging me to my bedroom.
Until I couldn’t, I’d fought his ass with everything in me, punching, scratching, biting, gouging him with a pen from my bedside table, whatever I could until he’d thrown me down on the floor and knocked my lights out.
