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With our hands still pressed together, I wrap my pinky around his, and he stiffens. He glances at me, his chest heaving with his breath. “The things he was saying,” he mutters, his eyes searching mine, “how rough he was with you. That was normal? He did it like that every time?”
I see the pain, the reluctance to ask the question in his eyes, but he still does. “Not every time,” I admit. “The first time wasn’t so bad. Not so rough. It changed after that.”
I can’t tell him I liked it. The rough way Isaac touched me, spoke to me, punished me. I liked the things he did and said…
Until I didn’t.
Roman clenches his jaw again, his pain melting away into something else, something fiery.
“He should’ve been gentle with you,” he says darkly. “He should’ve taken care of you, not berated you. Not hurt you.”
I shake my head, my brows pushing together as I glance back at the water.
“He didn’t hurt me,” I whisper. His pinky wraps tighter around mine, squeezing until I look at him again.
“The rice?” His voice is guttural, like he’s holding back. “What happened with the rice, Goldie? What else did he do?” I shake my head again, tears filling my eyes.
Goldie.
“Nothing,” I rasp. “He didn’t do anything.”
But he did, didn’t he?
He whipped me while I knelt on the rice, then fucked me with the handle. I was into it at the time, or I thought I was. But now…
“He didn’t hurt me,” I reiterate. “Everything that happened was consensual.”
Wasn’t it?
“It can be consensual until it’s not,” he murmurs. “He should’ve stopped the second he realized you were uncomfortable.”
“I was fine.”
But was I?
“If it was just rough, and you both wanted it, you should have had a safe word. He should have stopped.”
My heart squeezes in my chest and suddenly, my skin feels too tight, too hot, too wrong.
I shake my head again.
“Stop,” I rasp. “Nothing happened. He didn’t—he didn’t—” He didn’t hurt me. I can’t stop the words from playing on a loop in my head.
Isaac would never hurt me. He’s Isaac. Even if the last few weeks have been weird between us, he was still my stepfather, still the man my mother and I came to when we had nowhere else to go. He was the one who saved us, who protected us. He wouldn’t hurt me. He wouldn’t.
But with the way Roman’s staring at me, his eyes gentle, and a soft expression, his mouth tipped in a pitying frown, I start to second guess myself.
Did he hurt me on purpose? Was I always into it, every time, the whole time?
I was. I know I was.
Right?
Right.
If I wasn’t, he would’ve stopped. He would’ve never done anything to me that I didn’t want to happen. Even when he punished me, I all but begged him to. I needed his forgiveness. And he gave it to me.
“He didn’t hurt me.”
