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“Plenty.”
“Name one,” she insisted, reaching out and lightly tracing her fingertip over the thin, barely visible lines.
His skin quivered under her touch. “Touchin’ my sister.”
Reilly froze and her chest tightened. “You touched your sister.”
“Hugged her.”
There had to be a lot more to that story than those two words. Her mouth opened and it took a few seconds for her to repeat flatly, “You hugged her.” Her brow furrowed. “You weren’t allowed to show your sister any affection?”
“No.”
“No one could?”
“Not in the way normal families did.”
Normal families. Yes, the description of normal didn’t seem to apply in Rev’s family’s case. “I’m confused.”
He spun around and her eyes dropped immediately to those damn shiny barbells. She curled her fingers into her palms so she wouldn’t reach out and touch them. The time had to be right and now was not it.
She needed answers first.
“We were always in training.”
“For what? Sports?” Every answer he gave made her want to ask so many more questions. This conversation was like opening Pandora’s Box.
“To be Godly, most of all. Also, to be obedient. For both of us to become good members of our congregation. For me to become a worthy husband. For Sarah to become a worthy, submissive wife.”
Sarah.
“Who’s Sarah?” Did he have another sister he’d never mentioned before?
“Saylor is Sarah.”
He wasn’t clearing up her confusion, he was creating more. She did a little shake of her head and, once again, forced her gaze from his chest to his face as he began to explain.
“Hated the name Michael ‘cause of what was attached to it. Saylor hated the name Sarah for the same reason. We both wanted to be free of that life and start new. In school, I began to tell people my name was Mickey and refused to answer to Michael. Once Sarah freed herself from their grip, she changed her name to Saylor and took the same last name I was usin’ in an effort to scrape off the remains of this life.”
“But to be free of one prison, she had to be locked up in another,” Reilly murmured.
Holy fucking shit. That was heartbreaking. Saylor had never talked about her childhood. Not once. All the times they’d hung out together, either with the rest of the sisterhood or even on their own, she only talked about stuff currently happening. On a rare occasion, she’d bring up an entertaining story from her time spent in a juvenile detention center.
“Yeah.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
But wait, she needed to circle back. “So, those scars are from when your father punished you for touching your sister?”
“And other things.”
“Worse than touching your sister?” Because a brother touching a sister in an inappropriate way was pretty damn bad.
“Nothin’ worse in his eyes than me touchin’ Sarah.”
“And did you?”
He sucked on his teeth for a second, took a deep breath and lifted his bearded chin a notch. “Not in the way they thought.”
She was almost afraid to ask, “What did they think?”
The slow roll of his Adam’s apple caught her attention. She could see he was on the fence about continuing this conversation or shutting the whole thing down.
While she didn’t blame him for not wanting to talk about it, she also needed to know what the hell had gone on. Not only to be supportive for Rev while here and back at home, but for her club sister Saylor. Even if Saylor never found out that Reilly knew, Reilly could still know the truth and respond appropriately to a situation, if needed.
However, she would never spill any of Saylor’s secrets. If Saylor wanted to share them with others, that would be her choice and her choice alone.
Maybe that was why Rev hesitated. Because they weren’t only his secrets, they were Saylor’s. Their secrets were intertwined like a knotted shoe lace.
Holy shit, she hated to even ask this, because it was not the Rev she knew. “Did you… touch your sister inappropriately?”
She made sure the question was soft and not accusatory because she definitely didn’t want him to cut this conversation short. If he did, she would never stop wondering and questioning who the real Rev was. Who she thought he was.
But, holy hell, this trip was barely two days old and had been enlightening. And not in a good way. Worse, it wasn’t even over yet.
“You think I’d do that?”
Guilt washed over her for even asking if he would. “No, but… I mean, I assume you were young. Young kids don’t always know the difference between what’s wrong and what isn’t. We learn that from our…”
“Parents,” Rev finished for her when she didn’t. “Never molested my sister. I only ever tried to soothe her when she was upset.”
“They thought you were molesting her when you were actually consoling her?” For shit’s sake, now she hated his parents even more!
“Yeah.”
Again, the story had to go deeper than that. A simple hug was not sexual. A brother hugging his sister was not sexual, damn it!
