Selena Kitt - Falling Down

“Ah damn!” He moved back a little, his big hand resting on her hip. “Oh damnit, Lindsey. Damn them!”

His sudden change, the vehement anger in his tone, startled her. The Zach she knew didn’t get angry, not really. The hand moving over her hip shook, and she knew it was trembling with rage.

“I could kill them.” He whispered it under the cover of the darkness, as if he’d been afraid to speak the words aloud before, in the light, with all its possibilities. “With my bare hands.”

She believed him. “It was my own fault.”

“No.” His grip tightened, and his hand would have made a fist if he hadn’t been squeezing her hip. “I don’t care what you said about the little games you play- played ,” he made his insistence on past tense perfectly clear, “with these guys.” His voice broke and she heard nothing but his breath, harsh and uneven, for a moment. “No one deserves what happened to you. You didn’t do this to yourself, Lindsey. You didn’t beat your back into a bloody pulp, or…or…”

It was like he couldn’t make any more words. She gave a strangled little laugh that sounded more like a sob to her own ears than anything else. “Didn’t I?”

“No,” he murmured, pulling the sheet aside, exposing her back to the air. “Oh my god, no, sweetheart, no…” His lips moved over her back, kissing the wounds there. The deeper ones he had carefully bandaged before they’d gone to bed, but there were too many to cover completely, and it was the shallow ones he kissed now, over and over. It reminded her of those few memories she had of her father, of falling down and him putting on the Band-Aid, kissing it and making it all better. “Please don’t believe it. Not for a minute. You didn’t ask for this. It’s not your fault.” She didn’t believe it-couldn’t-and she cringed away, rolling to her belly and clutching the pillow. He didn’t stop touching her, his fingers grazing lightly, cautious, as if he were petting a shy animal, his lips murmuring words against her back, and he kept on whispering those awful, painful words.

“I know you’re hurting.” His breath was too warm, too human, too comforting. It made her want to cry and she fought it-hard. “God, baby, I could tell from the first minute I saw you. It shouldn’t be possible for a girl your size to be carrying around so much pain.”

“No,” she choked, begging him to stop, knowing he wouldn’t. This was worse, his tenderness, his kind words, worse than the rape, worse than anything.

“I just want to love you.” His forehead pressed against her lower back, and the sting she felt there was the salt of his tears. That realization broke her-Zach, crying, in pain-and all she wanted to do was curl into a ball and die.

“I don’t deserve you.” She sobbed against the pillow, the dam breaking, her body shaking with it. “I don’t deserve this.”

“Oh, baby.” Zach moved in beside her, taking her, fighting, into his arms. She tried to resist, shaking her head, pushing back, but he was too strong for her. “Please,”

he murmured into her hair as she began to give, letting him hold her. “Let me love you. Just let me love you.”

“I can’t.” Her strangled cry muffled itself against his chest, and he rocked her, back and forth, into a bed covers cocoon in the dark. “You don’t understand.”

“I don’t care.” He tucked her head under his chin, as if he could get her even closer. “Lindsey, I know more than you think I do. And I don’t care. Baby, I don’t care what you’ve done, how many other guys you’ve been with, the lengths you’ve gone to…just to hurt yourself.” She tried to make herself smaller against him, as if she could hide from his words.

“God, baby, you’re so full of that spite.” His words made her feel cold, achy, as if she had the flu. “Watching you do this to yourself…it’s like seeing you eat rat poison, but you think you’re hurting someone else, don’t you? You’ll show them, right?” He squeezed her tighter when she snorted and nodded through her tears. “And all the while you’re just killing yourself …”

“I know.” She drew a shuddering breath. “But I don’t care.” He sighed, kissing the top of her head. “Because if no one else cares…why should you?”

She nodded, holding back a full-blown sob, her throat closing off any words.

“ I care, Linds.” He cupped her face in his hands, kissing her wet cheeks. “I love you. Do you hear me? I love you .”

Burying her face against his chest, she gave a deep, shuddering sigh, sliding her hand down over the hard, flat surface of his belly, reaching under the sheet to find his cock, soft in a nest of dark, kinky hair.

“Lindsey!” Zach jumped, startled, at her touch. “Oh, baby, no no…” He took her hand, pulling it up to his waist, wrapping it around him. “It’s so not about that.”

“It’s always about that!” she choked, trying to push him away, but he wouldn’t let her. Instead, he held on, rocking, until sobs racked her body, trembling them both. It was a while-to Lindsey, it felt like forever-before they subsided into little hitching noises, the same kind she used to get when she was very small and had been crying a long, long time. Zach kissed the top of her head, using the sheet to wipe the tears from her face, his chest.

“He raped me,” she whispered, the words lifting a weight in her chest like an anvil.

“I know, baby, I know,” he crooned, stroking her. “I’m so sorry…”

“My stepfather. When I was twelve.”

His silence stretched until he managed a breathy, strangled, “Oh…god…” in response, his arms tightening around her.

“I had never even kissed a boy before.” The words, once begun, seemed to form themselves now.

“Oh Christ.”

“There was blood everywhere.” She shuddered. “And I tried to clean it-he told me to, before my mother got home. I tried…” She sighed, remembering. The memory wasn’t far away, like it usually was-the circle-face of the moon through a pane of glass-instead it was close, bright, painful. She wanted to push it away and found she couldn’t. “He was always like that. I couldn’t ever do anything right with him. It never mattered what it was. I wasn’t ever good enough.”

“Oh my god, Lindsey,” Zach’s voice cracked and she could feel how tense his muscles were, felt his jaw clench as he tucked her head under his chin. The words came and came, spilling out of her mouth, a fountain of pain, and he listened, mostly quiet, his jaw working, as she told him everything.

“I remembered…” She tried to swallow the memory, but she couldn’t. It hurt more than any of the others. “When I was little-little and I’d fall down and skin my knee…I remembered my father, putting on that spray stuff that hurt and telling me to go to the moon…”

“The moon?”

”It was something we did…” She smiled through her tears, remembering her chubby little girl finger, pointing at the glass. “At night, he would show me the moon out my window before he put me to bed…so whenever I was hurt, he’d try to distract me, tell me to remember the moon…think about the moon…”

Zach nodded, just holding her.

“I think I got to the point where I became the moon,” she whispered, closing her eyes. She could see it, tucked neatly into one square pane of glass. “I went to the moon whenever he touched me, Zach. I went away. Whenever anyone touches me, that’s where I go. And tonight…I went there, too. I felt like I swallowed the moon tonight, and it burned…”

“Oh baby…” He gave a deep, shaky sigh, swallowing hard. “Can I ask…what about your mother?”

“I tried…once.” Lindsey shook her head. “She wouldn’t listen. She didn’t want to know.” Her lip trembled and she pulled the comforter tighter around her. “She always loved him more than she ever loved me.”