Page 122 of Start With A Slap

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m... It can be you and me.”

He sat at the foot of the bed and put his head in his hands.

After a moment, she crawled toward him, gave his bare shoulder a soft kiss. He flinched. “Jase?”

He shook his head, and she sat back on her heels. Almost too quietly to hear, he said, “I’m her alibi.”

Ivy drew in a long, steady breath and held it before asking, “What do you mean?”

“Iwas with her that night. She was in my...” He trailed off. “Oh man, I did not want to tell you this.”

“You don’t have to say it,” Ivy said. Did he honestly think she couldn’t handle his secrets? She was a Mark now. She could handle anything. “I get it. You were with Melody. ...Sexually.”

“I don’t expect you to understand.” He got up and began to pace the bedroom. “You would never sleep with someone you hate, but I... Before you, that’s pretty much all I did.”

Yeah. She’d never do that... “You could have told me.”

“Never really knew when to spring it, you know? ‘Hey, my name’s Jason, I used to nail my stepmom’?”

“I’m serious. You act like I would judge you for being abused.”

“No,” he said with a bitter laugh, “you’re gonna judge me because I abusedher. She wasn’t some man-eating pedophile, Ivy, I wasn’t her helpless victim. I was old enough to know exactly what I was doing, she was hot and stupid and starving for attention;Imade the first move, and you know what? I left bruises all over her body.” As Ivy absorbed this shocker, he looked at the floor and said, “Awaiting judgment.”

“It... it doesn’t matter,” she told herself, and him. “You wereunderage.Sheshould have known better.”

“You want me to be ashamed? Is that what you want?”

“Ashamed? No, of course not?—”

“‘Cause I got plenty shame, Ivy. You have noideathe shame I carry with me every goddamn day of my life. For that, for... everything. You keep asking me, ‘What happened, what happened in Paris?’ If I told you what happened there, you would never look at me the same way again.”

“Nothing you did as achildwould change my opinion of you!”

“Oh yeah? Well my grandmother fuckin’ raped me!”

Her eyes widened, her jaw dropped...What?

He pointed at her face. “There it is.”

She got out of bed to go to him. “Jason...”

He shut his eyes. “Fuck.”

“Sever’s mother,” she whispered, her stomach curdling. “Sherapedyou? When?”

He let out a long exhale. “Little while after I met him. He didn’t know what to do with me, Melody didn’t want me around, so he just... dropped me off at Grandma’s.”

When he wastwelve? She covered her mouth. “Oh, god.”

He found and put on a t-shirt as he said, “Three weeks with that pseudo-Christian witch, at the end of it I’m tied buck naked to a fucking cross.”

“Oh, my god,” she said into her hand, a tear spilling down her cheek. “She tied you to a cross?”

“I told you she was sick,” he said with a mirthless chuckle, shaking his head. “She had a room just for praying, there was this big wooden Jesus cross inside? Most of the time she’d ignore me — until she got wasted. Then she’d rant at me in this... jumble of French and English, tellin’ me I’m just like my Dad. I’m a snake, I’m a rat, I’m ruining her, what the fuck ever.”

Her mind worked frantically through his pause.

“Out of the blue he calls up to say he’s back in town and he’ll ‘fetch’ me tomorrow. I’m stoked about it, ‘cause, slight improvement.” Nervously, Jason ran a hand through his hair. “But he musta said something to set her off, ‘cause she had this royal meltdown when she got off the phone. Throwing things and screaming and tearing at her hair... and then she hit the bottle. Real hard.”

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