Page 55 of Unmasking You

“We didn’t even kiss. And you were saving yourself, because if you’d wanted to save me, you could have told me instead of rejecting me, mistreating me, and allowing them to do what they did.” I take a deep breath and try to calm down, because by the time I’m done talking I’m shouting. That’s not what I want to do. I want to be in control.

“I needed you to hate me.”

I scoff at that. If only I could have hated him from the start.

“I promise you. Once school was done I would have come to you to beg for forgiveness. I never expected things to turn out the way they did.”

“Oh, believe me, I’ve hated you. I did hate you. Unfortunately, not enough. The feelings I had for you kept getting in the way. I hated myself because I kept looking for you, waiting for you to save me. You, all of you, were monsters. I couldn’t cope with everything you did to me. I couldn’t cope with you and your offensive behaviour. You broke my heart every single fucking time you rejected me. After what happened at the gym, I had to see a therapist. For years. I tried to take my life so many fucking times. It’s taken me years to be able to live with what you did to me.”

I don’t look away, because I need to see what my words do to him. Does wanting him to suffer make me a horrible person?

His eyes get bigger and bigger the more I share what’s rotting my insides, and then they fill with tears.

The pleasure I hope to feel is not there. I’m actually feeling guilty for dropping everything I went through on him all at once.

“Fuck.” He uses his sleeve to dry his eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was that bad.”

I scoff once more, and he’s quick to speak again.

“I mean, I knew it was bad, but I really thought I was protecting you from the worst of it.” He places a hand on his face. “I was so fucking blind.”

“Yeah, that you were.”

We don’t speak for a while, and I’m close to believing the conversation is done. Maybe there is no way for us to settle the past and move forward.

“What happened after I left?” Shane asks me, and hope makes the desperation and anger retract a little.

“I fought, hoping that the person who’d saved me from Dan would come back and stop them for good.” I shake my head. That didn’t happen.

“I ran to call the teacher after they pushed me out of the room. All the way there I was praying for you to be safe. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.”

I look at him, and everything in him speaks of how sorrowful he is.

“What happened after the teacher’s intervention?”

“I was still out of it, and at first I thought they would finally see Dan for the monster he was. Instead, he was sitting there with his face dirty with blood, acting as if it was nothing. He accused me of elbowing him. Of course, he omitted that he was the one who’d attacked me first.”

“Fucker,” Shane says, and I love how he pulls me closer to him, as if trying to protect me, even if there’s no need now.

“He accused me of being the bully, and they didn’t say anything.” I involuntarily clench my hands into fists, a sign of how much I’m still affected by what they did to me that day. The hand Shane is holding squeezes his, but he doesn’t complain even though it must have hurt. “It looked bad, I admit that, but I couldn’t believe they took his word as truth.”

“I broke Dan’s nose,” Shane says, and I raise my eyes that had fallen to our linked hands. “And nothing had ever felt that good in my life. Until I kissed you.”

“Did you? Did it?”

“Oh yeah. The next day, I was waiting for you to come to school and I would have told you everything, and told you how sorry I was, but you never came.”

“Yeah, I asked my parents to take me out of school. I didn’t want to see you or the others ever again.”

“When Mrs Watson told us you were never coming back, and Dan made one of his stupid comments, I just lost it and punched him a couple of times, until I heard the sounds of his nose breaking.”

“My hero,” I say to him. And it’s not until he stops and looks at me that what I just said hits me, and I’m not sure if I want to laugh or cry, because there is a bit of truth behind it. I did consider him my hero, my knight in shining armour, until his behaviour tarnished it.

“I was never a hero. I was always someone just trying to survive.” He stops, and I clearly see the wheels in his brain turning and turning.

“In that moment, when I thought everything we had was slipping away, I lost it. And if Mr Johnson hadn’t stopped me, I would have kept punching him and then turned on the others until they’d paid for what they’d done to you.”

Does it make me a bad person to wish I’d been there to see it? Watching as Shane defended me?

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