Page 28 of Cassie
“Hush. I’m okay.” Hoss held his words. Telling Cassie she was far from okay wasn’t the way to keep her confiding in him. “The doctor was just as bad, you know. He wasn’t kind, wasn’t careful. He talked to me about a morning after pill, but that information came with a large dose of how he personally felt it was murder, which was worse than rape.”Jesus. Layer after layer of shit on a little girl, barely grown. “Told me what STDs they were testing for, and what treatments would be available if anything came back positive. They didn’t in the end, but he was so loud, I imagined everyone in the building heard him telling me about HIV and herpes.”
“He’s an asshole, too.” She snorted, and he heard a tiny thread of amusement in there. “Fucker.”
“The nurse gave me a set of spare scrubs when they were done. She collected my clothes, not that there was much left of them, and told me she’d hold them for the police.” Cassie shook her head. “I told her I didn’t know what to do. That I didn’t want anyone to know. She said to report it, said she would because she didn’t trust the security guards to do it right, but it would take me talking to the real cops.” She paused, and he pressed another kiss to the top of her head, giving her another squeeze. “So much for not wanting anyone to know. I got back to the dorm to find out bad news travels fast. Everyone I talked to had a tone and I just knew they knew. All the things those men had done to my body, and everyone knew.”
“God, baby.” Brute’s goddaughter had suffered similarly after she’d been attacked at a school out west. She’d left campus and driven nonstop to Fort Wayne. Brute had told Hoss how Natty had imagined her attackers behind the wheel of every car on the road. “Like you couldn’t get away from it, huh?”
“Yes. With everything that happened, emotionally I was a wreck. I’d wake up and look in the mirror and see a different me every day. Sad me. Angry me. Depressed me. Frightened me. I’d wake from dreams and imagine I still smelt them on my skin. Lock myself in the bathroom and try to get clean.” Her voice shook and his chest was wet.God. “There just wasn’t an end in sight.”
“Did you get nervous before?” The women Hoss knew who had suffered similarly all shared some traits with Cassie, but none had the same crippling anxiety.
“Some. Normal kid stuff about boys or tests. After the attack, it took on a personality of its own. Blew up from being controllable to impossible to manage.” She sighed. “I started looking for something I could control. If I couldn’t control my own mind, then I’d find something else.”
“You looked for something to beat it back.” He understood the tactic. “Find success in something you could control and it would give you the confidence to tackle something else. Something bigger.”
“Yeah. That worked.” A pause and Hoss tensed, waiting. “That worked for a while. Then I missed my period.”
“Oh my God.” He rolled, careful to not put weight on her. As fragile as she had to be right now, the last thing he wanted to do was set off another panic attack. “Baby. One of them?”
“Uh-huh.” Cassie rolled her lips between her teeth, biting them bloodless as she struggled to keep her chin from quivering. “I couldn’t get away from what happened. Everything felt like a nightmare at that point. I hadn’t told my parents what happened, but obviously, that had to change.”
“Had to change? Why?” He stroked her cheek with the backs of his fingers as he kept his gaze locked to hers.
“Well, the rape crisis center offered options, but there was only one decision for me. No question in my mind.” She blinked wetness away, and he swiped the escaped tear from her temple, fingers cradling the back of her skull. “My graduation pictures weren’t what you’d expect. I finished school seven months pregnant, and by that point, I didn’t care who talked trash about me. The baby was the single redeeming factor in what happened.”
“You kept it. The baby.” His throat tightened around the word, because there was no child living in her home.
“Yeah.” She smiled, sadness radiating out from her expression. “I wanted it. Him. It was a boy. I didn’t set out to be a single mom, but I would have rocked that.” A fierceness suffused her features and she glared at him. “I would have rocked it. I would have done anything for him. I sang to him, told him stories, and promised him he would be born in love. Maybe not made from it, but I loved him.” She reached between them and cupped her belly, fingers trailing the scar tissue that bisected the flesh. “I loved him.”
“I can see you do.”Keep it present, like my love for Hope. Just because someone was gone didn’t mean a person’s love died too. It stayed with them and changed them in good ways or bad. It all depended on the individual and how they chose to live with the loss.
She leaned into him, burying her face against his chest. Muffled, her voice was still audible as she said, “He died. Inside me. He stopped moving, and I got scared so I went to the doctor. We went from normal soccer practice against my bladder to this utter stillness that terrified me. I still have pictures of him, this 3-D thing they did. Ten tiny fingers, and ten tiny toes. He was perfect, Hoss.”
“How far along were you?” If she’d been seven months pregnant when she graduated, then the baby had to have been fairly mature. “Were you near term?”
“Thirty-eight weeks.” Two weeks before her due date.Jesus. “They couldn’t tell me why. One nurse told me it was God’s will.” Cassie was weeping openly now, sobbing against him. “Like that made it any better.”
He’d heard the same platitudes after Hope died. Nothing helped, and being told that some anonymous supreme being decided they wanted a loved one more than the survivors needed them had only fostered anger. “No, it doesn’t help the pain.” The scar. “What happened next?”
“The doctor’s office was connected to the hospital. Next thing I knew I was flat of my back on a gurney, belly rising like it always did those days. I couldn’t see my feet.” He remembered Hope’s pregnancy, and her feigned irritation at how round her belly had been, how it had gotten in the way of so many things. “There were lights and announcements. Nurses running around like crazy. Everything echoed until I couldn’t hear myself think. I couldn’t wrap myself around the idea that my son was dead, and they were telling me he needed to be born. ‘But he’s dead.’ I remember telling one doctor that and he shushed everyone and got close. ‘Cassandra, he is dead. There’s nothing I can do for him. My only concern at this moment is you, and we have to get him out from inside you.’ To me being born was this glorious idea of life and living, and beauty, and here they were telling me it was an unfortunate necessity.” Cassie lay quiet for a moment, shoulders shaking and he felt the force of her grip on his arm, tight fingers leaving bruises behind. He’d take them, take anything from her if it gave her a chance to move past this pain.
“You were having a panic attack, weren’t you?”
She nodded. “Everything echoed and boomed, and all I could hear were fragments of all these conversations. It was as if the doctors were talking about someone else. They needed to know what I wanted to do. How I wanted to do it. I couldn’t find enough of myself to tell them anything.”
“What did they…how did they care for you?” If he made it about her, maybe he could soften the blow.
“I just wanted to go home. Go home and crawl under my covers and stay there. But he, the doctor, kept after me. There were procedures and processes, things he told me that didn’t make sense. I felt so bewildered by the medical terms. Hoss, I was so scared.”
“Were you alone through all of this?”Where the hell were her friends, her family?
“My OB’s nurse had called my mom when they did the ultrasound. My folks lived about four hours away. By the time they got to the hospital, I was already hooked up to an IV. Induced labor. I remember looking up at one point, and my mom’s fingers were wrapped around the IV pole, like she was trying to hold it back. It took forever.” She sniffed, fingers wiping at her nose. Hoss shifted and pulled a bandanna from his back pocket and pressed it into her hands, smiling slightly at her murmured thanks. “Hours and hours. Then something went wrong and suddenly they had to do surgery.”
“The C-section scar.” This time it was his hand that drifted to her belly. He touched her protectively, as if he could stop whatever was coming.
“They took me to an operating room. I felt awkward moving from gurney to the table, all the tubes and things were in the way, and they were in such a hurry. There were boards for my arms, and the fastenings made this noise. Like ripping as they were tightened, then tightened again. I couldn’t move. There were nurses everywhere and this guy who kept leaning over me real close, telling me I’d be asleep soon. He told me to count backwards from one hundred.” Cassie shivered and burrowed closer. “At fifty-eight, I was still counting.”
“What happened?”
