Page 70 of Mistaken Identity
She blew out a breath.
“I met Patty a year after I had Damon,” she started.
Anger and jealousy instantly surged through me, unwarranted and seriously uncool.
Yet, I couldn’t stop myself from having the feelings despite knowing that I had no right to my anger and hurt.
“Who’s Patty?” I asked carefully and, hopefully, neutrally.
She smiled at me and patted my hand. “He’s a really good friend.”
“What kind of good friend?” I asked before I could stop myself.
She was quiet for a long moment before she said, “The kind that cured me of anything sexually related.”
That had me instantly shutting up.
“Like I was saying, I met Patty nearly two years after…” She trailed off. “We met at a rape survivor support group. He was twenty-one and had survived being sexually assaulted by two ladies at a college party…kind of like me.”
“Fuck.”
The sickness in this world…
“He was roofied. He was aware of everything, just seriously unable to do anything about it,” she continued. “And when we met, we kind of gravitated toward each other because we were both the youngest in the room. My mom begged me to go to this, and I was seriously against it. I didn’t want anything to do with it. When I got there, I spotted him immediately because he looked just as miserable about being there as I did.”
I leaned back in the chair, taking her hand with me.
“He’s…” A sound bonged, and Creole got up, giving me a single raised finger telling me to wait.
I did as she got up and answered the call light someone had just pressed.
She came back with an empty tray and cup and put them away before returning to the seat next to me.
She placed her hand back in mine when she said, “We hit it off. Not in a romantic relationship kind of way, but in a bone-deep friendship kind of way. We bonded over our own tragedies and became really good friends.” She looked at me. “Laney kind of loathed him because I called him one of my best friends. She hated him on principle until she met him. Then she liked him a lot, too.”
I smiled. “If Laney liked him, he must be a solid person.”
Laney had always been the best judge of character.
“I know,” she leaned into me. “It took us a year of friendship before we decided to figure out how to get us back to normal, functioning human beings again. I was in desperate need of some normalcy because of Damon’s diagnosis. And Patty had issues of his own to deal with at home. We just felt like we needed to fix ourselves and start the healing journey.”
“He helped you have sex again,” I guessed.
Another bong sounded, and she walked to the phone and picked it up.
A few words were shared, and I distinctly heard the name ‘Audric.’
“Got it,” she whispered softly and came to sit back down.
“He did. We helped each other.” She nodded her head. “It was an arduous process. Both of us had major triggers. He was great, though. Just as I was for him. And we came back out the other side able to have sex with others we fully trusted. Though, admittedly, I never met anyone that I wanted to share that with.”
“But do you fully trust anyone?” I asked bluntly.
She started drawing patterns on my thigh. “I fully trust you.”
And that, my friends, was the comment that broke me.
She fully trusted me.
