Page 6 of Serpentine Valentine
Until Morgan.
So I cared, and when he bent forward to cup my cheek, I let him. Ilet him, and I leaned in to the affection.
“I wondered about the sadness on your face,” he said softly. “It’s hard to imagine why such a beautiful girl could be so sad, but I understand now. You’ve never had a man treat you right, have you, sweet Lex?”
I didn’t answer. My heart was beating too fast, my breath coming too shallow. The heat of my anger beneath my skin felt too great, like a balloon overfilled and about to burst.
“It’s hot in here,” I told him, but my lips were numb.
“Really?” he asked, smiling gently, his face so close it was all I could see. He was handsome like the Roman statues they had on display in the Helene Art Hall, but I didn’t like his callous hands on my face and the musk of his maleness in my nose.
“I think, I think I might need some air,” I tried to say, but my tongue was thick and dry in my mouth. “I’m thirsty.”
“Drink some tea,” he encouraged, wrapping a big palm around mine on my mug to help me raise the drink to my lips. “Good girl.”
Unease shivered through me, and my stomach cramped.
“I don’t feel right,” I mumbled, the mug falling from my suddenly ineffective hand to the Persian rug, where it broke along the seam of the crack with a gentlepop.
It was dark outside, the room only lit by the warm golden light of the task lamp on Morgan’s desk and the standing shaded lamp in the corner. It made him seem bigger, looming over me like a monster.
“Morgan, please, I need to get outside,” I reached up to try to pry his hand off my face, to push him away, but he only crowded me closer.
“Hush now, silly girl,” he murmured, hauling me up out of the chair into his arms, my breasts pressed to his chest, one arm banded over my lower back to hold me to him. “Let me teach you what it’s like to be loved by a man.”
“No,” I breathed, so shocked by his intent, Ialmost couldn’t process it. “No!”
How could this be happening, I wondered, oddly disassociated from my body as he bent his head to kiss my neck? How could I have been so oblivious?
Later, I would be disgusted by my own naïvety, a sheep led so easily to the slaughter, but at the moment, I was stuck on Morgan’s betrayal.
Because I’d trusted him.
The first man in my life to earn that since my father lost it when I was only a girl.
I thought about every conversation we’d had as I stood stuck in the cage of my mind, unable to move as Morgan laid me out on his desk and began to violate me with meticulous, almost gentle purpose. I thought about how he’d told me I was smart beyond my years, that he couldn’t wait to see my name in academic journals. About how kind he’d been when I’d confessed I suffered from insomnia before exams, how he’d suggested meditation and melatonin. About how he’d smile at me, true smiles, smiles that seemed so much more than what he flashed like currency in his classrooms. About how he made me feel special.
About how he’d made me feel loved.
How bitterly, horrifically ironic that he was perverting that love now. Whispering words about how beautiful I was as he tore through me, about how perfect I was for him to use like this. About how he’d change my mind about loving women. I just needed to lie still and take it.
I cried.
Oh, I could feel the tears on my cheek, cold and painful on my skin before they fell off my cheek onto the papers he’d been grading on his desk.
He smelled like parchment and clove cigarettes, like sweat and man.
It made me gag, and at one point, I vomited on the desk.
He moved my rag doll form farther away from the stain andcontinued.
After the first time, he took a break, lighting a cigarette beside the open window behind his desk. I watched the smoke curl and fade into nothing as it blew through the crack, and I thought woodenly about how I was that smoke. Something used and discarded dissipating into nothingness.
He spoke to me, but I didn’t hear him.
And when I didn’t respond, something in him seemed to break. The zipper on his sheep’s clothing fell clean away, and when he came for me the second time, it was the wolf who closed his teeth around my neck.
At one point, I passed out, and my last thought was that I hoped I never woke up.
