Page 95 of Serpentine Valentine
Another knock, another demand, this one firmer, to open the door. Just as the officers outside warned they were coming in anyway, I turned my cheek to face Morgan’s mottled face, and I smiled, blood smeared across my teeth, tangy on my tongue.
I wiped my hand across my split lip and let him see the wolf he’d forced out of my skin.
“I’ll murder you, Morgan,” I whispered, a promise, an oath I had no problem making and signing in the blood he’d spilled from me. “When you least expect it, you’ll be gasping for breath on the verge of death, and you’ll know it was me.”
Three officers burst through the door and, seeing me, bloodied and slumped, raised their guns.
“Dylan Morgan,” Officer Ponce, the same idiot who’d dragged me in for questioning twice before, glared at the professor with more than professional dislike. “You’re under arrest for two counts of sexual assault and battery.”
Professors, the same from that morning after Halloween a year ago, crowded in the doorframe to watch the mayhem as I sat primly bleeding in my chair as Dylan Morgan was finally punished for his crimes.
I closed my eyes against a surge of riotous tears and let out a slow controlled breath before whispering a quote fromThe Merchant of Venice, “‘and theyshall feel the vengeance of my wrath.’”
Because the truth was, falling in love with Luna had made me realize there was more to life, and me, than revenge, but it hadn’t fundamentally changed who I was.
I was a monster, not just by circumstance at the hand of Dylan Morgan, but now, I realized, bychoice. I would always be something with teeth and claws, hunters chasing me through the woods and prey racing from me through the bush.
Maybe there was more than the choice between a victim and a monster after something happened to a person like what happened to me, but I didn’t care.
I’d chosen to be monstrous, and Luna had shown me that even monsters could have hearts and morals, too.
Even if they were a little crooked.
“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”
––Bertrand Russell
Luna
I wasat field hockey practice even though I wouldn’t be cleared to play for another three weeks. Still, I was the captain so I should be there even if I couldn’t participate, and I was bored of wallowing in my pain and misery. I was a happy person by nature, probably because my mother was a complainer, and I’d relentlessly honed myself into an optimist to contradict that negativity. It didn’t matter now if I was a counterweight to her or not because I’d cut her out of my life. She’d seemed surprised by my resolve, by my anger, when she’d visited me in the hospital. A momentary rebellion, she’d said of my recent behavior, a blip she was willing to forgive me for if I smartened up and moved home.
Even drugged up, my entire face throbbing from Beckett and his buddies’ beating, I found the resolve to stand up to the most important person in my life.
“It’s not a blip,” I’d told her, tongue thick and dry as a piece of leather in my mouth. “Just like your behavior isn’t. I know you’ve hushedup more than just Lex’s assault, Mom. Ironically, you didn’t raise a girl who would be okay swallowing that truth. These girls deserve justice, andyoushould have been the one to give it to them.”
“This is because of thatgirl, isn’t it?” She’d sneered, lips peeling back over capped white teeth. They had none of the sharpness of Lex’s canine smile, and I had the thought that Mom had never stood a chance against her vengeance, even if I hadn’t helped take her down. “Awarding her a scholarship is the biggest mistake I’ve made in my life.”
I laughed hollowly, then winced as it ached in my ribs. “Oh, Mom, there is so much wrong with you that you believe that. And it’s as much about Lex as it isn’t. She helped me realize some things that were so close under my nose I couldn’t see them. Things about you, yes, but also about me. I think I’m gay, and I think I’m good. That is, a good person. Lex helped me see both of those things, and I’m glad she did.”
“Don’t do anything stupid here, Luna,” Mom warned, a flash of something like fear in her eyes. She reached out to touch my face, her fingers cold and shaking. My throat closed up because I wanted desperately to feel she was giving me comfort and genuine love, but I knew well enough to doubt her intentions. She was and always had been about herself. “You don’t want to ruin our lives, do you?”
“Our lives? You mean your life. I’m not the same person as you, and I’m not your puppet,” I asserted, dominance flooding through me as surely as the drugs through the IV. “Now, get out.”
She hadn’t. Instead, she’d railed at me, voice growing shrill enough to draw the nurses into the room. When she refused to leave at their behest, I had the awful/awesome pleasure of seeing her escorted out by security.
And I’d lain there alone in my hospital bed, badly roughed up, brokenhearted, but alive in a way I hadn’t been since I was a child.
The blood pumped fiercely through my veins, and my vision was clear despite the drugs.
I’d chosen my path, captain of my own destiny, and decided against the easy journey in favor of the one that felt right.
When Pierce found me, I was crying, but I smiled at him through the tears to let him know I was okay. He didn’t buy it, but he didn’t have to. He was my friend, so he let me have my dignity, and he didn’t push while I recovered in his apartment even though I could see how angry my circumstances made him.
Lex didn’t try to contact me. Relief and despair tangoed in my gut, driving me crazy as I tried to recover as quickly as possible from my concussion and sprain. Even when Pierce came home one night, dull-eyed and shaking, and admitted that he’d started to strangle Lex in retribution for how she’d treated me. I didn’t reach out and neither did she. What Pierce did was horrible, but I could see the way it ate him up inside. He reminded me a little of her at that moment, his heart in the right place but his acts made bestial by a white-out surge of fury. He apologized to me as if I was the one he’d put his hands on, begging for absolution. I gave it to him because, in his own way, he’d been my champion through everything. The only one to love me wholly and unselfishly however I came.
But I suggested he apologize to Lex again.
In fact, I was struggling with the urge to do the same. I’d declined every visiter who’d made an attempt to see me after the assault, too depressed to do anything but curl up on Pierce’s couch and rewatchPride & Prejudicea hundred times. So, I hadn’t known about the rumors swirling that Lex of all people had been the one to beat me up for breaking up with her. Pierce hadn’t asked me to validate the gossip before he’d gone after her, thinking I would cover for her out of pride or shame. By the time I set the story straight with Pierce and the rest of my friends, the false gossip had already made the rounds.
