Page 105 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
I feel crazy. I feel crazed. Frantic, unconsolable, unreasonable.
Driven mad by something that’s entirely in my mind.
How can I tell people? How can I tell them and have it make sense? I can’t, because it doesn’t make sense. It makes no sense that I can easily muster the actual words rape and assault, that I can talk about what happened, that I can describe it and sound normal and well-adjusted and calm. And yet the mere memory of the lipstick I was wearing that night plunges me into panic.
The mere memory of it.
It sends me straight back there, back to that garden, and then breathing is impossible and my skin burns and my heart pounds and I can’t feel my fingers, my lips, my anything other than the roiling, metallic tightness in my chest. Nothing is real except the desperate, desperate feeling that I’m about to die.
I’m ashamed of it. And that’s why I haven’t been able to tell anyone, not even a therapist or a lover or a friend. Not even Auden, not even Rebecca, not even my mother.
Not even when I feel like I’m full of cherries on the inside, a pretty doll stuffed full of shiny fruit. Like when I open my mouth to speak, cherries will fall out instead of words.
Like even my tears will be red and sweet.
I should have said no when I saw the cherry-patterned swimsuit. I should have faked a diva fit, faked sick, faked something. I should have pulled my manager aside and made her deal with it.
So many things I should have done and didn’t. I didn’t want to be dramatic. I didn’t want to let anybody down. I didn’t want to bother anyone.
And so, while my mind screamed itself hoarse, while my shoulder blades tickled with the memory of wet grass and my heart tried to slam its way out of my chest, I let the stylist help me into the swimsuit. I let them touch up my lipstick—a red which all of a sudden seemed perilously close to Cherry Tree—I let them fluff my hair. I held my shoulders back, I popped my bottom out, I tilted my pelvis back so my thighs wouldn’t press together as much. I kept my angles dynamic, my mouth warm, my eyes intimate.
I gave them everything they wanted, even though I could feel each and every cherry on that swimsuit sinking through the fabric and branding itself into my flesh. Onto my tits and my arse, onto my hips and my cunt. Acid-etched cherries all over my skin.
But I smiled and posed and tossed my hair anyway, even as my skin was scored with cherry upon cherry, because that’s what they wanted, because I didn’t want to let anyone down.
Because I wanted to be easy.
Just like I wanted to be easy for Rebecca, and look what a mess that’s become.
But is that such a crime? I wonder, staring down at the lipstick-smeared flannel in my hands. Is it so bad to want to be easy for someone one loves? To want to spare them the worst of one’s demons? To absolve them of trying to fix the unfixable and trying to share the unsharable?
It can’t be. I refuse to believe it is.
I did the right thing today, and I powered through. I only hope—well, I don’t remember the rest of the shoot really—so I just hope I didn’t seem off. I hope no one could see how the stupid cherries from a stupid bikini scorched themselves onto my skin.
“Delph?” I hear a voice call over the noise of the shower. “Pet?”
Rebecca.
Oh bleeding hell.
I scramble to my feet just in time for her to walk into the bathroom, looking polished and ravishing in a tailored black jumpsuit. She stops at the entrance to the shower—a large, subway-tiled walk-in with benches and multiple showerheads—and tilts her head at me. “Delph?” she asks, sounding concerned.
“Bex!” I chirp as brightly as I can, forcing a smile. “You should be at work!”
“I have the afternoon off for my hair appointment,” she says slowly as she searches my face. I know she’s missing nothing—not the puffy eyes, nor the abraded and swollen lips. “I thought I’d come home and see you before I went. Are you all right?”
“Oh yes,” I say, still forcing the brightness out. Sunny, happy, easy easy. “It was capital.”
She frowns down at the flannel in my hands. “You always say not to remove makeup that way.”
“Photoshoot makeup,” I say, coaxing a laugh up. “There’s something the stylist used that was making me swell up and itch, so I needed to scrub it off.”
“Ah,” Rebecca says, immediately sympathetic. “That’s terrible—I hope your manager gave them a talking to.”
“Oh yes, you know Kendra. She tore them a new arsehole.”
Rebecca nods, seeming satisfied, and it’s funny, isn’t it, how easy it is to lie after enough practice. How easily people will believe one, especially if one lies with a smile on one’s face.
