Page 77 of An Improper Deal (Elliot & Annabelle 1)
Dizziness comes suddenly, and I grip the vanity behind me. “I see.”
“So.” He folds his arms. “What happened?”
“Nothing.” I’m not going to talk about the sordid story. It’s so cliché, it’s painful.
“Were you raped?” he asks quietly.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know or you don’t remember?”
I just shake my head. Coldness seeps all the way to my bones, and I clench my teeth. Breaths hiss through them.
“Did you get pregnant?”
I shake my head. I don’t even want to think about that period of my life. If I deny it, it doesn’t exist. Nobody knows anyway, not even Traci. Whoever got me pregnant never stepped forward, and if the universe has even a modicum of kindness, the boy was too drunk to remember anything.
“Look at me.” Elliot steps up, grips my upper arms and shakes me. “Look at me when you deny it.”
My eyes clash with his. They’re thunderous, a stormy sea of seething emotions.
“Tell me again you weren’t.”
I swallow. I want to tell him he’s wrong, that nothing happened to me, and I’m just a girl who had your typical upper middle class childhood, nothing more, nothing less. But I can’t. The lie sticks in my throat, and the hot ugly truth, the one I’ve kept buried deep inside all these years, finally comes out.
“I drank,” I begin, my voice low. “And I passed out. Seven weeks later, I found out I was pregnant. Couldn’t tell anyone. No doctors.”
I couldn’t have the baby. I was only fifteen at the time. My parents would’ve been so disappointed, devastated in fact, that I put myself in that position. Mom in particular told me to be smart because girls have to be smarter than boys—we’re weaker and more fragile…and we have something they want badly enough they’ll sometimes resort to violence to get it.
But I didn’t listen. I was so very stupid.
“What happened to the baby?” Elliot asks.
“I miscarried,” I whisper. But there’s always a part of me that will forever wonder if the miscarriage happened, in part, anyway, because I didn’t want the child. I wanted to expel it from my body with the force of my will—and more—because no doctor would get rid of it without informing my parents first.
“Jesus.”
I pry my arms from his grip and step away. “Does it bother you that I’m damaged like that? I’m not just some fun, carefree stripper who likes sex for money.”
“Shut up,” he says roughly. “Not a single unkind word about yourself or I’ll put you over my knee.”
“Why would you care?”
“What the hell does that mean? Of course I care!” He drags his hands through his hair. “What happened to you is wrong!”
“I’m just one in four. Not that unusual. I looked up the stats.”
He spins around, then rushes toward me. His face is in mine. “So that justifies what happened to you?” He flings his arm. “Fucking numbers? They justify nothing.”
Suddenly I’m tired. I don’t even know why I’m expending emotional energy on him. “You’re right. They don’t. Let’s just stop. There’s no reason for you to be so upset.”
“How can you just dismiss it like…that? What’s the matter with you?”
I laugh. It is an ugly sound, but I can’t help it. It kills me that he wants to know what’s wrong with me. Doesn’t he know? “How can you ask me that? You’re the one who insisted that I’m not good enough.”
He recoils as though struck. “What are you talking about? I’ve never said anything like that.”
“You won’t even call me by my name. To you, I’m a substitute for Gigi, not a person. Not a woman named Annabelle Key. But because I need money and you have plenty to spare, you get to make me into whatever you want.” He pales, but I don’t stop. The dam that used to contain my bitterness has been breached, I couldn’t control the torrent even if I wanted to. “You’re just like that boy who took me when I was unconscious. To him I wasn’t a person either. Just some orifice where he could stick his dick for his pleasure.”
