Falling

36

After a few more days, it’s time to head back to Seattle. I’m finishing packing our bags while Candace gets ready in the bathroom. Having this week away has been good for us. And having her here with my mom makes this connection that we have so much stronger.

Needing to grab a few things out of the bathroom, I don’t knock when I see she has left the door cracked. When I open it, she startles as she pulls down on her sweatshirt.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” she says as she still has her top clutched in her hands.

I walk over to her and take her hand, lifting it up along with the shirt, and when I do, she says, “I don’t like it,” referring to her tattoo that is peeking over her pants that she has tugged down.

I lower her shirt and ask, “Why?”

“Because it’s not me,” she admits. “I was trying to be someone different, and it only led to bad things.”

“What do you mean?”

“I got it in a moment of rebellion, I guess. It was stupid, really. I got it and started acting foolishly, which led to . . . umm . . .” her words stammer off as she drops her head away from me. I know what she’s trying to say, and it’s insane to think getting a tattoo would result in her getting raped.

“I get it. But, babe, nothing you did led to that.”

When she doesn’t say anything and refrains from looking at me as she starts walking out of the bathroom, I grab ahold of her because I need to know that she agrees with me.

“Wait. You know that, right?”

God. She doesn’t agree with me. I can see the guilt in her eyes. How could she possibly think this?

“Come here,” I tell her as I sit on the bed, taking her hand and pulling her towards me. “Tell me you don’t think that.”

When she doesn’t respond, I say, “Babe, there is nothing you could have possibly done to deserve that.”

She turns away from me as I say this, and when I tug her back to me, she’s crying.

Fuck.

How did I not know that she blames herself for this?

“Shit, babe. I had no idea this is how you feel.”

“Please, don’t,” she says in a broken voice.

“I need you to talk to me about this. You have it all wrong. What that guy did was fucked up, babe, and you didn’t do shit to deserve what he did to you.”

She looks up at me and pulls her hands out of mine when she gets mad and yells, “You don’t get it, Ryan! What I did was stupid, and I completely led him on. It wasn’t right, and I knew it, but I did it anyway.”

Infuriated that she feels this way when her logic is so fucked up, I raise my voice at her, saying, “What the fuck could you have possibly done? Because I know you, Candace, and I know you couldn’t have led him on that much. But that shit doesn’t even matter because you could’ve stripped down in front of him, and you still didn’t deserve to be raped.”

“Don’t say that fucking word, Ryan!” she snaps and then begins to fall apart, sobbing.

Banding my arms around her, I hold her close. “Babe, I’m sorry. I just had no idea that this is how you think.”

“I didn’t even really like him,” she begins to stammer out between her cries. “But I was stupid and lonely, so I would let him kiss me, knowing that I didn’t like him. And I fucking hate my mother for this, because if it wasn’t for her being such a bitch, I never would have gone out with him.”

“Candace, please don’t do this.”

“You just don’t get it. I did lead him on, and I pissed him off. I never should’ve acted like that. I should’ve just been honest.”

“This isn’t your fault.” I tell her in a hard voice.

“Yes, it is!”

“It isn’t your fault, Candace.”

Facing me, she takes my shirt in her hands, fisting the fabric when she yells, “But it is!” and then falls into my chest. Her cries are loud, staggered, and strained. It’s hard to listen to, but I do because I love her. I don’t say anything else because I’m only upsetting her worse.

I can’t argue her irrational thinking because she isn’t seeing it with clear eyes. This guy screwed with her head so badly that she’s been carrying the weight of the responsibility on her own shoulders. And here I am, blind to this fact. My girl has been holding fault when that son of a bitch is the only one to blame.

Moving her with me as I lie down on the bed, she tucks her head under my chin and continues to cry for a while. She’s in so much pain, and I don’t know how to make it any better for her. I’ve always questioned her choices for how she’s been dealing with this, but now, knowing this piece of the puzzle, it’s clear that she needs to do something.

We’re face to face when she finally speaks. “It’s been seven months, Ryan.”

“I know, babe.”

“I just want it to go away.”

“I know. But it’s never going to get easier if you keep blaming yourself. It kills me that you feel this way. It fuckin’ kills me that I can’t take this away from you.”

Knowing that there isn’t a goddamn thing I can do to lessen her misery frustrates me beyond anything I have ever dealt with. I want to take care of her, to be the person that makes this better for her, but that’s what’s so fucked up about this situation—that’s what’s so scary—because it all lies within her. She’s the only one who can make this better, but she refuses to help herself. She figures if she just ignores it for long enough then it will fade away and everything will go back to normal. It’s not a sane way to deal with this. In fact, I think it’s just making it worse for her with every day that passes. The avoiding is catching up with her, and I’m afraid she’s just going to—one day—crumble.

When her breathing begins to even out, she asks, “Can’t we stay another night?”

“Anything you want,” I tell her.

I lie here, and I can’t shake my own guilt about this whole situation. I’ve always had it. I’ve always asked all the what-ifs, but the fact remains, this girl was outside fighting for her life while I was mere feet away. If only I would have gone out there, I wouldn’t be lying here with my girl falling apart on me. She wouldn’t be carrying this around with her every day. I was the only other person there, and I did nothing.

Noticing that her body has gone limp, I remember that she hasn’t taken her sleeping pill. Slipping out of bed, I go to her purse to grab the bottle. I take out a pill and fill up a glass of water from the bathroom before waking her.

“Baby,” I urge as she slowly opens her eyes. “Here, take this.”

She does and then hands the glass back to me. I crawl back into bed and hold her until she falls back asleep. The whole time, my mind is just eating away at me. At everything. When she’s finally asleep, I quietly head downstairs because I need a little space to get my thoughts together, but shit is just spinning more and more the longer I sit at the dining room table.

“Hey, dear,” I hear my mom say softly when she crosses the room to sit with me.

“Hey,” I sigh.

“Where’s Candace?”

“She’s sleeping. We’re just gonna head back tomorrow,” I tell her as I look at her from across the table.

“Are you okay?” she asks. “I heard you two fighting earlier.”

Leaning forward in my seat, I rest my forearms on the table, saying, “We weren’t fighting, Mom.”

She shakes her head at me and questions, “Well, is everything all right?”

I normally tell my mother everything, but when I found out about Candace, I held it secret. But I feel like I’m in so deep with this girl, and the stuff I’m dealing with is some of the heaviest shit I’ve ever dealt with. I haven’t had anyone to really talk to about it, and knowing how much my mother loves her, I trust her enough to make this confession that I have had locked up inside of me.

“No.” I drop my head when I say this because I already feel the remorse building inside for betraying Candace by telling her secret, but it’s breaking me, and I don’t know where else to turn.

She places her hand over mine as she says, “Talk to me, sweetheart.”

Staring at our hands, I take in a deep breath and begin, “There’s something I’ve never told you about Candace.”

“Okay.”

“Remember the attack I told you about that happened this past summer at the bar?”

When she nods, I swallow hard and reveal, “It was her, Mom. That girl was Candace.”

“Oh my God,” she whispers as she removes her hand from mine to cover her mouth. She’s in complete shock when she asks, “How did you . . .?”

“She doesn’t know,” I confess. “I didn’t even know it was her for a while. I thought it could be, but I wasn’t sure. I was so confused, thinking my head was just trying to make something out of nothing with her weird behavior. But I honestly didn’t know.”

“I don’t understand. Where did you meet her?”

“I grabbed a coffee from where she works. And then I kept seeing her because she’s friends with a couple buddies of mine. But there’s this tattoo,” I say as I fight to hold back the tears that threaten. “I saw it on that girl, and then after I had already fallen for Candace, I saw that same tattoo on her. I was scared, so I never told her.”

“Ryan . . .”

“We weren’t fighting earlier. She told me that what happened to her was her fault. I was trying to talk to her about it, and she got really upset.” Pressing my palms to my forehead, I tell her, “God, Mom, you have no idea what that fucker did to her. What she looked like when I found her.”

It’s when I drop my hands that I see the tears running down my mom’s face and that’s what sends me over. I don’t cry, but I feel it stabbing inside of me.

“Honey, you have to tell her.”

“It felt like the right thing to do at the time. That I was keeping it from her for all the right reasons,” I try to explain. “I didn’t want to hurt her, but now . . . now it feels like a lie, and I’m scared. I’m scared I’m gonna lose her.”

“But now things are different with you two, and she needs to know.”

I can feel the heat of the tears welling in my eyes when I ask, feeling desperate, “Do you think she’ll understand?”

She takes her time before responding with, “I think you have a girl that’s been shown, in the most horrendous way a person can be shown, just how gruesome life can be. She’s been stripped of her security and faith in people. It’s awful, and people like that don’t trust easily.”

Dropping my head in my hands, I nearly beg, “What do I do? I love her.”

She takes my hand and pulls it down when she looks at me and tells me to do what I’m terrified of doing.

“You have to tell her . . . You just have to.”

But I don’t want to. I can’t risk losing her. All I want to do is keep her forever, so I selfishly go back upstairs, crawl under the sheets next to her, and hang on to the one good thing that finally came into my life and changed everything about me. I can’t lose her.

Waking up with Candace just didn’t feel right with the dread that has made its home in the pit of my stomach. And seeing how clingy she’s been with me all morning, and now on the drive home, makes the thought of telling her that much worse.

She has kept a hold on my hand ever since she opened her eyes this morning. I don’t question her about it; I just give her the closeness, the security that I’m here and I’m not leaving. I can’t tell her. Not now. Not when she’s vulnerable like this.

Thinking about what sparked the whole conversation with Candace yesterday, I say, “I hate that your tattoo makes you feel the way it does.” I hate the way it makes me feel too. It’s hard for me to look at because almost every time I do, I see the girl from that night, and I can’t stand thinking of her like that, the way she looked lying there unconscious. There have been a couple times in the past where I’ve had to cover it with my hand while we make love because it hurts too much to look at.

“I thought about having it removed once.”

“Have you thought about changing it?” I ask as I glance over at her, giving her hand a little squeeze.

“I just don’t know what I would do. I don’t want anything bigger than it is now,” she explains.

“Did Roxy’s boyfriend do it?”

“Jared? Yeah.”

“When we get home, why don’t we talk to him, see what he can do?”

“I guess,” she says, unconvinced.

“I just think if it looked different, or you could add something to it that was meaningful to you, that you could associate it with something new, instead of what you’re doing now. Give it new meaning.”

“We can go talk to him,” is her only response, and I don’t say anything else about it because I know it’s a difficult thing to talk about.

When we arrive back in Seattle, I take Candace to her house to spend a little time with her before I have to run to the bar to take care of some work.

Setting her bags down on the bed, Candace quietly says, “I don’t want you to go to work.”

I hate that she’s feeling like this today, and that she doesn’t want to be alone, but I tell her, “Baby, I have to. It’s Saturday night, and I’ve been gone all week.”

She leans into me, sliding her arms around my waist. She’s needy, and I don’t want her to be alone either, so I offer, “Come with me.”

“What?”

“You don’t even have to be around everyone. Stay with me in my office.”

I’m not expecting her answer when she says, “Okay.”

“Really?” I question, stunned that she would agree so easily, especially for a Saturday night.

“Just park in the front, okay?”