Page 94 of In Harmony

The words lodged in my throat. Wanting to spill out, yet they remained locked behind my teeth. A backwards stage fright. I had no problem letting playwrights speak for me when I performed for strangers. This girl in my arms made me feel closer to my true self than I could ever remember.

Willow heaved a final sigh. At last she slept, in as much peace as she could find on the ground between headstones. Only then was I brave enough to whisper it.

“You’re the girl I want, Willow.”

I said it as me, as Isaac Pearce. Not a line in a play written by someone else. Me.

“You’re it. You’re the girl. I don’t want anyone else.”

She sighed again and settled deeper against me. And that’s how we slept. The old dead and the new, with the sun rising and a morning mist coming to settle over us all.

Willow

I woke up with a headache thundering behind my eyes and a sour taste in my mouth. The smell of soil filled my nose. I opened my eyes to a tuft of grass and tried to remember. The alcohol had broken last night like a deck of cards, shuffling events and words out of order, dealing them back to me in random flashes.

I blinked. Row after row of crooked gravestones swam into view, a white mist hanging low and seeping between them.

Oh my God, I slept in a graveyard.

I came more awake, aware now of Isaac wedged behind me. His black leather was draped over my body, along with his bare arm, goosebumped from the chill morning air. I noticed the tattoo there, Old English script in black ink, in a line up his forearm.

I burn. I pine. I perish.

Shakespeare? Maybe. The words felt so very Isaac in a way I didn’t fully grasp yet, but maybe someday I would. His warm body was flush to mine. His presence—the hard, heavy reality of him—didn’t terrorize my psyche. I slept all night. I felt safe.

And then I remembered.

I told him everything.

It floated back to me on a current of fear and humiliation. I told Isaac he was beautiful approximately six hundred times. I tried to kiss him. Offered him my body because I thought being half out of my mind with alcohol was the only way I’d ever be able to be physical with a man.

I told my story.

I screamed obscenities at the sky.

Then I threw up.

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

The secret suffocating my life was out, and Isaac Pearce had it now. All of it. Every screaming, puking minute of it. Every sordid detail. He bore witness to the ragged agony pouring out of me. It was no longer a shadowy memory locked somewhere inside, leaking to the surface of my skin in little black X’s. It was real. It was out.

Xavier Wilkinson drugged and raped me.

I’d said the words to Isaac. Said that word, out loud, in my own voice, and by doing so, I took away a little of its power. Not a lot; a drop in a vast ocean, but it was a start.

I sat up slowly and Isaac’s jacket slid off my shoulders. My jeans were mud-streaked and damp from lying in the grass all night. My hair fell down around me in a tangled mess.

“Hey,” Isaac said in a low voice.

I whipped my head around to stare down at him. All the words I’d spoken hung heavy in the air between us, and I could not take them back.

What if I don’t want to?

Isaac knowing wasn’t the same as Xavier having a naked picture of me. It wasn’t all over his face. He wasn’t turning it over and over in his mind, looking at it like a lewd photo. He watched me with furrowed brows, concern and uncertainty in his expression.

“Hey,” I said, and winced. My throat was raw and hoarse from screaming. My thoughts such a jumble, I didn’t know what to say except, “We slept in a graveyard.”

Isaac smiled and his brow smoothed out. “Yeah, we did.” He glanced at the gravestone. “I hope…Joseph P. Bouchard, ‘dear and loyal husband,’ didn’t mind.”