Free Vulnerable by Allyson Young Page B

involved with prior to her.
    “I guess we had maybe six months of marital bliss, and then he started hanging out with his brothers and cousins at the strip clubs, coming home drunk and demanding his dinner or sex, depending upon the amount of booze he had put away. The novelty had worn off for him, because he didn’t feel anything for me other than as a sex partner, and I since figured out that it had indeed been infatuation, although I didn’t know what to call it at the time. I wasn’t smart enough to keep my own counsel and bitched at him, as he called it, and he retaliated. At first, it was just shouting and shoving, but then it escalated, and I wouldn’t back down. I stopped going to school because I didn’t know how to explain the bruises on my face or the black eyes. I could cover the rest of my body for the most part, but my face…”
    Ross’s body trembled beneath her, but his face remained impassive, only his eyes reflecting some of the rage she knew he was suppressing.
    “I tried, Ross. I really did. I made his favorite food, I kept the house clean, his laundry done, and the sex sometimes made things better between us. Except then he started screwing around on me, and gave me chlamydia. I found out at the local clinic and then everybody probably knew, because confidentiality in our little town wasn’t exactly honored. I went home and lost it on him, and he beat me unconscious. And that was really the start of things.”
    Ross was now taking deep breaths, and she could feel his heart beating harder and harder under her. Elise rolled up and off her hip, wincing as her buttocks took her weight. She looked into his face, and saw nothing there that would suggest censure or disgust, but rather, there was pure, raw fury now boiling like wisps of steam against the crystalline blue of his eyes. “Ross?”
    “I find myself wanting to kill your ex-husband, Elise. And I think I know what happened to you next. Did he sexually abuse you?”
    Elise felt a bark of bitter laughter escape her and shrugged. “It was a long time ago. Bodies heal.”
    “I saw the scarring, Elise.”
    “I had no idea anal sex could feel like it did until last night, Ross. I don’t regret a moment of it, and you must know that from my response. My ex didn’t give a shit about anything but his own pleasure in the end. If he was drinking or if his brothers and cousins were there, well, pretty much whatever they felt like doing got done. To me. Together, separately, it didn’t really matter to them. I was nothing to them, nothing to my husband. I would have given anything for a crumb of affection, trapped in that house, unable to go anywhere because of my own shame. After a while, it became my lot in life, and I lost the will to even think about it. I used whatever energy I had to heal between times and push it to the back of my head.”
    Ross groaned and cuddled her close again, rubbing her arm, rubbing her back. “How did you get away?”
    “My mom came by with a cake. It was my nineteenth birthday, and I hadn’t even thought about it. Terry certainly had no clue. I’d been with him a year and three months, and he didn’t even remember my birthday. It was a Sunday afternoon, and he and his “guys” were watching the game. I had made them some food and was making sure I served the drinks, trying to keep them mellow without tipping them off that I was trying to do so.
    “His brother, Lloyd, followed me into the kitchen and was trying to bend me over the counter when my mom came in the back door. He couldn’t get himself back in his pants in time, and she figured it out right away. I guess it helped that I was her child, but he’d torn my shirt, too, so she believed I didn’t want him to do what he was doing. She went right back out the door and got my dad and one of my sister’s boyfriends who were waiting in the car. They faced the drunken fools down, and I walked right out with them. I didn’t stop for anything. I left