Free Close: A New Adult Thriller by M.H. Young Page A

than the rest of us.
    Did I really want to go through with a trial, assuming that it would even get that far. The answer was I didn’t. I wasn’t brave like that. Kish was wrong.
    But I kept coming back to the same question. What if he did it again? How would I feel knowing that another girl was going to have to go through what I had? Even if I couldn't stop Bentley, I could at least slow him up. If it went to trial and he was found not guilty then at least girls would know what a slime ball he was.
    That was when it hit me. It was so obvious. A jury might not believe me, but what if there other girls like me out there who hadn’t come forward, or hadn’t remembered as much as I had, or were just too scared?
    But even if there were, how would I find them? It wasn’t as if I could post an ad on Facebook? Ever been raped by this guy ?
    Something else occurred to me. Maybe I wouldn’t have to.

 
    Twenty-Two
     
    Becky, the lady I’d seen at the Crisis Centre, agreed to see me that afternoon. We’d had an appointment scheduled for later in the week, but I’d told that I’d like to see her before. She agreed straight away.
    Kish drove me into town to see here. She was still worried about my decision not to tell my mom. Kish saw it as an issue of trust. What would my mom think if she found it from someone else, first?
    I saw it as an issue of protecting someone I loved. Life was weird like that. We grow up having our parents protecting us from the world. But at some point there’s a switch, and we’re the ones shielding them from it. I guessed that most people faced that as their parents got old. I was just having to face that transition a little earlier than most.
    “You want me to come in with you?” Kish asked as we pulled up outside.
    I shook my head. “Thanks, but it’s okay.”
    “Okay,” said Kish. “Well I’m going to go do some retail therapy. I’ll swing back in an hour and pick you up.”
    I smiled. Even though retail therapy was a dumb joke, and it would have been easy for me to take it the wrong way, it was the first time since I’d told Kish about the rape that I’d seen the slightest glimmer of old Kish. I wasn’t going to spoil it. I had come to cherish the tiniest normal moments. I welcomed anything that was an echo of my life before.
    I walked inside the Centre. I only had to wait a few minutes before Becky appeared.
    “Come on through,” she said.
    I followed her into her office. She motioned for me to sit down.
    “How have you been, Laura?”
    I told her. But I didn’t tell her everything. I didn’t tell her about Drew, or at least about the moment we’d had. I only talked about the interview, and, of course, about the pretext call. She didn’t say it in so many words, but I got the impression that she was unhappy that Drew had asked me to call Bentley without speaking to her first. I didn’t want to dwell on it, so I moved on to what John had said.
    Becky sighed. “Different people are going to react in different ways, Laura. The most important thing is that you don’t forget that this wasn’t your fault. It’s no woman’s fault. No one asks for this to happen to them.”
    I remembered something in the papers recently where the head of campus police at a college in the South had got in a lot of trouble for suggesting that if coeds didn’t want to be raped they should dress more conservatively and not get drunk at parties. What had surprised me wasn’t that he had said it. What surprised me was how many people, including women, had agreed with him. There was part of me that had thought like that too, part of me that believed if a girl went out and showed a lot of flesh, and got drunk then she was inviting trouble.
    I didn’t think like that anymore. The reality was too raw, the pain too great, for me to believe that a person deserved this. No one deserved it. The guilt was all on the perpetrator.
    We talked a little more. I was glad I’d come to see her. There were lots