Reconstructing Meredith (12 page)

“Which we both knew would happen eventually.”

I nodded. “I know. I’m just concerned about… conditioning.”

She cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

“Conditioning is a powerful thing.” I spoke so softly my voice didn’t echo at all in the cavernous garage. “You said yourself even the smell of coffee or leather has given you flashbacks.”

“At one time, yes.” She furrowed her brow. “But what does that have to do with this?”

“I don’t want to condition you…” I bit my lip, then took a breath. “I don’t want to condition you to associate me with the fear or panic or pain he caused.”

Meredith blinked. “That’s not possible, Scott.”

“Isn’t it?” I rested my hand on her waist. “What if I push you too hard, too fast? If I start giving you more flashbacks, more panic? How long before you start associating those with me?”

She put her arms around me. “I know we’ve only been doing this for a little while, but I’ve never once thought to connect you to what he’s doing. Even when I panicked on my bedroom floor after that thing with the flogger, I never connected you to it.”

“Not consciously, maybe.” I kissed her forehead. “But if it happens enough times, under enough different circumstances, I’ll be the common thread.”

“So what do you suggest? I don’t trust anyone else to do this.”

“I’m not saying to have someone else do it,” I whispered. “That’s why I took this on in the first place. I’m not digging my heels in or backing out. I absolutely want to help you get past your trauma and give you a chance to experience your fantasies.” I ran my fingers through her hair. “What I’m suggesting is we take smaller steps. Move a little slower. That way, if negative things happen, there are more positive steps in between.”

“Do you want to forget the whole threesome thing, then?”

“No, I’m not suggesting that.” I touched her face. “I’m just suggesting we take it slow. Smaller steps, nothing more.” I swallowed hard. “Can you trust my judgment on that?”

“Of course I trust your judgment.” She smiled and stood up on her toes to kiss me. “I trust you, Scott. I wouldn’t be your sub if I didn’t.”

After months of paperwork and bullshit, Meredith finally obtained access to her storage unit. Rich had kept the unit in his name, and the storage company wasn’t about to hand it over to his ex-wife. She’d at least convinced them to let her keep paying for it rather than letting it default, which would have resulted in her possessions being auctioned off or discarded. It had taken an endless stream of phone calls, letters, faxes, affidavits, statements, and aspirin, but at long last, her things were hers again.

I parked the U-Haul in front of the unit.

Meredith stared at the metal drop door and took a breath. “Guess now I get to see how much of my stuff he destroyed.” Unbuckling her seatbelt, she turned to me. “You brought the cutters, right?”

I pulled the bolt cutters out from under the seat. Since there was no key for the lock, we’d gotten permission to just cut it off and be done with it.

It was a good thing, too, because the lock was rusted shut. The cheap, piece-of-shit lock was probably the absolute bare minimum Rich could get away with while complying with the storage company’s safety regulations. Fortunately, it was also easy to cut, unlike some of the more expensive types on the market, and with minimal effort on my part, the corroded padlock clattered on to the pavement at our feet.

Meredith bent and grabbed the handle on the bottom of the door. “Here we go,” she muttered, probably more to herself than me. She pulled the handle, and with a deafening rumble, the door rolled up.

Sunlight illuminated the haphazard stacks of boxes for the first time in years. The smell of mold and mildew immediately made me wince, both from the strong odor and the sinking feeling as I considered what kind of damage it might have done to her things. Furniture and boxes alike were shoved wherever they’d fit, most likely with no regard for how well they’d bear weight or if any finishes would be damaged. What moisture hadn’t damaged, force and physics probably had.

Meredith stood, but otherwise didn’t move. For a moment, she just stared at everything, her hands clasped beneath her chin. It must have been overwhelming for her. Overwhelming and intimidating. Where to start?

I rested my hand on the small of her back. “Ready to empty this thing?”

Without taking her eyes off the boxes, she nodded slowly.

“You okay?”

Another nod. Finally, she looked at me. “Just having a hard time getting my head around this.”

“I don’t doubt that for a second.”

She threw a sad look toward the boxes, then dropped her gaze. “I wonder if it might be a good idea to go through everything here. I mean, there’s no sense hauling everything home and up to my apartment, only to find out things are busted to pieces.”

My stomach twisted into knots. I could only imagine why she was so certain he’d destroyed enough of her things to warrant going through it all here. Then again, looking at the jumbled heap of all her possessions, there was no way everything had survived unscathed.
Did you bother leaving
anything
in her world intact, you cocksucker
?

I cleared my throat. “It’s up to you. We have the truck until tomorrow night, and I have all weekend to help.”

She smiled. “I appreciate it.” Her smile fell and she looked at the boxes. “Guess we should get started. We can just open stuff, take a quick look, and if everything looks reasonably intact, put it in the truck.” She handed me a pair of gloves. After five years, God only knew what creatures had moved in here.

We shoved boxes out of the way until we got to the furniture. Most of that was pretty well trashed. What wasn’t broken was badly damaged from moisture and mold. Anything with upholstery or stuffing was beyond saving. Fortunately, she wasn’t terribly attached to any of that. A trunk given to her by her grandmother and most of the antique bedroom set were fine, though, and those were important to her. They had a few scratches and such, but nothing that couldn’t be either fixed or covered up.

A gouge out of her dining room table was almost dead center, so a well-placed centerpiece would keep it out of sight. Two of the chairs were destroyed, but the other four were intact, so she still had a decent dining set.

“You can always find a matched pair for the head chairs,” I said. “Even if they don’t match the other four exactly.”

She nodded. “Good idea. Not that I’ve ever needed to use six chairs.”

“Always good to have them in case you need them, though.”

“True.” She looked around. “I think that’s it for the big stuff.” She picked up a box cutter and looked around. None of the boxes were marked, so there was no indication of what was in them or where they should go in her apartment. A few were torn, split, or chewed, revealing hints of their contents. Some dishes peeked out of a gaping hole that had been punched into a small computer box. A rodent or something had gnawed its way into another, and continued right into the spines of the books within. What looked like a computer tower was visible in the split-apart side of a half-crushed box.

I shook my head and picked up the other cutter. “With as carefully as he packed all of this, I’m honestly surprised he bothered paying for the storage unit all this time.”

She laughed bitterly. “Oh, that was just one of his little games.”

“What do you mean?” I sliced apart some dusty tape and opened a box.

“He used it to keep me in line. He’d show me the statements so I could see that he was dutifully keeping all of my stuff here, but if I upset him somehow, he’d threaten to stop paying the bill or just close the unit.” She shoved a box aside with her foot.

“Figures he’d find a way to use it against you.”

“Trust me,” she said, picking up a relatively undamaged box, “he could use anything against me.”

“I can imagine.” I riffled through the box in front of me, checking to make sure its contents were salvageable. Aside from a couple of cracked glasses and a bowl that may or may not have been chipped before it was packed, everything looked fine. I pulled out the damaged pieces, dropped them into a box we’d designated as a trash box, and took the rest out to the truck.

When I came back, I cut open another and started sifting through it. “What was Rich like, anyway? I mean, when you first met him. Before he, you know…”

“Before Mr. Hyde showed up?”

“Yeah.”

“He was a really nice guy, to be honest with you.” She set a box down and toed it toward the door. “And truth be told, even after we got married, he
could
be a sweet guy.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “I never would have guessed what he was really like. Honestly. He was sweet, charming, the kind of guy I could talk to for hours.” She blew out a breath and rolled her eyes. “Had everyone fooled, actually. Everyone in the community was completely horrified when they found out what happened to me, and a lot of people thought I was just trying to ruin his reputation.” She paused, cutting the tape on a box before sliding the box cutter into her back pocket. “Honestly, if the D.A. and judge hadn’t been so hellbent on making an example out of him, he probably would have gone free just like most abusers do. And he would have gone right on convincing everyone what a fucking saint he was.”

“Amazing how well people can hide sides like that,” I said through my teeth.

“You’re telling me.” Something ceramic clattered and clanked. Paper rustled. Then she closed the box and pushed it off to the side before reaching for another. “We put on a pretty good show for them. Both of us. Especially at all those black-tie events we’d go to. You know, the things rich people are always invited to? Oh, man, we could pull off the happily married couple image like nobody’s business.” She gave a snort of sarcastic laughter, but then paused. When I glanced at her, her expression was sad. Almost nostalgic.

“What’s wrong?” I asked over a box of water-damaged-beyond-repair paperbacks.

She sighed and met my eyes. “He even had me convinced every once in a while.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’d go through… phases.” She shook herself back to life and reached in to sort through the box while she continued speaking. “He was always absolutely domineering in the bedroom, but sometimes he almost fooled me into believing we were a real couple. We’d go out, we’d talk, we’d even sit on the couch and watch a movie once in a while.” She pulled a rat’s nest of tangled—and chewed—cables and cords out of the box and tossed them into the rapidly growing trash pile. “Of course, we’d be back to the usual shit before long, but those were the times he almost convinced me he really loved me.”

I ground my teeth. I didn’t know what made me hate him more: treating her like shit, or pretending he was the loving husband in spite of everything he’d done to her. Either way, I loathed the ground he walked on.

“I’ll never understand that asshole,” I said. “I just don’t get what kind of person would do that. Any of it. Shoving everything you own into storage, cutting you off from everyone, and taking you to another state, not to mention how he treated you sexually? It blows my mind.”

“I don’t know.” She paused, her shoulders dropping a little. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, keeping her eyes down, but not focusing on anything that I could see.

“What?” I asked.

Taking a breath, she looked at me. “Sometimes I’ve caught myself wondering if I… had it coming.”

The box cutter in my hand clattered on to the concrete. I stooped to pick it up, all the while staring at her with wide eyes. “Had it coming? What are you talking about?”

Even in the dim light, the way her cheeks changed color was obvious. “I had this… fantasy…”

“What kind of fantasy?”

Swallowing hard, she shifted her weight. “It’s sick.”

“Try me.”

She opened a box and concentrated on sorting through its contents while she spoke. “It was about having someone… I mean, it…” She sighed and rested her hands on the sides of the box. “To be perfectly blunt, it involved having someone kidnap me and…” Trailing off, she shook her head again. “It’s messed up, I—”

“A kidnap and rape fantasy?”

Meeting my eyes, she nodded.

“They’re more common than you might think, babe,” I said. “There’s nothing sick about the fantasy, but there is something sick about someone taking it upon himself to force you into that fantasy on his terms.”

She exhaled and dropped her gaze.

“I’ve played out rape fantasies with women before,” I said.

Her head snapped up. “You have?”

“Yeah. Under their control, with safe words in place, yes.”

“I guess I just started wondering if I’d somehow brought this on myself. Like the universe was saying ‘okay, this is what you wanted, have fun.’”

“No, not even close,” I said, almost growling. “Even if you’d told Rich that fantasy, he had no right to force you into that. The whole point of playing out a fantasy like that is to do it under
your
control with
your
rules. So it’s safe.”

She blew out a breath, but didn’t respond.

I went on. “Even if you did have a fantasy about someone really coming in and kidnapping you, truly hurting you, raping you, whatever, that doesn’t give anyone the right to take it upon themselves to play it out with you.” I swallowed hard, struggling to keep my fury at her ex-husband in check. “And Meredith, even if you had decided you really liked what he was doing, it doesn’t make it any less a crime because he didn’t have your consent in the beginning.”

Nodding slowly, she ran a hand through her hair. “I know. I guess I just…” She trailed off, then shook her head again. “Fuck, I don’t know. Deep down, I know he had no right, I just can’t help feeling a little—” She gulped. “—guilty.”

“So do a lot of rape survivors,” I said. “That doesn’t mean you actually did anything wrong or deserved it.”

“I guess that’s just one more thing that will hopefully get better in time.”

“It will.” We exchanged smiles.

I cut open another box. This one was full of framed photos, each separated from the others by a single layer of newspaper. They’d actually been placed into the box fairly carefully, even if they weren’t wrapped in much, so I guessed Meredith had packed them.

I pulled a few out and carefully unwrapped them to see if they’d survived well enough to save. Family portrait, graduation photo, parents on some trip or another, and—

My heart skipped.

Us.

We stood in front of the lodge at Whistler Mountain, arms around each other and smiling, bundled up with snowboards in hand. It must have been the second day of that three-day trip, since we both already had a little sunburn on our faces and still looked pretty energetic, like we hadn’t worn ourselves out yet that day. In fact, I was pretty sure that was right before the run during which I—while showing off and attempting something well above my own skill level—broke my ankle. Aside from that little mishap, though, the trip was a blast. That was the weekend I’d learned that even a freshly fractured ankle and some painkillers couldn’t keep me from appreciating Meredith’s oral talents.

I couldn’t help smiling at the memory, but that smile faded when the light caught the jagged edge of the frame’s broken glass. Most of the glass was gone, and what was left was splintered. The picture had a few scratches that vaguely mimicked a spiderweb, and none of the missing pieces of glass were inside the cocoon of newspaper. Whatever happened to it happened before the photo was packed.