Violated (7 page)

At the mention of her old fiancé’s name, Shannon raised her eyebrows and hesitated a moment with her soda halfway to her lips. “Marty! Haven’t heard
his
name in a while….”

Marty and Shannon had been engaged their last year of high school. Then the poor kid had been out riding his motorcycle one night when an asshole ran a red light. Russ attended his funeral right before senior graduation. Shannon had been a wreck. She couldn’t even go to the service.

“I’m sorry,” Russ said. “I shouldn’t have brought him up.”

“It’s all right.”

Feeling like an insensitive ass, Russ gave an awkward nod and said, “He was a good guy.”

Shannon snorted. Then she quickly tried to cover it up by taking another sip of soda.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Did I miss something?”

Shannon looked at one of the citronella candles for a long time as it sputtered in the slight breeze. Then she said, “He wasn’t all that wonderful, you know. I know everybody thought so. But he wasn’t.”

That threw Russ for a loop. Nobody had ever said anything bad about Marty before. He’d been handsome, charming, polite to the parents, cool with the gay younger brother. “What do you mean?”

Shannon was still staring at that candle when she said quietly, “Are you sure you want to know, Russ?”

“What? Yes.” She was acting a little strange, which made him nervous. What the hell could Marty have done? “Come on, Shannon. If there’s something I should know about….”

She leaned closer to him and lowered her voice. “All right. I suppose it’ll be good to finally tell someone, but you’ve got to promise not to tell
anyone
. You got me? Not Bill. Not Mom and Dad.
Nobody
. Got it?”

Jesus
. “Yeah, I got it.”

“Marty raped me.”

The revelation seared through Russ’s brain like a branding iron.
Impossible
. For a while he couldn’t do anything but stare blankly back at his sister. There was no way to reconcile what she’d just said with the image of Marty in his memory. “What?”

“He was drunk the first time, so I tried to forgive him.”

“The
first
time?”

Shannon glanced quickly back at the house. “Quiet down,” she hissed. “Yes, it happened twice. He wasn’t drunk the second time. He was just a fucking pig. And dead or not, I’ll never forgive him for that.”

Russ couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Not that he doubted his sister. But what she told him, as she tentatively filled in the details, went against everything he thought he knew about Marty. God! He’d even had a slight crush on the guy when he was a teenager! How could he have held his sister down and forced her, even after she’d started crying and begging him to stop?

“I don’t know,” Shannon said. “He’d always been kind of pushy about sex. We did it more than just those two times—I never claimed to be some delicate, virginal flower. Most of the time, when he got horny, I went along with it. But the two times I didn’t want to, he made me do it anyway, and it terrified me. I knew after that I didn’t have the strength to fight him off, and he couldn’t be trusted not to use his strength against me.”

“Jesus!” Russ snarled under his breath. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You think I wanted everyone to know I’d been raped?”

“My God!”

Shannon put a hand on his arm. “Russ… I handled it, okay? I broke up with him.”

“When?”

“The next day.”

“You never told us the engagement was off,” he said, afraid he was sounding accusatory. He didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want to make it sound like any of it had been her fault.
Jesus, Marty!

“He got hit by that car just a couple days later,” Shannon replied. “There didn’t seem to be much point after that.”

Russ felt rage surging through him. He had to get up out of his chair and walk to the deck railing. If only there was something,
anything
he could smash!

“Russ… there’s nothing you could have done.”

“I could have bashed his fucking face in! Ripped his goddamn dick off!”

She hushed him again and got up to join him at the railing. In the yard below them, spring peepers called to each other and fireflies drifted lazily through the air. It was a beautiful, peaceful night. “I didn’t want that. You looked up to him. You adored him! It was hard enough for you to lose him. I didn’t want to make you
hate
him.”

“Christ, Shannon, I’m so sorry….”

“It was a long time ago,” she said, shrugging as if it was of little importance. But he remembered how she’d begun the conversation.
I suppose it’ll be good to finally tell someone
. What had it been like to keep this a secret for the past fifteen years?

“I wish you’d told me.”

“Don’t get all worked up over it,” she said, rubbing his back to soothe him. “I’ve put it behind me. For the most part, anyway. It does feel good to tell someone. Thanks for being here for me, Rusty.”

He snorted and shook his head. He felt so frustrated he wanted to explode. But she was right. Marty was dead. There was nothing he could do now except listen if she wanted to talk. He reached out to drape his arm protectively across her shoulders and pull her in for a hug. He kissed the top of her head and said, “Anything you need me to do, you just let me know.”

“Just be my brother,” Shannon answered. “And don’t ever…
ever
… tell Bill.”

I
T
WAS
still dark when Derek awoke. He was lying on his stomach, head still swimming from the alcohol, and he really had to piss. But something else was going on—someone was jostling the bed. That’s why he’d woken. He smelled sweat and leather and alcohol, and it filtered through his fuzzy brain that Victor was in the room with him. With a sudden prickling of alarm, he realized the man was slipping under the blankets and climbing on top of him. He felt hot, sweaty skin brushing against his, the disturbing sensation of Victor’s erection sliding along the back of his leg, and then Victor dropped down onto his back with an impact that forced Derek’s breath out of his lungs.

“Ugh! Wha….” He couldn’t take in enough breath to form words.

He was still too drunk to coordinate his movements. His right arm flailed at his back, but he couldn’t do more than slap weakly at Victor’s massive bulk. Victor’s weight seemed heavier than he remembered, even from earlier when they’d been… wrestling? Or whatever the hell Victor had thought they were doing. Now the man was lying on Derek without supporting himself at all—just dead weight. And Derek wasn’t in a position to push back at him. He could barely breathe. Victor’s skin was like a furnace against his back, against his naked ass. He felt Victor’s hard dick pressed into his inner thigh, the stubble of his shaved pubic area against his ass crack.

“Get… off….”

“Nobody needs t’ know…,” Victor murmured into his ear, his voice slurred and his breath reeking of vodka. He was clumsily kissing Derek’s neck.

Derek couldn’t accept what was happening. It was impossible.
Inconceivable
. Not until he felt Victor pry his legs apart and that massive, hard cock slide upward along the skin of his inner thigh, leaving a trail of precome in its wake, did he realize the true horror of the situation.
He’s trying to fuck me!
“Victor,
stop
!”

Not there, not there, anything but there!

If I ever hear you let a guy fuck you up the ass, I’ll put a goddamn bullet in your brain.

Derek tried to get his arms under himself, to push up or roll over. But he couldn’t do more than squirm under the two-hundred-plus pounds of naked flesh pressing down upon him. Unable to draw more than quick, shallow breaths, he couldn’t even shout. His voice came out of him in short, squeaky gasps.

Stop!

Victor kept murmuring reassurances, barely coherent, drunken fragments spilling out of him. “Won’t hurt you…. Calm down…. Won’t tell…. You’ll like it.” All the while he prodded, searching for Derek’s opening, ignoring the way Derek’s legs kicked at him until he finally grew impatient enough to reach down with a hand and guide himself.

Not there! My God—

Victor was too drunk to think of lube—or he just didn’t give a fuck—and the pain that seared through Derek’s bowels when he shoved himself inside was agonizing. Fire ripped through Derek’s body, burning him, destroying him, tearing him in half.

“
No!
”
I’m dying! I’m dying! God, save me!

Victor shoved Derek’s face into the pillow to muffle the scream.

“Shhh! Jus’ relax.”

But it was too late.
Too late
. He was already dead.

Derek couldn’t breathe at all, and he felt Victor’s cock tearing him apart inside with every hard thrust, shredding him like shrapnel. He was only dimly aware that his bladder was emptying, urine soaking the mattress and pooling like warm blood alongside his stomach and chest. His stomach was nauseated and churning, and he was terrified it would spill and he’d choke on vomit.

It went on and on and on, never-ending pain in his guts and sparks and stars shooting through his vision as he struggled to draw air through the pillow. Then Victor let out a long groan into his ear, and for the first time, Derek felt a man’s cock erupting inside him, polluting him, desecrating him, searing through him like hot lead.

Like a bullet in my brain.

Victor lay on Derek’s back, gasping. Rivulets of sweat trickled down Derek’s sides from where it had collected between their bodies. Derek was finally able to lift his head and suck in some air as Victor’s hand eased up on him—air that reeked of alcohol and foul breath and sweat and piss.

Victor crawled off him at last, patting him on the shoulder and murmuring something that could have been “Thanks, bud.” Then he staggered across the short gap between their beds, fell onto his mattress, and seemed to fall asleep instantly.

D
EREK
LAY
motionless for so long he lost track of time. He could have been there for hours—days—lying in a cold pool of his own urine, Victor’s come leaking out of him. But the time on the hotel alarm clock read just past four thirty.

Am I bleeding?
He had to be. He felt torn up down there, as if his insides had been ripped apart—as if the slightest movement might cause everything to fall out, his intestines slithering out onto the filthy mattress. He didn’t believe in God, but some tiny voice in the back of his mind kept saying, over and over again,
God help me God help me God help me
….

Eventually the disgust at lying there in his own filth compelled him to move and clean himself up. He pushed up on trembling arms—
weak arms, helpless arms, like a child’s
—and somehow managed to get out of the bed and make his way into the bathroom. He was afraid to turn on the light, afraid of what he’d see in the mirror. But when he finally worked up the courage, he was shocked to discover that he looked the same. Pale and damp, but… no different, really. No different from the last time he’d looked in the mirror. Except the person in the mirror didn’t feel like him anymore. It
wasn’t
him. It couldn’t be.

Filthy faggot
.

He reached down to touch it then, to touch where he was sure he’d been torn in half. It burned, and he quickly pulled his fingers away. When he looked down at his hand, there was blood. Not as much as he’d expected. Just a small spot. But it was enough to make him vomit into the sink. He was surprised to see it wasn’t full of blood. The damage had to have been just to his rectum. But he couldn’t make himself believe it. He
knew
he was torn up inside his entire body. He could
feel
it.

He vomited again. Then he didn’t
stop
vomiting until there was nothing left but dry heaves.

He hadn’t closed the door, but Victor didn’t stir while he was heaving into the sink. Derek closed it now and turned on the water to wash the basin. There were a couple of small spots of blood mixed with semen on the floor between his feet. The sight of them caused his vision to tunnel, and he nearly fell over. He held onto the edge of the sink and gripped the cold, wet porcelain with his fingers until the world stopped tilting. When he was able to move again, he ripped some toilet paper off the roll and frantically wiped the floor, tossing the soiled paper into the toilet. Then he sat down and forced himself to evacuate his bowels. It was excruciatingly painful, and he had to grit his teeth to prevent himself from screaming, but he couldn’t stand the thought of Victor’s semen inside his body one second longer. When he wiped himself, the toilet paper came away covered with blood, and Derek nearly passed out again at the sight of it. He sat on the toilet for several minutes, his head between his knees, taking deep breaths.

Then he flushed it all away.

He turned on the shower, waited for it to heat up, and stepped in. With the water as hot as he could stand it, he used one of the bleached white hotel washcloths loaded with soap to scrub the piss and blood and sweat and the putrid stench of Victor’s cologne off the outside of his body—scrubbing until every inch of his skin was raw and red and stinging under the scalding water. He scrubbed though he knew it would never come off him. Even if he removed all the layers of his skin, Derek knew he would always be filthy inside.

Always.

D
EREK
HAD
nowhere to go. He was trapped—trapped with that…
thing
on the other side of the bathroom door. He needed to go home—needed it desperately. But to get home, he had to fly. And his seat would be right next to….

Could he cancel? No. No. He’d be trapped here. It could take days to get another flight. Victor would… God knew what Victor would do if Derek refused to go with him. And the company…. They’d want to know why. They might not pay for the flight or more nights in a hotel.