“I had sex with him,” I said flatly.
“What?” Ethan jerked, staring at me. “Just now?”
“Jesus. No,” I said, making a face. “A long time ago.”
“You said he was an asshole.”
“He is. He was,” I said. I paced, one hand braced on my hip.
“But you dated?”
“No. Not even remotely,” I said, turning back to him. “We don’t have any kind of relationship. We hooked up a few times here and there, that’s all. But I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want him to say anything. I’ve slept with a lot of people I shouldn’t have and I don’t mind talking about it, but Oscar … I just didn’t want that to be what you knew about me.”
“When was this?” Ethan asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, but that was a lie. I knew exactly when the first time was. And the last. I sat down on the motel bed, my fingers finding the scar at my wrist.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “Really. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“The last time was eight years ago,” I said, ignoring him.
I’d come back to town to be with Liv after she got out of the hospital. She wouldn’t talk to me, Kimiko and Marcus would barely talk to anyone, and I’d been suffocating in the silence. I’d gone to the bar I knew my dad didn’t frequent, and Oscar had been there.
I took a breath and made myself say the rest. “The first time was eighteen years ago. And a handful of times in between. Every couple years when I was in town and feeling shitty enough that Oscar seemed like an improvement.”
“Eighteen years ago you were a kid,” Ethan said. Trust him to do the math.
I shrugged and didn’t look at him. “Fifteen. It was my birthday.”
“That would make him—”
“Old enough to buy the booze,” I said lightly. “It was my idea. I made my own decisions every step of the way. They were terrible decisions, but they were mine.”
“That’s statutory rape,” Ethan said. “It doesn’t matter that it was your idea. It was his job not to be a fucking rapist.”
“I don’t—I’m not telling you this to get sympathy or something,” I said quickly.
He sat down beside me. “All right,” he said. “So why are you telling me?”
“Like I said. I just wanted you to know— I didn’t want—” My voice choked off into silence. “I don’t know. I’ve never told anyone before. Cass would kill me. Well, she’d kill him first. Then she’d kill me.”
“Is that why you hate him so much?”
“More like it’s part of why I hate myself so much,” I said. The room was too cold, and my skin prickled with the chill. “There was a reason I knew Oscar would say yes, when I told him to bring a bottle of rum and a condom and meet me in the woods. When I was eleven, right before…” I waved a hand. I didn’t need to spell it out; before was enough. “Oscar was joking around. Shoved me up against a wall and put his hand up my shirt. Scared the shit out of me.”
“That goes beyond ‘asshole,’” Ethan said. He was working hard to sound calm and factual. I watched him carefully. Even as I kept my own tone casual, I was relieved at the anger in his eyes, the strain of keeping a civil tone. “He should have been arrested.”
“His dad is the mayor, Ethan; that wasn’t going to happen. Besides, Cody stopped him. Beat the shit out of him, actually.”
“Good,” Ethan said firmly. “Cody’s always had your back, hasn’t he? I’m starting to understand why he’s so protective of you.”
“He’s not that protective,” I said.
“I thought he was going to take me apart when we first met,” he said, eyebrows raised.
I made a feeble attempt at a smile. “The point is, when I asked Oscar to…” I had to stop, take a fresh breath. “When we had sex, it was my idea. I knew it wasn’t healthy. I wanted to get hurt. It was all me.”
“You wanted to get hurt, so you went to someone who’d be happy to hurt you. It doesn’t mean it was anything close to okay,” Ethan said. “And it doesn’t remove his responsibility in any way. You were fifteen. You were a child.”
“It doesn’t bother me anymore,” I said. “It didn’t traumatize me. Not like Stahl. It’s a shitty memory, but I don’t think about it much. Bad first sex. No big deal.”
“Right. No big deal. Which is why you’re shaking.”
I bunched my hands tight in my lap to stop the tremor. “I kept going back. I don’t think I get to complain if I kept going back.”
“You’re talking to the son of a battered woman,” Ethan reminded me. “And you are never going to say anything to convince me what Oscar did was anyone’s fault but his.”
“Fuck,” I said, pulling my knees up to my chest. “I don’t know why I told you any of this. I’ve never told anyone all of it.”
“I told you. I’m good at getting people to talk to me,” Ethan said with a half smile. “People tend to trust me. It’s…” He paused, but pressed on. “It’s actually disconcerting, sometimes. It’s easy for me to get people to talk or to do little things to help me.”
“You are uniquely unthreatening,” I told him.
He made a sound in the back of his throat, acknowledgment and discomfort. He looked down at his hands. “When I was in college I was driving home one night. I saw this girl on the side of the road, walking along dragging a suitcase in the rain. I didn’t really think about it, I just pulled over and offered her a ride, and she got right in. She said she usually wouldn’t, but I had a ‘good vibe.’”
“Unless you’re hiding your ax-murder side business, you are actually a good guy,” I pointed out.
He looked up at me. “But did she trust me because I’m actually a good guy? Or is it something else about me, something that seems trustworthy but doesn’t have anything to do with me, with my character? Stahl—” He paused again. “Alan Michael Stahl convinced at least six women to get into his truck. They got in willingly. He seemed trustworthy. Lots of people said so. The kind of person you told your whole life story to. The kind of person you trusted on instinct.”
“You don’t murder people, Ethan,” I said, unsettled. His gaze stayed fixed on me, and I couldn’t look away.
“But I do use them. Get them to tell me their secrets.” Like you have went unspoken.
“Should I trust you, Ethan Schreiber?” I asked him.
“I want to be someone you can trust,” he said.
“That’s not the same thing,” I said, like it was a joke, not sure how to react.
All he said was, “I know.”
The knock on my door came just as I was stepping out of the shower. “Hang on!” I called, hastily toweling off and pulling on clothes. I trotted to the door, expecting Ethan, and was taken aback to discover Cass standing on my doorstep instead.
She took off her sunglasses and gave me a withering look. “We need to talk,” she said, and stepped past me. I opened my mouth to say something, but all language fled me.