“Yeah.” He frowns, as if it was hard for him to hear. “She told me about your little delusions.” He makes air quotes with his fingers around delusions, and my stomach sinks again. Caroline’s told her lies to Rick, just like I feared she would. Rick will only be the beginning. “Listen, Haley. Your family wants to help you get better. Caroline’s trying to help you get better.”
“No.”
“She is.”
“She’s not. I want to go back to Leo’s.” This is too far to go with Rick. Too much to admit. “You could take me to my dad’s. But I need to talk to Leo.”
Rick shakes his head. “I’ve heard that before, and now look at you.”
A shadow darkens the doorway and my whole heart leaps. Leo—it has to be Leo. Please, let it be him.
It’s not. It’s a guard in a dark uniform with a gun holstered on his hip. Rick nods to him and stands up.
“Are you leaving?” I want him to get the hell out of here, and I don’t want him to go. Rick fell for Caroline’s lies but he’s better than Caroline. Anyone is better than Caroline. I’m already alone in this, alone in this place and trapped and helpless, and I will sit here and listen to him talk about his business if it means she’s not in here.
“I’m not leaving.” He’s using a weird tone. I think it’s supposed to be soothing, but it makes me feel even more cornered. “Let’s sit together on the sofa.”
“We’re supposed to be having dinner.”
Rick puts out his hand to me. I keep mine in my lap. “It doesn’t have to be hard. Okay? It can be easy.”
What is he talking about? None of this is easy. But now there’s an armed guard at the door watching our every move, and I don’t want to eat soup, so I put my hand in Rick’s. I let him help me up and take me to the sofa on the other side of the room.
“Here. Sit right here, and I’ll sit next to you.”
He narrates this for me while he guides me down onto the cushions, his touch soft. I’d almost call it tentative if he didn’t seem like he’d planned this. Rick settles into the next spot over just like he said he would.
And then he puts his arm around me.
My body freezes at the contact. I’ve been touched too much already, by Caroline and her bulldog, and I hate it. But Rick runs his hand over my arm. It’s adjacent to the way Leo ran his hand up and down my arm when we got back to his house after the hospital, only it’s wrong. Rick’s rhythm is off. It doesn’t match me the way Leo did.
“I know,” Rick soothes. “She said you’d have a hard time with this. We can go slow. It’ll be good, in the end. You won’t regret it.”
“Won’t regret what?”
“We just have to spend some time together, Hales. It’s part of your recovery.”
What the fuck? I want to scream the question at him, over and over until he answers. I wish I was the kind of person who screamed and fought. One of the many problems, though, is that he’s not doing anything terrible. He’s just touching my arm. His body is too close. I don’t want him there. But he’s not hurting me. Not really.
Rick draws me in and my breaths come shallower. It’s not the first time we’ve been close. I’ve been on a few dates with him, and he plays the part of the gentleman. Once, when it rained, he tucked me to his side like this so we could both stay under his umbrella.
Now that I’ve been with Leo, I can’t stand it.
We sit like this for long enough that the soup has to be cold.
No one comes back in.
The guard stands silently at the door.
“Okay,” Rick says, and then he reaches for my chin. His grip is even softer than Caroline’s. Even more gentle. He turns my face to his and looks into my eyes. “There. See? Not so bad.”
“What’s not so bad?” I sound breathless and horrified because I am. My pulse bangs in my ears and it’s not the pleasant high of Leo’s restrained violence, it’s my body trying to save me. From Rick. Who hasn’t done—
He kisses me.
High on one cheek, then the other, and then his mouth meets mine.
It’s such a soft kiss. Disgustingly soft. His lips are wrong. His face is wrong.
I can’t move.
The air stops dead in my lungs. I don’t want to breathe, to smell him, to kiss him back. I don’t kiss him back, but that doesn’t stop Rick. He darts his tongue out to brush against my lower lip and my arms lock to my sides. It’s so unhelpful. God, I’m as useless as I was when Leo was shot. It’s that bad.
I start counting heartbeats. If I can get through this kiss, he’ll let me go back to dinner.
The kiss doesn’t end. It keeps going, and going, Rick insisting. It’s the most gentle insistence. A person could almost mistake it for being nice.
It’s not nice.
Rick turns me to face him, angling me the way he wants, and I’m a puppet. I am actually a fucking puppet. Something must tip him off that I don’t want this, don’t like it, that I hate it, because he stops kissing me. “It’s fine,” he says softly. “You’re doing great.”
“What are you talking about?” I get the words out just before his mouth closes on mine again. This time he’s less gentle about it. Not by much. It’s only a lapse of a few seconds and he’s back to that horrible soft kiss.
Rick puts his hand on my leg, just above my knee. He slowly, steadily, opens my legs.
And I understand what’s happening.
The sharp understanding pushes me out of my head. Shoves me out. I can’t stay in my own mind anymore so I fly up to the ceiling and look down on us from a dizzying tilt. There’s me, on Caroline’s couch in a blue dress that’s been pushed up almost to my hips. There’s Rick, with one hand on my face and the other moving on my thigh. Even pressure. Even strokes. I feel it from far away.
And I watch as his hand moves up.
Rick kisses me while he inches his hand toward my waist. I feel that, too, but in a peripheral sort of way. I can’t tolerate the sensation of it. Can’t tolerate how wrong he is and how violating it is. Up here on the ceiling it doesn’t seem so bad.
Maybe it’s not so bad.
No.
It is very, very bad, and this is what Caroline’s game has been all day. To put me off-balance. To put me in a state of mind where I might accept this. And I’m looking down the barrel of an endless string of days like this, where she’ll repeat lies until they sound like the truth and bring Rick in for “dates” and put a guard at the door to—
Rick presses his thumb against my inner thigh, a soft brush of the curve just before my leg meets my hip, and leans in so I can’t close my legs.
His hand drops to his belt buckle.
I fall straight down into myself. It’s like plummeting through a frozen surface from a height. The ice cracks. It’s frigid shock. And I snap like a dropped plate.
“What are you doing? Stop. Stop.” It turns into a shout on the way out of my mouth at the same time my numb limbs come back to life. I wrench myself off the sofa and away from him, turning my ankle on one of my shoes in the process. I barely feel it.
He’s on his feet right away, reaching for me. “Haley. Haley. I’m helping you. This is what we’re supposed to do.”