Total pages in book: 43
Estimated words: 39947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 200(@200wpm)___ 160(@250wpm)___ 133(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 39947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 200(@200wpm)___ 160(@250wpm)___ 133(@300wpm)
“You’re not a shattered vase.” His eyes hardened. “You’re a human, and one of my favorite ones at that. Now tell me what happened. I need to know just how hard I need to punch this guy next time I see him.”
God. I was going to open up to him, wasn’t I? There was no other choice. I needed him to understand me. Unfortunately, baring my soul made me feel a million times more vulnerable than baring my body to him.
“Remember when you joked in your car that he must’ve killed a baby to make me hate him so much?”
A zing of something formidable passed through Grant’s pupils. “Yes?”
“Well, he kind of did.”
Grant’s expression morphed to deadly and entirely frightening. For a second, he didn’t look like himself at all. “I’m going to need you to elaborate.”
I couldn’t believe I was going to tell him what I had only previously told Maddie. Though I’d never admit it, I always felt what I’d been through with Connor was proof I was a weakling. A starry-eyed, naive girl who deserved how he’d treated her.
“I met Connor the first week of my freshman year in college. It was in Oregon, across the country, light-years away from my friends and family. We immediately got together. He was my first boyfriend. My first everything, really. I’d always been extroverted and popular, but I waited for the perfect boy. For a short while, that’s who he was for me.”
There were dates. And singing under my dorm window. Kisses under star-littered skies. We spent hours talking on the phone. He’d leave me iced coffees and doughnuts at the reception when I was studying for exams and forgot to eat. I wasn’t just in love. I was smitten to a point where I thought about a wedding, and babies, and a happily ever after.
“Freshman year was great. He was popular, athletic, wealthy—though that was neither here nor there for me—and he treated me like I was the rarest, most precious thing. I gave him my virginity. Then I gave him more parts of me, slowly. Parts he had no right asking for. By junior year, we’d moved in together. I didn’t mind living in dorms, but Connor had an entire apartment rented out for him by his parents. He convinced me to move in, claiming I’d be saving money. That’s when the power shift began.”
I took a breath, chancing a glance at Grant. He was inhumanly still. I doubted he was even breathing.
“It was the little things he did to make me remember I was indebted to him. He asked me to do all the housework to pay off my part of the lease. At first, I thought it was a reasonable enough request. Until I became our housekeeper. He didn’t lift a finger. Like, he didn’t even load the dishwasher once the entire time we lived together.
“As time progressed, he found more and more ways to make me feel . . . less. In every possible way. He wanted me to lose weight—only five or six pounds, he said—so I could be as skinny as his ex. He framed it so it was for me, not for him. He just didn’t want his parents and siblings to compare us and for me to fall short.”
“That scumbag . . .” Grant ran a hand over his mouth and jaw, his nostrils flaring with barely contained rage.
We were still standing in the mouth of his kitchen, which I thought was a little awkward for this conversation. Then again, you didn’t get to choose when or where your monumental moments took place. Sometimes the biggest moment of your life happened right in someone’s hallway, between a shoe rack and an umbrella bin.
“So I lost the weight, but that didn’t help either. He seemed to slowly hate everything about me. The way I smelled—I had to switch from my favorite perfume to Chanel 5. Who I hung out with—he thought all my friends were shallow. My college performance—he always told me I was slacking. The first couple years he put me down privately, but that last year, he was public about it. He’d openly criticize me when in front of our friends, comparing me to other women and showing me where I fell short. And the worst part was, I tried so hard to appease him. He was so subtle about changing me, about loathing me. So careful to make it look like he was just watching out for me, pushing me to my limits, helping me grow. That I was a lazy, incompetent, ditzy woman with no aspirations or talents.”
“He abused you,” Grant said simply. “But my guess is he had seen this kind of abuse at home, perfected the technique, and was able to apply it on you. You didn’t have any experience with relationships, and he capitalized on that.”