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The words stun her. Grip her neck, vise-tight, preventing even the slightest amount of air from permeating her lungs. Or is it his fingers, closing around her throat and holding her screams hostage in her mouth? Bruising their weight into her neck, just enough pressure for her to lose consciousness for the briefest moment. But that’s probably all it took. A second crime, committed in remembrance of the first, in absence of a light she may have needed to see the truth.
And now here he sits, sobbing to her, begging for her forgiveness. What for? His only crime to her was of silence, an oath he had sworn never to break until memory pried that awful story from his reluctant lips.
And then silence. It overtakes her, reaps what little air remains in her blood and suffocates her in her own mind. She is deaf even to the panic that has now consumed him, his desire to not ruin this one perfect thing he has. Just the words he uttered first, floating through her mind. The absolute conviction that he has stolen something from her that can never be returned: her trust, the foundation for his lie.
The words had left his lips and escaped into the air of the car, staining his breath and melting into her throat like hot wax, dripping on her heart and pouring into her lungs, sealing them shut. A burden off his chest replaced with a new weight: the fear of her wrath, swallowing him like darkness.
Her silence is entrenched in a scream wrapped tightly in her throat. The way she wishes she could cry the injustice of his betrayal to her best friend, but he is sitting next to her. Holding her hand; not her throat. Begging for her forgiveness; not her silence. He has made her an accomplice, she feels; like she too is responsible for this horrible beast inside of him. He has stolen from her, too. Her safety, though not her light. The sense that she could trust him with anything. The fragile remains of her love for him, cutting his hands where he has shattered her heart. She is confused when confronted with his truth, and angry. At him: for everything he has told her. At herself: for hating that he has told her any of it at all.
But the crime isn’t to her, not the worst of it, anyway. Is it her place to forgive him for the hell a changed man had caused a different girl?
She knows it is selfish, but she cannot help but wonder if she will ever escape the yearning to return to that compelling darkness that had so comfortably encroached on the beginning of their happy ending and kept her eyes blind to his truths.
She feels his hand pressing slightly on the side of her neck, tender, the touch of a man she knows and loves with the story of a stranger. Wonders how it would feel to be a victim of his violence. Wonders if she will ever stop having her doubts.