CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PAST

The story Angel had just told was truly shocking.

It shocked me on many, many levels and it deeply disturbed me; not only for its content, but for the effect it had on me. The story was short and delivered by Angel in a surprisingly matter of fact way, with little or no emotion. No emotion? Was that no emotion or was it deliberate detachment? Was it so traumatic for her that the only way she could tell it was to tell it as if she had just read it in a newspaper? And why did her family react the way they did? I was trying to wrap my mind around the truly strange events that she was portraying to me.

We were in the living room finishing one of the last bottles of Domain Boyar Platinum Reserve, boy they had gone quick. You sure can drink some alcohol when its being cancelled out by Meth all the time. I had never asked Angel about her past or the long-term lesbian relationship she had been in prior to dating me but she seemed to feel the need to tell me the reason she had been in a lesbian relationship for the two years before meeting me. Fair enough, I was cataclysmically in love with her and eager to know every tiny detail about her.

“We worked together at a pizza restaurant in Nesibar,” she started, Nesibar was and still is a beautiful island just off the coast of Bulgaria’s Sunny Beach. It has Byzantine ruins and expensive restaurants. “And we shared an apartment on the island,” she continued and I listened intently.

“One day, on our day off he came home very drunk. He pulled off the covers from the bed, forced my legs apart and shoved a beer bottle up inside me. It broke inside me and cut me severely. I woke up in a pool of blood. The next day I went to the Hospital and after that I went home to my parents.”

I was, as I said, shocked. I wanted to offer sympathy and compassion but something about the story stopped me. I was not filled with passion as I should have been, instead I was filled with curiosity. My instinct told me to allow Angel to tell only what she volunteered and not to make her delve deeper than what she wanted to offer, but I could not help it. She had told me a lot about her previous boyfriend over the few months we had known each other, he was handsome, he was intelligent, he was pathologically jealous, he was many things but it had never been mentioned that he drank a lot or that he was prone to violence, she had never even mentioned arguing with him, not even over the jealousy issue.

“Was he usually aggressive or violent when he got drunk?” I enquired, as delicately as I could.

“No,” she shrugged. “he’d never been like that before and he didn't usually drink, he smoked weed instead.”

Silence.

“So, what had happened that night, while he was out, to cause it? Do you have any idea?”

“I don't know, he was just with his friends,” she said flatly.

“So totally out of the blue he comes home and viciously sexually assaults you for no reason?” I was aware I was starting to sound like an inquisitor and made a mental note to back off.

“Yes,” she said solemnly.

“God that’s terrible,” I finally replied after the silence was long enough for me to realize she was not going to offer any more information. I hugged her tight and she seemed to like it. My CSI watching brain ran through the unanswered questions I dare not ask. Where did a man who does not drink get a beer bottle at 3.00 a.m.? Did he bring it home with him? Drunken men don't normally plan vicious attacks in advance, do they? At least not well enough to think to bring an empty beer bottle home with them, right? Are vaginal muscles strong enough to break a beer bottle? If a beer bottle breaks inside you does it not leave the broken end in there? You woke up in a pool of blood, how the hell do you sleep after that? If you get severely cut by glass in the most sensitive part of your body are you not in screaming agony on your way to hospital immediately, instead of sleeping and then reacting the next day?

It wasn't that I did not believe Angel. But I was sure she was not telling the full truth. I assured myself that that was normal, reasonable and understandable. Anything that traumatic would take years to overcome, possibly her recollection of it was nothing like clear? Certainly, I could easily see how it could lead to a deep mistrust of men.

“So how come you can trust me then?” I asked not wishing to poke this potential hornet nest too vigorously.

“Your different, your special,” she said, which answered nothing yet had the effect of lifting me high up within my own mind. Determined to make the next one my last question I asked “What did your family say about it? You did tell them I guess?”

“Yes, I told them. They didn’t seem to care much. In fact, my father had him stay at our apartment for a night a year after it happened. His farther knew mine and he needed a place to stay on his way to Sofia one night.”

I was shocked into a literal silence. There was WAY too much stretching of credulity in that last statement for me to believe it. The last thing I wanted was to think that the girl I so desperately loved was lying, especially about a story so terrible and so personal. There may have been a question in my mind over the attack, but I totally believed something terrible happened that night. After all, who would lie about such a deeply personal thing? And, the relationship had clearly ended and Angel had moved back home in the middle of the tourist season unexpectedly.

But nothing made sense. Angel had a close and loving family; how could they not have cared about their daughter enough to go to the police? But if, for some supposedly good reason, they had not gone to the police, there was no way on earth her and Tanya, her sister, would have let the guy stay in their house!! No loving family in their right mind would have such little regard for their daughter. Nothing made sense.

I concluded Angel must have never actually told them. It was the only possibility that fitted the pieces of the jigsaw together into anything like a plausible answer. And if she had suffered severe injuries that needed hospitalization, well it’s not like the scars were visible to the naked eye.

That feeling of fear crept over me again, that same feeling I had when we had gone window shopping. This thought tantalized my mind, this obsessive thought that there was something SEVERELY wrong with the most beautiful and amazing girl I had ever met. My mind seemed to wrestle with the thought, a part of me unwilling to acknowledge any flaws whatsoever combated constantly with my logical mind. The skeptical part of me was sounding off all kinds of alarm bells, as visions of me running as fast as I could and as far away from her as I could, began to torment my waking mind.

Who was this woman in my arms? Who was this woman who at one moment had me dying from laughter, the next starving and hungry for her, to then leave me feeling as if I had broken and shattered from the inside out? Regardless of what emotion she provoked at any given time, it was the most intense I had ever felt. If she provoked anger, I never knew I could feel so much wrath. If she provoked desire, I never knew I could want someone as badly as I wanted her. There are few occasions I can admit to having a woman provoke fear in me, but Angel could provoke even that emotion, and once again it would be at a depth I was unaccustomed to feeling. I was embarking on uncharted waters even within the confines of my soul, my innermost being.

Even now, as she shared with me what was probably the most devastating moment of her life, dread seemed to fill my veins; a dread I had never felt before as if the blood within me was hardening and at any moment one touch would send me into a pile of dust. I wanted to run, to leave and not look back.

I glanced down at her, her big eyes meeting mine and at that moment she seemed to be the most vulnerable creature I had ever come across. A feeling of tenderness flooded me, drowning out the fears, the doubts and the dread as I felt my body insubordinately leaning down and feeling her soft lips brush against mine; it was the most gentle, loving thing that quickly turned to hunger and need.

Apparently, I was different than other men, very different because the girl who was not able to trust men to the point of engaging in a lesbian relationship for two years, engaged me in the most passionate and erotic love making I had ever experienced in my life.