Collin turned me so I was facing him, and used his thumbs to gently brush away the few tears that had fallen. “All you need to understand is that I love you.”

My head shook. “No, that’s—you hurt me.”

His blue eyes flashed with something I’ve never seen before, but it was gone just as quickly. He gently gripped my fingers to bring my hand close to his face and whispered, “I’m sorry,” before he placed soft kisses along my palm and the now-sensitive spot on my wrist. “I lost control of myself for a second, Harlow, that’s all,” Collin said as he straightened my engagement ring.

“Collin,” I began hesitantly, but didn’t continue. I thought about what was going on in our lives right now, and knew he was under a lot of stress finishing his senior year and graduating from college in a month. I knew he was worried about getting a respectable job, and figured he might have been right. Maybe I had embarrassed him in front of those men—the same men he might or might not work with after graduation.

Because I’d been trying so hard to understand the conversation earlier, I might have said something I wasn’t supposed to. Or maybe I wasn’t supposed to say anything—I hadn’t heard Collin’s mom offer anything to the conversation other than introducing us. Could those conversations be only for the men? Something the women pretend not to hear? And now that hours had passed, I couldn’t remember if I had said something I should’ve been embarrassed about.

With the way Collin’s mouth was ghosting across my collarbone and playing with the zipper of my dress, I also wasn’t sure if I’d over-dramatized the whole thing with him earlier. Had it actually hurt? Had he meant it to hurt? He’d never touched me in any way other than the way he was now. Like I was precious . . . like I was his everything.

“We’ll go buy you something tomorrow,” he promised just before his lips brushed my own. “Whatever you want.”

I huffed and shook my head as I cradled his face in my hands. This was the Collin I knew and loved, the one who was absurd in his need to give me things. The one who knew how to make me forget the bad. “You’re so ridiculous. You give me too much . . . I don’t want anything.”

“We’re going,” he assured me as he unzipped me, and my dress pooled to the floor.

“Just give me you.”

With a look I knew well, he led me to his bed, and did just that.

Present Day—Richland

COLLIN HAD WORSHIPPED my body and made love to me for hours that night, and I’d pushed the bizarre encounter out of my mind. I’d slowly learned over the next six months that he knew about a dozen pressure points on each side of my body incredibly well, and every time we were in public and I did something he deemed stupid, he would be quick to show me, along with commanding me not to show my pain. If we were alone, he would dig his fingers into a pressure point until I ended up on the floor, begging him to stop. But it wasn’t until just a few hours after we said “I do” that I understood I’d never known Collin at all, and that pressure points were the least of my worries with him. The guy I’d been making excuses for, the guy I’d loved, was no longer there.

He was still tall and handsome, with sandy blond hair and dark blue eyes. He still knew how to charm anyone into believing whatever fell from his lips, and he still held the hearts of my family. But everything I’d loved about him was now gone. My love for him died the moment he finally crushed my spirit, and I’d just been going through the motions, and praying for better days, every day for the last two and a half years.

My hands froze when Collin’s arms slowly wrapped around my waist that night before I was able to calm myself enough to continue washing the dishes from dinner.

“Are you almost done?” he asked softly; his lips brushed the back of my neck as he spoke.

“Yeah.”

His hands moved to slip under the bottom of my shirt, and I suddenly wanted to have more dishes that needed to be washed.

“Then hurry.”

I didn’t.

As soon as the last plate was in the dishwasher, Collin was pulling me back toward the bedroom. I don’t remember him undressing me, and I wasn’t sure when his clothes had joined mine on the floor. I just knew he was laying me back on the bed, and I was losing my grip on my safe place to block out what was happening. I needed to get back to my safe place in my head; I didn’t want to be a part of this.

Gripping my chin in one of his hands, he forced me to look up at him as he moved inside me. Each thrust made my body jerk against the bed as I felt my hate for him grow. My arms lay unmoving at my sides, my body stiff as I fought with myself to push him away.

He could’ve been fucking a corpse and there would have been little difference.

Releasing my jaw, he sat back and moved his hand between us, and every nerve ending came alive when his fingers brushed against me. My head fell to the side and I stared at the window as my body started responding to him. I clenched my jaw shut against the shaking, and began hating myself for feeling any kind of pleasure from him. My throat tightened against the tears I was holding back, and my body jerked with silent sobs when he forced an orgasm from me.

Leaning back over me, he quickened his pace until he found his own release, and seconds later he was moving my head so I was facing him again. If he saw the wetness in my eyes, he didn’t comment on it.

He pressed his lips to mine firmly. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” I managed to say past the tightness in my throat.

“Go clean up.”

As soon as he released my chin, I was moving out from underneath him and off the bed to walk into the bathroom. After cleaning myself, I stood in front of the mirror just staring at what I’d become.

My brown hair was dull and flat, and might have started thinning, but it was still too thick to be sure. My blue eyes had no life left in them, and I wondered what people saw in them even when I pretended everything was fine. I’d lost forty pounds when I’d only had about five I could lose when I’d met Collin. Bones stuck out that shouldn’t, making the bruises on my stomach and tops of my thighs that much more apparent.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to eat—I couldn’t. I was always too afraid of what was about to happen, or was coming off whatever had just happened. If I did manage to eat, the stress from my life with Collin usually had it souring in my stomach soon after. And the bruises—there was never enough time for the old ones to disappear before there were new ones there. But Collin was smart: he never put them somewhere they could be seen. Which is why knowing pressure points and how to instill fear were his biggest allies.