Heron Lake Plateau shadow, my sweet shadow

His words were met with a nod and a grateful smile, but that smile was quick to fade. The way he looked at her, so innocent, so...blissfully unknowing. She didn't want that look to go away. She didn't want to tarnish herself in his eyes. She didn't want him to look at her with revulsion and disappointment. Would he leave her? Would he attack her? She thought she knew him better than that, but just as his mind often nagged at him with the Worst Possible Scenario^TM, hers sometimes did as well. And this was definitely one of those moments when it was like a runaway train of horrors for her.

She gazed into that face for a long time, a loaded silence enveloping them. She didn't want to say the words. She didn't want this to be the last time he looked at her like that.

When her words finally came, they were halting, hesitant. "He...he did something to me. Before you and I got together." She risked a glance at his eyes before her own darted away, staring unblinking off into the darkness somewhere. "He said he wanted to show me some...wrestling move? he used with a friend of his. He...he got me into a position where I couldn't get away and...he uh...it wasn't a wrestling move. It was rape." Her gaze remained focused elsewhere, anywhere but his face, as a sinking sense of horror and self-disgust seeped into her. She had tried for so long to think of it as literally anything else but that, tried to explain it as being somehow her fault rather than his, tried to protect her brother from his sins. But his behavior in the months since then had made it more and more difficult to do so, and this latest attack was just...too much. She now felt that it had never been anything but an attempt to assert some sort of twisted dominance over her, to own her somehow, to make her even more vulnerable to his manipulation. And it only made her feel more disgusted with herself, especially now that she had so much to lose.