Elise awoke once more to Brodi's scream as he sat up in bed gasping for breath.
"Brodi! Brodi, sweetie, you're OK."
She reached out a hand to touch his arm, but he shrank away.
"Brodi. Brodi, honey, take a deep breath."
He was still shaking violently, so she moved to where she would be in his direct line of sight.
"Brodi. Brodi, look at me, babe." She hoped the repeating of his name would connect with something, anything to bring him around to the present. "Brodi, look at me. Look at me. That's it. It's Elise, baby. You're safe. Whatever it is, it's not happening now. You're safe, Brodi."
She reached out a hand again, and again he shrank back. She pulled her hand back, wanting desperately to touch him, but also needing that touch to be a comfort, not an additional source of fear. Having no reference to work from, and fully realizing that he could easily hurt her in this state, she decided to just sit in front of him as still as possible and continue trying to talk him down.
"OK, baby. I won't touch you until you're ready. I'm just going to sit here with you, OK? I want to make sure you're safe, and I'm not going to leave you hurting like this. You can reach out and take my hand if you want. You have all the power, Brodi."
Brodi rubbed his eyes with his palms. "Elise?"
"That's right, honey. I'm right here. Just you and me. We're in my room and we're safe. Come on, baby. Just take my hand. Take my hand. Deep breaths now—that's right."
Brodi reached out tentatively, still trembling, and after a tense hesitation finally took her hand. Elise began massaging his hand, and finally he broke into sobs. Elise moved closer so that she was sitting beside him, resting a hand on his shoulder. When he didn't shrink away, she pulled him into her arms. The sobs became violent, packed with ten years of rage and grief.
"Just let it out, honey. Let it out." She held him tightly and rocked him back and forth, too shocked and frightened to do anything but react to comfort him. "It's OK. You're safe. You can let it out here. Just let it all out."
"WHY?" He screamed. "Why now? Ten years and I thought I'd moved past it. She shows up one day, and I'm right back in the middle of hell, as if it just happened."
Elise rocked him a few more minutes and let him scream and rage and cry, providing a silent witness as is body was wracked with its painful release. Slowly the raging subsided and he laid his head in her lap and just started talking. Everything came out. Some of the details Elise already knew; she'd accidentally triggered a flashback of sorts in the early days of their friendship and had gotten thrown across the room for her efforts. Still there was a lot that she didn't know, and he laid it all out. She was horrified by some of the details, and then felt ashamed because she only had to listen, not live through it. At this point Elise wasn't sure if the man in her lap even knew where he was; it all seemed to be an automatic response, like a recording. She heard it all. There was his first meeting with Lauryll and her zealous pursuit of him, despite having a boyfriend. The spiked drink, being unable to fight off being loaded into a car. Being beaten until he passed out, revived, beaten again. More drugs. Sodomy, forced oral sex. And then Lauryll; more drugs and more unwanted sex. More beatings. More sexual violence from all three of his captors. Beatings, rape, drugs—a vicious cycle that ended as suddenly as it began when he woke up alone, the drugs clearing. He threw on the first item of clothing he could find, every move extremely painful, jumping and startling at every sound for fear of being discovered mid-escape. Those were the intense memories. More vague was his memory of making it down the street, painfully slow, frighteningly slow, then no memory at all for the time between his finally collapsing on the street and arriving at the hospital, where he endured being poked and prodded and X-rayed, signing himself out AMA as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
A friend had driven him home, furious that he had signed himself out. His first few minutes alone were spent shaking in a steaming hot shower. He stayed until the water turned freezing, then got dressed and returned his mother's frantic phone calls. He then lied to his mother for the first time in his life, assuring her he'd just come down with the flu because he let himself get run down studying so hard for finals. He'd just been sleeping heavily, he told her, and hadn't heard the phone ring. After that, every waking minute—and there were a lot of them—was spent in the surf. He felt safe in the water, cleansed, reborn. Surfing and swimming were his therapy in those first few days after the attack, the burn of the salt water on his wounds a catalyst in his moving meditation as he struggled to reorganize and somehow make sense of his violently altered view of the world.