Chapter 21: Time and Trauma.
Kate's P.O.V.
The next three days were the longest days of my life, and, honestly there aren't even words to describe what happened. Believe me, I've tried to put the events that transpired over those three days to tongue, but there are some things that are just beyond words, and I gave up trying to make sense of it all years ago. All I know is that somehow, some way, my husband defied the odds, cheated death, annnnnnnddddd discovered that Flint's suicide was only one of many scars that my time in A-School scourged upon my soul. With time, it's gotten a bit easier to talk about what happened to me, but there's really only so much that time can do for a wound like this. So I apologize in advance if this becomes too much for me and I end up faltering, okay?
Okay... So...
Truth is, I had another friend in A-School. I was vaguely familiar with Daniel before he and I shipped out to Pointe West. We had crossed paths a time or two, and he was nice enough, but he was always a bit of an odd duck, so we didn't ever really connect. However, when he was outed as gay during Zero Week, that all changed. Contrary to what many may believe, I struggled in A-School. In spite of my bloodline and in spite of the countless hours that I trained, I avoided washing back or washing out by the skin of my teeth more times than I'd like to admit. As I'm sure you're aware, kids can be quite cruel and they love to prey upon the weak. To them, I was a pathetic washout, and Danny, well...
Danny faced unrelenting hate and discrimination from the other students as soon as his secret was revealed, so he and I quickly became the black sheep in our class. The other students either shunned or bullied us on the daily, and Flint, being the friend that he was, would defend us every chance he got. This, of course, caused them to turn on him as well and it wasn't long before we three were all each other had. I know it sounds lonely, but honestly, we lived for it. Our shared ostracism bound us together. We wore it like a badge of honor, and before long, we had grown closer than any group of friends I had ever seen. When our trio so suddenly and so tragically became a duo, Danny was my rock. He held my paw at Flint's funeral. He was the only living soul to ever see me break down. I trusted him more than I ever trusted anyone before, but it is because of him that I will never be able to fully trust anybody ever again.
Danny was my best friend. I used to tell him all the time that if he wasn't gay, I'd marry him. He would laugh his stupid, boyish laugh and shoot me that goofy, crooked grin of his.
"Marry me anyway," he'd jest, "nothing says we gotta fuck."
"No offense, Danny," I'd reply with a roll of my eyes, "but ya girl wants to get some dick at least once in her life."
"Dirty birdie," he'd tease.
And our conversations would go on like that. Fun, good natured back and forths like that, but somehow we would always go back to the day that they pulled Flint's body from the river and sadness would taint the air between us. In these moments, the weight of the loss we shared would begin to slowly crush me, but I knew that when things got too heavy for me to carry, I could always find comfort in his soft, yellow eyes. Those eyes that held me close and told me that everything would be okay. Those eyes that prevented me from seeing the monster that hid beneath...
...
...
...
Excuse me.
Humphrey's P.O.V.
Ask me how I did it and I'll say that your guess is as good as mine. By all accounts, I should be dead after what happened to me in A-School, but somehow I survived and life went on. I won't say anything about what happened to my mate. That's her story to tell if she even wishes to tell it, but what I will say is that once those truths were brought to light, a noticeable tension began to form between us. I couldn't even begin to tell you why. It's not like a blamed her for what happened to her or what she did as a result. She didn't ask for it to happen to her, and the guy had it coming, but for some reason, seeing the darker side of my mate's past made me deeply uncomfortable. If I had to take a guess, I'd say it's because in that moment, I realized just how little I actually knew her.
I grew up with her, I pined for her, I married her, and we shared some of our most intimate secrets with each other. I thought I knew everything there was to know about her, but that clearly wasn't the case. Though I guess I couldn't hold it against her. There are worlds inside of me that she has still never seen, and that she never will see. Honestly, that makes me wonder just how well she actually knew me. I guess it's true what they say: "You never truly know a person, only what they show you", and honestly, I didn't want to know. Now that those skeletons had been dug up, I shared in her pain. Ordinarily that would be a good thing, but with how she handled trauma, I felt so helpless. I knew that deep down she was suffering, and there was nothing I could do. She insisted on carrying it alone, so all I could do was sit and watch.
I used to wonder if I should just break down and tell her the secrets that brought me to her doorstep that fateful night, but once I saw her ugly side, I realized just how lucky she was that she never had to see mine. She didn't have to endure the disenchantment and the mounting frustrations that I did. In her mind, she knew me and it was honestly best for both of us to keep it that way.
Kate's P.O.V.
I'm sorry about earlier. I guess that wound hasn't healed quite as much as I thought it had...
...
...
Anyway, as I was saying earlier: Danny was my best friend. I loved him, but I pretty quickly discovered that what I thought was a beautiful, poignant friendship was nothing more than an insidious scheme. First of all, Danny wasn't gay. He deliberately planted that rumor amongst the students so they would target him and he allowed himself to be brutalized by the other pups. He assumed a life of misery so he could get close to me and pose as my friend. He used Flint's suicide as a tool to make me vulnerable around him, and then, as if all of that wasn't enough, he raped me. Now, you might be asking yourself: "If he just wanted to rape you, why would he go through so much trouble?"
Well, I'll tell you. It's because he was as smart as he was sick. You see, Daniel was the type of guy who got his kicks from playing with people's heads. He was handsome, charming, eloquently spoken, and he always knew exactly how to get everything he wanted without consequence. Personally, I admired that part of his personality and enjoyed watching him spin various, tense situations to his favor. It allowed him to live a life free of doubt, and I wished I could have what he had, but now that I look back at it, I realize that he had me under his spell long before Flint threw himself from the bluff. He made me believe that he was my friend, that our bond was unlike any other, but in reality, he had spent the entirety of A-School manipulating me into becoming emotionally dependent upon him. He wanted me as his property and with each interaction, I had unknowingly given small pieces of myself to him until I was chained to him. Every day, I was at his mercy and I didn't even realize it, but he made every single intention known the day that he pinned me to the floor and took my innocence.
And what's worse? He had established enough of a reputation among the students and instructors alike that if I tried to report him, nobody would believe me. He literally rendered me powerless in every aspect of my life, and he knew that he did, too. The next day, he acted as though nothing ever happened, and once again under the spell of his silver tongue, I believed that I had to do the same. Honestly, looking back at it now, I can't believe that I was once so stupid, and, even though I didn't ask for any of it to happen, I feel like Humphrey secretly resented me for it.
Maybe I was reading too much into it all, but after he discovered everything that had happened to me and saw what I did, he started acting... weird. Even though the lead I got up north was not quite as helpful as I'd hoped, we did start to make headway in the Elias investigation, but Humphrey suddenly refused to talk about it. If I'm honest, he barely spoke to me at all after it all happened and his entire demeanor began to change. He became aloof, quiet, angry even. Sometimes we would go days without speaking to one another, or even really spending time together. Since he failed A-School, he was in a bit of a temporary limbo while my dad tried to sort out what to do. He no longer performed any of the alpha duties he'd previously been assigned, and he no longer was my shadow. Then, with no more responsibilities to keep him busy, he began to revert back to his previous lifestyle.
I went to work before he woke up in the morning, and he would stay out all night drinking and doing whatever else with his friends, so by the time he got home, I was already asleep. Or if on the rare occasion he stayed out late enough to catch me on my way out in the morning, he would be far too drunk or delirious to have any meaningful conversation.
I truly didn't know what to make of it. If it ever actually was me, he never told me, and if it was what happened while he was under, he never even mentioned it. Maybe it was a mixture of both, but come on...
I mean, even though I didn't ever see any of it, if Humphrey had to relive his worst days while he was under like I did, then I'm sure he had a laundry list of shit to deal with. So, in that sense, I could understand wanting to numb himself, but in the process of numbing himself, he phased me out. One day, I'll admit, I got fed up with it all and that was when we had our second big fight.
Humphrey's P.O.V.
Looking back at it now, I can't believe how stupid we both were after what happened in Pointe West. We both had to relive some serious traumas, and rather than work through them and heal together, we suffered apart. Kate buried herself in her work, and I burned the park down every night with my friends. Kate and I barely saw each other during those couple weeks after we returned, and if we did, I can't really remember. That time in my life is a bit of a blur, but I do remember the fight we had like it was yesterday.
Kate took two days of leave specifically to spend time with me, but for whatever reason, I didn't want to spend time with her and, as I'm sure you can imagine, she went absolutely ballistic. I mean, I can't say that I blamed her, of course. I was completely in the wrong, but at that time, my head was so clouded by everything that I was trying to deal with that I couldn't see or care about anybody's needs but my own. Completely blinded by rage, we argued and screamed at each other, called each other names, even declared that we hated one another.
And then things got violent...
Kate's P.O.V.
I can't remember what Humphrey said that made me do it, but I remember that at some point, I became so angry that I completely lost my head, and that's when I hit him. My paw landed squarely upon the side of his face and knocked him off balance, but before I could even process what had just happened, he squared up and struck me back. That's when things really got ugly. I leapt upon him and we rolled around on the ground: snarling, snapping, slashing, tearing. Personally, once we were on the ground, I thought for sure I could have him, but in the blinks between our youth and that moment, I had forgotten how strong he was. I fought valiantly to gain the upper hand as we so viciously snapped at each other, but it wasn't long before he overpowered me and pinned me down by the shoulders.
And after that, I don't know what the hell happened. One moment, he towered over me and glared down at me with gnashed fangs and I returned that hate-filled look in kind, but then in the next, we were lost in the throes of passionate, angry sex. Our lips met in a heated, violent kiss, and as we rolled together on the floor, our lust only continued to build until we were both ablaze with raw, primal instinct. Like, I'm sorry to be so crass, but when he climbed on my back that night, he fucked me like he hated me, and I was in heaven. He took charge, pinned me to the floor, and mercilessly dominated me from behind. Like, I'm talking paws between my shoulders, biting my scruff and pounding me into the ground.
It awakened something in me, and it was then that I realized that this was what I'd wanted from him all along. Sure, we had a few good moments between our honeymoon and then, but as I said before: Most of the time we fucked, it would inevitably leave me disappointed and I never quite understood why. He did everything right- at least as right as he knew how to do, but for whatever reason, it just wasn't ever enough to satisfy me and it frustrated the hell out of me. That night, however, he could do no wrong, and by the time it was all said and done, we were both so satisfied and exhausted that we could barely move. So we simply lied there on the floor, tail to tail with one another and breathed heavily as we swam in the high that flooded our bodies.
Humphrey's P.O.V.
I can't even begin to describe the way I felt as I lied on the floor and struggled to catch my breath. What we had just done was so ardent, so... angry, and it awakened something inside of me that I had never felt before. As I forced my mate's chest into the ground and rendered her helpless against my desires, it all felt so wrong, but at the same time, so right. I never thought I could bring myself to treat her like she was my property, but in the heat of the moment, as she begged me to thrust myself into her deeper, faster, to bite down on her neck until she bled, I felt so... powerful. There was something about the idea of setting my paws upon an alpha and making her nothing more than an object for my pleasure that really turned me on, and as I stared down at her from my position of dominance upon her hips, as I forced her chest into the ground so I could take her as quickly and as deeply as I wanted, I couldn't help but feel like that was how it was meant to be.
That kind of thought process obviously went against everything I had been taught, but my mate liked it that way, and I got such a power high from it that I never stopped to think about the damage I was doing to her. I never considered just how toxic and deranged it was, given what happened to her when she was young, or how those traumatic events may have contributed to her insatiable desire to be defiled, abused and subjugated by someone stronger than her. All I knew was it felt good, and we finally connected sexually, the way I always hoped we would in my many failed attempts to get her body in tune with mine, so I wasn't about to stop. If extreme intercourse was what she wanted, then extreme intercourse was what she got.
All it took was for us to continue to destroy our marriage one stupid mistake and one petty fight at a time, because the angrier we were, the more we despised each other, the better it was for us. Of course we still loved each other, but we had lost ourselves so deeply in that pernicious game of anger and spite that we lost sight of why we were truly together. That all changed, however, when we received some rather shocking news.