Violated by Jamie Fessenden

them?”
    “Yes.”
    “I know. A lot of straight guys do that with their gay male friends.”
    “Trying to prove they’re cool?”
    Russ shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe they like the fact that here’s a guy they can get a little closer to without him feeling uncomfortable. One of my coworkers does it sometimes. Marty Johnson used to do it too.”
    At the mention of her old fiancé’s name, Shannon raised her eyebrows and hesitated a moment with her soda halfway to her lips. “Marty! Haven’t heard his name in a while….”
    Marty and Shannon had been engaged their last year of high school. Then the poor kid had been out riding his motorcycle one night when an asshole ran a red light. Russ attended his funeral right before senior graduation. Shannon had been a wreck. She couldn’t even go to the service.
    “I’m sorry,” Russ said. “I shouldn’t have brought him up.”
    “It’s all right.”
    Feeling like an insensitive ass, Russ gave an awkward nod and said, “He was a good guy.”
    Shannon snorted. Then she quickly tried to cover it up by taking another sip of soda.
    “What?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Did I miss something?”
    Shannon looked at one of the citronella candles for a long time as it sputtered in the slight breeze. Then she said, “He wasn’t all that wonderful, you know. I know everybody thought so. But he wasn’t.”
    That threw Russ for a loop. Nobody had ever said anything bad about Marty before. He’d been handsome, charming, polite to the parents, cool with the gay younger brother. “What do you mean?”
    Shannon was still staring at that candle when she said quietly, “Are you sure you want to know, Russ?”
    “What? Yes.” She was acting a little strange, which made him nervous. What the hell could Marty have done? “Come on, Shannon. If there’s something I should know about….”
    She leaned closer to him and lowered her voice. “All right. I suppose it’ll be good to finally tell someone, but you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone . You got me? Not Bill. Not Mom and Dad. Nobody . Got it?”
    Jesus . “Yeah, I got it.”
    “Marty raped me.”
    The revelation seared through Russ’s brain like a branding iron. Impossible . For a while he couldn’t do anything but stare blankly back at his sister. There was no way to reconcile what she’d just said with the image of Marty in his memory. “What?”
    “He was drunk the first time, so I tried to forgive him.”
    “The first time?”
    Shannon glanced quickly back at the house. “Quiet down,” she hissed. “Yes, it happened twice. He wasn’t drunk the second time. He was just a fucking pig. And dead or not, I’ll never forgive him for that.”
    Russ couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Not that he doubted his sister. But what she told him, as she tentatively filled in the details, went against everything he thought he knew about Marty. God! He’d even had a slight crush on the guy when he was a teenager! How could he have held his sister down and forced her, even after she’d started crying and begging him to stop?
    “I don’t know,” Shannon said. “He’d always been kind of pushy about sex. We did it more than just those two times—I never claimed to be some delicate, virginal flower. Most of the time, when he got horny, I went along with it. But the two times I didn’t want to, he made me do it anyway, and it terrified me. I knew after that I didn’t have the strength to fight him off, and he couldn’t be trusted not to use his strength against me.”
    “Jesus!” Russ snarled under his breath. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “You think I wanted everyone to know I’d been raped?”
    “My God!”
    Shannon put a hand on his arm. “Russ… I handled it, okay? I broke up with him.”
    “When?”
    “The next day.”
    “You never told us the engagement was off,” he said, afraid he was sounding accusatory. He didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want to make it sound like any of it had been her