The Choir Director 2 by Carl Weber Read Free Book Online

food in her mouth.
    “Good for you. Did you tell him where you were?”
    “No,” she replied bluntly. “I told him to go fuck himself and move on with his life, because that’s what I’m doing.”
    My jaw dropped and I had to resist the urge to slap her. “You did what? Don’t you understand that man loves you? Why would you do something so hurtful?”
    Her whole body seemed to deflate, and her tears had started again. “I don’t want him to love me anymore.”
    “Tia, you don’t have to go to these extremes. Plenty of people have problems in the bedroom. You’re not the first woman who was nervous about making love to her husband. I have a few techniques I can teach you. Or if you’d prefer, I have a friend who—”
    “Stop! This is not about sex. This is about him .”
    “Girl, what the hell are you talking about?” She was making absolutely no sense.
    “I saw him, Monique,” she said quietly, her voice cracking. “I saw him, and just like that, it changed every damn thing.”
    “Jesus, Lord, don’t tell me you snuck into that man’s bachelor party. I told you not to do that, Tia. When you go looking for a mess, you find a mess.” I put my hand on hers and waited for her to make eye contact. “So you saw him with a stripper?”
    “No.”
    I didn’t want to imagine what could be worse than that. “A church member?” I asked, praying I was wrong.
    She shook her head vehemently. “Aaron didn’t do anything wrong, Monique. Hell, I wish he had. Then I wouldn’t feel so bad.”
    This girl had my head spinning. It didn’t look like I was going to get to the bottom of things soon enough to go take care of my own home. “Then what? Who could make you leave a man you profess to love?”
    Other than perhaps another man you love , I thought.
    Tia began sobbing. Looking up at me through her tears, she cried, “It was my rapist, Monique. I saw one of my rapists the other night.”
    I held her as she released her pain, wailing and shaking. When she calmed down enough to speak, she told me, “Just the sight of him brought it all back. I’ll never forget his face, and that hot, nasty breath of his kissing my neck as he…” All I could do was stare at her as the magnitude of her words sank in and tears fell from my own eyes. “It was like it was happening to me all over again. I still can’t shake the feeling. I don’t think I ever will.”
    “Oh, no. Sweetheart, I’m so sorry.” I rubbed her back, making a futile attempt to comfort her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “I’m a rape counselor. I tell women every day to be strong, to fight through it, not to let them win. I was hoping that if I could just get in the church and see Aaron I’d be all right, but I couldn’t,” she said, finally giving me the explanation I’d come for. Sadly, her reality was much more tragic than any reason I could have imagined for her disappearance that morning. “The closer I got to stepping out of that limo, the more ashamed I felt.”
    “You have no reason to be ashamed,” I told her. “This was not your fault.”
    “Really? Because it sure as hell doesn’t feel that way. I met this guy, and I probably drank too much, but I had already made up my mind that I was gonna end my birthday in his bed.”
    I listened in stunned silence as she shared details of that night that she’d never told me before. Actually, I realized, other than admitting that she’d been raped, Tia never said anything else about it. Now I understood that her reticence did not mean she had healed.
    “Monique, I wasn’t a good girl back then. I went to his house and got high. Heck, I was planning on sleeping with him, and we’d just met. But he and his roommates had other plans. They gang-raped me over and over and over until I passed out. I woke up in a Dumpster somewhere near the Staten Island ferry.”
    My stomach churned at the thought of her ordeal. What type of men could do that to another human being? “Those bastards. I