Chloe picked herself off the floor, shivering from the shock and the drizzling rain slowly soaking unto the material of her clothes.
She needed to get out of there.
Standing up, she realised that she’d been in such a hurry to get away from Mark that she’d forgotten to put her shoes on. She turned around and looked at the house behind her. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up and she felt more sick than she’d ever done before. She wasn’t actually going to be sick, though – it wasn’t a nauseas feeling, more a feeling of utter disgust. Disgust at Mark and disgust at herself. She felt all unclean, like she wanted to turn herself inside out and scrub and scrub and scrub until every last cell of Mark’s was off her, but even if she sat in a bath of disinfectant for a month, she knew she still wouldn’t feel clean. She wouldn’t feel like she did before, because before, she’d felt like Chloe, a normal, happy, 19-year-old girl, and now she was just this thing. This dirty, disgusting, thing. She felt like someone had taken away her soul and left empty nothingness in its place. She didn’t know herself any more. She felt worthless, devalued, and mortifyingly weak. Why had she let Mark do that to her? Why didn’t she do more to stop him? Coz she must have been able to stop him – there was a way out of every situation – and she should have stopped him. She should have gone home the second she started to feel uncomfortable; she shouldn’t have gone at all!
So what had happened was all her fault. If she hadn’t gone round there was no way Mark would have come looking for her to do that. And she’d provoked him. She’d wound him up by acting like a total slut at the club last night, and she should have told him face to face that things were over, not avoided him like a coward. She shouldn’t have been seeing him at all! All this had happened because she’d been unfaithful to Ben.
Maybe she deserved it after all. They say what goes around, comes around, and so maybe this was all the negative karma she’d created getting its revenge on her. She felt so ashamed, and she had no-one to blame but herself.
As she walked down the road, Chloe realised she had no idea where she was. Obviously she knew the name of the road, and the name of the area she was in, but she didn’t know how to get back. And she didn’t know where she wanted to get back to, either. All she really wanted to do was go back to Ben and let him take all the hurt away, but she knew that if she saw him, she’d break down and tell him everything, which would mean telling him about the affair, and then he’d have no sympathy for her and he’d be hurt as well. Mind you, no-one would have any sympathy for a stupid little tease who’d brought everything on herself. So no, she couldn’t go running to Ben, and she couldn’t tell her best friend, because she hadn’t agreed with the affair and had told her it’d all end in tears, and she could hardly go crying to the police when she was sorta involved with Mark and it was all her fault anyway.
Well it didn’t matter, because she was so embarrassed and ashamed by it all that she didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened. She just wanted to be away from everything and everyone; to forget this chapter of her life had ever happened.
She wanted to go home.
Mark lay on his bed. He lay there until the CD that was playing ran out, leaving him alone in the screaming silence, he lay there until he brother got home, the bang of the door shooting through his veins like lightening shots, he lay there until his phone started to ring, disturbing the perfectly settled black clouds of despair resting over him, and he lay there until it stopped ringing, taking away his last hope of sanity. He lay there and lay there and lay there, with his eyes shut, not moving a muscle, because if he moved, that meant that he was alive, and if he was alive, that meant he was that person who’d done such a terrible terrible thing to the girl he’d swore he was in love with. That disgusting, evil person, who vulnerable girls were warned about on the TV and in magazines. But if he stayed still, if he hardly breathed, then he could pretend he didn’t exist, and you can’t rape someone if you’re not really there.
Rape.
Oh God, that was what he’d done.
He’d raped Chloe.
Mark swallowed hard. He felt sick: sick at the thought of the person he’d become, sick at the thought of what he’d done, and sick at the thought of Chloe, and how she must be feeling. Part of him couldn’t believe he’d done something like that, and part of him just wanted to die.
He wanted to sleep: he wanted to sleep forever, to sleep all the memories away, and if he had to wake up, he wanted to wake up as someone else, somewhere else, doing something else. Except he was already someone else: he was a rapist. And it didn’t matter that he knew Chloe, it didn’t matter that he’d been in a relationship with her, the fact of the very serious matter was that he had forced her to have sex with him – God, he’d even held her down! – and in doing so, he’d broken the law in one of the worst ways possible. He’d done something he’d never be able to take back, never be able to put right, and never be able to forget. He felt utterly disgusted.
He didn’t know why he’d done it; didn’t know why he’d gone so far. He couldn’t even remember most of it: it was almost as if the real Mark – the Mark who didn’t even kill spiders – had switched off and this evil part of him that had lain dormant until Chloe came into his life had taken him over. It would have been a fairly funny thought if it weren’t so terrifying. But the thing was, he wouldn’t do something like that, he just wouldn’t! It really was like it hadn’t been him, like he hadn’t even been there to stop himself doing something so horrific. He loved Chloe; he’d never ever hurt her! He didn’t know why he had. He’d just wanted to be with her so much… but that wasn’t an excuse. There were no excuses, not this time.
And what happened next? What was he supposed to do? He didn’t know where Chloe had gone, but he did know the seriousness of his offence, and – pop star or no pop star – it was frighteningly realistic that he could end up in prison if Chloe, or anyone else, went to the police. Mark didn’t know what kind of sentence rapists got, but he knew it would be more than a telling off down the local station.
And then his life would be over.
Just like that.
Worse than being a normal prisoner, he’d be a celebrity prisoner, and somehow everyone would find out what he’d done. He’d lose his job, his friends, his place in society… Mark knew there was no place for criminals in the real world.
Even if Chloe didn’t go to the police, she’d almost certainly tell Ben, and his reaction probably wouldn’t be a pleasant one. When it came to matters of the heart, Ben was irrational and hot-headed, and Mark didn’t know what he’d do if he found out that, not content with having an affair with his girlfriend, his sick sick friend – someone he trusted - had raped her as well. And Mark knew that Ben loved Chloe very much – he’d either kill Mark, or kill himself when he found out. Because he would find out. It was only a matter of time.
Mark was scared. Not of the impending consequences of his act of depravity, but of the fact he was capable of doing something like that on the spur of the moment. The thought that - contrary to his previously held belief - when it came down to it, he wasn’t in control of himself, and didn’t have the power to prevent himself from hurting someone else, was more terrifying than anything else Mark had ever come across in his life. That was something about himself that he’d rather not have found out, and the most worrying thing of it all was the question of, if he could do what he had done to someone he cared about deeply, what could he do to someone he didn’t know, or, worse still, disliked? Did he have it in him to mug someone? To attack someone? To murder someone? Was this the way his life was going to go from now on? Was raping Chloe the first in a long line of offences that he couldn’t stop himself from committing? Was this how all serial criminals started out? Maybe the only way to stop his inevitable fate would be to end his life…
So whatever happened, Mark was left with the unhappy option of more guilt than he could cope with – which was what he had already – or death, which, at the moment, seemed like it’d be best for all concerned. And it wasn’t like he didn’t deserve it: he deserved far worse than Ben could ever inflict on him. But considering that, maybe prison would be best after all. Solitary confinement in a dank, dark cell, so he could learn what it was like to be the victim, and suffer as much as Chloe must have.
Ultimately though, Mark knew that it didn’t matter what he thought: he knew he was going to be made to pay for what he’d done, and rightly so. Punishment was so inevitable, that Mark was already resigned to it – that wasn’t the thing troubling his mind. No, what Mark was facing was far more frightening than that. He felt like someone had taken away his soul and replaced it with the one of someone he’d never met. Like he was living inside an unstable time bomb that could go off at any moment, and he didn’t know what could trigger it.
He didn’t know himself any more.