This chapter contains non-consensual sexual touching.
When Bianca was 16, she prone to flights of romantic fantasy. She would sit with her finger marking her spot in a book, and imagine meeting her soul mate. It would be love at first sight, she would meet him and she would know that he was The One.
One hot summer day as she sat reading a library book, she heard music. Curious, she looked out different windows until she saw a shadowy figure on the screened porch next door. The music was hypnotic, and instead of going back to her book, she sat by the window entranced.
Library books went unread, and she would push them into the return slot, puzzled. She didn't even like Tate Harper. Yet everyday she wasted her time listening to him play, unable to do anything but move closer to him. She would doze from the heat and the repeated string of notes, drifting into an unconsciousness so deep that she was dreaming.
Her fugue continued until the day she woke up on the Harper’s porch with Tate’s hands up her blouse. She was so startled, that she slapped him without thinking and ran into her house. Her anger didn't surprise her, nor did her tears. What surprised her was her sense of disappointment. It nagged at her the same way as the empty and silent porch, and it made her question everything.
Maybe she had feelings for Tate Harper. Was that even possible? And if she had, he had ruined it, breaking the rules of consent for a cheap feel. If he had gone about it the right way and asked her for a date, she was pretty sure she would have said no. She wasn't attracted to him. His skin always looked greasy and his body was overly slim. Bianca’s heart raced as she tried to imagine him in front of her. She picked the most obscene word she knew and said it slowly, dragging the vowels out with a sigh. She was attracted to him, but she had no idea what to do about it.
The next day she waited for him to appear on his porch with a mixture of fear and anticipation. When the day passed without sight of him, she cried herself to sleep. With each passing day, her sorrow hardened into bitterness until she suddenly knew what had happened: he had taken advantage of her, not because he liked her, not because he was attracted to her, but merely because she was there. Anger welling inside of her, she looked out her window at the house next door. “You’re a wolf, Tate Harper,” she said spitefully.
She didn't think twice of what she had said until several days later. It was early evening, and Bianca and her mother sat out on the porch, a book across the lap of each woman, a picture of lemonade sweating on the wicker sideboard. Ms. Harper walked up on the porch to join them, her eyes sunken from a lack of sleep. Her mom poured the other woman a glass of lemonade, spiking it with anisette.
“Tate has been missing since last Wednesday,” Ms. Harper’s hands shook as she accepted the drink, spots of yellow sprinkling her white skirt.
Bianca choked on her lemonade and it burned her throat until her eyes watered. Missing? Did he hate her so much that he ran away?
“Don't be ridiculous,” she told herself, “You’re not that important.” He could have run away for other reasons, or maybe he had turned into a wolf. The guilt of the thought gnawed at her. She had spoke the curse not in anger, but in an inside-out form of sorrow.
From then on, she put him out of her mind. The unexpected mention of his name still jarred her, the mere sight of a bag of tater tots filling her with anxiety. If she thought about it too long, her mind filled with little Tates and her skin crawled.
Tate. He was the first taste she had of real romance. None of her books had ever told her what she herself learned over the past ten years: that romance would devour anything that was soft enough to chew. So she vowed to make herself hard enough, not just to survive, but to break the teeth of anyone foolish enough to taste her.
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