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The woman sobbed as she stood in front of the mirror over the bathroom sink. She couldn't believe the turn her life had taken.
She eyed her reflection. God, she was a mess... Her eyes were all red and puffy from crying, her hair mussed in the struggled that had ensued. Her clothing was torn in places... Her throat felt raw from the amount of harsh screaming and crying she'd done. She just plain hurt.
Running both hands over her hair before turning on the cold water, she couldn't believe what had happened only moments earlier.
She ran her hands under the tap and splashed the cool water on her face as she recalled it all.
With a horrified shudder, everything all came rushing back. She was certain it would never leave her, either...
His hands, they'd become so brutal as they'd roamed over her body. His lips had been searingly hot - demanding. Her own lips were now swollen because of his brutal kisses.
She had questioned him as to what had gotten into him. He'd never been like that before. Never - he'd always been patient and gentle with her before tonight... A perfect gentleman.
But tonight, had been a different story...
Tonight, he'd forced himself on her. He'd raped her.
The young woman raised her head to stare into her own haunted eyes in the mirror once again. She loathed what she'd been reduced to. Not once in a million years would she ever have guessed she would become a victim - just another statistic.
That's what she was now - she was now a sniveling statistic.
Her body was wracked with physical pain. When he'd raped her, he'd forced into her before she'd been ready for him, and she'd torn and bled as well. He'd pawed at her roughly, and her breasts had been raw with the brutal handling he'd given them. Now that she took a better look at her reflection, she noticed that there was a tiny bit of slightly dried blood in the very corner of the right side of her mouth. Her tongue even hurt, and she feared she'd probably bitten it. That was probably where the blood had come from.
But the physical pains were nothing compared to the emotional and mental anguish she was now feeling...
Oh, damn it... She realized how sharp a pain she felt in her left ankle. She'd felt the ache earlier, but it hadn't been all that bad, and she'd been able to walk on it. Now, it was a sharp pain as she put her weight on that foot. She didn't think it could be broken, but certainly it might be sprained. It must have happened during the struggle...
She cried out as she hobbled from the bathroom back to the main part of the room. Tears leaked from her eyes as she dropped herself to the bed, and she felt the horror consuming her again as she surveyed the disarray of the room.
It looked as though some horrific crime had occurred here tonight. The bed upon which she was sitting was in a shambles, the pillows and blankets haphazardly discarded on the floor. Even the bedsheet was partially pulled up from the mattress.
And then the woman suddenly recalled exactly how she'd hurt her ankle...
The bedside lamp was lying in a broken heap on the floor on the other side of the bed. She'd kicked it in the middle of their struggle - hard.
The woman felt her eyes well full of tears again as she recalled the horrible and humiliating experience. In her wildest and most ferocious of dreams, she would never have imagined that this man - whom she had loved and respected for the past two years, would ever hurt her.
But he had...
How very wrong she'd been. And that was the second strike against her. As they said in baseball, one more strike, and she'd be out...
She buried her face in her hands as she was once again overcome by her sobs. She cried so hard it felt as though she might break.
She'd always prided herself on being such a strong woman, with a backbone
of steel. But now, Lita hated herself. She hated herself with
such a passion, she wished she were dead...