Someone to Watch Over Me by TERESA HILL Page A

brokenhearted man and a flirtatious dog. It was one thing to do things because she’d decided she was ready, another to have him pushing this way and making her want to push herself.
    “Come on, Gwen. It was a man,” Jax said, gently stroking her hand with his shirt. “I know it was a man.”
    “Yes.” Gwen risked a glance up into his face. Kind, beautifully blue eyes stared back at her. Bleak eyes with sad, little, crinkly lines at the corners that spoke of sleepless nights and heartfelt pain, way too much understanding in his expression.
    “And he hurt you. With his fists?”
    “And a knife. He had a knife.” She didn’t really have to say it. She just turned her head to the right, and this close he could see the scar there on the side of her neck, where that man had cut her. “I thought he’d cut my throat. I mean…You know what I mean. He did, but it wasn’t deep. I didn’t know that, because I couldn’t see it. I just knew that it hurt, and I was bleeding, and…He was just trying to scare me. That’s what the policeman said later. I was hysterical and thought I couldn’t breathe and that I was bleeding to death, but…it wasn’t that bad.”
    “Sounds pretty bad,” Jax said, his jaw gone tight. He put down one of her hands and she held out the other. If anything, his touch was even gentler than before as he bent over her hand and went to work cleaning it. “Gwen, did he rape you?”
    “Not quite,” she said, still wondering whether it really mattered. The not quite part.
    “You got away?”
    “No, I got…lucky.” That’s what so many people had said. Lucky. “Someone came along.”
    A couple of kids had walked into the dark alley. She’d heard them but never seen them. They hadn’t come to help her, but they had scared her attacker away. She’d stayed there, frozen, in the alley. Lying on the cold, wet pavement, bleeding, the rain running down her face and all down her body, and she’d kept hoping it would somehow wash everything away. That she’d wake up and nothing would have happened to her.
    She looked up at Jax’s angry face, hoping he didn’t pity her and determined to finish this and never talk to him about it again.
    “I was on a date,” she said. “A second date with a man I’d just met. We were downtown at the arts center. When we left, he wanted me to come home with him. When I told him that I wouldn’t, he got mad. I told him I’d find my own way home, didn’t think a thing about it. I planned just to get in a taxi. We hadn’t come that far from the theater, and there had been so many people there. But when I got out, it was so quiet. I guess I got turned around in the dark. Next thing I knew, somebody grabbed me and pulled me into a dark alley. It all happened so fast and I was so shocked, I didn’t even make a sound. It was all I could do to breathe. Can you imagine that? A woman about to be raped, and she can’t even make a sound.”
    “It happens when people get scared. It’s not unusual at all.”
    “I hated myself for not even making a sound. When the prosecutor started talking to me about what it would be like at the trial, she said his attorney would say, ‘Did you tell him no? Did you tell him to stop?’ And I thought, how could anyone think a woman wanted a stranger to grab her off the streets and drag her into an alley and hold a knife to her throat? Was it only wrong if I told him I didn’t want him to do that?”
    “I’m sorry, Gwen. I’m so sorry.”
    She shrugged as best she could and blinked back fresh tears and looked off into the sky, because she couldn’t look at him.
    “They convicted him of attempted rape?” Jax asked.
    “Aggravated assault. We didn’t push on the attempted-rape charge,” she admitted. “The prosecutor said it could have gone either way. I never really got a clear look at his face, and the kids who stumbled into the alley ran right back out, so there were no witnesses, and he hadn’t really raped