Surrender 01 - Surrender

toes.
    “Take this, Ari. It will help.”
    Ari froze at the sound of Rafe’s voice. What was he doing here? What was she doing in the same room as he was? Where was she? For a moment, her mind was a complete blank, making the pain and panic escalate.
    Searching her mind for the last thing she could remember was agonizing, but Ari tried to summon up her previous night’s memories. Slowly, through a thick veil of fog, memories started trickling back in.
    She’d been at the bar with her friends. She knew she was drinking too much, but she was having a great time — laughing, flirting with the waiter, acting like a normal twenty-three-year-old with no worries on a Friday night.
    She wasn’t just a normal person, though. She had her mother to take care of, bills to pay, and stress beyond anything a single woman should be enduring. She’d just wanted one single night to be free of thinking about any of it. It seemed she wasn’t allowed even that.
    No matter how much she searched her memory , she didn’t recall seeing Rafe anywhere at the club. The very last thing she could remember was her friends encouraging her to dance with the waiter. She couldn’t even think of his name. Everything had started to go fuzzy.
    “Come on, Ari. I’m going to sit you up now. I know you hurt at the moment, but if you take these pills, you’ll start to feel better. I turned down the lights so you can open your eyes.”
    The next minute was filled with excruciating pain as she felt Rafe’s hands beneath her body helping her to sit up. Nausea rose in her throat as sharp arrows of discomfort tore into her.
    She felt the edge of a glass against her bottom lip and she automatically opened her mouth, feeling a small token of relief as the icy-cold liquid slid down her throat. She felt Rafe’s callused finger against her lip, and, opening up once again, she felt him place a pill on her tongue. She swallowed it down when he pressed the glass against her lip again.
    She wasn’t brave enough to open her eyes just yet. She’d wait until the pounding in her head settled down first.
    Over the next several minutes, she concentrated on taking deep breaths in and out as she started to feel the effects from the magic pill. The throbbing in her head and excruciating bodily aches didn’t cease, but they began to ease to a bearable level.
    Eventually, Ari braved cracking her eyes open. The room was dim, but it didn’t take her long to spot Rafe sitting next to the bed in one of her rickety kitchen chairs.
    She was stunned to find the sophisticated man in her apartment. She never would have thought that day would come. He was far too polished to hang out in the slums of San Francisco.
    She struggled to focus her eyes on his face, becoming more surprised by what she saw. Rafe had at least a full day’s growth of stubble coating his normally smooth skin, and the circles under his eyes attested to lack of sleep. Her curiosity spiked; what in heaven’s name had happened?
    “I’m glad to see you finally awake. You’ve been semiconscious the last few hours, but only enough to allow me to get some liquids in you and take you to the bathroom. I was beginning to think the doctor was wrong. You slept all night and day and were going for night number two when you finally woke up.”
    “What happened? Doctor? What doctor? Why are you here with me?” Ari was again surprised by the hoarseness in her voice. She sounded as though she hadn’t spoken in years.
    “You were drugged at the club last night. I happened to be there and stopped the man before he carted you off to do unimaginable things with you.”
    Ari waited for him to continue. When he said nothing further, she turned her eyes back on him and looked into his anger-filled eyes. Why was he so upset when she was the one who’d almost been raped? It wasn’t as if she’d done it on purpose. It wasn’t as if she’d asked him to step in and save her and then play doctor.
    As the two of them engaged in a stare-down, the reality of the situation set in. She’d come close to being raped. It seemed unreal — as if she were looking through a window and watching her story happen to someone else.
    Leading a sheltered life had its positives, and one of those was thinking horrible things could never happen to you. Death, rape, suicide — they all happened, but they were so distant that it never occurred to her that she could ever be a victim. With her head still pounding, she pushed down the panic