Two Punks In Love

Truth Long Denied

A/N: Trigger warning for domestic violence 

Trace

I never should have agreed to residential psychiatric treatment, but the lawyers and Riley and Marley and Matt all said it was for the best.

It might go a long way toward getting the charges against me lessened, the lawyers said. The label needs to know you understand the seriousness of what happened, Riley said. It's just an evaluation period to determine how best to manage where you are right now, Marley said.

Trace, we all go crazy sometimes. Hell, I spent so long in a treatment facility once upon a time that I actually started to look forward to the lime jello everyday, Matt had said with a grin. There's no shame in regrouping to get your shit together.

I believed Marley when she said "evaluation period." I thought that would mean, two, maybe three days at the most.

I've been here five days. It's been an endless round of psychiatric sessions, meditation sessions, yoga sessions, and group sessions.

Not to mention all my "family sessions"—which haven't been family at all. They are limited to an hour a day, so every day so far my "family" has been Riley and the team of lawyers, plus two follow-up police interviews. It's actually pretty fucking pathetic that I haven't been charged yet. If I were anyone but a rich and famous celebrity, with an even richer and more famous celebrity father, my ass would have been locked up already for what I did to Manning.

I deserve to go to jail. Hell, there's even a part of me that wants to go to jail for what I did.

See, I also get my phone for an hour a day. And that hour, I've spent talking to Kat. And she told me everything about Manning and the sex tape. So there's a part of me that is glad of what I did.

Okay, it's a small part, but it's there. Yet it doesn't change the fact that whenever I look at my battered hands, they begin to shake. I'm actually terrified of what I did, because when I did it, it seemed so perfectly logical. Justified.

And that is crazy. The police showed me the pictures of Manning, after I beat him. The psychiatrist said it was a good thing that I threw up, because it showed how viscerally I feel remorse.

Sooo...awesome. I'm not a psychopath.

The same thing can't be said for certain about Manning. When Kat surrendered the phone she and Bodie stole to my lawyers, they reviewed the contents and advised her to turn it over to the police. There's some very sick shit on there. It's not really admissible as evidence in my case, because it was obtained illegally, but it has prompted an investigation into Manning that has eclipsed the DA's investigation into my kicking the shit out of him. So Manning is on the hot seat, but I'm currently in limbo. Which really fucking sucks, because I'm supposed to be getting married in a foreign country in a few weeks, and even if I get the hell out of this place, no one knows if I'll be legally cleared to leave the country.

Another thing no one knows: if or how or when our sex tape is going to surface.

Apparently the DA has put some kind of injunction on all of Manning's photography files, because like I said, some of the shit is criminal, amoral, incorrigible and disgusting. So in theory, that should include our sex tape, too. But I'm not exactly holding my breath that it will stay buried.

It's not like Ashlynn's sextapes. Those were in Slade's uber private stash of sick, until Varrick deleted those personally.

The video Kat and I made has already been viewed by god know how many cops, lawyers, clerks, admin, plus whoever Manning may have shared it with.