TW ⚠️: grooming, child molestation

When I was 12 years old my sister had went through a very rough break up and her and my brother surrounded themselves with a new friend group. There were 8 people in this friend group, my sister was 16 and my brother was 19 and all the friends ages ranged from 14 to 20 years old (the 14 year old was a cousin and even though at the time I thought of him as so much older it's insane to me that he was out hanging with 20 year olds at 14) There were only 2 girls in the group and rest were boys and everyone always called me "little sister".

Well they had a friend and we'll call him "A", he was 15 years old when I met him and I always remember our relationship really clicking. I of course liked him because I was well... a 12 year old getting attention from an older guy, how could I not like him? In my 12 year old brain I was in love and I knew it was meant to be. He would text me all the time and I remember feeling giddy from the things he would say to me. He of course knew I had feelings for him and used that to his advantage. He would come into my bedroom when my family was asleep and talk to me about sex, there would be times when no one was around that he would touch me around my waist or caress me and at the time I loved it… again, I was a child thinking it was so cool an older guy was interested in me.

A change happened when I had a friend from school that started coming around, they started getting close and everyone was noticing it. They weren’t as sneaky as he was with me. Her mom even found out and didn’t want her talking to him anymore but she had changed the name in her phone and continued talking to him. There was a day where we were going out to the lake and my brother decided to invite my friend but ALSO A’s girlfriend. Once A found out he had a breakdown moment and literally just ran away from our house. It took a couple of months for him to even show his face again and then acted like nothing happened. Things were different after that and he didn’t come around as often but still stayed in touch with me.

Fast forward, I was 15 years old and he was texting me pretty frequently, he had already graduated high school and was getting ready to go into the military. A couple days before he left for basic training I was texting him and we were talking about relationships and I had mentioned I had always had feelings for him. He met up with me the day before he left for basic training and kissed me. While he was gone he was talking about when I’m 18 we can live together and was talking about marriage, meanwhile that kind of stuff wasn’t even on my mind. I had told him this whole thing probably wasn’t a good idea because we have to be so secretive about it and I didn’t want my parents to find out. A couple months later he is back and we start being sneaky again. Every couple of weeks it was this cycle of he would flirt with me, something would happen between us, I would feel extremely guilty about having to hide everything, we would stop and then I would give in because he would flirt with me again. He would frequently pick me up from school and we would hang out and eventually got to the point where we did have sex. We had only ever had sex a total of 2 times. First time I agreed to it, I said I wanted to. Second time, he had picked me up from school and told me he needed to go by our friends house and go feed his dogs, which I thought was weird because our friends house was out of the way from mine. But we went over there and he let out their dogs and just kissed me, he was trying to convince me to have sex with him and I kept telling him no and that we needed to go. He would just ignore me and keep feeling me up and kissing me and it eventually got to the point where he wouldn’t let me leave until I gave in and had sex with him. A couple months later my sister had found out that I had lost my virginity to him and she ended up confronting him and that was the last of him coming around. The rest of my family never knew anything and he still remained on all of our social media and would try to keep in touch but never came around.

Once I was 19 and started dating my now husband, “T”. I of course told him about my sexual history and how the only other person I had been with was A. My husband felt very weird about it because of the age difference between A and I. He then started asking questions out of concern because he wanted to know how we ended up getting involved and I had told him about the second time I had sex with A and my husband said “that’s not normal” I really tried to defend A saying “it’s fine” and that I agreed. It wasn’t until a couple weeks later, T was going back home to his place and I was sitting there making dinner. All of sudden a wave of realization hit me and I started sobbing, I called T and said I just realized what had actually happened and it had stuck with me for years that I was a victim.

Fast forward to last year and I still had A on my social media, I hadn’t talked to him in years but I would still see his posts. I had noticed he had 2 girls he was hanging out with and one of them was a year younger than me so I had assumed the other one was too. Well it wasn’t until that girl came up on my Instagram and when I looked at her page I saw she was actually a 17 year old still in high school (I will remind you, this man is 28 at this point). My heart dropped because I realized the same thing that happened to me is going to happen to her. I called my sister’s friend sobbing because I needed her to investigate and find her mom’s Facebook to message her and warn her about the guy her daughter is hanging out with. I found her mom and unfortunately she doesn’t get on Facebook and still hasn’t seen my message. It was at that moment I blocked him from everything. That entire week I was having these buried memories pop up in my head again, the touching and caressing, him coming into my room talking to me about sex, it was all him grooming me. I don’t know how I hadn’t realized before that I was groomed from the age of 12 until he had finally gotten into my pants at 17. Since I’ve made this realization I have been diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and suffer from anxiety attacks.