Maybe it would be better to let them have their illusions.
I took a slug of my beer. “Go plan your wedding.”
“Silas, if there’s something wrong—”
“No, you’re right,” I said. “I’m still in that trying-to-protect her mode. But she’s safe now. She’s safe. If she wants to enjoy that, well, I’ve got no right to stop her.”
* * *
I dreamed about Sylvia.
I was in my bunk at Op Wraith, the darkness thick around me. She climbed into bed with me, snuggling close and whispering that there was no way that Derek would find her here. As long as I kept her hidden, she’d be safe.
And then I woke up.
And I was in my bed at home in Morgantown, not in Op Wraith. And it wasn’t Sylvia who had crawled into bed with me, but Christa.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, turning on her side and thrusting her ass against my crotch. “I was used to sleeping close to you, I guess, and I was tossing and turning in the guest room.”
I sucked in breath. Her body was warm and lithe, and I was just waking up. I could feel my dick lengthening inside my boxers.
Damn it.
I tried to move away from her before she felt it.
She giggled softly. “You do want me still, Silas.”
“You woke me up,” I growled. “It does that when I wake up. It’s got nothing to do with you.”
“Sure, it doesn’t.” She was still giggling.
I moved away from her, to the other side of the bed. “God damn it, Christa.”
She rolled onto her back. “Why are you so mad at me?”
“I’m not mad.”
“You’ve been avoiding me all day.”
“You’ve been avoiding everything all day,” I said. “Are you really that into planning weddings?”
“It’s a nice distraction,” she said. “It helps to not have to think about Rolf all the time.”
“Yeah?” I said. “How’s that working out for you?”
She scooted over to me, resting her head on my shoulder, pressing her body into mine. “Easier when it’s not dark outside. Can’t you just hold me? Like the other night? Please?”
I let out a noisy breath. “Maybe I can’t.”
She lifted her head to look down at me. “Why not?”
“Maybe it’s too confusing and too awful,” I said.
“Confusing because of your hard-on?” she said. “Because we can totally do it if you want.”
I shoved her off of me. “No.”
“Jesus.” She shrank from me.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered.
Her voice was small. “You really don’t want me.”
I shut my eyes. “It’s confusing.”
“Okay,” she said, “but can I stay here tonight, at least? I really don’t think I can sleep alone.”
Now she sounded so sad and beaten that it broke my heart. I reached for her. I pulled her into my arms. “Yes, you can stay,” I whispered into her hair.
She clung to me. “I’ll get better, I think. It’s only that it’s the first night.”
“Is this why you didn’t nap today?”
“Maybe.”
“Shit, Christa, you have to stop pretending like everything’s okay.”
“But I want everything to be okay.”
“But it’s not.”
“Sure, it is,” she said. “I can make it okay.” Suddenly, her hands were moving on me, darting under the band of my boxers. She grasped my dick.
I choked.
She started to stroke me. “It can be okay, Silas. It can be just like nothing happened. You can want me again, and we can have sex, and it can be okay.”
“Christa…”
Her hand felt good there. I couldn’t deny it.
She quickened her pace. Her voice went breathy. “Oh, you’re so hard, Silas. You have such a hard, huge cock.”
She was against the tree, the bark digging into her back, and Rolf was between her legs.
I ripped her hand away. “What the fuck are you doing?”
She flinched.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
She rolled away, so that she wasn’t facing me.
“How can you want to do that after what happened to you?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice was strained. “Maybe it’s like getting thrown from a horse, you know. You have to get right back on, or you’ll be afraid forever.”
“So, you don’t want to do it, but you’re forcing yourself to.”
“I don’t know.”
Shit. She was crying.
I tentatively touched her shoulder. “Christa, aren’t you just trying to make it your idea?”
“It is my idea.”
“You think it’s going to be better if you start it, if you control it. But you tried that before, and it meant that you had sex where you never got to have orgasms.”
“No, Silas.” She sniffed. “I would let you do that. It would be okay if I was out of control with you. You’re different.”
Shit. I wrapped my arms around her. “I can’t.”
“Why not? You don’t think I’m attractive anymore?”
“No, of course you’re beautiful. So beautiful.” I pulled her tightly into my chest. “Do you remember what you said to me? That we were the same, and that we both couldn’t stand to be out of control, and that was why we had sex with people but refused to feel anything for them?”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s true. We are the same.”
“Well, maybe it would be the best thing for us to not have sex, you know? Like maybe we have too much sex.”
“No such thing,” she said.
“Besides,” I said. “I feel things for you.”
“No, you don’t,” she said.
“I do,” I said. “You know that. You gave me shit about it in the woods.”
“I was teasing,” she said. “I know you don’t really—”
“I do,” I said. “I care about you a lot, and it kills me that you don’t care about me back.”
“Silas…” She laughed a little. “You’re just saying that because you feel sorry for me.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“Shit,” she said. “Now I feel like I shouldn’t sleep here.”
She was trapped in my arms.
“I’m not letting you go anywhere,” I whispered. “Just go to sleep, okay?”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
* * *
“Silas, wake up!” My sister’s voice, full of panic.
I sat straight up in bed, cracking my elbow against Christa’s head, because she was lying next to me.
“Ow.” She clutched her head.
I winced. “Sorry.”
Sloane pushed the door open, a phone in her hand. “Christa’s not in her room.” Then she saw us. “Oh,” she said in a different tone of voice.
Christa massaged her head, making a pained face.
Sloane was speechless for a moment. Then recovered, thrusting the phone at Christa. “It’s your brother. He wants to talk to you.”
Christa took the phone. “Hey, Griffin…. No, I’m fine, I just hit my head.” She walked out of the room, still rubbing the place I’d collided with her.
I pushed aside the covers and got out of bed.
Sloane was staring at me.
“What?” I said.
“So, that’s why she wanted to stay here,” she said.
“No, it’s not like that,” I said. “She just got freaked out last night. While we were out there, we slept close a lot. For body heat. Protection. Comfort. She just… got scared, that’s all.”
Sloane folded her arms over her chest. “So, you were like, ‘You’re scared? Sure, hop into bed with me’?”
“She climbed into my bed. She didn’t ask permission.”
“I can’t believe you’re still sleeping with her. Did you guys get it on like bunnies while you were out in the woods?”
“No
, it’s not like that,” I said. “We’re not having sex.”
Sloane let out a disbelieving laugh. “Yeah, right.”
“We’re both fully clothed, aren’t we?” I glared at her.
She considered. “You guys really aren’t sleeping together? I mean, obviously you just slept together, but… that’s all you did?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Huh.” Sloane furrowed her brow.
“Listen, Christa is putting on an act, but she’s not as okay as she seems. She’s been through too much shit. Do you know that she’s the one who killed Rolf?”
Sloane gave me a funny look. “Oh my god. Silas, you’re worried about her.”
“Of course I am. She stabbed him in the neck with a sharpened piece of wood, and he bled out in front of her. Then two minutes later, she’s like, ‘Let’s have a wedding.’ But the minute the sun goes down, she can’t sleep alone. So, you just tell me that there’s not something wrong with that.”
“You care about her,” said Sloane. “Like really care about her.”
“So?” I said. “Is that so hard to believe about me?”
“Kind of,” she said. “Generally speaking, I’d say that besides me, you don’t care about anybody at all.”
“I do,” I said. “We have… friends and stuff. I care about Leigh and Griffin and…”
“Not really, you don’t,” she said.
“Well… well, maybe I want to.”
She shook her head. “What happened to you out there?”
I sighed. “Forget me. What about Christa? Isn’t anybody going to do anything?”
“What should we do, Silas? Cancel the wedding again? Tell her she can’t help Leigh with flower arrangements? Look, every single one of us has been through hell. And we all know that there’s no way to wave a magic wand and fix everything. If she can feel good, I say let her.”
“I don’t think she really does feel good. I think she’s forcing herself to act that way.”
“Silas, she killed someone. So have I. So have you. So has Griffin. So has Leigh. We’re all functioning, okay?’
Damn it.
“I know it’s a big deal. But she did it in self-defense, and she seems all right. So, as sweet as it is that you’ve developed empathy or whatever, you’re being kind of creepy.” She patted me on the shoulder. “It’s going to be okay. Calm down.”
* * *
I couldn’t “calm down.” It wasn’t that easy.
Everyone was back at the house that day. It was Thursday. The wedding was set for Saturday. According to Sloane, the entire house needed to be cleaned from top to bottom and the yard needed grooming.
I thought that I’d be able to lose myself in hard work.
But the problem with working with your hands is that it leaves your mind free.
So, I mowed the lawn, but I didn’t think about the grass I was cutting. Instead, I thought about Christa telling me that she felt sticky from blood… mostly.
I trimmed hedges, but I didn’t think about whether or not I was getting them squared enough. Instead, I thought about the sound of her sobs in the cave as I stroked her hair.
I vacuumed the entire two top floors of the house, but I didn’t pay attention to the coins and paper clips that the vacuum cleaner occasionally picked up. Instead, I thought of Rolf kneeling next to me and telling me that I was beaten.
He was right.
He’d beaten me.
He was dead now, but he’d still won, and I’d lost.
Before he’d tied her to that tree, I’d still contemplated things like whether or not I believed in the idea of romantic love.
Now that seemed so silly and abstract that I couldn’t believe I’d ever bothered to think about it.
He’d stripped me of all the armor I’d used to protect myself, and I now realized that human emotion was visceral and raw.
In the woods, Christa had been mine. Mine to protect, mine to watch over, and, yes, mine to fuck. Hadn’t I been inside her the night before it happened? It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t poetic, but it was the truth I felt in my bones.
My Christa.
You could call it possessive and misogynistic if you wanted. You could say that what I felt for her was barbaric and that a modern man had to evolve in terms of his relationship to the role of women.
But the thing was that being out there in the woods had been barbaric. And so I’d responded like a caveman.
She was my woman, and he took her. Hurt her.
And I was in pain, because I was a failure as a man.
And because I…
Fuck. I tore the vacuum cleaner plug out of the wall.
The machine cut off, leaving me in silence.
It wasn’t about my failure. It was about her.
She was hurt.
And it hurt me that she hurt.
I didn’t know if that was romantic or poetic or anything.
But I thought it was love.
Maybe it was barbaric, but it was real. It was true. It was the rawest, most powerful feeling I’d ever felt.
She was hurt, and she was running from it, and she wasn’t ever going to heal if she buried it.
She might hate me for helping her, but I had to do what I could.
Because I didn’t help her before. I couldn’t help her before, when Rolf had her tied to that tree. I didn’t know if I’d ever recover from that. But I did know that not helping her now would only make it worse.
* * *
“Griffin, we need to talk,” I said.
Griffin was standing outside on my stone patio. He was scrubbing the top of the outdoor table with a wad of paper towels. “Sure, what’s up?”
“You’re probably going to want to stop doing that,” I said.
“I can’t stop doing this,” he said. “Didn’t Sloane give you a really long list of shit to clean too?”
Okay, fine. I took a deep breath. “The thing is, I, um, wasn’t exactly honest with you.”
“About what?” He moved the paper towel in wide circles over the surface of the table.
“I didn’t keep Christa safe out there.”
He stopped his movement. He looked up at me. “What are you talking about?”
“She doesn’t want me to tell anyone about it,” I said. “And I told her I wouldn’t, but I have to say something to somebody, because she can’t bury it forever. And you’re her brother. And you’d probably understand what she’s going through better than any of us, because of the shit that happened to you. So, I’m telling you anyway.”
He straightened. “Silas, what are you going on about?”
“Rolf…” God, now that I was here, it was so hard to figure out how to say this. I scuffed my toe against the patio. “You know that he was angry with me because of his wife, right?”
“No, I guess we didn’t really get into his reasonings,” he said. “What’s this have to do with Christa?”
I took a deep breath. “Well, it’s a long story, but Rolf’s wife was one of the, you know, clients for French’s little side business. You know about her side business, right?”
“The prostitutes,” he said. “Again, I thought this about Christa.”
“Right, well, so Rolf found out that I’d slept with his wife—”
“You were one of French’s prostitutes?” he said. “I thought they were all women.”
“Not all of them,” I said.
“So, Rolf’s wife paid French to sleep with you, and then Rolf found out, and that’s why he wanted to kill you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “When he saw Christa with me at that bar, he assumed that she and I were… together, and told me that he was going to show me what it felt like to have a woman stolen from me.”
“Wait a second,” said Griffin. “Sloane said he hunted people. You said you were in the woods, running for your lives.”
“Oh we were,” I said. “But he caught us. And I… I tried to stop him. I—God, I tried, but he shot me, and I went dark, and
they’d been shooting me so much, and my body was exhausted, and it took me so long to heal, and when I did…” I dragged a hand over my face. “I’m so sorry.”
“Silas, are you saying that…?” Griffin left the question unformed.
I nodded.
He shook his head. “No.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice breaking. “He tied her to a tree, and I was trying to get up, and I was bleeding, and I couldn’t make my fucking muscles move, and when I woke up, it was done.”
Griffin’s expression was stony. “What was done?”
I felt a sob starting to form in my throat.
Griffin stepped closer to me. “What was done? Say it.”
I looked into his eyes. “He… he fucked her. He fucked her, and I didn’t do anything.”
Griffin’s fist slammed into my face.
I stumbled backwards. Okay, I hadn’t been expecting that.
He hit me again, driving his knuckles into my jaw. “You fucking bastard.”
The impact knocked me off balance further.
He punched me in the stomach.
I doubled over, my center of gravity completely fucked. I went down, landing on my back in the grass.
Griffin leaped onto me. He pushed my face to the side, grinding it into the ground. “You were supposed to take care of her.”
“I know,” I said. “I failed her.”
He put pressure on my cheekbone.
There was a crunch. Searing pain shot through my face.
It woke something up in me. My training. My bloodthirsty spirit. I don’t know what. But suddenly, I was on.
My fist shot up into Griffin’s midsection. It wasn’t a hard enough hit to dislodge him completely.
But he did lessen the pressure on my face.
Enough that I was able to get my hand around his wrist and wrench it away.
He was leaning too much of his weight on me, and he couldn’t recover. He came down on top of me.
I dug my fingers into his eye sockets.
He wrapped a hand around my neck.
We rolled over and over on the grass, grappling with each other.
He was on top for a minute. He slammed my head into the ground, stunning me for a moment.
I recovered enough to roll over. Now he was under me. I drove my elbow into his nose.
He brought his knee up into my groin.
I gasped.
He knocked his head into the cheekbone he’d already broken.
I roared in rage as the pain consumed me. I rained blows down on him. His nose was crushed and bleeding. I pummeled it again and again.
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