by Jessie Evans
Or not, which would be devastating in its own way.
Gabe blinks, but doesn’t seem surprised, or displeased. “Then we should start…taking care of things. We might not have much time.”
I shake my head. “Tell me what’s wrong. Are you sick? Is that why you couldn’t run the other night? Is that why you’re trying to leave me?”
“I can’t leave you,” Gabe says. “I didn’t last a day. I missed you so much I drove by to sit out on the street and watch the house. I would have ended up in your bedroom, begging for forgiveness, if I hadn’t seen Pitt’s car pull away.”
So that’s how he found me. My shoulders sag. I’m relieved that I’m safe, relieved that I’m not crazy, and that Gabe does care about me as much as I care about him. The relief lasts only a few seconds, however, before Gabe says—
“I told Danny to call the police if he didn’t hear back from me in twenty minutes. I blacked out on the way here and when I came to, my cell wasn’t getting service. I was going to turn around and drive closer to town to call him, but then I saw the railroad trestle. I realized Pitt must have you, and had to get to you. I couldn’t think of anything else.”
He lifts a hand, cradling my head. “I’m so glad I got here in time. I’m so glad you finished it. You did the right thing.”
I take a shaky breath, love and fear and adrenaline mixing inside me until it feels like my heart is going to burst through my chest. “Why don’t you go downstairs and call Danny, tell him not to call the police. I’ll check Pitt’s pockets to see if I can find a key to the cuffs.”
Gabe pushes into a seated position, holding his head in a careful way that makes me think it must still be hurting. “No. They might get the phone records. It wouldn’t look good for Pitt’s last call to be made to your house.”
“Okay, then we’ll just have to hurry.” I turn back to Pitt’s body, clenching my teeth against the bile that rises in my throat as I force my hand into his urine-soaked pants pocket, searching for the key to the cuffs. I find it in his back pocket a moment later and glance back to tell Gabe, but he’s already across the room at the attic stairs.
“I’m going to find bleach and something for you to wear. We’ll have to burn your tee shirt along with the rest of it. It got blood on it while you were fighting Pitt.”
I glance down, blinking in surprise. “I forgot I was naked.”
“You’re probably in shock,” Gabe says. “Just get yourself free and wait here. I’ll be right back.”
“Look for a recording device while you’re down there,” I say, already reaching down to unlock my bruised ankle. “Pitt was recording everything the past twenty minutes or so. I’m not sure what I said, but it was probably incriminating. We have to destroy it. And probably his hard drive while we’re at it.”
Gabe nods. “All right. Hang tight.”
I unlock my ankle as Gabe thumps down the stairs and spring to my feet, making use of my newfound freedom to pad across the attic and rip the camera from its place in the rafters. I smash it to pieces on the floor, slamming it into the boards until it shatters to bits, shocked to discover how okay I am with being naked right now. I don’t feel vulnerable the way I did when Pitt was ordering me to strip. I feel powerful, primal, ready to tear my enemy to pieces, bury the bones, and put this night behind me.
Maybe Gabe is right, and I am in shock, maybe not, I only know that when Gabe returns, and we start cleaning up the blood and mess, my hands get steadier. I don’t tremble as I throw on a plain white tee shirt and a pair of men’s khaki shorts, rolling the waistband over until the fabric is tight enough to stay on my hips. I move calmly from one task to another, and in ten minutes Gabe and I have everything in the house cleaned up, a suicide note emailed to the school from Pitt’s account, and Pitt’s body positioned on the mattress.
“I’m going to soak the mattress and make it look like he dropped the lighter,” Gabe says, pressing a soft kiss to my forehead before beginning to spray the kerosene we found in Pitt’s garage over the body. “Run down to the garage and wipe down the inside of the trunk with the bleach cloth. Make sure you look for any stray blond hairs. If the fire department gets the fire contained before it reaches the garage, we don’t want them to find any evidence that you were ever here.”
“Meet me in two minutes, or I’m coming back up,” I say, still worried about him, though he’s been acting fine since he recovered.
“No, you head into the woods,” Gabe says. “The police could be here any minute.”
“That’s why I’ll be back up to check on you,” I say, heading for the stairs, ignoring his protest that making sure I’m not caught is the top priority.
I don’t want to lose my freedom, but I don’t want to lose Gabe, either. He’s necessary to my existence, even more so after tonight. He may have been part of the reason I was almost killed, but he also saved me. He’s brought danger into my world, but he’s also brought joy and passion and life.
I was only half alive before I met Gabe. I know that now. I was a shadow of my true self, going through the motions, spending my life responding instead of acting.
Now, I don’t put out fires, I help light them, and I won’t go back, not even for the kids. Maybe that makes me an awful person, as much as killing Pitt or stealing or anything else, but I can’t help it. It’s true. I won’t give up Gabe, not for safety or love or family. He is a part of me, and I will never let him go.
By the time the police sirens pierce the still, humid air, the attic and the roof of Pitt’s house are burning brightly enough to light up the night sky and Gabe and I are through the woods to the abandoned chat dump where he parked the Beamer.
I start around to the passenger’s side, but he stops me with a hand on my arm and drops the keys into my hand.
“Just in case,” he whispers. “I just got you back, I’m not going to risk an accident taking you away from me.”
I nod, swallowing the questions on my lips until we’re safe. I start the car and pull down the narrow gravel road, heading away from Pitt’s house and the sirens growing closer and closer, howling like dogs chasing a train they’re never going to catch. Gabe and I are gone, and all the evidence is burning away. Even if they get the fire put out, Pitt will be nothing but charred remains. There will be no fingerprints, no hair or spit or blood or anything to tie me and Gabe to Pitt’s death.
Together, we’ve killed a man and gotten away with it and it feels…okay.
Not great, not a rush like the other jobs, when we could barely wait to get back to my house and make love, but okay. He was a horrible man who had already murdered one person, and who would have tortured and killed me if he’d had the chance. I can live with his blood on my hands. As long as I have Gabe, I can live with anything.
“I know something’s wrong,” I say as I steer the car down back roads, instinctively guiding us toward the highway, not caring where we’re spit out. I know the area around here well enough to get us home in minutes as soon as I see a mile marker. “But I want you to know that I’m not going anywhere. I want to help, no matter what it takes.”
Gabe sighs. “Okay.”
I blink, and cast him a surprised glance out of the corner of my eye. “That’s it?”
“I was expecting you’d say that, and I know how strong and determined you are. I knew it when I was driving to your house tonight, but now…” He looks over at me, admiration in his eyes. “Now, I wouldn’t put anything past you. You were amazing. I’m proud of you and I love you so much.”
Tears fill my eyes, but I bite my lip, using the pain to hold them at bay. “I love you, too. But don’t ever try to get rid of me again, okay? I can handle anything, but that.”
“I won’t,” Gabe says. “And I won’t leave. At least not willingly, I promise.”
I sniff away the stinging in my eyes, swiping the back of my hand across my nose. “What should I do with these clothes?” I ask, not wanting to think about the last thing he said, or what might be so wrong
with him that he felt compelled to try to destroy us in order to shelter me from it.
Better to concentrate on the things I can control, at least until we’re back at the house.
“I’ll take them home and burn them in the back forty tomorrow,” Gabe says. “The police shouldn’t have any reason to come to your house tonight, but even if they did, I pulled those from Pitt’s clean laundry. They shouldn’t have any DNA or anything on them that would connect them to him or that house.”
I nod, feeling a little of the tension leak from my arms. “Okay.”
We drive in silence for a few minutes, before Gabe softly asks. “Can I ask a favor?”
“Anything,” I say, meaning it. I would do anything for him, and I know he would do anything for me.
“Can we wait to talk until tomorrow morning? I want one more night. I just want to hold you and go to sleep with you on my chest and pretend that everything is the same. Just for one more night.”
My tongue slips out to dampen my lips and tears are slipping down my cheeks again, but I nod. “But tomorrow you tell me the truth, and we move forward. Together.”
“Yes. Together.” He reaches out, threading his fingers through mine. “I don’t want you to feel guilty about what happened tonight, okay? We didn’t have a choice. If he’d lived, he would have continued to be a danger to you and the kids. Even if I could have convinced him to leave you alone, he’d obviously developed a taste for what he did to his mother. He would have found another victim, sooner or later.”
I slow, braking as we pass under the overpass and prepare to turn south on the highway. “I don’t feel guilty.” I stop in the middle of the abandoned road, and turn to face him. “Do you think that makes me one of them?”
“One of the monsters?” Gabe asks, reading my mind the way he does sometimes. “No. Not even close.”
“Are you sure?” I ask, suddenly needing the assurance, making me wonder if maybe I am in shock, after all, and if any minute my fragile calm is going to come crashing down all around me.
“No, you’re an angel, the scary, beautiful kind,” he says, lifting his hand to my face, cupping my cheek in his warm palm. “You are…the most beautiful person I’ve ever met, inside and out. I love you, and I wouldn’t have you any other way than the way you were tonight.”
Tears slip from my eyes. “Is it okay that that’s enough for me?”
“Yes,” he says with such surety that I’m able to pull myself together with only a nod and another sniff.
We drive home in silence to find Danny sitting on the front porch with one of the pay-as-you-go cell phones Gabe bought under an alias clenched tight in his hand. Even in the heat of the moment, Gabe was careful to make sure the call to the police wouldn’t lead back to our family, and Danny was level-headed enough to follow directions.
Or crazy enough. I can tell Danny realizes something bad went down, but he doesn’t ask any questions. He just throws his thin arms around me and hugs me tight before doing the same to Gabe.
I look over to see Gabe’s big arms cradling my brother to his chest and I have an eerie feeling that Danny is like me, like Gabe, that whatever is missing inside of us is missing from Danny, too, but it doesn’t scare me the way it would have even a month ago.
Maybe more people are missing whatever this is than we think. Maybe other people aren’t near as good or pure or kind as they would like to believe. Maybe Gabe was right that first night in Sherry’s car, and none of us truly know what we’re capable of until we’re put in an impossible situation, until we step over the line and realize things aren’t so very different on the other side, after all.
Whatever the truth is, I know Danny will be okay. He has me, and he has Gabe, and we’ll help him figure out how to walk a path that is good and honorable, even if it isn’t always a path other people would approve of. It can be done; I believe that. Anything can be done with people who love you by your side.
Half an hour later, it is almost three o’clock in the morning and Danny is tucked back into bed and I take Gabe’s hand and let him lead me into the bathroom to wash away the stains of the day, to spend one last night letting all the questions lie before the sun rises and exposes all our secrets to the light.
Chapter Seventeen
Gabe
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken.
-Shakespeare
She’s still crying, though I’m not sure she realizes it. Tears stream soundlessly from her eyes, like a leaky faucet that refuses to be turned all the way off. There have been times when the tears have been worse than others, but they haven’t really stopped since we left Pitt’s house.
She says she’s okay, but I can tell she’s not.
And why should she be? She was almost killed, maybe almost raped, too—I haven’t worked up the courage to ask her about that. I don’t want to know. I’m afraid it would make my head start exploding all over again.
Stress seems to play a role in the blackouts and dizziness. If I want to be here for Caitlin tonight, I have to remain calm, and hold my shit together. I can’t think about the fact that I’m dying, or that I’m going to leave her alone to carry the weight of what happened tonight all on her own. I can’t think about Danny’s thin arms trying to gather Caitlin up and hold her together. No matter how tough he is, he’s just a kid. He clung to me tonight like I was his dad, not some idiot barely eight years older than he is.
Standing there on the porch, that kid clinging to me like I was the only thing standing between him and losing everything he cares about, I realized how deeply I’ve fucked things up. I have fucked them up so badly I don’t know how to start making them right, but I’ll start here, now, with Caitlin. By finding a way to help her stop crying.
I draw a bath in the chipped claw foot tub while she sits on the toilet, watching me with her red-rimmed, shell-shocked eyes, then I help her out of her clothes and into the hot water. Like earlier tonight, when she was walking around Pitt’s attic wearing nothing but black bikini panties, her nakedness doesn’t affect me the way it usually would. Now, it only makes me more keenly aware of how vulnerable she is, how easy it would be for someone to hurt her, no matter how strong she is, or how well she held it together while we were cleaning up after the killing.
Killing. We killed a man. Together.
It hits me like a slap in the face every time the thought drifts through my mind.
I never dreamt things would go this far, I never intended to lead Caitlin to such a dark place, but I don’t regret it. Pitt had to die. If he’d lived, I would never have been able to trust that Caitlin was safe. I just wish I’d been able to finish the job, that another mind-blowing episode of vertigo and pain hadn’t hit at the wrong time and left Caitlin to pick up where I left off.
I will never forget the way she looked, the intensity and agony and determination mixing on her face as she straddled Pitt and locked her hands around his throat. She was different after, transformed. I can’t put my finger on what it is, but something was born inside her when Pitt died, something savage and raw I can sense humming in her bones as I brush a washcloth over her back, washing away the soap clinging to her skin.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I reach for the soap again and draw one of her legs from the water. I start with her toes, lathering each one before moving up to her calf and knee, finding it soothing to do this for her. To take care of her, even in this small way.
She leans back in the tub, the hair hanging loose below her shoulders turning into darker tendrils of blond as she sinks lower in the water. “What’s there to talk about?”
“The fact that you can’t stop crying,” I say in a gentle voice, easing the leg I’m holding beneath the water and reaching for her other foot.<
br />
Caitlin lifts her hands, swiping her palms across her cheeks. “Oh.” She sniffs, blinks, and after a moment the tears finally stop. “There. All better.”
“I highly doubt that,” I say. “It’s been a rough night, to say the least.”
Caitlin huffs, a sound that is almost a laugh, but not. “You think?” She sighs, leaning her head back on the edge of the tub, staring up at the ceiling. “You know the worst part?”
“What’s that?”
“I wouldn’t go back and undo it, even if I could,” she says, eyes still flicking back and forth across the ceiling, as if reading some great truth on the water-stained paint.
“You shouldn’t,” I say, massaging her calf. “Like I said before, he had to die, or you and the kids would never have been safe.”
“No, I don’t mean that.” She drops her gaze, staring into me with such a naked look I forget what I’m doing, forget everything but this girl, my girl, who is such a part of me her emotions echo inside my chest. “I mean us. Everything we’ve done. I wouldn’t take any of it back. I wouldn’t give up a moment with you, even if it could keep tonight from happening.”
Tears well in her eyes again, but they don’t spill over, even when her lips pull into the saddest smile I’ve ever seen. “But I’m afraid, Gabe. I’m so afraid. I know we promised to have one more night, but I can’t stop thinking… I can’t stop worrying. I can’t lose you, I just can’t. I don’t know who I am without you anymore.”
I swallow and it hurts like hell, like I’m swallowing a strawberry stuffed with razorblades, forcing it down whole.
But that’s good. That’s what I deserve. I deserve pain. I deserve to suffer for how epically stupid I’ve been.
“I never meant for this to happen,” I say, my throat clenching so tight it feels like the muscles in my neck are going to snap. “I didn’t think feelings like this existed. I’d never been in love and I never imagined… I never meant to get so lost in you, and I certainly never meant for you to get so lost in me.”