by West, Sinden
“Did it work out?” His eyes were back on me again.
I looked him directly in the eye. “Yes. And they were all nice to me. Not like him.”
He chuckled. “Nice pedophiles?”
“I thought you said he wasn’t a pedophile?” I snapped at him.
His smile dropped, and his hand came up to grip my chin, tilting my head up. “I don’t want you to talk about him. Ever. You understand?”
“Yes,” I said through gritted teeth. He released me suddenly and I rubbed at my jaw while he drank more.
“Tell me about your mother.”
“What do you want to know?” I wrapped my arms around myself.
“Let’s start with her real name.”
“Holly Sanders,” I lied. It was effortless on my tongue. Old habits die hard.
“And you’re con artists?”
“I guess.” I hugged myself harder. “We were. But we’re not now. She got freaked out after what he did, and she found out he had mob connections or something.” I dared look at him, only to meet eyes staring directly at me. “I guess that’s you. Am I right?”
He didn’t answer.
I took a breath. “Why don’t you tell me about you? There’s no harm in that.”
He looked amused. “And why is there no harm in that?”
I dug my nails into my arms. “Because you’re not going to let me go. Are you?” I said softly.
He looked away “I’m done talking. This has been a pretty shitty day, so you either go back to your room,” he emptied what remained in his glass down his throat, “or you come over here and distract me like you offered before. Choice is yours.” The glass came down on the bedside table with a bang and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. The light glinted off the cut glass and I imagined smashing it into his head.
But instead I did the wisest thing, and reached over to free him from his towel.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Afterward, he fell asleep. He lay between my thighs with his head resting on my breasts, looking younger and far more innocent asleep than when awake. A lock of hair fell over his forehead and for a moment I wanted to brush it away, but I stilled my hand.
At first I’d done all the work, but then he took over and screwed me almost with a sense of urgency, as if he needed something. He wasn’t rough though. I had expected him to shove away from me once finished, but instead he’d rested on me and promptly fell asleep. I wondered what he dreamed about because he stayed so motionless, as if untroubled by guilt. Surely to be like him, you’d need to not feel guilt. Your emotions would need to be hidden behind an impenetrable wall. Must be nice. I couldn’t move with him on me, so eventually I slept as well.
I woke up with him inside me, moving slowly. It took me a moment to register where I was. I had a dream about when I went a Halloween party with Mara and Torrance. Mara was a princess, Torrance a genie, and I was a witch. But not a hag, I was a pretty, sexy witch. I wore a figure hugging black dress with more cleavage showing than I would normally dare, but Torrance talked me into it while I was drunk. My makeup was dark and dramatic, and I held a twisted stick as my magic wand. I looked good and got hit on a lot that night, so much so that Finn and I had a fight over it. He had stormed off (probably to fuck Melody) and I’d spent the night getting drunker and drunker and flirting with boys I’d never kiss. But in my dream, I caught sight of myself in the mirror, and I was ugly. My face was scarred like someone had taken a knife to me. My face pulled lopsidedly down to the side, and my lips were twisted. I grabbed at my face desperately because this had to be a mask. But it wasn’t. And I clawed at my face desperately until blood started to drip and coat my hands.
When I managed to crack my eyes open blurrily, I saw him looking down at me. He rested on his arms on either side of me as he slowly slid in and out of me. “Shh, you were having a bad dream.”
I looked to the side; sunlight was peeking through the curtains. But his grip on my chin forced me to look back at him. “No. You look at me when I’m fucking you.” He released my chin, and I kept my gaze where he wanted. His hand snaked around to tangle in the hair at the back of my head as he picked up his pace. His lips lowered to my neck and kissed me there, sucking on the dip where my neck met my shoulder. His grip on my hair tightened as he came with his head buried against my skin.
He lay resting on my breasts again as he caught his breath. I wondered if he’d fall asleep but after a while he raised himself up and moved away. On his side, he rested his head on his hand as he watched me.
“You’re on birth control, right?”
My mouth opened in surprise. “Yeah. I have an implant.” Why did he care about that?
He nodded. “Go have a shower.”
I took a long shower, washing my hair and trying not to think about things. When I pulled back the shower curtain and reached for the towel, I saw clothes folded neatly on the closed toilet seat. My clothes.
I barely dried myself before pulling on the underwear and jeans. There was no bra, but I didn’t care as I pulled on the sweater. I couldn’t stop grinning, but managed to contain myself as I made my way down the stairs. As I passed the living room, the smell of bleach assaulted me. I didn’t even look in that room, instead passing through into the kitchen. Aaron was placing two plates with scrambled eggs on the table. Two cups of steaming liquid sat there already.
I tugged at the sweater, suddenly shy. “Thank you for the clothes.”
He just nodded, taking a seat at the table. “Come have something to eat.” He picked his fork up and dug into the food.
I sat down at the table and did the same. My cup contained coffee, and I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed caffeine. I held the warm cup in my hands and sipped it, not being able stop the smile spreading across my lips. But it dropped suddenly when I noticed him looking at me.
He laughed softly. “You like coffee, huh?”
“Yup.” I took another sip.
Other than that, we ate in silence. When we’d finished, I grabbed our plates and started to clean up the kitchen. I nearly dropped the plate when I heard the sound of a cell phone receiving a text message.
He watched me and laughed as he pulled a phone out of his pocket. “We may be in the middle of nowhere, but we still get cell reception.”
I hadn’t even realized that he had a cell phone. Although, even if I had got my hands on it, what would I do? I didn’t know where I was. His smile turned to a frown as he read his message. He quickly typed something in reply before placing it on the table. I finished cleaning the kitchen, and then went and sat back down at the table with him.
“You ever get caught doing what you did?” he asked. I hated his way of asking questions; it made me feel like I couldn’t lie. Except when he had asked about my mother’s real name; that was easy to lie about.
I shook my head. “Those men never would have gone to the police. They had too much to lose if it came out about them…”
“Raping you?”
“They didn’t rape me. Only he hurt me,” I rushed out.
He cocked his head and studied me. “You’re pretty naïve, you know that?”
My jaw hardened. “Are you done insulting me?”
“Calm down.” Another message came through on his phone. He didn’t bother to reply to that one. Instead, he leaned back in his chair. “Any of those men get angry when they found out what you were up to?”
“Only one figured out that he’d been set up. The rest just felt guilty, and scared, I guess.” I twisted my hands together tightly.
“And what did he do?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I bit my lip; I didn’t want to anger him but I didn’t know what to say.
“Rachel?” he prompted, leaning forward.
“Why is this important? It happened years ago.” I twisted my hands tighter, and my knuckles were white. I hadn’t bothered to bandage my hurt hand after my shower, and the wounds had opened and started to bleed.
His eyes flicked
down to my hands. “Shit. Stop it Rachel. You’re making it worse.” But I couldn’t stop, the pain felt good. I heard him shove his chair back and a cupboard door open. Then he was back sitting in front of me, prying my hands apart. He cleaned the hand up and rebandaged it expertly. When he had finished, he examined his work, finally giving a satisfied nod.
“Maybe you should have been a doctor instead of…whatever you are.” I told him in a numb voice.
He lifted his eyes to look at me, a small smile on his lips. “What? Saving lives? Not my style.”
“Oh. So you do kill people?”
He let out a sigh and stayed silent.
“You ask me questions, why can’t I ask you?”
“Because you wouldn’t like the answers, Rachel.” He released my hand. “Besides, you didn’t answer my question. What did that guy do when he found out?”
I hesitated. “He hung himself in my bedroom.”
Aaron raised an eyebrow. “So you came home from school and found him like that?”
I shook my head. “No, he did it while I was asleep. I woke up and found him hanging above my bed.”
“That must have been fucking scary.”
He didn’t know the half of it.
Aaron was staring at me in such an intense way that I couldn’t look away. “And now you feel guilty,” he said softly.
I stared hard back at him. “No.”
He leaned in closer to me. “Liar. Why’d hang himself? Couldn’t he pay?”
“No, my Mom always made reasonable demands. She always knew their financial situation first.”
“So why did he do it?”
I shrugged. “Can we stop talking about this?”
He stretched back, relaxed like he had all day. “Sure. Just answer my questions first.”
I looked down at my hands and made sure my voice was as steady as I could make it. I took a breath. “He was an idiot. He thought I was in love with him. He felt betrayed, according to his suicide note.” I didn’t look at him to see what Aaron’s reaction was. I just kept staring at my hands, but what I was really seeing was the heart shaped note paper that he’d taken from my desk. His writing was neat, like he’d practiced it a thousand times as a child with some parent or teacher standing over him, praising his perfectionism. I read that note so many times that the words love and hate just ran together on an eternal loop in my brain. I imagined him crying as he wrote it, and that unsettled me more than anything else because men shouldn’t cry. That’s why I liked Finn so much; he would never be soppy or sensitive enough to do something so horrible.
Aaron’s voice broke through memories. “And you didn’t stop after that?”
I frowned. “How could I? I was a kid. We needed to survive.”
“I don’t get it. Why are you so concerned with her welfare? She whored you out.” He asked this like he genuinely wanted to know. I gave the only answer I could.
“She’s my mother.”
He snorted in disbelief, before standing and moving to a drawer in the kitchen. He pulled out a pen and a writing pad, placing them in front of me.
I looked up at him in confusion. “What’s this for?”
“I want names, dates and addresses of the guys you screwed over.”
“Why?”
He gave me that amazing, suck-you-in grin that he was so good at. “Insurance.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
I wrote what I knew warily. I remembered a lot, even though the most important stuff was somewhat fractured in my mind and sometimes I wasn’t sure what the actual reality was. Aaron watched me like a hawk, shooting the occasional question. Were they all recorded? How many copies? I knew they were all sitting on flash drives somewhere, but that was all. I was always on a strictly need to know basis.
After I finished writing, I set the pen down on the paper, and he scooped it up, folding it neatly and placing it in the pocket of his jeans. He motioned with his head “C’mon.”
We paused to grab jackets before he unlocked the front door and led me out into the winter sun. I wanted to enjoy the feeling of the weak heat on my skin, but I couldn’t relax. I couldn’t trust Aaron. I needed to be vigilant.
He led me over to the wood pile and positioned me on the tree stump that I’d sat on previously. But this time there was no handcuff. I sat obediently and watched him as he pulled his shirt off and started to chop wood. He looked even more menacing with the axe in his hand, and it served to remind me of what he was. The sound of the axe hitting the wood echoed around us. There was nothing else, not even a bird chirping. It was as if there were nothing else alive in the world but us. And then a thought hit me. Maybe we weren’t even really here. Maybe we were ghosts sentenced to live together in eternal hell for our sins. Maybe this was purgatory.
I laughed. It was a louder, stronger, crazier laugh than any I’d let out in my time here. Aaron stopped swinging the axe and looked at me curiously. “Why are you laughing?”
I stopped. “Why? Is that against your rules?”
He rolled his eyes at me. “No, Rachel. I just want to know.”
I kicked my legs against the tree stump like a kid and shrugged. “I was just thinking that maybe none of this is real. You’re not real; I’m not real. We’re just in some sort of hell. We’re two horrible people who do horrible things, and this is our punishment. You and me, stuck together in this,” I looked around me, “horrible place.”
He started to swing the axe again, but couldn’t hide the smirk on his face. “You’re very philosophical this morning, or you’re just crazy. Which is it?”
I shrugged again. “It doesn’t matter. Neither one will make a difference.”
He split through the wood, his muscles moving under his skin. His body was perfect, almost like a sculpture. Beauty always disguises evil, I mused to myself.
“There’s a small flaw to your plan, anyway,” he said as he set up another lump of wood to be split.
I frowned in annoyance. I didn’t like being corrected, or proved wrong. “What do you mean?”
His axe sliced cleanly through the wood with ease. Then stopped in his work and watched me. “Only one of us is being punished here, and it’s not me.”
I met his eyes directly, knowing that my next words would be unwise, but I didn’t care. “That’s not true.”
He grabbed another piece of wood and set it up. “Oh, really?”
I leaned forward in case he would have difficulty hearing me. “You killed your uncle. Isn’t that a punishment?”
He slammed that axe down, so it cut through the wood and embedded its blade deep in the chopping block. I didn’t flinch or even think about running. I kept my eyes trained on him as I kept talking. “You obviously cared about him, to do the things that you’ve done. It must hurt that he’s dead.” He didn’t look at me; he just kept staring at the axe and breathing hard. “I don’t blame you though. I used to like him too, at first, before everything horrible started. He was really nice to me until he started drinking.” He wiped sweat off his brow but still didn’t look at me. “I know I made him go crazy by doing the things I did, and I’m sorry. I wish things were different…”
I took a deep breath. I had expected him to do something by now but instead, he yanked the axe out of the block and proceeded to cut more wood without saying another word or giving a single glance in my direction. When he was done, I helped him gather up the wood and carry it inside. I stopped short of entering into the living room when the smell of bleach hit me, reminding me of what had occurred in there. He just set his wood down into the basket by the fireplace before looking at me and raising an eyebrow.
“Come on, Rachel. The dead can’t hurt you, and they sure as hell don’t haunt you. Trust me, I know.”
He must have believed his words because we spent the remainder of the day in that room. He paid me no attention as he looked at something on his laptop, which was another device that I hadn’t seen until today. I curled up on the couch and read a worn car magazine t
wenty times. I hated cars; I always tuned Finn out when he started to gush about that kind of stuff. But there was nothing else to read.
Later, I cooked us dinner. Nothing fancy, just chicken breasts and frozen vegetables. There was still plenty of food left in the freezer, but I wondered what would happen when it started getting low, what his plans were, and if I’d get to live to know. He didn’t talk to me at dinner either. He just grunted, “Thanks,” when I placed his plate in front of him. I hesitantly sat at the table as well and silently ate my meal. I half expected him to order me onto the floor; after all, this piece of leather around my neck constantly let me know my place here.
As I cleaned up, Aaron spent his time constantly receiving and sending texts on his phone. I watched his face, and there was no emotion. I had no idea if he was pleased or upset by whatever was going on. When I put the last dried dish away, I stood awkwardly against the kitchen counter.
“I’ve finished.”
His eyes flicked up to me. “Go upstairs. I’ll be there soon.”
“Oh. Which room…” I tapped on the counter nervously.
His attention was back on his phone. “It’s up to you.”
I ducked my head down and walked out of the room and up the stairs. I took a shower, brushed my teeth and used the toilet before wrapping myself in a towel. I hesitated in the hallway, then took a breath and headed to his room. It was empty.
I removed the towel and folded it neatly on the dresser before I slipped under the covers, already missing the clothes that I had been allowed to wear. I kept to one side of the bed with my back was to the door. It was a while before he entered. His movements were mostly silent, just the sound of his fly unzipping and shoes being kicked off being the only real indicators of his presence. I kept my back to him and wondered if he was surprised by my being in his bed. Something told me he wouldn’t be.
He slipped in beside me and was still at first. Then the bed dipped as he moved closer, and a hand touched my shoulder. I turned to meet him, and made the first move by raising myself up to meet his lips. Like the other time, he didn’t really kiss me back at first, but he soon got into it. It felt like we were two normal people, strangers who had met at a bar, and we seemed to move in unison. He came silently; the only indication was his quickening heartbeat and his firm grip on my hair. After he moved off me, we lay on our backs, side by side, and not touching.