Red Water: A Novel

by Kristen Mae

  The story we told the police was very close to the truth. There was plenty of evidence to back up my claim that it was self-defense. I’m scratched and bruised enough that it’s obvious I was attacked, and the longer backstory I gave the police was corroborated by searches they unearthed in Garrett’s computer history. He’d deleted most of his research, but not all. So cocky, this guy. Some articles on the topics of social influence could be linked to his insurance business, but he’d also pulled up a search or two on individuals driven to suicide, making those seemingly innocuous searches more difficult to rationalize away—especially once they found the books in his closet about depression. The police detective looked sick when she told me what they’d found, said no one on the force had ever seen anything so patently evil. She said I was lucky to be alive.

  “I’m still…not right, though,” I say. I’ve told Rome I wanted to kill myself. That I was ready to do it. That it was only at the very last second, almost without knowing what I was doing, that I turned the knife on…on him. I can barely think his name. I know it’s sick, but I miss him. I can’t believe he’s really gone, cannot believe the intense ache that is a constant hum at the center of my chest. I have many times wished I’d done it the way we originally planned—with the knife sinking deep into my flesh, with the earth stained black with my blood. It was never supposed to be Garrett. It was supposed to be—

  “Do you still want to die?” Rome asks.

  He keeps doing this. He keeps saying things that are so intuitive I almost believe he can read my mind. I’ve told Rome every ugly, disgusting detail, from my father, to my mom’s death, to everything that happened with Garrett. “Let’s just say…it’s a good thing the dorm doesn’t have bathtubs.”

  He seizes my hand and kisses my knuckles. “Please stay alive. Please don’t throw yourself away. Please don’t.”

  I release a long, sad breath. “I’ll try not to.”

  “Can I be here for you? Will you let me?”

  “I think…” I pause, giving my thoughts a moment to organize themselves. I want Rome, but there is something bigger and more important that hasn’t fallen into place yet. “I think I need to be here…for myself. I think. Does that make any sense at all?”

  “It makes perfect sense.” He smiles, his brown eyes warm and kind. “In the long run, it will be better for you to find your own strength. You don’t need a superhero.”

  There he goes again. One thing I never told him was how, from the start, I thought of Garrett as Superman. How does he do that? I stretch an arm around him. “I need to call my sister.” It’s been days and I still haven’t told her anything. “She’s going to freak.”

  “Should I…do you need some privacy?”

  “Just for a little while. I might not need you to be my superhero,” I say, tightening my embrace, “but I do need you to be my friend.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  May

  Standing with my cello, squinting into the blinding stage lights while the audience applauds—it is a single, transient moment that will flow away from me like water, like every other moment I have experienced. Nothing in life is permanent, I know that. But the memory of the moment, that is mine to take with me, mine to keep, forever. Memories are the one thing we’re allowed to keep. I bow once more and then rush off stage before I embarrass myself by bursting into tears.

  It’s unusual for a first year to play a recital, but Professor Yarvik wanted to challenge me, give me something positive to work toward. I performed the Sixth Bach Cello Suite and the Elgar Cello Concerto with piano accompaniment. Yarvik, front and center in the audience, had tears in her eyes when she stood up with everyone else to clap. Daphne, Bethany, Rome, and Liza meet me backstage, piling flowers so high in my arms that I can barely see over them. Bethany takes my cello for me and latches it into its case since my arms are too loaded down to manage the task myself.

  “I finally got to hear you play,” Daphne says, mock-groaning as she gives me an awkward, flower-filled hug. She’s got a girl with her tonight, a tall brunette with a pixie cut, and judging from how close they stand to one another, they are more than just friends. I nod and whisper, “Is she the reason you haven’t been sleeping in our room?” and when Daphne pulls away she’s trying not to giggle.

  I finally told Daphne everything. With Rome’s encouragement—actually, “insistence” might be more accurate—I started meeting with one of the campus counselors, who urged me to reveal my history and dark thoughts to a small circle of trusted people. That way, if I stumbled, I would have a network of friends to lift me up. So. Daphne, Rome, Bethany, Liza. They’re my people.

  We go out to celebrate after the recital, and Liza sleeps in Daphne’s bed that night before driving home the next morning. Somehow she convinced Aunt Bonnie to let her take the car for just one day. That’s no surprise, though—Liza always has been the strong one, the resilient one. She never really needed me, but all the same, I’m glad I didn’t abandon her in that final, irrevocable way.

  The following night, Rome is back in my bed. He’s always in bed with me, always out of bed with me, always by my side with his jokes and his genius and his front flips off benches. Always with his hands on me, his mouth on me, giving while I take, giving even when I tell him that I cannot reciprocate his feelings, that someone else could give him the love he deserves. “I told you I wasn’t going anywhere, and I meant it,” he always tells me back. He says it again and again.

  We’re spooning in my bed a few weeks after my recital, Rome’s warm body curled around my naked back, when I finally tell him about the Aspen fellowship. I didn’t get it. I’ve known for several weeks actually, but I was too disappointed to tell anyone but Yarvik.

  I can almost feel his heart breaking on my behalf. He wants happiness for me even more than I want it for myself. More than he wants it for himself. I think he has some sort of weird savior thing going on, like, he couldn’t save his sister so he needs to save me, or some convoluted shit. He insists that isn’t true: “Don’t try to turn my love for you into something fucked up,” he always says. “My shit’s pure.” And I can’t accuse him of codependence when he comes out with such ridiculously sweet things.

  “So what’s going to happen with the cello?” he asks now. “You have to give it up?” His lips are against my neck, his arm draped over my waist, his hand resting light on my belly.

  “Yarvik spoke with the guy who owns it and explained my, uh…situation.”

  He hesitates, and I imagine he must be thinking of the last four months, of the disordered rubble that remained of my mind after that horrifying day in the woods, of the many jarring stops and starts that gave us psychological whiplash as my brain performed the emotional equivalent of a computer reboot. On several occasions he’s found me balled up on the hard floor under the bed in my dorm room and had to drag me out and peel my arms from around my knees. Nearly every night those first few weeks, I roused him from sleep with my broken, desolate wails, so loud and haunted they sent rumors spreading through our dorm like a virus. Everyone knows now that I killed another student.

  “And?” Rome finally says.

  I’ve been dying to tell him about the cello; it will make him happy. “She must have made the guy feel pretty sorry for me. She told me today that his foundation has granted an exception and agreed to allow me to keep the cello indefinitely—for as long as I’m a cellist. I just have to submit quarterly documentation to verify that I’m still actively playing.”

  I can’t see Rome’s face, but I can feel his grin from the way the energy changes in the room. He rolls over and climbs on top of me and kisses my neck, my chest, my neck again, my face, attacking me with soft, tickling scrapes of his teeth, and he says, “I’m so fucking happy for you, so fucking awesome, you fucking deserve this so much.” Then he’s trying to pull my underwear off, but I grab him by the arms and stop him.

  “What’s wrong?” he says, and though it’s dark, I can see the worry in his face by th
e moonlight streaming through the window.

  “One more thing.”

  He settles on top of me, supporting himself on his elbows. “Tell me.”

  “Since I can’t go to Aspen, Yarvik asked around about other festivals I could attend. There’s one in Italy toward the end of the summer. She sent them the video of my Aspen audition, and they’re offering to cover the tuition plus a stipend for travel.”

  “Holy shit. Are you kidding me?” His smile is like a flower blooming. I could never tell him that, though. Can’t just put a feeling like that right out in the open.

  “I know,” I say. “It’s crazy. The string quartet from the Conch Garden Symphony Orchestra coaches there. They say it’s really high-level.”

  “That’s incredible.” He attacks me with kisses all over again.

  “Will you come with me?” My voice is so small that I’m not sure he hears me over his joyful kissing, but then he stops and gapes at me in disbelief, his features almost blue in the dim light.

  “You’d want me to go with you…to Italy?”

  I shrug. “Well, I mean…just as friends. We’re just friends, obviously.”

  He grins again, his eyes crinkling. “Yeah…obviously. You don’t love me for shit.”

  I feel almost nauseous when he says things like this, or like I’m going to have a heart attack. Now the tightness in my chest takes my breath away. “I don’t love you, Rome. Not even a little.” I stare hard at him.

  The smile melts slowly off his face. He knows where this is going.

  “Do it,” I tell him. “Start with my hair.”

  He mirrors my stare, though his is laced with the soft surrender of reluctant participation, and maybe a little sadness. And love. Always love. He lifts himself off me a little, still supporting himself on one elbow, and slides his free hand up under my head, deep into my hair. I stiffen, readying myself as he closes his fingers into a fist…and yanks.

  He gasps along with me, cringes as if it is himself he has hurt. I grab him around the waist, claw at his back, and pull him down snug between my legs, tilting my chin up so he can rake his teeth over the skin of my neck. “Is that all you got?” I say, my words a rush of hot breath at his ear, and so he tugs again on my hair, hard enough that tears spring to my eyes, and then I’m moaning, begging him to hurt me and fuck me and call me ugly names.

  It’s a sick and beautiful dance, this game we play together, a graceful merging of need that transcends the little lies we tell one another. It is the place where Rome can pretend he doesn’t enjoy the moans he pulls from me when he overpowers me, and where I can pretend I don’t notice that he comes hardest when I hurt the most. And it’s where I can drown myself in my feelings for him without having to admit them, where I can die a thousand tiny deaths instead of one big one because his touches, every one of them from the most docile brush to the most painful pinch, kill me just a little. It is death and resurrection, again and again and again.

  So he’s got a fist in my hair and a hand at my breast, squeezing and pulling as he fills me deep and whispers dirty sex into my ear, and I’m dragging my nails down his back and pouring an ocean of love out through my exhales. And Rome, ever the giver, does me the kindness of pretending he cannot feel it.

  A LETTER FROM KRISTEN

  Based on feedback from beta readers, Red Water is as brutal to read as it was to write. I agonized for months that readers might perceive some of the more gruesome scenes as a glorification of sexual violence, and I even considered pulling some explicit moments. In the end, I kept nearly everything. Some truths are so ugly they need to be seen. There is a place for stories portraying controlling, violent men as heroes (the ol’ “love the beast so well, he turns into a prince” trope)—and I’m not knocking anyone who finds those fantasies a worthy escape. But I wanted Red Water to be more realistic. I wanted to reveal the disgusting, terrifying underbelly of abusive relationships and depression. No filters.

  If you connected with Red Water, I’d love to hear from you. Did you identify with Malory or her experiences? Do you think she would have fallen for Garrett if she hadn’t had such a tumultuous past? What do you think is in store for her and Rome? (And do you adore Rome as much as I do?)

  I can be reached via Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, my website, or my book group on Facebook. I love hearing from readers about how a story affected them. Makes all those lonely hours of writing worth it!

  ~ Kristen Mae

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  SNEAK PEEK FROM BEYOND THE BREAK

  PROLOGUE

  Six months after I nearly drowned in the ocean, Oren asked me, “Do you ever regret what happened with Claire?” It was a fair question on a day like that, the sort of day when I couldn’t let go of all the “what ifs” and “what would it be likes,” a day when I could smell her everywhere I turned: water lily body wash, sweat and woman. Really? On my pillow? She’s never even been in my bedroom. And in the refrigerator? I just want to make a sandwich! Go away, Claire! Get out of my head!

  I paced the house like a caged tigress, head down, shoulders rolling, desperate to find a place where she wasn’t. And I was being terrible with my poor husband, sending him ugly thought-daggers: God, Oren, can’t you read my mind yet? I need you to hurt me, tear me apart, make me forget; don’t make me beg.

  He leaned on his elbows over our granite kitchen peninsula and furrowed his blond eyebrows at me. I knew the question he’d really wanted to ask: Wouldn’t you be better off, more emotionally stable, if you’d never met her? And, boiling beneath the surface of his so-concerned exterior: I’m so goddamn jealous I could split in two.

  I forgave him for this. Jealousy, that relentless wrenching of the guts, was a feeling I understood intimately. Oren had been far more gracious than I, more generous, more forgiving, more accepting. But the martyr thing gets old, and I was in a lashing-out sort of mood. So I asked him, “Do you ever regret that you encouraged the situation?” I said it with a voice turned to saccharine but gave him the bullish look that probably made him question how well he knew me, the look that needled him right in the soft parts. I might as well have said: You started it, darling.

  He cocked his head to the side and huff-sighed through his pretty, straight nose. His glasses slid and he pushed them back into place. “You know what I mean, Hazel. You act like you’re miserable.”

  I shrugged. “Well, I’m not miserable, and I don’t regret anything that happened with Claire.” The timbre of my voice bordered on flippant.

  I did not feel flippant. I was a human knot, a mess of twisted, frayed nerves. But my words incensed Oren enough that he was able to do what I needed him to do, right there in the sunlit kitchen. He grabbed me and shoved me up onto the countertop, manhandled me (God! Finally!), pulled my hair, violated me while I breathed into his ear, “Show me. Do it.” I wasn’t even making any sense. But he understood; he had to unravel me, had to finish what she had started.

  It’s not like I had any control over what happened with Claire. She was thrust upon me, injected into my psyche, one of those right-time-right-place coincidences. I could have fallen in love with a monkey or a robot if you’d inserted one of those things instead of Claire. Probably. The point is, I was positively itching to lose control.

  CLICK HERE TO ORDER BEYOND THE BREAK

  A FREE Short Story from Kristen Mae

  A predator lurks...

  She caught his attention right away with her blond angel curls, heart-shaped mouth, and huge black eyes. She’s young, but she’s mature for her age—someone he can confide in. Someone who doesn’t pester and nag and berate him. Someone who, with a webcam recording, will do any naughty thing he asks.

  And now that her parents are out of town, she’s invited him for a visit.
>
  He stands on her front porch ready to knock, knees shaking, heart pounding. He knows what he’s doing is against the law—that it’s wrong. But he won’t turn around. Because on the other side of that door, Susan is waiting. And she says she wants to make all his fantasies come true.

  But what he doesn’t know is that when it comes to little Black-Eyed Susie, you’d better be careful what you wish for.

  BLACK-EYED SUSIE AVAILABLE APRIL 2017

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  Acknowledgments

  Another disgusting pile of word vomit turned into a book that actual humans can actually read. There is no way in hell I could have done this by myself.

  Meghan O’Flynn. Is it going too far to say I cannot live without you? I don’t think it is. Thank you for believing in me when I cannot seem to believe in myself. Mary Widdicks, once again you lasered in on the finer details of character and demanded I dig deeper than I thought I could. Thank you. Christina Frey of Page Two Editing, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: You are an editing genius. Michelle Fairbanks of Fresh Design, this cover is so gorgeous I want to make out with it. Jocelyn Pihlaja, I want to go back to school just so I can have you as my writing teacher. Amy Hunter, thank you for pushing me to write a better ending. Dr. Samantha Rodman, I almost made Malory and Daphne hook up because of you, you naughty, naughty woman. Casey Delicarpini, I always thought that you “wailed on” something. I’m devastated to learn that you “whale on” it. And now I can’t stop imagining Malory beating the shit out of her cello with a giant whale. Thanks a lot.

  Chrissy Woj, Alexa Bigwarfe, Joelle Wisler, Christine Organ, thank you so much for taking the time to read and offer honest criticism. You made Red Water better. Celesta Ramirez, Suzi Frausto, Asleigh Johnson, Kristine Csuti, Amy Mayo, Billibel Karcz, Andrea Maa, Trish Rice, Marissa Adkins…I cannot thank you enough for weeding out those remaining typos!