by Nicole Thorn
I felt it before it even ended, the mark on my soul. Black and permanent. I accepted it completely as I watched this man die with eyes wide open.
CHAPTER NINETEEN:
Eighteen Cups. Six white, six gray . . .
Juniper
“He left?” I asked Zander, frowning at the puppy splayed across my feet, making it impossible for me to move. Cerberus had rolled over onto his back, showing me his pink belly, and all three tongues hung out of his mouths. His tail wagged. I just tried to figure out why he had decided I would be his new best buddy.
Zander nodded. He moved about in the kitchen, making cookies. He normally made cookies to call his mother. I didn’t think he did that right then, because he would have told Jasmine. My eyes narrowed on him even as I took the dirty cookie sheet, and started cleaning it off the in the sink. “Why did he leave?”
“He wanted to check on his mother,” Zander said.
I glanced at him over my shoulder. He acted kind of funny. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something definitely felt off.
“That sucks,” Jasmine said, taking plates down. She started putting food on them, one plate at a time. “I wanted to ask if Cerberus knew any tricks, other than maiming and mauling people.” Even she frowned at that sentence. Instead of saying anything else, Jasmine shook her head. She took up two of the plates, and went to give them to Kizzy and Jasper in the studio.
I took my little salad, and sat at the kitchen table with it. I didn’t have dressing, because dressing from places like this had so much fat. I also didn’t trust the grilled chicken to be anything good, but the lettuce and veggies would be fine. I would be hungry in an hour, but it’d be worth it.
Zander finished with his third batch of cookies before grabbing his food. Jasmine came back out, and he dragged her off. They would eat in their room. I tried not to think about where those plates would end up. I liked my sanity too much to dwell on it right that second.
I finished my salad in relative peace, as long as I didn’t focus on the dog sitting on the floor, watching me with hopeful eyes. Sighing, I looked at my chicken. Well, I didn’t plan on eating it, and he looked so desperate. I shouldn’t teach him bad manners . . . But his favorite toy was a human femur, so this couldn’t have crossed any lines. I pulled the chicken out, and gave one to each of Cerberus’ heads. His tail wagged so hard.
Popping out of my seat, I started doing the dishes, getting everything into the dishwasher, and then waiting patiently for it to finish running. I had nothing to do now that we had found the dog, and Verin had left.
Not that I wanted to do anything with him. He annoyed me. He acted so obnoxious and stupid. He liked to pick on me, and push me into things that I’d rather not do. He could be loud and messy. Cocky as hell. Just because he was tall and handsome didn’t mean he could get away with anything.
Great, now I am mad. Why the hell am I mad? He isn’t even here to make me mad with his smug smiles and twinkling eyes. I frowned at myself. I didn’t make any sense. If anything, everything got more confusing the longer I thought about it.
When the dishwasher finished, I put everything away, exactly where it belonged. I found solace in the order. Nothing in my house bothered me, because everything had been placed in the right spot. I knew exactly where to put it, and retrieve it. Unlike with people, who always seemed messy. They did things that they didn’t understand, and you had to give them emotional support. Or they irritated you, and then decided to switch it up with being really nice. Sweet almost.
Ah! Verin again!
I ended up sitting at the table again, my chin in my hands, glaring at nothing. I saw no end to the thoughts circling my head. It all kept coming back to Verin, and I couldn’t make it stop.
Someone rang the doorbell. I popped up so fast that my chair skittered backward. I had been too eager to think about anything other than Verin. I had to take a second to right the chair, and then I rushed off to the door. I looked through the peephole, and saw a familiar mug looking back at me.
Verin.
I tilted my head back and glared at the ceiling. Guess I really couldn’t escape him at this point. I might as well get this over with. I pulled the door open, ready to ask him why he had come back, but then I took a look at his face. Shadows surrounded his eyes, and he seemed too serious.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, whatever irritation I had been feeling draining away. Thoughts zinged through my head, starting with his mother. Could she have gotten hurt? She didn’t seem like the kind to let herself get into a bad situation, but I knew that you couldn’t always stop such things.
Then it devolved from there. I wondered about that guy that had been blackmailing Hermes. Did he come after the dog again? I didn’t want to get into a scuffle with someone else.
“May I come in?” Verin asked. He stepped closer to the door, and I stepped away without pause, letting him into my house. When had it become so easy to let him into my space? I hadn’t liked him before . . . “Thanks,” Verin said. “Where is everybody?”
“Jasmine and Zander are upstairs. Jasper and Kizzy are in the studio still. They’ll come out when the fumes start to get to them,” I said. “Why? Do you need me to call them down? I can do that.”
He grabbed my arm before I got too far away from him. His expression never wavered. “No, that’s all right. I just wanted to talk to you for a second. They can stay wherever they are.” I didn’t entirely think I wanted to hear whatever he had to say, but I nodded anyway. We went into the kitchen, so that I could make some tea. While the water warmed up on the stove, Verin looked at his hands.
I sat down in the chair across from him. “What did you want to talk about?” I asked.
“Earlier, when we were talking, you didn’t tell me everything,” he said, still staring at his palms. “And that’s fine. I understand that you didn’t want me to know certain things. It must have already been difficult for you to tell me what you have already. I don’t expect miracles.”
I squirmed around in my seat. I’d rather forget about the whole thing and bury it in the back of my head, where it used to be. The fact that it had cropped up now just felt like ill timing. What with everything we had going on, the last thing we needed was another breakdown from Juniper.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What’s this got to do with anything?”
“Zander and I talked,” he said.
My heart plummeted. I felt like it would beat right out of my chest, and flop to the floor in a bloody mess. I sat back in my chair, and just stared at him for a second. “What, exactly, did you and Zander talk about?” It better have been his cookie recipe, because I couldn’t handle it being anything else.
“He told me some things,” he said. “About how you, Jasmine, and Jasper grew up. What your father was like. The kind of man that he was, and the kind of things that he did.”
I had to kill Zander. I swallowed hard. “Okay. What did he tell you?”
“About the dog kennel,” Verin explained. “The rocks you slept on. The photos.”
My eyes closed. I didn’t want to hear any more. We all had our own private hells. I didn’t want to know how far Zander took telling this stranger about it. My first inclination was to march up to his room and smack him around. To tell him that he had no right to talk to Verin about any of that, and that if we had decided to tell him, we would have done so in our own time.
Except . . . I couldn’t be sure that my siblings would care. Jasper knew that our father had been a terrible dad, but I didn’t think he would have cared about others knowing. Jasmine was the bubbliest person around, and she liked Verin. She would have told him herself if he had only asked.
Only I felt unhappy about this. Neither of them thought we had anything to be ashamed of. Only me. I always lagged behind the two of them. They had finally figured out how to get to a good place in their lives, and I sat at the table, wondering what needed to be cleaned. Thinking about how to get all the mail sorted, and the floor mopped.
Taking care of every little thing that didn’t fucking matter. I still breakdowns, because of this or that. I made them worry, because they finally had their shit together enough to get better.
And I never would.
The teapot whistled. I stood up, wandering over to the stove. I removed the pot, setting it on a cooler part of the stove, and opened the cabinet for cups. I looked at them. Six white, six gray, six black. All carefully placed so that the handles faced the left, so that they barely touched the cups they sat next to.
Verin touched my side, pulling me away from the cups. “There’s more that I need to tell you, Juniper.”
I looked at him. “What else could there possibly be? Did Zander tell you something more?”
“No,” Verin said, his eyes heavy and sad. “I won’t lie to you, and I won’t keep secrets. I need to tell you what I did.”
“What’d you do?”
Verin moved me over to the table, and sat me down. My mind should have been focused on what he said, and what he wanted to tell me. Instead, I kept thinking that the water would get cold if we left it in the pot for too long, and that it needed to be cleaned out sooner rather than later.
“After Zander told me all of that stuff, I got very angry. No parent should ever think it’s okay to treat their child like that. But it was you. He had treated you like that, and that’s the part that I couldn’t move past. That it was you who had to sleep in a kennel out back, on rocks. You had to be ashamed every time you got your picture taken. You that was made to feel like you were ugly and unwanted.”
My heart started to beat harder. “Verin, what did you do?”
He sat back in his chair, watching my face. I felt perfectly calm. For a moment, everything had stopped, and I dreaded hearing his answer. I knew what he would say, I thought. My hands twitched, wanting something to do. A dish to clean, tea to make. Something. Anything.
“I went to see him,” Verin said. “He answered the door, and I pushed him inside. And I killed him.”
Blood rushed to my head, so that all I could hear was the pounding of it in my ears. The world spun around me for a second, before realigning. “You . . . murdered my father?” I asked. The words seemed to come from far away, even though they slipped out of my mouth. It felt like someone else said them.
Verin nodded. “I killed your father. What he did to you . . . he didn’t deserve to live. Didn’t deserve to walk around after what he had done to his own children. I killed your father.”
I stared at him for a long time. Thoughts zipped around my head. He had killed my father. He had killed the man who raised me. The man who held me when I had been a baby, and changed my diapers. The man who kept me after my mother walked out. The man who had fed me and clothed me for eighteen years. The first person to ever tell me that he loved me, whenever we did something that pleased him. The first person to tell me that he hated us whenever we did something bad. That he wished he had dropped us off somewhere he’d never have to see us again. The man who gave me birthday presents when I had been a good girl, and locked me in a dog kennel for the night when I had been bad. The one that told us that we would never make it on our own, and that we needed him. That we would die within the first year of leaving him behind. The one that told us that we could do whatever we wanted, as long as we never forgot where we came from. This man that had tormented Jasper when he would stand up for us, and hit him when he didn’t talk enough. The man that tore me apart so that he could keep me under his thumb, and the one that drove Jasmine into a depression so dark and black that she had to drink to make it go away. The one that gave us hugs, kissed our boo-boos, taught us everything we knew, put a roof over our heads, and abused us for eighteen years. He was dead.
The man who told me that no one could love me. This person I cared about killed him, because of all the things my father had done. Because he had hurt me more than any wound would ever show, Verin had killed him.
Didn’t that mean that Verin cared about me, at least a little bit? That, in some small way, he loved me? Even if he wasn’t in love with me—which I wasn’t fool enough to hope for.
“Juniper,” Verin said, reaching for me. “Are you okay? Can you please say something? Anything?” He had worry written all over his face and eyes as he asked me this. I wondered how long I had been sitting there, staring at him.
“Jasmine is going to be heartbroken,” I said. “I don’t think we should tell her that it was you.”
“Won’t that be a big secret to keep?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It’ll just be between you and me. I don’t want them to get upset with you.” My voice sounded odd. Kind of flat. I wanted to pump some more emotion into it, but this weird distance had formed in my brain. “I don’t want you to go away,” I finally said.
Verin blinked. “I’m not going anywhere, luv.”
“They might try to drive you away,” I said. “If they find out what you did. So, we’ll just keep it between you and me. I’ll wait until someone calls about Dad, and then I’ll tell Jasmine and Jasper, and they’ll never have to know you had anything to do with it. It’ll all be fine.”
He took my hand, squeezing my fingers. “Juniper. I am not going anywhere. They can’t make me.”
“Good,” I said.
The disconnect still felt strong when I got up, and moved towards the tea kettle. We had been sitting there long enough that the water had gone cool. I poured it into one of Kizzy’s potted plants, and refilled the kettle. My movements seemed mechanical. I had done this a thousand times before, and this time wouldn’t be anything new. I moved back to the stove, and put it on the burner.
“How’d you do it?”
“Is that something you really want to know?” he asked, looking back at me. “Maybe you should wait a couple of days before asking that question again. Just to be sure you want to hear the answer.”
“I think you should tell me now,” I said. At the moment, my head had become nothing but white noise, and if I stayed like that, then nothing could touch me. He could tell me anything, and it would all be like it happened to someone else. I didn’t know how I should’ve been feeling, but I knew this wasn’t it.
Because I only felt an intense desire to keep Verin with me.
“Crushed his lungs,” Verin said. “Stepped on his chest, and pressed down until he couldn’t breathe anymore.”
The image floated into my head and hung there. My father on the ground. Blood bubbling up between his lips in a foamy stream, dripping down his chin. Verin stood over him, putting pressure, more and more, until he finally stopped struggling. I still felt nothing. I should’ve felt something, right?
“Was it quick?” I asked.
“Quick enough,” he said.
The tea kettle started to whistle. I took it off the burner again, and moved it to the side. I opened the cupboard, and stared at the cups. Six white, six gray, six black. All with the handles facing the left. All of them perfectly aligned, straight, even. The same size, the same slightly rounded shape. The same cups, but for the color. I took one out, and set it on the counter. A white one. I reached to take another white one down, and set it next to the first.
The kettle knocked into the first cup as I brought it forward. The white cup slipped over the edge of the counter, and I watched it plummet toward the ground. It turned into one of those moments that seemed to take forever. The cup struck the ground, and shattered into dozens of pieces that flew everywhere.
I stood there, staring at it for who the fuck knew how long. My eyes turned up to the cabinet, looking at the cups. Six gray. Six black. Four white.
The stillness in my head shattered. My heart pounded so hard that I started seeing spots in front of my eyes. My knees unhinged, and I collapsed right there on the floor. I threw my hands out to catch my fall, and ended up slicing my palm open on a large piece of the cup. I barely noticed
“Juniper!” Verin said. He leapt out of his chair in a second, and touched me the next second. “Juniper, are you
okay?”
“It’s broken,” I said, and my voice sounded breathy. “It’s not right anymore. It’s supposed to be six, six, six, and now it’s five, six, six, and that’s not right. It’s broken. I ruined it. There aren’t any cups like this anymore, I’ll never find another one to replace it. I ruined it. It’s a mess, because of me. Fucking clumsy, always clumsy. What am I supposed to do? It’s not even anymore. It’ll never be even again.” I pushed my hands harder against the ground, feeling the broken glass slice through my palm even more.
Why did I bother doing anything? It always got messed up, and I broke everything that I touched. Glass and blood had spread all over my floor, and it looked a mess. I would never get all the glass up in one go. I would have to get completely new cups. How did I find new cups before I needed to use another one?
Five. Six. Six.
Wrong. Uneven. I had been so careful. Everything in the house had been just as it needed to be, and I had been so, so careful. Now it had been ruined. I shouldn’t have been allowed out of the house. He had been right. We would never make it on our own. Oh, but he was dead now. He was dead, dead, dead. He couldn’t tell me that this had been my own damn fault for being so clumsy and foolish.
Hands touched me, pulled at me. I wanted to fight them, but I couldn’t focus on anything but the shattered cup. The one that I had destroyed. It had been the perfect cup. Then I left the ground, and someone held me. Someone said things, but those things didn’t matter. They joined the white noise in my head. I liked the white noise when it canceled out the emotions, but it had stopped doing that. Everything crashed into me.