She can only hear muffled voices from this far away. Damn. She dares to peek around the corner to see what’s going on. Finn tries to guide Char up by her shoulders. She lets him for a minute. He tries to hug her, but she pushes him.
“Always gonna be like this!” is the only thing Paige hears as Char turns toward her and comes barreling down the hall, away from him. She quickly turns and walks a few steps away. She holds her phone up to her ear and pretends to be on a call as Char huffs past.
“Oh, yeah. We’re getting ready to leave. No, no. Yeah, yeah.” Paige has no idea what she’s doing—no real backup plan, but Char pays no attention to her. She just breaks into an emotional sprint back to the banquet room.
There’s an unexpected opportunity; she has to decide what to do in a matter of seconds. She has a very drunk Finn on her hands. Maybe a just-broken-up-with Finn. Vulnerable? Check. Would it be morally wrong to take her shot? Yes. It would.
She waits a minute, expecting him to appear, but he doesn’t, so she turns down the hall and sees him leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette. When he sees her, he drops it and crushes it out with his foot in an instant.
“God, you scared me. I thought you were...”
“Who?” Paige asks.
“No, I—don’t—What are you doing over here?”
“You smoke?” She changes the subject.
“Not usually. Someone gave it to me, and I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea.”
“Nobody smokes anymore,” she says. Acting coy last time didn’t work, so why not be herself?
“Very true,” he says.
“I’m here because, if you’re not aware, the line to the women’s bathroom is thirty people deep. I saw the guy’s line. There was none. No idea what your secret is. Urinals, maybe. But the insiders know about these bathrooms. So if you’ll excuse me,” she says and pushes past Finn into the bathroom.
She runs the tap and dots some cold water under her eyes, then applies blush-colored lip gloss and presses her lips together a few times. She doesn’t know what to expect when she opens the door. She’s fairly sure he’ll be gone, back whining to Cora that they have to go. Or maybe he’ll still be there. She’s suddenly not sure which one she hopes for. Her nerves are taking over.
When she opens the door, he’s still there. She’d be embarrassed for him if she didn’t feel about him the way she did. He looked sort of pathetic, leaning on the wall, no drink, no phone. No reason to be there.
“Sorry about the other night,” he says. “I just wanted to say that. I was stupid. I’m sorry.”
“No need to be sorry,” she says, ready to walk past him.
“You said, ‘Offer’s open,’” he says. Then, they just look at each other.
“I did,” she finally says, and he grabs the sides of her face and kisses her, almost violently. They stumble through the bathroom door and lock it behind them. He unbuttons the first few buttons on his shirt and reaches for his back collar, pulling the shirt off in a practiced sweep. He unzips her dress. She thinks this would be much easier without so many layers of fancy clothes, but she helps him pull her tight skirt up over her hips, and he picks her up and places her onto the sink counter.
It’s not a passionate, romantic encounter, and she doesn’t take the photos she promised. She lets him take down his pants and push into her, desperately. She hates him for so easily betraying Cora, but she pushes this thought away. Her legs wrapped around him, her back pushed against the vanity mirror, one hand in the sink. The blitz of satisfaction feels like an electric current running through her in that moment, and it doesn’t allow room for any other feelings, like remorse or shame. She hushes his grunts and moans, and the whole thing is over rather quickly.
“We’ve been gone too long,” she says, as she hurriedly retrieves a fallen earring from the tiled floor and they check their hair and smooth out the wrinkles in their clothes.
“Go first,” she says, pushing him out. “We can’t go together.”
“Okay, yeah,” he says, rushing out the bathroom door while she waits a few minutes to leave.
They don’t have time to process or talk about what just happened, but she knows one thing for sure, and she mumbles it under her breath. “He’s mine now.”
10
GEORGIA
I feel hungover in the morning from lack of sleep. My limbs feel heavy, and I overcompensate with coffee, which leaves me a combination of jittery but still exhausted. At night I stay up thinking of ways to kill him. I sleep in Avery’s room each night, and he padlocks the door from the outside before he goes to bed. I wonder sometimes if I could make myself plunge a kitchen knife through his heart while he sleeps if I did get the opportunity. I think about poisoning him, but I have no idea how. Without a phone or computer to look up how to do it, it’s a risk that could prove deadly. For me.
Every woman onSnappedseems to slowly poison their husband with antifreeze. We don’t have antifreeze or rat poison—I’ve looked—but we have household cleaners and insect spray. How much would kill a person? They would have a taste, for sure. He’d know, and that would be it. I think about ambushing him when he comes in the door. I tried once. I hit him in the head with a Rawlings baseball bat, but since he’s twice my size, it only enraged him and barely left more than an egg-size bump. He approaches the house with caution. He looks at the cameras and has eyes on me almost twenty-four hours a day.
When he first brought me to this house, it wasn’t like this right away. He was becoming somewhat controlling, yes. But we were a pretty normal couple. I went shopping and for walks during the day while he was at work. I looked into getting a job at a hotel, something he pretended to support. I went out after he fell asleep and had a glass of wine on the porch or texted my friends back home.
He was buying time so he could set it all up. When I think about how happy I was, how blissfully unaware that life would be anything but romantic dinners, holidays, and lazy Sundays together the way it had been since we met, I feel waves of nausea like motion sickness take over. I could have gotten away if I’d had any clue—if I’d been less trusting and stupid.
