“Sounds like a question rather than an answer.” I pull open the seal and tip the pills into my hand, rolling them back and forth. No stamp. No number. No markings at all and the pills have too crumbly a surface to be factory made. “Have they been sitting in there the whole time?”
The panic explodes, convulsing her features before she gets control of them. “Yeah. I thought they m-might help me relax enough to sleep.”
“Sleep?” I click my tongue against my teeth. “What’s keeping you awake at night?” I tip forward, bending to her ear. “Do you lie there fantasising how you’ll pay off your daddy’s debt?”
She licks her lips again, the bottom one swelling now from my earlier nip.
“One each?”
I press a tablet between her lips and watch as her eyes contort with messages she desperately wants to conceal. The pill sits below her lips, pushed out of her mouth. My fingertip pushes it between them again, and I watch as her tongue refuses it for the second time.
Refusing to swallowherpills.
Herpills. That she brought intomyhouse.
Refusing to take them like she knows they’re not what she’s making them out to be.
Startled tingles swirl across the back of my neck. The thrill of danger. My brain tries to rally, to think things through, but it’s drowning in the alcohol I poured over it earlier.
“What the fuck are these?”
“I t-told you—”
I reach over and take the knife, jerking it out of the wood. “Take the pill.”
“N-no, I don’t want to sleep just—”
She falters as I point the tip of the knife towards her eyes, resting it against the sensitive skin at the side.
At dinner, I moved her. Just to the other side of me, but still…
If I hadn’t, my mother’s plate would have been easily accessible, along with her glass. My father seated just one place setting farther away.
Not an impossible feat. Not for someone with determination. Someone who I don’t really know the first thing about. Someone who has fake names up the wazoo. A trait I found annoying and amusing but which my father might have been right to question.
My voice is soft as I tell her, “Take the pill.”
That more than anything gets me. That he might have been right. I can’t stand my father being right.
She sticks her tongue out, searching for the tablet she so recently rejected. There’s so much fear swimming in her expression that I can’t parse out what belongs to the knife, the threats I’ve already given, the threats yet to come, or the unmarked white tablet that she so far has failed to snag.
“Here. Let me help you.” I push the pill nearer, watching asher tongue sticks to it and pulls it inside. “Show me,” I say after she grimaces her way through swallowing. “Let me see you’ve taken it.”
She opens her mouth wide, tongue flicking up to the roof, then lolling out like an overheated dog. “Can I…?” She swallows again, wincing. “Can I have some water?”
“No.”
Her reaction is a slight frown but there are no other symptoms to suggest the contents of the pill were anything other than what she described. I’m tempted to take the other because tonight has been a disaster but have enough sense to leave it. Even if it’s just what she claims, on top of what I’ve drunk tonight, it won’t be a good idea.
“You want the second one?”
Her head whips from side to side. “I didn’t want the first.”
She blanches a moment later, apparently her brain and her mouth aren’t quite in synch. A strange decision, to bring drugs she doesn’t want to take to a party, but I let it go.
Now I’m reassured she’s not trying to kill me or a member of my family, other considerations come back to the fore.
I tug at her bra with the tip of the knife, holding it aloft like a prize being ridden out of battle.
