It hurts worse that Oaks doesn’t correct them.
Because if he wanted to, he could. He could shut it down with one look. One word. One hand on my back in front of everybody that says, she ain’t yours to talk about.
He does nothing.
He walks by like I am air.
And I realize something awful.
Bethany screaming was easier than this.
This feels like the kind of punishment Hell is famous for. The kind that does not leave bruises you can point at.
In Hell, Kentucky, men don’t always ruin you with fists.
They ruin you by walking away.
And Oaks just did.
By afternoon, the lake doesn’t feel peaceful anymore. It feels split.
On one side, the men comb the shoreline and treeline in coordinated sweeps, radios crackling, boots cutting paths through brush. On the other, down near a shallow cove where the sand curves wide and flat, a handful of club girls have turned the search weekend into something else entirely.
Music thumps from a portable speaker. Beer cans sweat in the heat. Two of them stretch across folding lounge chairs like they are on spring break instead of standing twenty minutes away from a missing woman’s last known location.
I know what I expected when I first imagined a biker camp.
Tents. Roughing it. Something wild and stripped down.
Instead, the officers have cabins. The older couples too. Prospects are in tents closer to the woods, and the club girls float between everything like glitter in water, shiny and sharp and not always harmless.
Lottie is helping Sophie unpack something at one of the picnic tables. Sophie looks composed the way rich girls always do, even at a lake, even in cut-offs and her Property of vest. Even while danger hums at the edges. She speaks quietly with Lottie, both of them glancing toward the water now and then like they’re trying not to.
I wander toward the dock because I need air. I need space from the fact that Oaks hasn’t looked at me all day.
That’s when I hear it.
“Speak of the floatel.”
I stop.
Three of them sit on a tailgate, bare legs, bikinis, sunglasses pushed into teased hair. They have that look. They’re painted up like Bethany. Women who know exactly what they are in this world and don’t apologize for it. Club bunnies if I’m polite. Whores, honestly.
One of them is a brunette with a snake tattoo curling up her thigh. She tilts her chin toward me.
“Well, look who washed up.”
Heat climbs my neck. I consider pretending I didn’t hear. I don’t move fast enough.
“Hey, floatel whore,” another one calls lazily. “You lose your life jacket?”
A whore calling me a whore hurts more than it should. It lands with the weight of Bethany’s voice. With the weight of every whisper back in Hell. With the weight of being watched through a wall and falling in the lake. It’s heavy because of what I finally gave to Oaks. And because he’s gone cold.
I stop walking. Turn slowly.
“I don’t know you,” I say evenly.
The brunette grins like I’m cute.
