“Either someoneelseis stalking me…” There’s an undercurrent of true fear in her words. I felt it when I was achild. My first memories are with Preacher Tim in that darkened room with the candle between us. The one I didn’t know to call red, not at first. It was brown, I told Mom when she asked me about it as she waited anxiously outside the preacher’s luxurious house, right in the gardens, her head bent and hands folded together in prayer.
Mom suspected then I was colorblind, but it never concerned her.
It was what happened to me with Tim that ate her alive.
The fear made her too thin; she threw up everything she tried to eat. I remember thinking she was always pregnant when I was a child and suffering from morning sickness, until I understood no baby came, and on the weeks Tim was traveling to meet with other delegations, she was at peace, and she ateeverything.
It was my time with Tim that gave her the courage to tell my dad we needed to leave.
They still haven’t, but they supported every move I made in hockey to get me far away from Refron.
I haven’t been back since I moved into the hockey house.
Then from there, it was always going to be Drayton. More scouts, more eyes, more chances to never go home.
Neve holds my gaze. “Or it’s you.” She whispers the words, but now, withthisoption, she doesn’t hold the fear she did, thinking it was someone else.
Or maybe that’s only what I want to believe.
“Tell me who you were with last night.” I try not to let jealousy harden my words. That twist in my gut I always had when Mom would laugh at Preacher Tim’s jokes during our monthly dinners, hosted by my mother, and every woman who was a member of Deliverance.
I wanted to break his neck.
I wanted to bury his body.
He didn’t deserve good things.
Hedoesn’tdeserve good things.
But I can’t save Mom.
Neve, though…
She swallows, her slender throat rolling with the motion. God, I want to bite her so badly. Taste her blood. What is she like, on the inside?
“Do you know?” she whispers.
And for once in my life, I find it hard to lie.
So I simply deflect. “Tell me.” I lower my voice to match her volume.
She takes a jumpy breath in. “Faust,” she says softly, watching me carefully.
And I can’t stop it. Not now. The ease I hold onto so tightly, the one skill aside from skating I’ve gotten so incredibly good at, it seems to slip with her.
“Did he feel as good as I did?” The words sound as if they are coming from someone else. Floating free of my restraint, like my mind has a separate voice and I can watch it with some distant, mingling horror, but I can’t stop it. It’s the same sensation I get when I’m fighting on the ice. Someone else is throwing the punches, getting the penalties, risking ejection. Someone else is taking over my control.
The same feeling when I went numb on the table for Preacher Tim.
“Did you get as wet for him as you did me, Neve?” My voice is clinical and detached, but I’m not.I’m not, Neve.
Her eyes widen, and she jerks back from the table, but she doesn’t get up and leave. She doesn’t run from me.
That has to count for something, doesn’t it?
“Did you fuck him?” My voice breaks on those words, the same it would with Preacher Tim, even when I was telling the truth.
I paid for it then.
