It was too late. She was already typing.Do you mean that?
Yes, Nick. Go ahead, he imagined his father’s voice sneering.Tell her how you really feel.
Something inside him burst. What, precisely, was wrong, he could not say. Only that being here in this room with the smell of wine still emanating from the carpet, taunted by the phantoms of the father he despised and the woman he wasn’t allowed to love, he felt like he might go mad.
And now, knowing the violence that he was capable of and terrified that she might glimpse it and push him away, he couldn’t trust himself to tell her anything.
She’d already ripped his heart out once.
Nicholas picked up his half-full glass of wine and hurled it into the kitchen trash, the shatter resonating with the dark impulses that clawed beneath his skin. If she were here, he’dshowher what he meant. He would throw her down and tell her with his body what he couldn’t say with words, making her come until she fucking screamed.
She’d asked him once why he always kissed her on the hand before he tied her up, and though the words had eluded him then, it was because he wanted her to know that he loved her so goddamn desperately. That even when she was on her back taking him like Daddy’s eager little slut, she was still his sweet, perfect blue jay: the woman who made him feel as if he mattered even without the gilded trappings of his life.
He set the phone down on the window seat and shucked off what remained of his clothing, diving into the pool nude. His body sliced through the surface like a white-hot iron cutting through sheets of ice as his limbs made the mirror-like surface roil with violent waves.
Swimming had been more satisfying when he was younger and the thrill of competition had made it feel vicious. Now it was just something to pass the time until he wore himself out.
After four laps, he stopped counting and just gave himself over to the emptiness. And when he went to bed, drenched and exhausted and empty, he left his phone downstairs.
Chapter Six
???????
That party still haunted her dreams.
Half-blinded by her own tears, Jay had woven her way through the startled guests, who stared at her and her tattered dress as if she were a battered Cinderella fleeing the ball. Nobody asked if she needed help—that was what she remembered later. All those men who had asked her to dance had stood idle with their hands in their pockets, watching her run as the beads from the torn bodice scattered like hail and the women in attendance had all turned away, one by one.
It was surreal. In that part of her brain that was slowly processing all of this, and would replay it over and over again in her nightmares for years to come, she had been shocked that nobody had even cut the music. It wasn’t like the movies. There was no collective gasp, no dramatic silence. She had run from her old life while 90s elevator jazz played in the background. Someone had even laughed: a woman, brassy and high-pitched. It sounded like her mother. She hoped it wasn’t.
Danielle hadn’t called her for weeks afterwards. Her mother’s silences could feel as enduring as a harsh winter when she was angry.It must be a mistake, she had told herself.Damon must have told her another lie.But when her mother had called, it was because she was looking for her driver’s license and wondered if Jay had somehow taken it in her purse.
She didn’t seem to care about what had made her leave at all.
“Where are you, baby? You know you’re embarrassing us all, leaving like that. People are asking questions. Come home. We can fix this. Don’t be a foolish child.”
Ignoring the cab driver’s staring, Jay had held what remained of her beaded bodice in place, staring fixatedly out thewindow with eyes that now felt too dry to cry. But she wasn’t seeing the cracked leather interiors or the buttery yellow lights in the assembly line McMansions. All she could see was Damon’s blood smeared over Nick’s knuckles. The violence in his eyes as she pleaded with him to stop.
He’s never going to let me go, she thought.Never. He’ll destroy us both before he’ll free me.
Her belongings were already partially packed from when she had tried to book into that hotel. Before Damon had put a freeze on her credit cards. Before—she swallowed hard—everything else.
Knowing that there was a very good chance anything she left would be thrown out or destroyed, Jay packed her journal, her favorite clothes, her beloved rocks. Even the gypsum rose Nick had given her. She told herself at the time that she could sell it later, the way she planned to sell her jewelry, but part of her had known even then that this was a lie.
With her backpack on, weighed down by the cat carrier and her largest purse, Jay left the house for what she thought would be the last time and waited for the taxi that would take her to the Greyhound station. She jumped at every sound, every crunch of gravel, every rasp of the trees, terrified that Nick—or Damon—were out looking for her already, ready to march her back to that hateful house and all that it represented.
The last bus left at eleven. Jay had gotten there at a quarter to, just in time for the overnight. “No pets,” the driver said, and Jay, clutching Carbon’s carrier, had burst into tears, which had made the driver shoo her along towards the back with a look of exasperation. She spent the next eight hours squashed between an older woman doing her knitting and a solemn-faced mother and son.
When she disembarked at last, and the bus pulled away in a cloud of acrid smoke, she found herself thinking that the city looked—different . . . but the same. She recognized the smell: stale urine, rainwater and exhaust, old concrete and new steel.
She had checked into the cheapest motel she could find, which wasn’t very. With a view of the buzzing neon sign outside her window, Jay booked nine apartment tours for the next day. She had needed to sell one of her purses to afford the advance her new roommates wanted for the next month’s rent, but they had all seemed nice. And one of them—Dante—had helped her get an interview at the restaurant he worked in, where she had ended up staying for the next three years while attending night classes at the local community college for an administrative certificate.
Jay sometimes wondered if Dante thought she had slept with him out of a pathetic sense of gratitude. Part of it was that. He had taken care of her at her lowest and she went weak in the hands of a capable man. But he was also nothing like Nicholas and that had been part of it, too. She needed to prove to herself that she could get off with a normal man.
That she couldbewith a normal man.
But when she had asked him, on their very first night, if he could put a hand around her throat, Dante had looked at her with such sympathy that she felt like he’d shot her in the head.
“Jay, who hurt you?”
