“Before the woods,” he echoed.
She looked like she might protest. Then her mouth firmed. “Can I talk to my aunt at least? Just for a few minutes?” Her voice was like fraying thread.
When he didn’t respond right away, she said, “Please. She’ll get too suspicious. She knows me too well. I don’t want her to come here.” Her eyes circled his room, bouncing off the dark wallpaper and imposing furniture. She sank down onto the bed beside him, and the soft feather mattress sank with her, causing her body to slide against his. “Please let me talk to her. You can hold the phone. I’ll even let you—” her voice broke “—tie me up, if you don’t trust me.”
“Nadine.”
She put her hand on his bare arm. It wasn’t often that she initiated contact between them, and he was surprised by the intent in that touch, thepossessionof it.
“Please, Daddy?”
It was like being struck by lightning—thiswas how he’d felt, seeing her that first time. Robbed of breath, unable to move, but, oh, still able to feel in a way that he never thought he’d feel again since that night he’d felt all hope die with that girl in the woods.
A dull ache built between his thighs when she leaned closer. Her breasts grazed his chest, eliciting an answering ripple in his sternum. If she had stuck a knife in him then, he would have allowed it, if only for the satisfaction of knowing she had pressed herself against him willingly like a bird seeking shelter from a storm in the cradling branches of a redwood.
He capped his marker and pulled away so suddenly that she spilled backwards onto his sheets. Not trusting himself to look at her, Cal reached into his bedside drawer, where he had been storing her phone, and held it up. “So youcanbeg,” he said.
She flushed, and it spread down her throat, and further—he knew how far now, just as he knew what color she was between her legs, and what she sounded like when she was past endurance and desperate for pleasure. She sucked in when hegrabbed her hand, using her finger to unlock her phone, before scrolling through her contacts to find her aunt.
“Five minutes,” he said, wondering if he sounded as breathless as he felt.
Nadine kept her hands in her lap while the phone rang. She looked like the very portrait of feminine obedience, but it was a well-crafted lie. For her, softness had always been a means of survival, a way of existing in a world that crushed bristly women whose spines wore runs into the warp and woof of tradition. Beneath her tender exterior was a core of steel.
“Nadine?” her aunt’s voice floated from the speaker, deeper than her niece’s, and less wavering. “Is that you? Oh, thank god. I’ve been calling and calling, and you weren’t answering. It wasn’t like you. I was starting to get worried.”
Nadine gave him a look of such spiteful vindication that he nearly smiled.
“Are you all right, honey? Do you need me to come get you?”
“No!” Nadine yelped. “N-no. I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Except reception. That’s been . . . well, shit.”
“You don’t sound too good. Are you sick? Have you heard anything else about Noelle? You sounded so worried the last time we talked. Did you go to the police about the necklace?”
Her eyes shifted away from his. “No. Nothing came of that. Nobody knows where she is. I think—” she drew in a harsh breath “—I think—she ran away.”
Tears spilled over her cheeks. She was seconds from breaking. Cal lifted a finger and mouthed,One minute, and she shut her eyes against him with a shake of her head.
“It’s really nice here. I think I’ll stay for a little while. Maybe . . . explore the woods.”
“Well, okay,” said the aunt. “If that’s what you want to do. But don’t push yourself if you’re not feeling well. Make sure you stay on the trails. Are yousureyou’re all right?”
Nadine’s red eyes made the grey even brighter, like the pure blue of arctic ice. “Yes,” she whispered.
The love between them hung suspended in the air like raw, textured thread. He had glimpsed traces of it before, here and there, and never paid it much thought, believing much of it to be the performative farce that it was for his own family. But this—this was real, as real as the red-mottled granite the town was built on: a solid and sturdy foothold, eternal in its endurance.
“Okay. Well, call me soon, all right? Or I’ll worry.”
“I love you so much,” Nadine said, and his skin felt charged beneath his clothes, even though it wasn’t for him. “I love you, Aunt Nikki.”
“I love you, too, kiddo. Stay safe.”
The phone went dead.
Cal dropped it back into the drawer and locked it as Nadine got up, shaking herself off.
“Thank you,” she said, not looking at him.
Cal nodded and shuffled his papers, still feeling off-center. Before Nadine had made her request, he had been planning on inviting her to stay in this room, with him, so that they might pass the time in a way that would be pleasurable for both of them, but after hearing her speak to her aunt, that offer had crumbled like ash in his throat.
