Instead, she unwound herself from the window as calmly as she could. Then almost as an afterthought, she pulled it closed behind her. As if there was no one out there at all—or at least, no one that they should concern themselves with. It was just her who had tried to escape. Just her who should pay for it, if that was what they were thinking.
And she suspected it was.
The smaller of the two had made a fist, and was currently grinding it into the palm of his other hand over and over. Like some movie cliché of how tough guys acted when they wanted you to be scared.
Only this was not an act.
The guy lunged before she’d even finished the last thought.
He practically knocked things out of the way to get to her.
And his hands, when he took hold, were brutal. He didn’t just grab her. He bunched her t-shirt into two ugly fists, and hauled her off her feet. She actually felt air between herself and the floor, and after that, only snapshots of sensation. The jagged hills of his knuckles pressing too hard into the tender flesh of her breasts; the rattle that happened in your head when someone shakes you.
Then the rush of air that comes with being thrown.
She remembered it from childhood, from the time she had been tossed in the air by her father. Her mother looking on, fretful. Turtle barking at his feet, the sun shining through the trees, the sense of contentment that she had thought would go on forever from there.
Didn’t everyone think it would go on forever from there?
No one could predict an end like this. Even the people who did probably didn’t believe, deep down, it was going to happen. It was hard to believe even as she experienced it.She tried to tell herself clearly and soundly:I am going to be raped. That is what this is. It is the reason he has thrown me onto Emily’snarrow bed with the ducks on the bedspread.There is no other explanation.
Yet still she clung on to some other, happier reality, in which they just locked her in and disappeared.
Later, she could relay the whole thing to Letty, who would gasp and look concerned in all the right places. She would say that she was thankful Lydia got out of it okay, instead of what she was actually going to do: read about Lydia in the paper tomorrow.Breckinridge Student Found Dead in the Home Where She Was Babysitting,Lydiathought.
And then suddenly something shifted inside her.
She didn’t know what it was. She had no idea where it came from.
It was just suddenly there, all teeth and claws. It made her kick and bite and make sounds she had never made before in her life—long vicious snarls that seemed to come up from her gut and screams that didn’t seem like screams at all. They seemed like something an animal might make, when it knew it was going to die. They seemed terrifying and terrified and most of allloud.
So loud, in fact, that she didn’t hear the other guy.
Not at first, at least. At first, she was just busy trying to survive.
The man on top of her suddenly had a hand on her throat. He was squeezing, and the world was starting to turn purple. It was a struggle just to breathe and think and fight, never mind listen.
Then suddenly his words were getting through.
Though it wasn’t the volume that made it happen.
It was thetonehe used.The haunting, heartbreaking tone—as if she was more than just some random stranger. She was someone else, someone he cared for. His wife, she thought, in a wild flash, and though later, she would think the idea was absurd.In that moment, nothing had ever been truer. It was threaded through his voice. It was in the wordgodand the wordhaveand the wordmercy.
But most of all, oh most of all, it was in his actions.
She felt the weight on her lift.
The hands abruptly disappeared.
And then came the bang.
Good god, thebang.
It was a thunderclap, pressed directly to her ears. It was too loud to stand—soloud that she could barely hear a thing, in the aftermath.
There was only a thin sort of ringing,followed by the strangest muffled sound.
Then she realized, in a rush.
