He’s strong, but he’s drunk and unprepared for my righteous anger. “I’m not fucking leaving you alone with her. She’s passed out. What the hell are you doing?” I smack his arm off my shoulder.
“C’mon, you’ve got to get out,” he says. “She doesn’t want you here.”
“Nat?” I run to her side of the bed and shake her. More gentle groans, but nothing coherent.
Suddenly there’s a hand on my arm. I stagger back with the force behind it.
“You gotta go,” he says.
“If you make me leave, I will scream up and down this house about what you were trying to do to her.”
He glowers at me, storms over to the door, and slams it shut. “And what was that?”
“Christ, you could at least put on some clothes.”
He still looks sullen as he staggers over to the bed, unsteady on his feet. Once he’s unceremoniously plonked himself down on the edge, he starts scooping up discarded clothes and putting them back onto his body. “You’re a real pain in the ass, you know that?”
Natty stirs again, this time forming a semi-coherent sentence. It’s slurred, each word bleeding into the next, but the question is clear:What’s going on?
“Is there anywhere we can talk?” I ask him. I don’t want her to overhear. Whatever he was doing was bad enough; she doesn’t have to hear about it in this state.
“Could you not justfuck off ?”
His growl is dark, menacing. But unfortunately for him, my amygdala only knows “fight,” not “flight” or “fright.” It’s a seed of savagery I wish my father hadn’t sown in me. A seed I’ve watered to grow over my fear. And so I find myself marching up to Marc and flicking him in the ear. Hard.
“Ow! What the—”
“Cut the attitude. Two minutes, and then I’ll leave you alone,” I say.
A glowering Marc indicates that I should follow him, ambling over to a large window. I don’t love heights, don’t love the prospect of being out there alone with him, something menacing in the glazed-over look in his eyes—the eyes of a spoiled teenage boy with no one currently at the helm. A boy like that is capable of anything.
He prizes the window open and steps out into the warm air. It takesmore effort to climb through with my short legs, but I make it out after him, pushing the window almost closed so that the sound won’t travel to Natalie.
“So, Marc, what the fuck?” I say. “I mean, I saw where your hand was. And you were naked.”
He looks at me with those dead eyes of his. They’ve always been so cold, devoid of something. I’m never sure if Natalie likes him because of or in spite of this. But in any case, something in his energy has shifted. He isn’t pretending to be pally anymore.
“Look, your sister’s a little fucking slut. I wasn’t doing anything she didn’t want.”
My temperature starts to rise again. “How could she want anything if she’s out cold?”
“She’s always desperate for it. I can smell it on her.”
“Care?”
Natty. She’s swaying unsteadily behind me, bare feet on the roof tiles.
“Natty, go to bed.”
“Yeah, babe, go to bed. I’ll be there in a sec.”
She looks confused for a moment, memories from the night clanging together. They aren’t together anymore, are they? Or maybe they are again…. She turns to go back inside, almost slipping. I’m relieved when one foot makes it safely back into the room and then the other follows. She almost falls over getting back to the bed, but thankfully, it’s a mere step or two away from the window.
Still furious, I turn back to Marc, who is gazing lazily out at the pool below. “You can sleep somewhere else tonight.”
He laughs, and his laugh is pitying me. Who was I to stop him from doing exactly what he wanted? Was I really going to stop the athletic, rich white boy from doing anything at all?
“I’m going to sleep in my bed,” he says with a shrug. “You can sleep where you want.”
