“I did.” I sat back, drawing my knees up, arms wrapping around them. “But you didn’t have to do what you did.”
“Of course I did,” he murmured. “God willed it.”
“What God?” I snapped, anger cutting through the haze. “Any decent God would’ve let us choose. You made your choice.”
“I always loved you,” he whispered. “We were meant to be.”
My fingers picked at a loose thread in the rug.
“Did you always know?” I asked quietly.
“That I loved you? Yes.” His eyes searched mine. “That we’d be together? No.”
“When?”
“When I graduated high school. A year before.”
I swallowed, staring at the thread between my fingers. “How did you know I was—”
“You underestimate what it means to be watched,” he said.
Cold spread through me.
“The church?” I said slowly. “That doesn’t—”
“It does,” he interrupted, almost amused. “Think. What did we do that Sunday after you told me you were dying?”
My mind scrambled, digging through fragments.
“…The Calendar of Eve.”
That strange activity was so minuscule in my mind because of the new knowledge of a woman’s body. I didn’t think anything of it when the creepy priest gifted me a calendar, thick as a bible, going out ten years, and had me mark the days I bled.
Reed’s smile grew as he rolled onto his back and gazed up at the ceiling. He sneered. “Six years of tracking that and you’d think our parents and priest wouldn’t establish a pattern?”
Of course they would have. I should have known the gift wasn’t for my own knowledge. I felt a sarcastic laugh bubble up in my throat, and Reed’s eyes darted over to me before his laugh also burst through his lips.
I cut myself off, feeling the newly ignited fury erase the ironic humor. I raised my hand and slapped him across the face, feeling my cheeks burn. “You donotget to share this with me.” My voice turned cold as I spat at him through gritted teeth.
Reed growled in response, his eyes narrowing in on me as his left cheek burned red from my hand. “You dumb cunt.” He whispered at me as I rose from my place on the floor and turned my back on him.
“You stupid, bipolar, viciousbitch.”
I stood, turning away.
His voice followed me—louder, uglier—but I blocked it out as I crossed to Erich.
“I’m ready,” I said, fists clenched. “I want this.”
Erich said nothing as he passed me, brushing my shoulder with a gentle hand—a reassurance. When he reached Reed, he buried his fingers in Reed’s hair and lifted his head by the knotted strands tangled between them. Reed snarled and spat at him, but the spittle barely cleared his dry lips, instead sliding down his chin. He was downright humiliating, drool and bubbled spit clinging to his face.
“You pussy-whipped fuck.” Reed cackled as Erich dragged him by the hair to the chair in the corner. “Just Cami’s bitch boy…For the lips of an immoral woman are as sweet as honey… But in the end, she is bitter as poison.” Reed hurled the quote at him, his eyes raking Erich for any sign of hesitation.
Erich gave him little more than a weary glance as he forced him into the chair and began unraveling the rope again.
Reed’s lips trembled, his eyes darting from the rope to Erich. “Strangers will consume your wealth, and someone else will enjoy the fruit of your labor.”
The corner of Erich’s lip twitched into a half-smirk as he began wrapping the rope around Reed and the ancestral chair I used to sit in at dinner.
