He’s calm in the way people get when they’ve given up arguing with the world. Something desperate claws at my insides, something that says if I lose him now, if I don’t drag him away from the inner demons he’s wrestling with, there will be a next time, and I might not be so lucky.
“Look, Rosie brought you a bunny.” I pull the soft plush out of the bag. He plays with the ear, and I catch the corners of his lips twitching, like he wants to smile, but then his eyes fall to his bandaged wrists. He pushes the stuffie away.
It comes as a choking sound at first. Then chest heaves. Then a sob so low and broken, my insides shatter.
“Griff.”
I’m up and on the bed, circling my arms around him. He hangs onto me like I’m his only lifeline, squeezing the fucking shit out of me. Griff’s tears soak my shirt. I rock him. A hoarse, strangled, ugly cry rips from his lungs. His body shudders. I hold him through it all.
Demons hunt us both, but the difference is, I’ve been hardened enough to survive them. Griff hasn’t. I don’t ever want him to be. He shouldn’t have to shut everything out like I do.
“I’m getting you away from here, Griff,” I murmur. “So fucking far away from here.”
3
TATE
September
It’s happened twice before, but not like this. Well, three times if you count my childhood doll. And never with someone that I wanted to fuck. Obsession. The kind of obsession that results in me making very bad decisions. I have an obsessive personality as it is, but this kind of obsession is dangerous. Life-ruining. I can’t get him out of my fucking head. I’ve devoted way too many hours imagining how I can abduct Ryan and keep him.
Ugh, but it’s against the law. Not that I care about the law, but it makes things difficult with everything else I have going on.
Spinning the flat metal talisman over my fingers, I lean back, my chair creaking, the sudden noise contrasting with the dead silence.
Practice ended an hour ago. I already wish I had them all back for another grueling couple of hours, but Shadowridge University frowns upon grinding its students into the ground. That doesn’t mean I don’t, I just have to be careful about how often I do it.
I didn’t think I’d love being a university hockey coach so much, and when Uncle suggested it, I thought it was another punishment. It’s hard to admit he was right, but not to admit—at least to myself—that I love it for all the wrong reasons.
Having men jump at my commands, sending them out to battle on the ice, winning—I love that kind of control.
Although Uncle Jasper would have known I’d love coaching for the wrong reasons. He knew it would hold my attention for a while, keep me busy. I like a challenge, and college hockey provides challenges in many forms.
Ryan. He’s a problem for me. He has the ability to make my life spiral out of control. If Uncle Jasper were still alive, he’d take him away just like he took away my doll.
Unless I can get him under my control.
“I don’t like the way you obsess over that thing,” he’d said. The doll was missing an arm. I’d found him—yes, him—that way, discarded at the park, and as soon as I set eyes on him, I knew he was mine. Just like with Ryan.
Mom let me keep him. From what I remember about her, Mom was an odd soul, like me. She wore long black dresses, oversized cardigans, and always smelled like the incense of the day. She only brushed and cut her hair on the full moon. We washed his plastic body as best we could, scrubbing all the dirt out of the artificial folds of his elbows, but we were never able to rid him of every speck, and I liked that. Liked that he was forever tainted. We put him in an infant-sized black and red hockey jersey.
Ryan’s jersey is black and red—but with gold.
Mom died. I brought the doll with me to Uncle Jasper’s. Sometimes I wonder if maybe I kept my love for her inside that doll. Or I associated it with her, and that’s how I loved her. I know that I wanted to love my mother.
But if I’ve ever loved anything, it was my big brother. And that fucking doll.Ifbecause my kind of love looks like obsession, and all the therapists Uncle Jasper made me see explained that obsession isn’t really love.
Even though it’s everything to me. Obsession is the most I care about anything. It stands out. The bright spots of color in a sea of endless gray.
I followed Luke around, wanting to be just like him. I carried the doll with me, sometimes in a case, sometimes with a cuff attached to another cuff that I wore around my wrist, and sometimes by that one good arm it still had.
And then Uncle Jasper made me watch as he melted my doll down to a pile of plastic and glass eyes. I wanted vengeance and blood. I was seven. They weren’t normal seven-year-old emotions. I snuck into his room that night with a butcher knife from the kitchen after I thought he’d be fast asleep.
He was waiting for me.
“Next time you want to kill someone—especially me—don’t make such a racket when you steal your murder weapon,” he’d said. Then he punished me soundly and succeeded in terrifying the ever-loving fuck out of me. I hated him silently for a while before I got brave again.
I haven’t talked about that doll in a long time, even though I’ve never stopped thinking about the way its body burned, never been able to smell melted plastic without flying into an irrational rage. I’ve never told anyone outside my family about him, either. Until fucking Ryan Savage. Why did I tell him? I don’t have an answer. It’s eating away at my carefully constructed narrative.
