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There is a reason that all things are as they are. —Bram Stoker, Dracula
I don’t need his help finding my mom. I just want to leave now. He was so mean to his son. My parents aren’t perfect, but I’ve never been screamed at like that.
But he doesn’t look like he wants me here. Or anyone, for that matter.
But as I turn, the sound of the water suddenly changes, and I look over, seeing that it’s hitting his hand now. He reaches out slowly through the water for me, inviting me in.
“Now . . .” my sister’s new husband whispered in my ear. “Now you belong to me.”
He made himself the cure, which wouldn’t have been necessary if he hadn’t also created the disease.
But my mother was a different story. She knew what inviting him into our lives would mean. She knew his end game here, and she didn’t protect me.
“You think I’ll be easy?” I challenged. “Of course not.” His tone softened, sounding amused. “That’s why he wants you, Winter. Just try not to be predictable next time.”
“Arion is Mrs. Torrance,” he clarified. “The face of his family, and the one who will raise his children. But you?” He paused, his tone darkening and making chills spread down my arms. “You’re his cherry on top.”
I knew I was fucked up. I just didn’t care. As long as I was happy, I didn’t explain myself to anyone.
Life felt like hell because we expected it to feel like heaven. The quote I read years ago went something like that, but I never understood it. When you’re in the thick all your life, living in ways you eventually figure out no one else is, you learn to sleep well in heat and eat fire. Until one day it’s all you need. It was heaven I didn’t trust. High hopes and false expectations . . . No, I needed the trouble.
“Fuck off.” “Well, top of the fucking morning to you, grouch,” Will said. “What’s your problem?” I swallowed again, raising my eyes to the prize once more. “Nothing my dick can’t solve if you leave me alone for ten minutes,”
“I told you,” he pointed out. “We’re connected. It’s spiritual and shit.”
Will, Michael, and Kai were my friends, and I’d walk through fire for any one of them. Will was the only one, though, who I was sure would walk through fire for me.
Confidence annoyed me. I didn’t like being hunted.
Sex for me was in the head. Almost entirely.
It gets hard when I do that. That means you like it. The memory of those words knotted over and over again in my gut, and I pulled her hands away. “No.” I didn’t like that.
Why couldn’t she shut up? Why couldn’t she just shut her fucking mouth? Most people did what they were told.
You’re so goddamn weak, you have to call me because someone hurt your feelings? Someone stepped on your toe, baby, is that it? Michael, Kai, and Will must be doing Jesus a favor to even consider breathing the same air as you.”
She’s lying. She’s doing what she’s supposed to do. I need her to hurt me because pain covers up pain, and if I feel one, I won’t feel the other. I need her to push back down what tries to crop back up.
Everything she said, I made her say, because we could only feel one pain at a time, and maybe if I could pile on enough dirt, I’d get so buried I wouldn’t be able to think.
People assumed I behaved
strictly on impulse, when actually, it required quite a bit of strategy to be this fucked up.
“You wonder why everyone hates you.” I opened my eyes, shaking my head. “I don’t wonder.”
knew all about her little romp in the steam room at Hunter-Bailey with Michael and Kai. And as much as I thought I’d be turned on by the reality of what Rika had enjoyed in that room, it actually pissed me off. I wasn’t quite sure why, either. Maybe because I didn’t get my turn and I felt left out of the fun. Or maybe, even though I knew her enough to know she didn’t let anything happen to her that she didn’t want, a small part of me still felt like she’d been . . . I don’t know . . . Used.
Such a fucking little monster, that one.
“You know what I mean,” she continued. “Don’t hurt her.” You mean other than taking everything Winter owned and putting her in a perpetual state of dependence on me? Or hurt her as in . . . Yeah, that was what you meant, wasn’t it? Don’t hurt her.
“And when you finally get a visit—four guards your dad pays to beat the shit out of you on the first of every month so you don’t get soft in solitary—you start to look forward to those visits.”
“Because pain in the body quiets the pain in the head. It feels good, like a kill switch for your brain.
“Acting like that time with her wasn’t the only fucking time I didn’t hate fucking.”
“But she stayed quiet, and you went into solitary for three years, and your friends fended for themselves while your mind slowly slipped off its axis and you’d rip out your own hair because animals do insane things when they’re caged for too long.”
“So, do you have anything for me yet?” she asked like she hadn’t just heard all that. “Or are you just ready to admit you’re completely incompetent?”
I met Will at the beginning of high school, and he’d played around with drugs for as long as I’d known him. Weed, X, pills, coke . . . It all ran rampant in our school. The only reason we didn’t have the heroin epidemic the inner city did was because we had the money and access to good shit from the town MD. And Mom’s medicine cabinet. It was almost the only thing Michael and I ever agreed on. We didn’t do drugs. We were the drugs.
Stay out of my place. Stay out of my shit. No more chitchat.
“I look like her,” I heard Rika say. “Don’t I? That’s why you’ve always hated me.” I hesitated. Like her. Like Winter.
hate all of you,” I mumbled. I don’t even blink saying the words. I hate all of you. Hate all of who? Their little group I was once a part of? Women? People, in general? Who knew? And she didn’t ask. But part of me wanted her to understand.
“That’s how I know you’re not half as dangerous as you pretend to be,” she said. “You only ever threaten.” I tapped the cigarette into the ashtray, my mood turning solemn as the smoke streamed into the air. “Sometimes,” I nearly whisper. “And sometimes I mean exactly what I say.”
“So trust me when I say you’ll never escape me. None of you will.”
Fuck you. This won’t go how you think it will go. You won’t change me. I’ll change you.
“Yes, I don’t really want to kill you,” he added. “You’re my only son, after all.” “No, I mean I’m not eleven anymore.” I grabbed a clean T-shirt and hoodie out of my duffel bag and kicked the door closed again. “I’ll be more difficult to strangle now.”
I’d always had tunnel vision when it came to things I wanted, and it was always one thing at a time. I couldn’t concentrate otherwise.
Most of them were sterilized, having not been used in a long time, but my gaze dropped to the lighter, and I absently rubbed my thumb over my index finger, feeling the raised skin from the old burn. I looked at the pushpin. I could sleep tonight. If I really wanted to.
“Are people staring at me?” I asked her. “They’re staring at us.” “Why?” I heard her inhale. “I think . . . they’re confused. We kind of look alike.” “Do we?” I replied. “Are you hot?” If she was hot, then I was hot.
I couldn’t make my mother’s decisions for her, but she also couldn’t make my choices for me, and there was no way I’d do whatever it took to survive. I had my limits, and I wasn’t going back to that place with him.
Damon’s voice came from somewhere deep in the room, and I guessed he was probably in the high-back cushioned chair in the corner by the window. I pictured him sitting in the dark, the only light the small embers from the tip of his cigarette.
“You teach your daughter to hide in everyone else’s world,” I shot back, “and I’ll teach mine everyone else exists in hers. Go fuck yourself, and leave the kid alone.”
In fact, he was kind of an angel at the end. An angel with really black bat wings. Psycho.
“I hated college.” “You hated being away from your family,” she corrected. “And I don’t mean Gabriel and me.” I clenched my jaw. Yeah. The year and two months I spent at college sucked, and even now, I look back on it as though time had been suspended as I existed without Michael, Will, and Kai. And her. “You were the only loner I knew who hated being alone,” she mused, gathering up her books and papers.
We were only a few feet from each other, but all of a sudden, it felt like miles. I’d nearly killed my friend. I’d destroyed Kai’s business. I’d threatened her, had her guarded, and kept her practically caged. I was sorry for some things, not for others.
“You were my heroin once upon a time,”
