Later in bed, we lie together silently, watching the sun come up. We’re on our sides, her back to my front, my arm underneath her neck, her head resting on my pillow. My knees are drawn up behind hers.
I once paid three hundred thousand dollars for a wristwatch. I remember it now and smile at how I thought a hunk of metal was worth something.
But I had nothing of real value to compare it to.
Now I do.
Sloane says, “You always wear black because it hides blood the best.”
I wonder what’s behind that, the training-wheel-trust question she suggested from days ago, before I left. “Why don’t you tell me one secret, and we’ll go from there. Like why you always wear black.”
“Aye.”
“I used to do the same thing.”
“What do you mean?”
She inhales slowly, lets the breath out. “I used to cut myself. I didn’t heal well. If I wore white, there would be little flecks of blood everywhere. I looked like an assault victim.”
That stuns me. “You? Cut yourself? Why?”
“Pain needs an outlet.”
I wait, knowing there will be more, not wanting to disrupt her thoughts before she puts them into words.
“I was this really chubby kid. My parents called me Chunky Monkey. Thought it was cute, my little belly roll, until I turned ten. Then my mother decided it was a bad reflection on her parenting. My dad thought it was a lack of willpower. A character flaw. They both hated it. And the bigger I got, the more disappointed they were in me, as if my flesh equaled my value. I took up too much space. Even without saying a word, I was too loud. Too obvious. Too overpowering. I had to be gotten under control.”
I listen, riveted, trying to imagine this lion I know as a cub.
“The summer between fifth and sixth grades, they made me go to fat camp.”
“Fat camp?”
“It’s exactly as bad as it sounds. Six weeks of body shaming disguised as education. That’s where I learned I wasn’t okay as I was. I was defective. In order to be okay, in order to be acceptable to society, I had to change. I had to shrink. I couldn’t be allowed to go on in my sad state, thinking my body was fine. Man, what that shit does to a little kid’s brain.”
“I don’t like your parents.”
I say it with too much force. Sloane laughs.
“The weird thing is? I know they had good intentions. They didn’t want my life to be hard, and they thought it would be really hard if I stayed fat. But they never gave me a choice about it. So off I went to fat camp to be humiliated and demoralized on a daily basis. I think they hired the counselors based on lack of a soul. The lady in charge of me made Kathy Bates in Misery look like Mary Poppins.”
She stops, sighing.
“What’s the name of this fat camp?”
“You’re not going to burn it down.”
“That’s what you think.”
“That’s sweet. But it’s closed now, anyway. The state finally stepped in when they had too many reports about the beatings.”
“Beatings?” I repeat loudly.
“Oh, not me. I got really good at hiding.”
Sick but mesmerized, I say, “Where would you hide?”
“Right out in the open. I got so good at being what they wanted, their eyes would gloss right over me like I wasn’t there. I lost more than thirty pounds in those six weeks, along with all my childhood.” Her voice hardens. “And nobody ever saw the real me again.”
I feel an almost overpowering need to break something. That counselor’s nose.
“When I came home, my parents were ecstatic. They didn’t notice my new silences. They didn’t notice how I always looked at the floor. All they saw was my thin new body. Success. I really fucking hated them for that. So, to get back at them, I gained all the weight I’d lost, plus some. Then my mother got cancer and died. My dad remarried a lady who hated the sight of me. Everything was about as shitty as it could be, until my dad’s best friend from the Navy came to visit when I was fourteen, and I got an education in what the word victim really meant.”
I realize I’m squeezing her arm too hard. I relax my hand and kiss her shoulder, half of me waiting for her to continue, half of me wanting her to stop.
I already know where this is going.
“His name was Lance. To this day, if I hear that name, I want to throw up. Lance with the buzz cut and too much Polo cologne. Lance with a smile like a shark’s. My father worshipped him, my stepmother flirted with him, and I stayed as far away as I could because of the way his eyes followed me everywhere, like one of those haunted house paintings at Disneyland.”
She stops abruptly.
My voice low, I say, “What did he do to you?”
“Everything,” she says with no emotion, as if it happened to someone else. “Everything that a grown man could do to a helpless young girl.”
I have to close my eyes and breathe slowly and deliberately so I don’t scream out loud. “Did you tell your father?”
“Yes.”
“What did he do?”
“Do?” She laughs. “Nothing. He didn’t believe me. He thought I was making it up. Looking for attention. Like a pathetic fat girl would.”
I’m breathless with fury. Glowing white-hot with it. I need to put my hands around her father’s throat and squeeze until I see the life fade from his eyes.
“Lance left in a week. Five weeks later, I found out I was pregnant.”
I curse violently in Gaelic. Sloane sighs.
“If that makes you angry, you might not want to hear the rest.”
Through gritted teeth, I say, “Tell me.”
“I decided I wanted to keep the baby. I kept the pregnancy a secret from my dad, but I didn’t know how I was supposed to handle being a teenage mom with no money. But ultimately, I didn’t have to know. This guy at school who was always harassing me for being a ‘fat fuck’ pushed me down the stairs on the quad. I miscarried at thirteen weeks.”
I can’t speak. For a long, frozen moment, I’m blank, unable to process what she’s telling me.
Her voice soft, she says, “That’s how I knew I wasn’t pregnant at the hospital. When there’s a baby growing inside you, all kinds of things change.”
“Sloane. Jesus. Fuck.”
“I know. It’s not pretty. It wasn’t pretty for me for a few years there after that. I was depressed. I had terrible anxiety. I felt like I was going out of my head. I started cutting myself, wearing all black. I shaved my hair to a mohawk. Pierced my nose and a few other things. I shut down. But underneath that, I was so. Fucking. Angry. So angry, I wanted to die.”
She rolls over and gazes at me with clear eyes. Her voice is calm. “Do you want to know what saved me?”
“What?”
“Natalie. My best friend. My only friend. I wanted to kill myself so many times during those years. The only reason I didn’t is because of her. Over and over again, she saved my life. You know what else?”
“I don’t know if I can take it.”
“She never knew about the pregnancy. Except for the nurse who gave me the test at Planned Parenthood, no one knew. I was too ashamed. You’re the only living soul I’ve ever told. I want you to understand what that means.”
My pulse throbbing and my voice hoarse, I say, “It means I can trust you.”
“No,” she says softly, eyes shining. “It means you can’t. If it comes down to a choice between the two of you, I can’t honestly say what I’ll do.”
I close my eyes and drag a breath into my lungs. “I said I wouldn’t make you choose.”
“You did. And I believe you. But now you’ve upped the ante. Now, you and Kage are the last men standing.”
“I wanted to end a war.”
“And you may have. But you’ve also backed him into a corner. What choice does he have but to retaliate?”
“Surrender.”
She says drily, “I take it you’ve never met the man.”
“I’ve met him. Don’t sound so bloody impressed.”
“This is going to offend you, but I think the two of you are very much alike.”
“You’re right. I’m offended.”
She settles her head on my chest and sighs. “Okay.”
I’m nervous when she doesn’t say anything else. I want to get her talking again. “How did you go from the girl who got pushed down the stairs to who you are now?”
“I eventually realized it wasn’t that I wanted to die. It’s that I wanted to escape my feelings. I wanted out. Life was too painful to live as it was. So I decided I needed to change it. My life, I mean. I needed to make it so that nothing bad could ever happen to me again. Which is magical thinking, of course. We can’t control when bad things happen. But we can control how we react.
“I vowed I wouldn’t be a victim ever again. I started taking care of myself. I got into yoga, fixed my shitty diet, read everything I could get my hands on about self-care. I built up my self-esteem like it was a house, brick by brick. Before I went off to college at eighteen, I did everything I could to be mentally and physically tough. It was either that or kill myself, so I figured it was worth a try. After a while, it worked. I dropped a bunch of weight, got strong, learned how to give zero fucks about what anyone else thought. I learned how to listen to myself. How to protect myself, because no one else would.”
Picturing her as a teenager, a girl in pain determined to save herself, my admiration for her grows even deeper. “That’s when you decided men were desserts.”
“And nothing more,” she says firmly. “Especially since they only paid me attention when I was fat and a source of ridicule and an easy target, or when I was in shape and a source of lust. I couldn’t trust them.”
I tuck her head into my neck, kiss her temple, and murmur, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“What I said to you in the hospital. How I acted like what to do about a pregnancy was my choice, not yours.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “Thank you.”
“Fuck, don’t thank me. I’m an idiot.”
A seagull flies low over the waves, his wingtips skimming the water. Another one makes a wide, lazy circle overhead, crying a lonely seabird cry.
Watching them, it dawns on me what a terrible thing I’ve done by bringing Sloane here. By making her my captive, then earning her trust. I’m like one of those clueless conservationists who think keeping a tiger in captivity is safer for it than living out in the wild.
A cage is no place for a wild thing, no matter how gilded the bars.
To make things worse, I keep demanding she tell me I can trust her. Like she really wants to make some fucked-up pledge of allegiance to the man who snatched her from a parking garage. Like that would make any kind of bloody sense!
How am I only just realizing this?
My voice rough, I say, “You told me you didn’t want me to keep you too long. Do you still feel that way?”
In her silence, I feel her attention sharpen. “Why?”
I have to swallow several times before I can force the words out. “I’ll take you home if you want me to.”
Her voice rises. “Take me home?”
“Let you go. Today, if that’s what you want.”
She exhales a hard little breath, full of disappointment. “See, I knew I shouldn’t have told you that story.”
“I’m not saying that because of the story. Ah, fuck, maybe I am. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I want you to know you always have a choice with me. A choice in everything. I haven’t demonstrated that so far. I don’t want to be like all the other men in your life. Taking. Hurting you. Letting you down.”
“No one’s hurt me in a long time,” she says quietly, her breath warm against my chest.
But you could.
She doesn’t say it, but I hear it all the same. She’s already told me as much. I’m caught again between wanting to do the right thing and wanting to do the selfish thing, which is keeping her by my side forever, no matter what she has to say about it.
I wish that last tiny shred of humanity inside me would just fucking die already. Things would be so much easier.
But I meant what I said. She has a choice. I’m a soulless Neanderthal, but for her, I’ll make an exception.
“I’ll take you back to New York if—”
“Say another word and lose your testicles.”
The anger’s back. I hear it in her voice, feel it in the new tension in her body. I like my balls where they are, so I only kiss her temple again and remain silent.
She does box breathing for a while. Eventually, the tension drains from her limbs. We lie together silently until I think she’s about to drift off to sleep.
Then my cell rings. It’s on the bathroom counter.
Sloane lifts her head and looks at me with big eyes. “Is that him?”
“I doubt Kazimir would call this soon. Stay here.”
I roll out of bed and cross to the bathroom. When I pick up the phone and look at the readout, it’s Kieran’s number I see.
I poke my head out the bathroom door, look at Sloane sitting up in bed, her eyes worried, and shake my head.
She collapses back against the mattress, releasing a big gust of air.
I answer Kieran’s call, then listen to him absently as I take a piss. He’s got logistics to go over. Plans that have to be made. A hundred different decisions await me, and it isn’t even seven a.m. yet.
Wanting to get back to bed as quickly as possible, I give him ten minutes of my time. I hang up, splash water on my face, brush my teeth, then head back into the bedroom, stopping short when I see the empty bed.
Sloane’s gone.
