Present
I sat in the theater, listening to the latest rehearsals for the annual Nutcracker performance and remembering when I was up there with all the little kids, too. The stage was larger than life, and I still remember leaping around as the snow fell, barely registering the audience, because the world up there was far too beautiful to look anywhere else.
Someone squeezed past me in my aisle seat, sitting next to me.
“How are you?” Rika asked.
I just gave her a small smile.
There were no answers to that question. Saying “fine” would seem comical.
I clasped my hands in my lap, chilled from the air, and I dipped my mouth under my thin scarf, breathing out to heat myself up.
“Come stay with us,” she said.
She’d made the offer ever since the haunted house the night before last, but I felt numb now, and I didn’t want to run. I wanted to win.
“You’re helping me,” I pointed out. “I appreciate it.”
We met yesterday about her and Michael sponsoring a performance, and it wasn’t much, but it was a path to get out on my own. They’d get their money back with ticket sales—if I were fortunate enough to have any—and whatever was left we’d split as profit. But she’d called earlier today with more ideas, including a tour. Maybe scouting other performers who weren’t getting seen. She was really into it, and it was nice to have another person excited for my dancing. Other than Damon…
“You look a little dangerous,” she mused. “Like you’ve got ideas.”
“For the tour or for my sister’s husband?”
She snorted. “Whichever one you have that look to kill for.”
“I hate him,” I said, pulling down the sleeves of my little jacket. “I hate what he did to me. He deserved his punishment.”
He deserved to go to jail.
“But?” she pressed.
But my weak heart kept thinking about what he said in bed two nights ago when I’d held the blades to his rib and neck. About lying to me being the only way he felt he could get close to me in high school. Maybe it was just a lie he fed my mother to get rid of her.
Or maybe it wasn’t. It didn’t make it right, though.
“There were so many moments back then—” I told her, “—they felt real, like he could’ve been different and I could’ve been different.”
He seduced me with a lie. Why was I having any doubts about the man he was?
“I do hate him,” I told her. “I just wish I hated him every second.”
“Alex told me after the haunted house the other night about everything that happened to you,” I explained to her. “How they mistakenly thought you were the one to upload the videos and they went after you because they thought you sent them to prison.” I paused as she remained silent. “She told me what Damon did. But you don’t seem to hate him. Why?”
She invited him and our family to her engagement party. She was fine being around him at the haunted house. I heard a rumor they were having business meetings.
But she just sighed. “Why don’t I hate any of them?” she asked. “I guess when you hate someone you don’t have to hate them forever.”
But it wasn’t okay. How could she trust him? How could she forgive him?
“I don’t excuse what he did,” she said, hesitating for a moment, “but…I don’t know. I see a chance in there. I can’t explain it.” And then she continued, “Michael, Kai, Will… They have never disappointed me since.”
I didn’t know what they’d done to her compared to Damon, but I knew what he did to me compared to her. I would never forgive him.
“He hasn’t hurt you, has he?” she asked, like she expected he wouldn’t really.
Another hard question to answer. Was he forcing me? No.
Was he threatening me? Playing with my head?
“The mindfucks are a little rough,” I told her.
She scoffed, sounding like she understood. “Yeah, they are good at that.”
The director was shouting on stage, giving direction, and then the piano started up again as I heard a dozen pairs of ballet slippers hit the stage, the musical number beginning again.
“The only good memory I have of Damon when we were younger was when we were kids,” Rika told me. “I was like three or four—the memory is faint but I remember the gist—and we were at the library. Another kid pushed me down and stole my pop-up book.” She laughed a little at the memory. “Damon stole it right back and gave it to me. He never talked to me, and my mom invited him to come sit with us and read, but he had to leave with his nanny, I think.”
I pictured it in my head, Damon doing what he did and taking control of the situation. I wasn’t sure why she told me that, as if an endearing little story would make up for who he was now.
“I didn’t start to fear him until high school.” Her voice sounded thoughtful as if she were figuring something out herself for the first time, too. “After everything that was happening in that house happened to him.”
“It’s no excuse,” I pointed out.
And she agreed. “No, it’s not.” she said. “It’s a reason. Plain and simple. There’s always a reason why things are as they are.”
I returned to the house late, sliding out of my shoes and unwrapping my scarf as I entered my bedroom. I hadn’t seen Damon for almost two days, and I wasn’t sure where he was or what he was doing, but I was tired.
So tired.
I undressed and slipped into one of my sleep sets, the cool silk of the shorts and shirt refreshing on my exhausted body, and I plugged my phone into the charger, ignoring the notifications from my mother.
I reached my mom yesterday morning, confirmed she and Ari were safe again, and when I asked how she could leave me and when she’d be back, she paused just a little too long, and I hung up. Let her get her excuses straight and leave me a message.
Had she honestly believed that shit he told her? About us being in love and needing time to reconnect?
Or was it what she wanted to believe, because it was easier than fighting back?
I locked my door and lodged my chair under it before sliding into bed and setting my alarm.
But as tired as I was, sleep wouldn’t come.
Doors opened and closed quietly downstairs as Damon’s security moved about, circulating around the property and keeping an eye on the house while he was away.
At first, I thought it was guards for me. To hinder my coming and going and report back to him on what I was up to. And those were undoubtedly some of their orders, but no one gave me any hassle when I wanted to go somewhere, and I never got any instruction to stop doing that or stop going there.
A driver chauffeured me, doors were opened for me, and if it wasn’t them or Damon creeping me out the other morning or in the theater, I actually felt a little safer with them here.
When he was gone.
I clutched the sheet, resenting the thought that wormed its way in. That a part of me wished he wasn’t gone.
Where was he? It had been days. Did he still have Mikhail?
Or did Damon go to the Maldives after all? A pang of jealousy hit me, and I drew in a deep breath, pulling my shirt away from my neck, because I felt stifled.
Fuck you.
What the hell was I doing? The sex was good, so I forgot that he was a lowlife? What a cliché.
I didn’t care that he defended Rika when she was four or that he was abused as a child. Plenty of people grew up shitty.
I’d fucking loved who he pretended to be, but his lie negated everything that happened between us. He humiliated me.
Why was it so hard to remember that whatever he made me feel had been a lie, too?
The haunted house. The fantastical fear. The pulse in my veins.
But then I remembered his strong arms around me.
I loved the danger. The way he brought me to life.
My fingers rested on my stomach, against the sliver of skin where my shirt rode up, and I glided my hand along it, throbbing between my thighs as my nipples poked through my shirt.
Tears burned my eyes. I hated myself.
Because I wanted him.
He lied so well, didn’t he? That I wanted to feel everything he convinced me of when he was in my bed when I was sixteen.
A tear fell, but I tried not to cry. I wanted to feel him again.
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t let him win.
I heard a car pull up outside, the door open and slam shut, and then the door downstairs slam.
I froze, the pulse pumping in my neck as I listened.
Footfalls on the stairs.
A creak in the floors.
The slow whine in the floorboards getting closer, and I heard Mikhail whine.
I closed my eyes. No.
He jiggled my door handle. When it didn’t give, because it was locked, he did it harder.
The door still didn’t open.
Everything was quiet for a moment, and I clutched the sheet at my sides, waiting, and then…
The door was kicked in.
I sucked in a breath as it flung open, the wood splintering, the handle crashing to the floor, and I heard my chair tip over and hit the wood.
I shot up in bed, shaking my head against the heat rushing my belly and the warmth between my legs. “Don’t,” I begged.
But I wasn’t sure if I was telling myself or him.
I didn’t hear him move, but I knew it was Damon. The cloves drifted off his clothes, and the security would’ve stopped him if it wasn’t.
A light sweat made the silk pajamas stick to my skin, and I pulled off the sheet, swinging my legs over the side of the bed.
“Please, don’t,” I whispered. “I can’t think straight.”
His footsteps approached, he stopped in front of me, and I heard ice clink in a glass as he took a drink and cupped my chin.
He ran his fingers over my jaw, possessive.
“You don’t want to want it,” he said in a low, deep voice, “but you do.”
“Please.” Just leave. “Please.”
Don’t touch me. Don’t hold me. Don’t take me in your arms.
He set the glass down on my nightstand, and I heard him remove clothes, his jacket maybe, and throw it off somewhere.
“Lie down,” he told me.
“No,” I mumbled.
I heard buttons go flying as he tore off his shirt and then the jingle of a buckle as he unfastened his belt.
“Lie down, Winter,” he said sternly.
He’s not him. He’s not who I fell in love with.
He was my sister’s husband, and he wanted to make sure I was never happy again.
I put my hands on his stomach, holding in my sobs as he threaded his fingers through my hair, bringing my head in close. Bending down, his breath falling across my lips, he said, “On your back, Winter. Do it.”
And then his lips caught mine, biting, and I kissed him back, letting his tongue sink into my mouth and feeling the need for him course through my body.
But instead of lying down, I pulled back, touched his face, and pleaded with him as he caressed my cheek with his thumb.
“Just let me go,” I told him.
And he growled, throwing me off.
I cried, scooting away from him on the bed as he stalked around my room.
“Let me go,” he mocked me, repeating my words. “Why can’t you shut up? Why can’t you all just shut the fuck up?”
“I will hate you if you do this to me,” I fought. “I’ll despise you and never stop trying to escape you, because I could never love you. Because you’re sick, and I hate the way you make me feel! I could never love you.”
A clutter went crashing to the floor, and I knew he’d shoved everything off my dresser.
But I didn’t stop. “And I hate myself around you,” I told him, saying anything to hurt him. “I hate what I let myself do with you, because the only way I can get you away from me is to get it over with!”
“That’s not true,” he bit out.
I climbed off the bed, facing where his voice was coming from. “You’re such a little boy. A child who can’t control himself. A disease!”
More went crashing to the floor, and I heard my mirror shatter in his little tantrum, but I only grew stronger.
“So come on,” I dared him. “Fuck me. Do the only thing you know how to do, because it’s all you can take from me anyway, and I don’t give a shit about any of it! Take the house. Take the family who left me here with you. Take the fucking clothes off my back and make me walk out of here naked!” Sobs filled my throat, but I refused to let them loose. “I would gladly do it if it meant getting away from you!”
He rushed up to me, grabbing the back of my neck. “You were in love with me.”
“It wasn’t the real you. It was nothing but an act!”
I slapped his hand away and shoved him in the chest.
“You shouldn’t have killed her,” I said, digging deep for the worst fucking things that would ever come out of my mouth. “She was the only one who was ever going to love you. She was the only one who wanted to touch you and take care of you and be around you!”
He breathed hard, labored, like he was struggling for air.
“Everyone else you have to hold prisoner!” I snarled. “You have nothing and no one! No one can stand you!”
“S…s…stop,” he gasped, sucking in air. “Just please stop.”
“I hate you!”
“Winter, please don’t,” he begged, and then I felt him move away, his body hitting the wall and sliding to the floor. “Please stop. Just stop.”
He grunted, like he was in pain, and I stood there, still hot from my fury and tears welled in my eyes, threatening to fall.
He said again, barely a whisper, “Please stop. Please.”
I stood there, my fingers curled into fists. What was wrong with him?
Why wasn’t he storming out or charging for me and throwing me on the bed like he threw me on the floor in the haunted house?
He just sat there, the air pouring in and out of his lungs, turning calm after a few minutes, but I fisted my hands, staying charged.
Who was he? Who the hell was he?
He was a machine. A monster. A liar.
What the fuck was I supposed to do? What did he want from me?
But he didn’t say anything. He just sat there. Quiet.
Until finally I heard his voice again, solemn and calm. “My father had this rottweiler,” he said, “who was pregnant with mutts when I was about seven. He let me have one of them. Not sure what happened to the rest, though.”
I swallowed the tears in my throat, still standing rigid and ready.
“I’d never loved anything so much,” he told me. “That little thing wanted to be wherever I was. He followed me everywhere.” He paused and then continued, “He had this thing, though, about barking. At the drop of a pin. He barked so much, and I couldn’t shut him up, and every time the doorbell rang or a car pulled up to the house or someone knocked on my door, I…I couldn’t get to him in time to settle him down before my father heard him and got angry.”
Dread knotted my stomach, and I pictured seven-year-old Damon and his puppy with their sliver of happiness in that shitty house.
“Even at seven years old, though,” he continued, “I knew the horror of finding my dog hanging from a tree in the woods wasn’t as awful as the realization that my father made no attempt to hide what he’d done.”
My face cracked, but I stayed silent.
“He wanted me to find him.” His voice grew thick with tears. “Even then I understood that the dog wasn’t the one being punished, and that next time he’d make me do the deed. I never asked for another dog after that.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, tears spilling over. Jesus Christ.
“And I learned, really quick, that life wasn’t going to be pretty. Not until…”
Until…me?
I put the pieces together. His dog at seven, the party at eleven and how his father yelled at him and how his demeanor had already started to go downhill. I had nothing to do with any of that.
“I was so alone,” he explained from somewhere on the other side of my room. “I couldn’t talk to people. I didn’t have any friends. I was scared all the time.” His voice was thick with memory, as if it all happened just yesterday. “I just wanted to be invisible, and if I couldn’t be invisible, then I just wanted it to end. I was going to run away, because…” His sad voice trailed off. “Because the only other way to escape was to end it all.”
I couldn’t wrap my head around it. That’s what was going through his mind when I met him that first time? What eleven year old wants to die?
“You were so little,” he mused. “When you came into the maze and noticed me hiding and crawled inside and sat down at my side, it was like…”
Like you had a pet again.
“Like I wasn’t alone anymore,” he finished. “So little. So quiet. But it was everything. Feeling you next to me.”
God, what was he doing to me?
“You taught me how to survive that day,” he said. “You taught me how to be strong and how to get to the next minute. And the next and the next. I could never forget, and when you came back in high school, and I had changed into this, because I’d seen so much shit,” he went on, “and my desires had morphed into something ugly and twisted, but I’d fucking survived, nonetheless, and didn’t swallow the bad for anyone anymore, because you had taught me how to get rid of the shit. I finally craved one more thing I realized had been missing when I laid eyes on you again.”
I didn’t understand. I was eight. What could I possibly have taught him to keep him surviving? To keep him fighting? And what was missing from his existence after he’d gotten through all that?
“I wanted something good,” he admitted. “Beauty, maybe? The night of the pool party, the house was quiet. It was just us, but you didn’t know I was in the house, too. I watched you dance.”
I remembered that night so vividly. For the two years after that, I’d looked back on it, excited and terrified, but also with this weird sense of being safe in that closet with him.
“You made the world look different,” he told me. “You always had, and it struck me as odd, because I had hated to watch my mother dance growing up. It was just some elaborate lie that I couldn’t stomach, but you…” He trailed off, searching for words. “It was pure, and it was a dream. I didn’t want to change you. I just wanted to be a part of it all. Of everything beautiful you were going to do.”
He sat there for a moment, and everything in my body hurt. I didn’t realize every muscle had been tightened this whole time. This was the first time he’d ever said things like this. The first time he’d ever really talked to me.
“But I was still me, and I scared you that night, because that’s what I do,” he admitted, sounding like he hated himself. “Something amazing happened, though. You followed. You wanted to feel that edge, too, as long as you were at my side, and for a few incredible days, I felt…”
He didn’t finish the thought, but I knew what he wanted to say. It had felt the same with me.
“When it was time to come clean, I couldn’t,” he said, his voice growing thick. “I just wanted to stay there with you. Behind the waterfall, in the shower, in the ballroom… Just stay with you.”
He rose to his feet, and the walls felt too close, and my clothes too tight, and I couldn’t get my lungs to open, because there was too much to take in and not enough said so many years ago. Why didn’t you say all of this years ago?
“Nothing was a lie,” he whispered.
And then he walked out, and my chest ached so badly, for air or for him, I didn’t know, but I ran to the window, yanked it up, and drew in a lungful of air, feeling everything give way. Slip away, fade, and ease.
My fear. My worry. My hatred.
My anger.
Why didn’t he say all that years ago?
Why?
