It feels good to be back at Sweet Maple. This place has been my anchor through some of the most chaotic times in my life.
So has Arthur. He might be the only man who’s ever done something kind for me without trying to put his hand on my ass afterward.
“There she is,” Arthur says, chucking my apron directly into my face. “You know you’re in the paper this morning?”
“I am?”
He tosses that at me too, already helpfully folded back at the right page.
It’s an article in the Chronicle, in the arts section. Just two columns on the bottom of a page, but it includes a large color photograph of The Mercy of Men, and a smaller picture of me, lifted off my Instagram.
This is Cole’s doing, I’m sure.
He’s constantly working behind the scenes, pushing me into the spotlight. He seems to get more pleasure out of grabbing attention for me than for himself.
I try to catch his eye, where he’s seated himself at the furthest corner table, but true to his word, he’s not distracting me and is only quietly taking out his laptop like any normal business-bruncher. Assuming that person just so happened to look like an off-duty supermodel in a cashmere button-down.
Arthur raises one thick, grizzled eyebrow at me.
“Isn’t that your other boss over there?”
“Yes.”
“I could be wrong but … didn’t you drive into work together? Quite early in the morning?”
I can feel my face flaming while I try to maintain a dignified expression.
“Yes, that’s right. I’ve been staying with him.”
“What!?” Arthur cries with mock surprise. “How did that happen? When you weren’t even trying to date him …”
I take back everything nice I said before. Arthur is the fucking worst.
I scowl at him.
“We’re not dating. It’s … complicated.”
“It always is,” Arthur nods wisely.
I throw myself into the business of waiting tables so I can avoid further interrogation.
Arthur is not going to be repressed that easily. He’s in a shockingly chipper mood, whipped into something approximating actual happiness at the prospect of teasing me all shift long.
This is catnip to Cole.
He immediately shoves his laptop to the side so he can gang up with Arthur against me.
I’m actually quite fucking busy as Sweet Maple hasn’t stopped being delicious. The sidewalk tables are crowded with people clamoring for bacon.
Meanwhile, Arthur has completely abandoned his duties and is sitting down with Cole, laughing and chatting like old friends. One thousand percent for sure discussing every intimate detail of my life that I’m heartily regretting sharing with either of them.
As I carry a backbreaking load of mimosas past them, I hear Cole saying, “I’m setting up a show for Mara in December. You should come, I’ll put your name on the list …”
The thought of Arthur coming to see my new series is too much to bear.
The more intimate and personal my work, the more it frightens me for other people to see it. Especially people who know me. Paradoxical as it seems, I’d rather strangers view it, because they won’t know how deeply self-referential my work has become. They won’t recognize how I’ve opened myself up, guts and all, laying myself bare across the canvas.
It feels good to work for money again, in a direct exchange, where a tray of food carried out equals a five-dollar tip. I’m puffing and sweating, but in a nice way. The way of good, honest labor.
Cole has never had to work for money at a menial job. That’s why money is only an abstract concept to him. He knows its power, of course, and wields it like a weapon. But he has no attachment to it. It comes easily to him, and he can always get more.
I don’t know if his way is better than mine.
In so many things, there is no better or worse. Just differences.
Cole will never feel the wild thrill of opening up a billfold and seeing a twenty-dollar tip on a fifty-dollar bill.
One thing I know for sure about myself: wherever I go in life, however rich I become, I’m always going to tip big. I know what it means to the server. How it can change their whole day, or even their week. How it gives hope far beyond any dollar amount.
Another useful thing about waitressing: you’re too busy to worry about anything else for long. I can’t stress over what Cole might be telling Arthur, or vice versa, when I have ten tables shouting requests.
The six-hour shift flies by in a moment.
Soon the tables are clearing out once more, and Cole has eaten the meal I ordered for him, and Arthur has drunk way too many cups of coffee. He interrupts me as I start my closing duties.
“You don’t need to bother with that.”
I keep rolling clean cutlery into napkins, saying, “What the fuck are you talking about? You used to chew a strip off me if I didn’t roll up every last fork in this place.”
Arthur taps a heavy finger on the newspaper article, still resting on the table next to me.
“I’m sure you’ve got better things to do with your time.”
My stomach squirms. I don’t want to hear whatever he’s trying to say. I keep rolling cutlery, stubbornly refusing to look at him or the newspaper article.
Arthur rests his hand on my shoulder instead.
I don’t know if he’s ever touched me before. His hand is heavy, calloused, and warm. It lays on my shoulder like a blessing.
“I’m proud of you, Mara,” he says.
I look up into his wrinkled face, at his faded brown eyes behind their thick, smudged lenses.
I want to say something back to him, but my throat is too tight.
Arthur murmurs, “You’re really doing it, Mara. And look, whether you want to date this guy or not, take his help. Take as much as you can get. Don’t be proud—be successful. You deserve it.”
I put my hand over his on my shoulder, holding it in place so he can’t let go.
My eyes burn, his wrinkled face swimming before my view.
“Why do I feel like you’re firing me?”
“You’ll always have a home here,” he says. “But I don’t want to hold you back. Not even for a Saturday morning. You don’t need this place anymore.”
I’ve worked at Sweet Maple for six years. Other jobs I quit or lost, but this one was always here. Arthur was always here.
“Come back to eat breakfast with everyone else who’s rich and famous and doesn’t have to carry a tray.”
“The best people carry trays,” I say ferociously. “You carry a tray.”
“I will if you come eat,” he says, squeezing my shoulder once more before letting go.
I leave quickly so Arthur won’t see me cry. Tears run down my face, hot and fluid, like there won’t be any end to them.
Cole chases after me, still stuffing his laptop back in his bag.
“Mara!” he cries. “What’s wrong?”
I wheel on him, furious.
“What did you say to him? What did you say to Arthur?”
Cole grabs me by the shoulders, forcing me to stop. I was running away from him down the tree-lined street, and I’m still torn between the impulse to shout at him or flee.
My life is hurtling down this new path, and I don’t know if I want it. It looks like a dream, but it’s mixed up with a nightmare.
Cole’s looking at me with his beautiful face set in an expression of concern, but I know what he is, I know what he’s done. Am I insane to think he cares about me?
Arthur does. But now Arthur is pushing me away because there’s no place for my new life in my old. I can’t be the Mara I always was, poor and desperate, and this new Mara, replete with money and success.
Cole forces me to look at him. Into those dark eyes that have always been the real window inside of him.
“Why do you hate when I talk to Arthur? Why are you worried what I’ll say to him? Or him to me?”
My face crumples up. I cover it with my hands, ashamed.
“I don’t know,” I sob. “I’m not used to people saying nice things about me.”
Cole wraps his arms around me, pulling me close against his chest. He’s warm and strong, his heart a metronome that never falters.
He tilts my chin up so I’ll look at him. So I’ll know he’s telling the truth.
“Mara, I will never tear you down to other people. I will never degrade you in their eyes. I want to build you up, do you understand that?”
I never knew until this moment that I believed every conversation about me had to be negative. It had to be an airing of all my mistakes, all my flaws. What else could they talk about?
“I thought you told him to fire me,” I admit.
“Why would I do that? We made an agreement. You can work here as long as you want, if you don’t mind me camping out in the corner. I’ll admit, it’s not just to protect you. I have to be around you. I’m addicted to you. You fuel me, you light me up inside. Just knowing you’re in the house enlivens me. I can’t go back to the way I was before. I’m afraid of it.”
I’ve never heard Cole talk this way before. I’ve never seen his face so naked, so exposed. Not blank and emotionless—raw and confused. I look in his eyes and I see that he’s telling me the truth: he’s afraid of losing me.
No one has ever been afraid of losing me.
No one wanted me in the first place.
I turn my face back into Cole’s chest, letting his arms envelop me. Letting him hold me tight.
“I don’t want to go back either,” I say.
That night, Cole takes me to Betsy’s party at her Jackson Street gallery.
I squirm nervously in the passenger seat of the car. I’m worried we’re going to see Shaw tonight.
“Maybe he won’t come,” Cole says. “That cop’s still poking around. He came to the studio this morning, did I tell you that?”
I shake my head.
“Janice didn’t let him upstairs, but he made such a nuisance that Sonia had to come talk to him. He’s insisting on meeting with me later this week.”
“Meeting with you?” I frown. “What for?”
“He pretended like it was all ticking boxes. But I’m pretty sure he’s running his own investigation, separate from what the SFPD thinks they’re doing.”
I know Cole has been keeping tabs on it all through a casual acquaintance in the vice department.
I remember Officer Hawks. I remember his perfectly polished shoes, his neat haircut and black-framed glasses. This is a man who ticks boxes. But also a man who notices small details and doesn’t leave a job half-done.
“He’s perceptive,” I tell Cole. “Not like that first idiot that interviewed me. Don’t underestimate him.”
“I don’t underestimate anyone,” Cole says. “I’m not as arrogant as you think.”
“But you don’t think Shaw will be here tonight.”
Cole shrugs. “If he’s smart, he’s laying low. And besides, he killed four girls, one more than usual. He should be satiated.”
I don’t like Erin being grouped in as one of the four, like she’s just another grape on the stem shoveled into Shaw’s mouth. Erin had talent—she made watercolors so beautiful you could weep. She was funny and blunt. She loved to tease me and Frank, but never to the point of actually hurting our feelings.
She loved her life, and Shaw had no fucking right to take it from her.
I’m sure all those other girls were just as unique, just as wonderful, if only I’d had the chance to know them.
“I want that cop to catch him,” I say. “I want him to rot in a cell for a hundred years.”
Cole doesn’t bother to reply. We both know his opinion on the subject.
We’re pulling up to the gallery. The line stretches all the way down the street. People crane toward the windows, several girls trying to take pictures through the glass.
“Why is it so busy?” I ask Cole. It was supposed to be a cocktail party, nothing out of the ordinary.
Cole marches right up to the doors. He’s probably never waited in a line in his life.
Betsy Voss waves us inside. She’s bouncing with excitement, her body as buoyant as her bouffant of lacquered hair.
“Come in, come in!” she trills. “You’ve got to see this, Cole. You’re going to love it!”
The reason for her excitement, and everyone else’s, immediately becomes apparent.
The entire gallery space is filled top to bottom, wall to wall, with a brilliant technicolor spiderweb. The thick strands are woven up and down, all around, with large enough gaps between that the guests can walk through, clambering in and under the installation. You’re forced to interact with it, to grip and touch the thick ropes. The puffy, loose-woven wool manages to look sticky and dripping, but also soft and enticing. The eye-searing shades of magenta, lemon, and teal are so vivid and wet that the strands might have been spray-painted via some sort of pressure-cannon.
The aggressive color envelops you, making your eyes burn and your head spin. You’re trapped inside a rainbow prism that seems to go on and on forever, disorienting and intoxicating.
Cole stares around at the installation, not touching anything.
We both know the architect of this piece. The signature colors give it away. But it’s nothing I could have imagined from him.
“Guess he’s not laying low,” I murmur to Cole.
Cole is unusually silent. I think I know the reason why.
Cole’s disdain for Shaw has been apparent to me since before I ever met either of them. He’s never spoken of Shaw’s work with any level of respect.
But for the first time, Shaw has created something truly impressive. Something even Cole can’t deny.
It’s slapping us right in the face.
Marcus York comes bustling up to Cole, his frizzy orange hair puffing out on both sides like a clown wig, an impression not helped by York’s short legs and too-tight waistcoat stretched across his large belly.
“Oh ho, Cole, someone’s putting you on notice!”
“What?” Cole snaps irritably.
“This is Shaw’s bid for the sculpture in Corona Heights Park! If chosen, he’ll do a larger version of this. And I haven’t even received your design yet. The deadline is this week …”
“I know the deadline,” Cole hisses.
“Well, better hurry,” York says, his eyes glinting wickedly. “You’ll have to come up with something good to beat this …”
York hurries away again, probably spurred by the murderous look on Cole’s face.
My own feelings of repulsion are so strong that I find it hard to speak. I feel exactly as Shaw intended: enveloped in this web, trapped by it, screamed at from all sides.
Cole says, “He would never have had the confidence to do something like this before.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, turning to look at Cole’s black stare.
“Everything Shaw has ever made is commercial.” Cole gestures around at the brilliant, dripping ropes. “You can’t sell this. It’s an experience.”
I nod slowly. “He’s leveling up.”
As if summoned by those words, Alastor Shaw himself materializes, striding toward us.
He navigates the web with confidence, easily maneuvering his bulk through the fluorescent strands.
Shaw glows with health and happiness. His golden hair, rich tan, and shining white teeth beam at us. His shoulders seem a mile wide as he stretches his arms open, greeting us in his booming voice.
“Mara! Cole! So glad to see you!”
He’s so loud that a dozen people turn to observe our meeting. Camera flashes wink at us. Everyone loves a tête-à-tête between their two favorite rivals.
We’re frozen in place. Trapped in his web. Watching the spider approach, grinning at us both.
“Cole.” Shaw slaps Cole on both shoulders, with such a loud sound that it feels like a detonation between us. “My oldest friend. Look at you. You know the thing I love about you? You’re unchanging. Your principles unwavering. That must be what Mara loves about you, too.”
While I still don’t know everything about the dynamic between these two, I understand the barb all too well.
Shaw abducted me as a provocation. To try to tempt Cole into breaking his own rules.
And it worked. God, how it worked. Better than Shaw ever could have dreamed.
Cole is breaking every rule for me, and me for him.
We’ve ensnared each other, more deeply than Shaw could ever have dreamed.
Cole is changing. And Shaw is mocking Cole’s pretensions of discipline and stability. I see how his words dig under Cole’s skin.
Still, Cole stands silent—it’s too true to refute.
Now Shaw turns toward me. It’s my turn for a blast of his smug sarcasm.
“Mara,” he says, his face twisted up in an expression of mock sorrow. “I heard about your friend. Erin, wasn’t it? You know she and I had a fling once. She was quite the wildcat.” He winks at me. “You know what I mean.”
His pretend pout has turned into a lascivious grin.
I am boiling with anger. Shaking with it.
How fucking dare he talk about Erin to me. How dare he stand here, flushed with happiness and triumph. Gloating right to my face, in front of everyone.
I look at Cole, expecting him to say something. Expecting him to cut Shaw down to size with some devastating retort.
He’s silent, the garish colors of Shaw’s web reflecting on his pale face, in his dark eyes.
For the first time, Cole has no response. Because for the first time, Shaw truly does have the upper hand.
Raising his voice a little louder so everyone can hear, Shaw says to me, “And don’t worry, Mara. I forgive you for pointing the finger at me. You must have been in a terrible mental state, after how brutally your friend died, in agony. What you must have felt, finding her there in your bed … No hard feelings from me, it’s all water under the bridge.”
All his shots fired, and every one landing right on target, Shaw gives us one last aggressive, “Good to see you both,” and strolls away.
His departure feels like a vise around my skull finally releasing. I can breathe again, but I’m shaking harder than ever.
I’m sick. Furious. Choking on everything I wanted to shout at Shaw that I had to stuff down inside instead.
Everything about him enrages me, from his taunts to his gloating grin. Even now I can hear the excited babble of guests interacting with Shaw’s vast, triumphant installation.
Why should Shaw get to experience a night like this when he’s taken so many lives and caused so much pain for everyone else? He doesn’t deserve this.
Cole looks at me. “Are you ready to kill him yet?”
My fingers itch with violent impulses. My mind runs wild, too far and too fast for me to rein it in.
I mutter, “I’m damn sure getting closer. Right now, I might be angry enough to do it. But you told me what it does to a person. It changes you. Breaks you away from humanity.”
“Good,” Cole hisses, jerking his head toward the throngs of people fawning around Shaw. “Why do you want to be like them? A blind fucking sheep?”
I can’t take my eyes off Shaw, who stands surrounded by admirers, bathed in his own private golden glow.
This motherfucker killed my friend, and don’t forget, he abducted me too, cut my wrists, pierced my fucking nipples. He’s living flagrantly, joyfully, rubbing it right in our faces. He can kill anyone he wants, do anything he wants.
“I want revenge,” I mutter. ”But I don’t want to take it. I don’t want to give in to it. I said I’d always rise above, I swore it.”
For the longest time after I left my mother’s house, I was tormented by anger. I had run away from her and Randall, but the memories of everything they’d ever said to me, done to me, came along with me, jammed in my head. I couldn’t get them out.
The longer I was away from her, the more I realized how wrong it all was. How monumentally fucked up.
I wanted them to pay.
My mother’s always gotten away with everything. CPS came to our house, summoned by teachers who reported the bruises on my body, the lack of food in my lunch. My mother cleaned the house and bought groceries for a week until they went away again. She was pulled over multiple times for DUIs, she got the fines reduced or charges dropped on technicalities, on overcrowded dockets, by begging and pleading and deploying her best sob stories.
She brought men into my life and me into theirs. Not just Randall—a succession of assholes of every flavor: drug dealers, ex-convicts, even a fucking neo-Nazi who pushed hand-printed copies of American Renaissance and The Daily Stormer into my hands.
While Randall wasn’t the first one who put his hands on my mother (or on me), and some of them went so far as to shove a gun in her face or push her down a flight of stairs, the devastation she wreaked in their lives was always greater than anything they did to her.
She’s sailed through life unpunished, unrepentant.
The worst people are free to maim and defame however they like. There is no justice. There is no fairness.
Cole and I had intended to stay at the party for several hours, to network with the dozens of Cole’s acquaintances all around us, but neither of us can stand Shaw’s malevolent glee, or the omnipresent discussion of his work. To say nothing of the technicolor spiderweb wrapped all around us.
We leave a few minutes later.
We’re both silent on the drive back to the house, Cole gripping the wheel with a rigid expression, and me replaying every taunt Shaw threw at me.
You know we had a fling once …
Don’t worry, Mara, I forgive you …
You must have been in a terrible mental state …
The moment we step inside, into the dark, cool interior of the house, the tension between us snaps. Cole jumps on me and me on him.
He tears off the deep plum gown I was wearing, ripping the straps so that the expensive beading scatters across the hardwood floor.
I attack him back just as hard, yanking open his shirt, ripping the material, losing the buttons.
We’re kissing each other with more than passion. We’re exorcising our anger, our resentment, our fear, and our rage.
It’s not directed at Cole and it’s not directed at me. It’s a dark, swirling energy between us. A bitterness that has to burn out before it consumes us both.
Cole hasn’t even got my dress all the way off when he throws me over the arm of the couch and takes me from behind. He wraps his hand up in the long rope of my hair, jerking my head back, using it as reins while he mounts me and rides me hard.
He’s fucking me ruthlessly, roughly, the slap of his hips against my ass punctuated by actual slaps from his hand.
“More,” I moan. “Harder.”
I deserve this.
My guilt over Erin can only be assuaged by punishment. I want to be spanked harder, faster, meaner. I need the sadist in Cole. I need the psychopath.
And Cole obliges.
He forces me down on my knees, the back of my head against the arm of the couch. He shoves his cock into my mouth, my head pinned, no way to escape.
He holds my head between both hands, fucking my mouth. His cock is iron-hard and relentless, tunneling into my throat. I’m choking on it, drooling around it, trying to steal gasps of breath before he drills into me again.
There is something so satisfying in this. Something that I deeply need, that I’ve never been able to ask for before.
The more I come to trust Cole, to believe that he won’t actually hurt me, the more I want him to push the line.
This is the broken, fucked up part of myself. The part that’s furious over every time that I was hurt or used, but still craves the freedom to seek out roughness and even violence when I want it, on my terms.
I’m a tree that grew in cruel wind, twisted and bent by it. Sex and violence, passion and intensity, are inextricably entwined for me. I can’t have one without the other. Right or wrong doesn’t come into it. I am the way life made me.
Only this satisfies: biting, clawing, scratching, struggling. Cole and I fuck on the couch, on the floor. He slams me up against the wall, bodily lifting me off the ground.
I need to experience his strength, his power, his ruthlessness, because that’s what I need in a man. It’s the only way I feel safe. He has to terrify me so I know he’ll terrify everyone else. I’ve never met a real hero, I don’t think they exist. Only a monster can protect me.
We’re fucking in the dark so we can unleash the demons inside of us.
Anguished sounds come out of me: sometimes sobbing, sometimes begging for more.
Our clothes are all gone now, torn to ribbons on the floor. Cole’s back is a mass of scratches as if he’s been whipped, his skin under my nails. His teeth marks print my shoulders and my breasts.
Still I moan in his ear, “Don’t stop. I need more …”
“You fucking lunatic, I’ll kill you,” Cole snarls. “You don’t know what I have in me …”
“Show me. You promised to show me.”
He throws me down on the floor, so hard that all the air slams out of me and I see stars on his ceiling.
He climbs on top of me, our bodies slick with sweat. It’s dripping down from the inky tips of his hair, from the sharp planes of his jaw. It splashes on my face and my breasts. I open my mouth to taste the salt on my tongue, I lick it off his throat. I want his sweat and his cum all over me. I want to be filthy.
He rams his cock inside me. The harder he fucks me, the harder he gets. His cock is on fire, I feel it burning all the way up inside me. My wetness could be pussy or blood. I don’t fucking care anymore.
I look up into his face and I see the naked Cole, that real, true creature. The devil himself. Eyes as black as pits, always burning. Face as beautiful as sin. Mouth forever hungry, swallowing me whole.
This is Cole unleashed. Full of fury and passion and hunger. His control was always an illusion. The real Cole takes what he wants.
He’s taking me here and now. Pounding me into this floor. Fucking me mercilessly.
And still he wants more. I can see it in those eyes. He wants something from me that I still haven’t given.
His hands close around my throat.
At first I think he’ll only squeeze for a moment, the way he’s done before: cutting off blood flow so my head spins and my pussy throbs. Turning sex into delirium.
This time he doesn’t stop. He only squeezes harder.
“Stop,” I gasp. Then, more frantic, “Stop!”
The word comes out in a croak. My throat is too constricted for speech. No air, no blood can get through.
Still he chokes me.
He’s looking down into my face, his eyes dark and pitiless.
I try to knock his arms away, but they might as well be iron bars welded in place. His hands close relentlessly, real pressure now, real weight.
Black moths flutter into view: first one, then two, then dozens. Blocking out my sight.
I’m hitting at his arms, scratching at them, clawing. Trying to tear his fingers off my throat.
I’m too weak and he’s too strong. I’m helpless in his grasp, floating, slamming back into my body, floating up again.
Now Cole speaks and I can’t see his lips moving, but I hear that low, insistent voice burying into my brain:
“This is what it will feel like if you wait for Shaw to finish the job. This is what it will feel like when he’s on top of you. This is what it will feel like to die as a victim.”
“Stop it! Stop fucking around!”
The words are a rasp, a whisper.
It doesn’t matter if he hears them or not: Cole isn’t fucking around. He’s never been more serious.
He chokes me harder. Fucks me harder. Holds me there while he beats the lesson into me.
“This is your way, isn’t it? Hoping for mercy? Never fighting back? Trying to do the right thing? You want to be a good person … good people die every day, Mara. Goodness never saved them.”
I’m clawing at his arms, desperate and dying. Black moths carry me away …
He’s looking down into my face, as cruel as Shaw as he taunts me. “Do you want to be a victim, or you want to be a fighter? I thought you were a fighter, Mara?”
I am fighting, I’m hitting him with all my strength but it’s not enough, I’m only a girl, a skinny girl, it will never be enough against a man …
I hate that I’m small. I hate that I’m weak.
The anger, the hurt, the goddamn fucking unfairness wells up inside of me. I’m the volcano now, I’m the fucking lava.
It all bursts out of me in a howl so raw, so animalistic that I don’t even realize that Cole has let go of my throat. I’m screaming right in his face:
“I HATE HIM! I HATE HIM! I HATE THEM ALL! I WANT THEM ALL FUCKING DEAD!!!!”
I’m sitting up now, I don’t know when that happened.
My throat is raw, my shrieks still echoing through the house.
I finally fucking snapped.
Cole watches me, calm and satisfied.
He got what he wanted.
I wait for the guilt and shame to wash over me, but I feel nothing. Only the hot throbbing of my throat with every frantic heartbeat.
Cole lays his hand on my head, gently stroking my hair.
“It’s alright, Mara,” he says. “It’s always better to tell the truth. Lie to the world, but not to yourself.”
