Chapter 7
7
HER
A ny number of thoughts knocked chaotically around in my head as I waited for him to react to the news, but the one that ultimately settled was that if I hadn’t gotten in trouble, the highlight of my evening would have been debating between hot pink and blush pink gel polishes at an Old Town nail salon, followed by campus gossip, half an overstuffed burrito, and maybe downing some cheap pink bubbly in Juliette’s dorm room.
Instead, in its place, I had a riot of images and sensations: My tears, not planned, then—yes, dammit, this was happening—my plunge into his arms, into the deep end—before I could talk myself down. Then, as if that weren’t enough: A broad, calloused hand trailing lightly down my spine, hesitant at first, then more confident as he realized, maybe, how much I really wanted it there, igniting every nerve ending along the way like tiny little bliss-filled explosions. My hot, teary cheek pressed right up against the thin T-shirt, concealing all those layers of warm skin and hard muscle, and underneath all of that , a heart that was— it couldn’t be just my imagination—pounding just as fast as my own.
But now it was over, and I wasn’t sure it was ever coming back. Although I was willing to consider that the guy responsible for all of it had been so thrown off balance by what I just told him that he might need a minute to decide whether he’d ever dare to try again.
Either way: Gel polish zero, getting grounded a million.
“Did you know she’s supposed to be free?” I asked. “Your sister?”
“I know,” he said slowly as if he still couldn’t believe he was even discussing this at all, let alone with me . “She told me right before she went dark on Palaestrio,” he added, using the name of the secret communication network I had learned about only a few hours ago after one well-placed phone call. “Which, by the way, you aren’t supposed to know about.” His voice still sounded flat and distant.
“Apparently, you do if, like my professor, you’re a card-carrying member of whatever’s left of the SLA. She explained to me how it’s done but that the technology is different here than what you used in New Europe. Your sister—Maeve, that is—may have tried to contact you before this, and you never even knew about it. Anyway, my professor gave me this. It’s just a cheap phone, but she told me it’ll give you access to the network. You can only use it a couple of times before you have to throw it away.” I pulled it out of my schoolbag and placed it on the counter in front of him.
“But where’s my sister?” he demanded. “Did she say?”
“It sounds like someone took her, but she doesn’t know where. We only exchanged a few words. I don’t think she was supposed to be on whatever device she was using, so I don’t know how reliable it’s going to be. But it’s something to go on, don’t you think?” I asked triumphantly.
That didn’t last.
“Why did you do this for me?” He sounded suspicious and even a little bit angry, and I deflated. I hadn’t expected a medal or anything, but what I had hoped to see on his face was very different from these opaque clouds and the traces of old wounds they hid.
“Curiosity, at first,” I said softly. “You wouldn’t tell me anything, so I went looking on my own.”
“Curiosity,” he said. “Right. Okay. So you want to use me as a case study for your research paper on slavery? Get a gold star from this do-gooder professor of yours? Sure. What do you want to know?”
I backtracked, remembering Erica Muller’s advice. “I—you don’t have to tell me anything. I just?—”
“No, really, what? You ready for another fucking story time, princess? How about we start at the very beginning?”
“I—”
“With how my first owner passed around my mom like a party favor to his friends, one of whom was almost certainly my so-called father? Or that I got put to work when I was three, only to get caned every time I dropped something so I could, in my master’s words, ‘learn what my life would be?’ Is that enough? Or if not, how about that a few years later, he gave me to his son to be his valet, but the son was a sociopathic freak who lit his younger brother on fire and got me flogged for it? Or that a few years after that, he tried to rape my sister and when my mom and I tried to protect her, he chained me up in the shed and raped my mom instead, right in front of me, causing her to later die of a miscarriage they refused to treat? And then I flipped out, went at his head with a garden spade, and would have killed him right there if the police hadn’t come to cattle prod me into submission? He died a week later, by the way, and I’m not fucking sorry about it.”
I clamped down on my lower lip as he barreled on without a pause, inhaling another tear I knew was forming in a hot pit deep down behind my eyes.
“The only thing I am sorry about is that the last time my sister and I saw each other was from separate pens at a public auction, after they sold us both to punish me.” The hard, cold edge to his voice didn’t change at all, even as he watched me stand there feeling ill. “Oh, and as a bonus epilogue, maybe you want to hear about how I lied and schemed and bribed and called in every favor I was owed from everyone I knew to make sure your dad bought me, to get here and look for her because I couldn’t forgive myself if I lost her, and by favors, I’m not talking about driving them to the airport. So there’s that, too. So what do you think? Great material, right? Think it’ll get you an A? If not, I’ve got more.”
It all felt like watching a horror film in slow motion. Of course I already knew intellectually that, at not yet twenty, he’d been through several lifetimes of hell. But to hear them fall out of his mouth like that, hard and brutal and unembellished? It felt like taking the blows myself .
“If you knew your sister was here, why didn’t you tell me?” I asked quietly.
“ Tell you? I don’t know,” he said incredulously. “Gee, I don’t know, you think the fact that you’re my master’s daughter might have had something to do with it?”
There it was. I didn’t trust you, in other words. You were the enemy. Maybe you still are.
But he wasn’t done yet.
“Let me make this as clear as I can,” he continued. “My sister has nothing to do with you. None of this has anything to do with you. And it won’t, as long as you and I are … who we are. It never will. It never can. Stick to what you know. Shopping, manicures, Daddy’s yacht in the Caribbean, and your advanced cosmetic dermatology course, or whatever the fuck it is you’re studying. We’ll both be a lot better off.”
“ God , you can be such an ass! I’m not studying dermatology, and I’m sorry!” I shouted, too loudly, though I wasn’t apologizing for what I really wanted to apologize for: namely, his entire life. “I’m sorry I did anything, okay? I shouldn’t have gotten involved.” I could not cry again. Because I was pretty sure he was not going to comfort me this time.
“No, you shouldn’t have.” He crossed his arms in front of his chest again in that closed-off posture, an armor that nothing could pierce.
“I was trying to help you.”
“Am I not getting through to you, slow learner? I. Don’t. Need. Your. Help.”
“Fine.” I snatched up the aloe and the phone selfishly. “I’ll just take these back too, as long as you enjoy suffering so much.”
“Fine.”
And that was where, of all places, things stood when the front door was flung open, then slammed shut. For real.
“Louisa, where are you?” my mother’s voice slurred.
“Fuck,” we said in unison.
She was back from women’s league night at the country club, boozily trilling out my name again as she lurched toward the kitchen.
With another familiar, panicked exchange of glances, we sprang into action. He, one step ahead as usual, filled a glass with ice and sparkling water from the refrigerator and handed it to me. I took it and met my mother at the door of the kitchen, then guided her carefully away from the kitchen and into the living room and settled her on the sofa with the water next to her. Certain he’d had enough time to do whatever he had to do, I turned to guiltily go—but my mom’s icy-cool hand pinned me to the leather cushion.
“We hardly ever talk anymore, Louisa.”
That was because we had nothing interesting to talk about—at least not anything, as of tonight, that wouldn’t cause her to keel over in horror. Luckily, though, she didn’t even want to talk about me. She just wanted inane chatter about everything from the latest celeb gossip to my father’s golf game to her favorite story about that time I threw up on the dentist when I was six, ha ha ha.
Honestly, the best way to deal with her when she was in this state was to keep her talking. If I could just do that, she would eventually run out of steam and drift off to sleep. It was generally a slick and successful method.
Tonight, however, she was on a particularly good roll. I laughed and nodded and agreed at all the right moments, while secretly dying of agony to know what was going on in the kitchen. In my haste, I’d left the aloe and the phone. Had he taken them? Had he left them? Had he left me ? Not that there was anything to leave, but?—
The light was still on. He wasn’t allowed to go to bed until four, and until then, he was supposed to find things to do around the house to make himself useful, or pretend to. Was there any chance he was standing with his back up against the other side of the door, hanging on our every word? Or had he given up in disgust, retreated back into the pantry or the garden, and was now just waiting for us to leave so he could be alone with his thoughts and figure out how to get to his sister without my incessant fuckery ruining everything?
“So how are things going with Corey?” Mom demanded. “Are things moving at all?”
I moaned and leaned back on the headrest. “Can we not talk about this? I’ve got my hands full with school, and?—”
“Okay, then,” she said, squinting at me through the haze of sparkling water she’d spritzed about the room in a fine mist. “But I know you’re spending time with someone,” she continued. “I can always tell. Moms can.”
My eyes darted back and forth like a corralled mustang. I was pretty much praying for death at this point, and I couldn’t imagine the boy in the kitchen was in a much more enviable position.
“You’ve been quiet. Secretive.” Mom kept poking me rhythmically with one of her sculpted coral nail tips. “But inside, you’re glowing. I see it.” Poke, poke, poke. “So there’s no use denying it, sweetie. What’s his name?”
“Mom, please!”
This had to end. Anything I said, and he heard, had the chance of destroying any chance of him ever speaking to me again, at least as anything other than an enemy. One of them .
“Okay, fiiiine,” Mom murmured, her eyelashes fluttering. “Be like that. Just give me one word. And then I’ll leave you alone.” She set her glass down clumsily on the edge of a coaster on the coffee table, and I pushed it back into place just in time.
“One word?”
“One word. If you had to describe this boy in one word,” my mother said, pleased with herself, her slow, sly grin reappearing in the circle of light the lamp made, cutting through the blanket of darkness that hung over the house, silent except for the mantel clock. “What would it be?”
One word, and this could end. It came to me instantly, of course.
“Brave.”