Chapter I
I
“Just stop. ”
Alice’s voice is a knife, slicing through the hotel room.
Lottie trails off and the silence that settles in her wake is somehow even worse. Three bodies, and no heartbeats, no movement, no sound save the constant, steady whisper of the shower through the wall.
Alice is sitting, knees drawn to her chest, on the hotel floor, and Ezra’s slouching in a chair, and Lottie is in exactly the same place as when she started, perched at the foot of the bed, her mind and face unreadable, unlike Colin, or Hannah, or the man in the nice car, whose thoughts and wants spilled out into the air like steam, so thick she could see and smell and taste them.
But whatever Lottie’s feeling now, she’s found a way to keep it to herself.
Ezra too, his expression steady, his mind a quiet blank, and Alice knows that her own head is probably wide open, all her fear and anger and confusion clouding up the room like smoke, but she doesn’t care.
Let them hear what she is thinking.
“Sabine seduced you,” says Alice. “Is that it? You fell for her, and she stole you away. And somehow, that’s enough of an excuse. Because she made you what you are? She hurt you. So you hurt me. And it’s all just some cruel cycle?”
Hurt people hurt people, she’s heard the words a hundred times. But Lottie is shaking her head, a slow, metronomic movement, side to side.
“No,” she says, rubbing her eyes. “No, you aren’t listening.”
“Why should I?” snaps Alice, surprised by her own anger, not because it’s there—it always is—but because it’s spilling out.
For years, she’s held it like a coal inside her chest, a searing heat that she keeps swallowed so it only hurts herself.
But she can’t contain it anymore, she doesn’t want to, shouldn’t have to, what’s the point?
“Why should I care about an old love story, Lottie? I want to know why you did what you did to me, not—”
But just then someone knocks.
Alice cuts off sharply, and they all look to the door, but it’s Ezra who stands, who goes to answer it, and it’s like a seal breaking.
Alice comes unstuck, rising from the floor on legs that should be stiff, but aren’t, and Lottie stands and slips into the bathroom.
Alice catches a glimpse of the woman, still standing in a daze beneath the showerhead, her chin tipped back and her eyes shut, as if lost inside a private storm.
Alice watches, and marvels at how gently Lottie guides the woman from the shower, how tenderly she feeds her limbs into a plush white robe, how carefully she glides the wet hair out from beneath the collar and sits her on a padded stool, crouches down so they are eye to eye when she tells her she’s wandered into the wrong room.
The woman blushes in embarrassment, and hurries to her feet, confusion streaked through the steam-filled air around her. How silly she feels as she rushes out, past Alice, and past Ezra.
And just like that, the woman’s gone, she’s free, she’s still alive, and Alice fights back a petty rage.
(It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair.)
Even though she knows deep down there’s nothing fair about life, the give and take, the luck of the draw, knows that it isn’t the woman’s fault for getting out, away, when she herself did not.
Ezra’s still standing in the open door, talking to someone in the hall. The barista, Alice thinks, the one from White Thorn Black Roast. He reaches out and takes a thermos from her outstretched hand.
And then the door is closed, and it is just the three of them again.
Alice sinks into a crouch, fingers clutching at her knees, and Lottie resumes her place on the corner of the bed, and Ezra unscrews the thermos top.
“Delivery,” he says by way of explanation as he swipes three glasses from the bar. “Long night. And getting longer.”
He pours, the contents viscous, red, and at some point, Alice knows, she’ll stop being so startled by the sight of blood, but right now, it still hits her like a blow to the face. The shock, the recoil, and worst of all, the want, like the world is shrinking to a cup-sized point.
Ezra hands a glass to Alice, offers one to Lottie, too, but she declines, cheek twitching away, as if that’s easy, as if everything inside her isn’t yawning open at the sight, and Alice remembers what he said, on the walk to the Taj, about hunger, and how to live with it, and she thinks maybe, maybe she can resist the urge to drink.
But then Ezra lifts his glass toward Alice in a small, imaginary toast, tips it back, and Alice loses that fight before it starts, and from the moment it touches her lips to the moment she swallows, she feels a little better, a little calmer, a little saner, tries to make the feeling last, but it’s already gone, and all that’s left is the echo on her tongue, and a hole that seems even wider in its wake, and she wishes she hadn’t even tried to fill it, and she knows that if Ezra refilled the glass, she’d do it again, and she hates Lottie more than ever, for making her this way, and that thought must be ringing through the room, because Lottie clears her throat, and looks down at the fingers knotted in her lap.
“I know you’re mad,” she says. “I know you want me to skip ahead.”
She swallows, and looks up at Alice, small red tears clinging to her lashes.
“But to understand what happened to you,” she says, “you need to know what happened to me first.”