Chapter 27 - Wolfson
I’ve never read Frankie’s journal, but I know it was written with my sharpies, the ink pressed too hard in some places, bleeding in others.
It started in the hills as one of my scrapbooks and mutated into a forensic case file. She even added hair samples from all the Strakh men. Short and curlies from me, thank you very much.
She wanted everything documented like a true crime investigation. Details about our gruesome childhood. Notes about the women Denver abducted and killed.
Her own kidnapping and torment was part of the unsolved mystery. Each day tallied like a prison sentence. Some entries precise. Others scrawled like she didn’t know if she’d have another chance to finish them.
But she did. She finished it before she escaped.
She sits beside me, cautious and patient. “Do you know what triggered you yesterday?”
A shiver skids through me as my mind tumbles back to Jag’s mouth against mine and his dick pulsing in my fist. The heat of him. The hardness of him. And worse… Wanting him.
I can still taste his come. The wrongness of it. The craving for more.
Desiring a man isn’t conceivable. Not with the memory of Denver’s depraved love, the stink of sweat and cruelty, and the pain… Christ, I’ll never forget that sickening, unbearable pain.
I don’t know where the line is between what I want and what was done to me. Every time I think about Jag, I relive Denver’s abuse.
So yeah. Kissing Jag, touching him, longing for him… All triggers.
Frankie isn’t asking for the gory details. Just an acknowledgment. So I give her a nod.
She nods back and sets the journal between us.
I don’t touch it.
“I wrote this to remember.” She strokes the cover.
“And to forget. I wrote it because there were days when I needed to prove to myself that I existed in sequence. This happened, then this, then this. I wrote it because there were things I couldn’t say to anyone, but they needed to be said.
” She swallows. “I wrote it because I was afraid if I didn’t, he’d win. ”
The he in our life doesn’t require a name. Even dead, he has one foot in the room.
I suppress a shiver. “Did you write about that day?”
There are so many I could be referencing but none more pivotal, haunting, or fatal than the day she killed Denver and I jumped off the cliff.
“Yeah, Wolf. I did.”
“You confessed to murder?” I whisper, horrified. “In writing?”
She gives a single nod.
“Bad idea, Frankieberry. If this fell in the wrong hands…”
She pushes it toward me, her eyes shimmering with trust.
Dammit.
I stare at the faded cover until it blurs, and I’m suddenly on the shower floor, the tile dark with icy water, my heart punching, punching, punching, trying to jailbreak my ribs. Then I see Dove’s silhouette crouched beside me, and I hear her whispered words.
You’re okay. I’m here. Breathing with you. Just breathing.
I feel the cancerous, unwieldy parts of me I need to amputate. Fear, rage, shame, and the one that’s growing harder to carry. My virginity.
That one belongs to Dove. But she deserves the whole story, not just the bits I’m willing to part with.
I return my attention to the book. The autobiography of a woman who murdered her captor and lived to write the ending.
Pinching the edge of the cover, I open it an inch, then another, and another, until the past rises out of the paper like breath on a cold day.
The first sentence I half-read speeds up my pulse. I close the book because if I don’t, I’ll fall into it and not sleep for a week.
“You don’t have to read it.” She touches my hand.
“It’s my story. The stupid brave parts and the brutal parts.
There are pages where I’m proud, when I was strong and fought hard and loved harder.
There are pages where I’m rotten, when I was mean and reckless and made bargains with the devil.
There’s grief, too. Constant, fathomless grief after we lost you on that cliff. ”
My face numbs, and my fingers go cold. I want to apologize, but it’s far too late for that.
Maybe reading about the pain I caused them is a start. Perhaps experiencing my suicide through her eyes is the only mercy I can offer.
I press my thumb to the cover until it hurts. “I’ll read it.”
I’ll read every page like penance. Not to pull pity from my death, but to stop acting like the worst thing I did was survive.
“There are parts you shouldn’t read.” She places her hand over mine on the book. “The messy, sexually graphic parts.”
“No shit?” I slide the book out of her reach because now, of course, I have to read it.
“I’m serious.” She tries to grab it back. “I describe your brothers’ anatomy in shameless, vivid detail.”
“Did you exaggerate size and stamina? Or did you keep it realistic?”
She groans. “Please, don’t read those parts.”
“Do you even know me?”
“Why did I say anything?” She drops her face in her hands.
“Hey.” I duck my head, trying to meet her eyes. “What’s a little brotherly porn shared between friends?”
Her face is still in her palms, but when I pry her chin up and angle it toward me, we’re locked, her eyes on mine, mine on hers.
We try. Frozen bones and fuckberries, we try to remain serious for the sake of this conversation. Her mouth tightens. My molars clamp together, but the longer we stare, the faster we crumble.
Her expression cracks first. A flutter at the corner of her lips. That’s all it takes to wrest a grin out of me. It splits across my face, lopsided and unguarded. Then we’re both grinning like assholes, shaking our heads, laughing without sound, and just being… Us.
“Wolf.” She says my name like a thought she’s been holding in her mouth to keep it warm.
“Hm?”
“I’m giving you my story because maybe it will help you tell yours.” She grabs the second book and stacks it on her journal. “This one is yours.”
I thumb it open and flip through the pages. They’re blank. Every damn one.
“Write your story.”
I bark a laugh and hate how it sounds. “I did, remember? It’s a dark comedy titled Already Dead.”
“And I said to rewrite it. Change the narrative. Remember?”
Yeah. That night, I told her I would live, that I would survive for her. I said it, knowing it was a lie. I’d already planned my dramatic exit.
But fate had other plans, and here we are.
I stare at her, processing her advice with better clarity than I had that night. Maybe I’ve matured, learned a thing or two since that jump off the cliff.
She wants me to write my story, put the past on paper. Words on a page won’t stare back at me with judgment. I can shape them, scrub them, cut the parts that don’t fit. Easier than saying it out loud and watching Dove’s face rearrange into pity or disgust in real time.
“Let’s say I follow your advice and let Dove read it. Then what?”
“Then you write the next chapter. In your head. Or on the page. Write the best damn story you can imagine for yourself. Then go out and live it.”
“What if my brain is an unreliable narrator? What if it edits out the parts where I deserve good things?”
“Then you remind it. Every day. With little stuff. Food. Warm showers. Letting people hug you. Reading a page. Writing a sentence. Making love to a pretty mechanic. Remind it that you aren’t where you were anymore.”
My mouth tastes like pepper and coffee and something like grief. I look down at the book, the cover darkening where my fingers sit, sweat seeping into the fabric.
The robe’s cuff brushes the edge of the cover, and for a second, I see my mother’s hand where mine is, the way she used to press herbs with her palm and tuck them into a tin.
I swallow hard enough it hurts. “I’m going to mess it up.”
“Probably.” She smiles. “But you’ll mess it up honestly. That’s a better story already.”
“Dove’s going to ask me things.”
“She might. Or she might not. She might just be there and hand you a wrench when you choke like an engine.”
“She won’t hand me the wrench. She’ll throw it at my head.”
“Sounds like a woman who belongs in our home.”
Our home.
The thought sends an avalanche down the inside of my ribs, and I breathe easier under it.
We sit with that a minute, the books between us.
Then I stand and pour more coffee, black and mean. The first sip is bitter enough to strip paint, fizzing on my tongue. I swallow and feel it hit my stomach like a small grenade, the good kind, the one that clears fog.
“What will you do now?” she asks, not as a command or a test. She trusts I have an answer.
Tattooing is a no-go today. I don’t want to see Jag until I come clean with his sister.
“I’ll bring food to Dove.” I shrug. “And take a shower.”
“And after?”
“I’ll… Read a page.” I glance at her journal. “Maybe two if the first one doesn’t eat my lungs.”
“Perfect.” She releases a slow breath as if I just saved a life. “And later, if you want, we can talk to Dr. Thurber about grounding exercises that don’t end with you emptying the hot water tank.”
“You mean, Dr. Freud. Because let’s be honest. He’s all but asked me to fingerpaint my mommy issues.”
She grins at the joke.
A grin that proves time passed, and we both survived.