Chapter 20
The house feels sensitized, sentient. As though it knows I’m here.
I wait, and it seems like the Japanese maple is waiting, too, spiky leaves poised spread-handed above me. The night holds its silver breath.
I hear footsteps—he’s alive!—hear him coming down the stairs, crossing to the door. My relief alarms me; I stuff it down, a useless sock, to the bottom of the hamper. It hasn’t been long enough anyway. He opens the door without hesitating, like he already knows what he will find.
I can’t surprise him anymore.
He towers over me in the doorway—larger, it seems, every time now—the hall behind him a tangle of shadow. His hair is messy, he was in bed; he’s wearing a soft T-shirt and loose sweatpants, but his eyes on me look fully awake.
There is a moment of total silence, and the air between us thrashes, seethes.
He is so mouthwatering, so horrible and beautiful, I want to tear something apart. Maybe him. My heart heats up, beats between my thighs. I can’t contain this; I can’t manage it at all.
We move at the same time, slamming together at the threshold, and he lifts me up, hands burning into my skin even through my clothes, and hauls me inside. He kicks the door shut and then we are against it.
This time he takes his glasses off himself, and my sweater (my shirt with it), and I am briefly grateful for the way the slippers fall off my feet.
His hands are all over me, rough; running down my sides, my back, seizing my hips.
I am biting his chest through his shirt—I am vampiric—I wrestle it off.
And then he has flipped me around, he is behind me, his mouth on my neck, his hands on my breasts.
I fall back into him—his bulk, his breadth is a wall, unmovable. I strain forward, twisting, and he won’t let me go more than a matter of inches.
He doesn’t try to keep me quiet; there’s no one to hear. I am loud, I am feral.
In what seems like only moments, I am on my knees on the stairs.
I am forgetting the plan.
I think I can feel the place inside me where our powers meet: two waves, each swallowing the other, countervailing currents heaving, an elemental deadlock. This time, I don’t waver. I am not compromised enough to falter or weaken. My heart kicks imperviously in my chest.
He’s angry and desperate. “I hate you,” he tells me. “I hate you. You’re so— ” He wrenches his gaze off me, and I think for an absurd second that he was going to say “beautiful.”
“How many men have you killed?” he asks me.
“You can’t kill me,” he says, his voice ragged. “I’m not going to die.”
“Why— ” he gasps, panting. “Why.” And I understand what he’s asking.
Why did it have to turn out like this?
Why is it so good?
His hands linger on my waist. For a moment, he touches my jaw, my cheek, and his fingers are unintentionally gentle. They seem to want to stroke me; I can almost feel him restraining them.
He knows the answer.
It’s magic.
Is it only magic?
I can’t think, anyway.
“Get out,” he says immediately after, his voice flat. He’s already half dressed, the star pendant on his chest catching the faint light as he moves.
I stand up, shivering in air that feels colder now that his body isn’t warming me.
I step forward and put my open hand on his abdomen, stopping him in place.
We are still for a moment. I feel only halfway real, borderline euphoric, diluted by the dark, my surfaces turning fluid.
I can’t see reality well enough to identify its edges, its firm little details.
I have stepped into the shadowland, the literal gray area.
He looks down at my hand, his jaw tensing. Then his gaze slips upward, and again I feel it as though it has weight and heat. I feel his eyes reach for my face.
I think of his threat. To kill me if I don’t find Dick Face for him. I wonder what he’ll threaten next, since I’m still here.
I let my hand drift downward and the tension in his muscles ratchets up in instantaneous response. I can start the whole process again. I don’t like how much I want to.
For a second, he leans into my touch, then his hand closes over my wrist and he forcibly removes me from him.
“Leave,” he growls.
He bends down, whisks the clothes from the floor, shoves them at me.
Now Mr. Button is padding down the stairs. I appreciate his timing, it could’ve been much worse. He produces an inquisitive and croaking meow, nuzzles my shin. He’s an affectionate cat. A snuggler.
He heads over to Joel, moseying, rubs against his foot. Joel ignores him.
I pull on my underwear. Joel looks away.
“This is yours,” I say, untangling his pale shirt from my dark pants.
I resist the urge to press it quickly to my face and breathe in his concentrated scent.
Which would be especially absurd because he is standing right in front of me.
But he won’t let me press my face into him, that’s perfectly clear.
I shouldn’t want to.
I don’t want to.
He snatches the shirt from me, holds it against his chest. “Faster,” he orders. “Go.”
I don’t have to respect this. I can stay. I can make him look at me. I can break his will.
But I yank my shirt on, my sweater, my pants.
I shove my feet into the slippers, and step outside as he nearly pushes me onto the stoop.
I spin to look at him where he stands in the doorway, and there is something so pained in his face, something being drawn and quartered, being dragged to death.
One hand has drifted ever so slightly upward as though it might have, in another life, reached for me.
And then the door thunks shut, seals its lips.
The moon has retreated farther into the reaches of the sky, everything is blackish metallic and strange.
I can feel him on the other side of the door. I can hear him moving; he makes a short, anguished sound. He’s pacing, agitated. Something thuds—his arm or his head against a wall? I hold still as a chrysalis.
Minutes later, I hear him leave the entryway, go into the living room. It’s quiet for a moment, and then the deep, rich voice of the cello calls into the night. A dark, primal sound— rage and keening sadness in it.
He plays demandingly, the music rough and running, trying to force an answer from the silence around it. There is aggression under it, even the gentler parts, pulling at the soft air, carding it like tufts of wool.
I am held hostage, listening. And then I rescue myself. I need to leave. Something is turning in my stomach, at my center, viscera reshaping, my body attempting to remake itself from the inside out.
I can’t let it.
I break into a jog—I would run, but I never run. I should, though. I should run away and never come back.
* * *
Let me tell you about my brother, I text Joel, even though he’s probably still playing cello. He was good and kind. He was funny. He loved LOTR and Greek mythology and basically every nerdy fantasy story ever.
No response.
Standing in the middle of my bedroom, on a blank spot between pieces of furniture, under the clunky fan, I describe Grub, starting at the beginning.
His tragic, lonely life. The way he was tortured by his curse.
How we met—him pretending to be a college student even though he was just a little boy. He said he was majoring in “science.”
The fort he built with Nate, when they were friends, how he convinced Nate to alternate times with him in the same patch of woods so they’d both add pieces onto the structure, working together but apart.
He came up with so many creative ways for them to stay friends before Nate got depressed and started starving himself.
The girl he had a crush on, for whom he once wrote and illustrated an anonymous online graphic novel. It was about a wizard who had been cursed at birth and a warrior princess.
I can’t stop.
I write and write about Grub. I am crying.
I want to write a letter to Grub’s mother, but I know it won’t make sense to her. I don’t know what to do.
I swore to myself I would kill the monster who killed him.
I want to go back over there right now. I’m turned on, remembering. Maybe I never stopped being turned on. Maybe there isn’t an off anymore.
I have put the phone down, and I’m holding a book instead now. One from the stack on my dresser. A sweet love story I’ve read several times.
The woman can fix people’s problems by cooking them magical food.
She has long, lustrous hair, of course. The man is brokenhearted from his wife’s tragic death.
There is a scene where they finally have sex outside in her herb garden, and the flowers all start blooming even though it’s nighttime.
It’s very hot, and the whole point of the hotness is that they love each other desperately. That they will end up together.
I take a step toward the hall, the stairs.
No.
I’m nauseous.
I’m furious.
I drop the book. I kick it under the bed.
I hurry to the bathroom, try to shut the door quietly behind me. I crouch, heaving, over the fishy breath of the toilet’s open mouth, clutching the cold porcelain in the dim of the night-light plugged into the outlet above the sink. But I can’t bring anything up.
I’m doing what I said I would do, I tell myself. I am killing him.
I will kill him.
It will just take a few more times.
Especially now that I am actively using my power.
He’s much stronger than Adam, and Adam lasted five times, I remind myself again.
And then my stomach curls like a fist. I am picturing Adam above me in his bed: his dark hair falling in his face, the old-world scent of his apartment in the Tudor building with the ivy growing up it, the way he whispered to me, “Tell me what you want.” I’ve let myself forget. I’ve needed to forget.
Joel seems so sure that I killed Adam.
How can he be so sure?
If I did, though. And his mother died of a broken heart. And then I kill Joel. I will have killed most of an entire family.
I gag.
But it has to be.
A few more times.
A few more times.