38. Tor
TOR
There have only been two times in my life that I wasn’t sure what to do.
Both times have involved Cassie Pritchard.
When she first leaves, all I can do is rage and destroy, but that release is fleeting, and then I realize she’s getting away from me.
And this time, she might not come back.
I know I can drag her back if I must, but the idea that she won’t want to be with me anymore lands like a boulder in my gut. I’ve gotten so used to being loved by her, I can’t stomach the possibility that I’ve lost it.
I have to stop her from leaving.
I have to fix this now, before it’s too late.
I race down the stairs after her and fling open the front door just in time to see Cassie getting into the car I gave her.
She sees me and fires up the engine.
If I ran, I could reach the car, but she’ll have locked the doors, so I won’t be able to drag her out of it. All chasing her will do is further upset her.
It takes every bit of my self-control to stop myself.
My mind jumps to what else I can do. If I can’t get her out of the car, I can follow her, but it would take too much time to get my car out with all these fucking people here. She’ll be too far ahead for me to catch up to her, and I don’t know where she’s going.
She shouldn’t even be driving right now, not in her emotional state. It’s not safe, and if I chase her, that will only make it worse.
I have to let her leave. I can go after her, but I can’t have her distracted watching for me in the rearview mirror and risk something happening to her.
“Fuck,” I say, startling one of my mom’s friends who came in to get some air. “Sorry,” I mutter, then I close the door and head upstairs.
I go to my bedroom this time, then straight to my closet. I pull down my suitcase because that’s where I keep my Cassie computer when we’re not traveling.
I lay it on my bed and unzip it, taking out the laptop and headphone case, then I sit on my bed and get to work. She said Nina told her everything, so hopefully she had her phone with her.
She did.
I feel a touch of relief, but it’s premature, so I cut it off until I’ve heard exactly what Nina said.
Her purse was with her in Tim’s bedroom after the encounter with Nina, so I play that back too. I wish I had video so I could see, but I can hear her struggling, panicking, denying the thoughts as they hit her.
Then I come in and make everything worse.
That fucking sucks.
Once I’ve heard all I need to, I close that out and open the tracker to see where she went. I’m guessing she didn’t go back to her apartment since she knows I can easily get to her there.
I frown when I look at the map and see she drove to her mother’s house, then turned her phone off.
Maybe she just remembered I could track her with it, but I have a hunch she’s trying to throw me off. I can’t see her going back to her mom’s house, even if she doesn’t really have anywhere else to go. There’s no comfort for her there.
Fortunately, she’s in the Lexus, and I have a backup tracker on that, so I pull it up and see that my instincts were correct. She did drive to her mother’s house and shut off her phone, but she didn’t stay there. I open another window and type in the address she drove to afterward.
Shaley’s place. It’s a house she’s renting from her sister.
A house is easier than an apartment to get into if there’s resistance, so there’s that.
But I don’t know if Shaley lives there alone, or what Cassie is telling her right now. That complicates things.
My bedroom door opens, snagging my attention. I didn’t hear a knock, but I wouldn’t have with the headphones on. I remove them, and my mom tentatively pokes her head inside.
“Hi, honey. I heard Cassie left. Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I mutter.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“I’ll let you know.” I turn off the headphones since I don’t really need them anymore, then I close the computer and stand.
I’m about to go after her, but seeming to anticipate this, Mom says, “I think you should give her a little space.”
I don’t want to give her fucking space.
The more space she has, the farther away from me she can get.
“Let her calm down a little, then you can go talk to her if you still want to,” she advises. “Why don’t you come downstairs? The fireworks are about to start.”
Tim always liked fireworks.
I was supposed to watch them with Cassie, out on the water with my arms wrapped around her, my lips on her skin. It was supposed to be romantic.
But my mom is usually right about these kinds of things, and I’m not thinking clearly.
I guess my world can’t implode any more in the next fifteen minutes.
And I could use the time to think, anyway.
Cooler heads prevail, and instead of leaving the lake house, I head to the back deck and sit on the steps alone.
When the first explosion of color lights up the sky, I think of my brother.
How different tonight would have been if he’d been here.
How different everything was when he was here.
I loved my brother.
So did everybody else.
He was Dad’s first-choice heir.
Cassie’s first pick, too.
That was disappointing, but I don’t hold it against her. She didn’t really know me back then. She knows me now, and she likes what she sees… most of the time.
The first time my brother and I liked the same girl, it was Cassie Pritchard.
It was seventh grade.
He made a move first.
She rejected him.
Looking back, I don’t know if it was because she didn’t like him (as I thought at the time). I think it was because she wasn’t ready to like anybody. Cassie was a late bloomer. She didn’t start dating until years later, and by that time, Tim wasn’t thinking about her anymore.
I still was, but she didn’t even see me. It was a common occurrence. I was used to it by then, but it irked me more when it was her. Most girls were drawn to Tim before they had a chance to notice me, but I didn’t care what most girls did.
I cared when it was Cassie.
I wasn’t obsessed with her or anything, but she caught my attention back then and never really lost it. I always imagined she’d visit our lake house someday, and I always imagined it would be with me.
It wasn’t.
The second time my brother and I liked the same girl, it was Cassie Pritchard.
It was high school.
She was dating Russell Wilcox, but it seemed like their relationship was winding down. “I wonder if he’s fucked her yet,” Tim said one day, tossing a football in the backyard.
I wondered that, too.
Tim smirked. “I’m gonna invite her over this weekend.”
I shook my head, tossing the ball back. “Don’t do that.”
“Why not? She deserves to have a little fun, doesn’t she? Russell has micro dick energy. She can do better.”
It was like a boulder landed in my gut because I knew exactly who he had in mind, and it wasn’t only me being territorial. I knew my brother well enough to know he wouldn’t stay interested in Cassie and he’d end up treating her like shit.
He would also ruin my chances.
Once she got involved with him, she would never see me.
So, I had to make sure that didn’t happen.
I had to make sure Cassie Pritchard would never steal flirty fucking looks over her shoulder at my brother while I was sitting right next to her ever again.
Tricking her wasn’t hard. We’re identical twins, and Cassie is convinced she can tell us apart in person, but no one can. Not unless we want them to.
And that night, I didn’t want her to.
It needed to be Tim who attacked her so that eventually, once the dust settled, I could swoop in.
Only there ended up being a lot more dust—and a lot more damage—than I anticipated in the aftermath of that particular demolition.
Tim knew I raped her.
He wasn’t even shy about asking.
He knew if he didn’t rape her and someone who looked like him did, there was only one option.
“What the fuck, Tor?”
I shrugged, then I lied. “I was drunk. It was a mistake.”
It wasn’t a mistake. I knew exactly what I was doing, and I accomplished my mission, though with much more collateral damage than I intended.
Once Tim knew I’d been inside her, he never looked at Cassie that way again.
And, of course, she didn’t look at him that way, either.
He figured it was innocent—or drunken—confusion that she couldn’t tell us apart and thought he had been the perpetrator, and in my family, you don’t throw each other beneath the wheels of an oncoming bus.
It was decided quickly that since he was already the target of the accusations, he would bear the brunt of them.
Besides, he knew it wouldn’t be that bad.
People like us more than they like Cassie. They would want to believe us over her.
We had excellent lawyers working the case, and I used lube and a condom so I didn’t hurt her too much.
I didn’t know it would be her first time.
I figured she may have had sex with Russell until I felt the resistance, heard her wrenching cries when I shoved past it, and saw the blood on her thighs when I pulled out.
I was careful enough not to cause any excessive physical damage to her that she couldn’t prove it wasn’t a consensual act. Once it became clear that was the path we were taking, no one thought she would be masochistic enough to see it through.
Maybe she didn’t know then that the victim is the one who faces scrutiny when she speaks out, not the perpetrator.
She knows now.
We offered her a good sum of money at the start of it all, hoping to avoid the fight altogether, but my sweet Cassie didn’t settle like we thought she would.
She didn’t want money. She wanted justice, and she held on for dear life as she was dragged through every filthy puddle, certain that somehow justice would prevail.
I knew it wouldn’t, but I still felt bad for her when she lost.
She really deserved a win. After all, she was the only one telling the truth about what happened.
But people don’t always get what they deserve.
The loss crushed her.
I didn’t know how to approach her after that.
At the time, I didn’t realize how damaged she would be by what I did, and I thought once the dust settled, I would be able to find an opening.
I couldn’t.
Until that fateful night when I was sitting in my bedroom and I heard a gunshot downstairs.
Cassie herself provided the opening I needed. I should have known she would. She’s my perfect other half, always complementing me.
If I’m the key, she’s the lock I was poured for.
I wasn’t lying when I told her I would do anything for her.
I never want to lie to Cassie at all.
The truth is, I want her to know it was me.
There have been moments I flirted with revealing it, but Tim’s death added a wrinkle I couldn’t have accounted for. Like Russell, I never believed that Cassie had what it took to take a life.
But she did, and now she’s in too deep.
I think she could forgive me for what I did now that she loves me, but I don’t think she would ever be able to forgive herself for killing Tim.
As much as I don’t want a single secret between us, seeing her reaction tonight answered that question definitively.
I have to carry this one. She can never know the truth.
I told Cassie I would rewrite reality to save her, and I meant it. The only reason she’s in this mess now is because I carried that indecision too long. When she asked me that question tonight, I should have been able to answer it. She would have believed me. I could have shut it down immediately.
What’s done is done. I’m not a believer in regrets. I fucked up, and now she’s suffering, but I won’t let it happen again.
I’ll rewrite the final chapter of our history and commit to that version, then we can move forward and put all this behind us.
It’s not like Tim was altogether innocent, anyway. He was perfectly willing to sacrifice Cassie to save me.
He just didn’t know I’d be willing to sacrifice him to save her.
Another explosion lights up the sky, and two more pops accompany it.
Nina sits down next to me.
I think that’s an interesting choice, so I look over at her.
“Hey,” she says with a brave little smile.
“Hey,” I say back.
She looks up at the sky. “Tim loved fireworks.”
I nod, looking up at them as well. “Yeah, he did.”
“Sorry about Cassie leaving.” She looks over at me, somehow unaware that she was the ember that sparked the tinderbox tonight. “What happened?” she asks.
It’s remarkable that in all this time, even knowing that Tim had an identical twin, it has never once occurred to Nina that Cassie might be telling the truth… as she understood it, at least.
But people see what they want to see, and she doesn’t want to see Cassie being right.
I shake my head, my gaze still trained on the sky. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.” Then she adds, “Honestly, though, when is that girl not crashing out? Maybe you dodged a bullet.”
My mouth curves up faintly.
She has no idea how true that is.
Misinterpreting my smile, she’s encouraged.
Her tone turns lightly flirty as she leans over and bumps my shoulder. “She’s not the only girl in Holbrook, you know? I’ll be your firework buddy.”
“Oh yeah?”
She smiles, holding my gaze as the grand finale lights up the sky in so many flashes of light and color that I can see the reflections in her eyes. “Yeah.”
When Tim was around, Nina never looked at me twice either, but his trust fund isn’t the only thing I inherited. Everyone’s interest in me has grown now that there are no longer two options.
Nina has never been shy about letting a guy know she wants him, so as the grand finale ramps up to its big finish, she leans her head on my shoulder to remind me I have options, too.
I’m struck by how easy it all could be.
I don’t have to deal with any of the fallout of what I did.
If I wanted to, I could wrap my arm around Nina and pull her closer.
I could have her lips wrapped around my cock in the next ten minutes.
She would happily warm my bed tonight just like she warmed Tim’s, while somewhere across town, Cassie spends another night crying herself to sleep.
I could move right on with my life, and no one would blame me for doing it.
I’m the one who chose to wound her, but she’s the only one who has to pay for it.
And she’s right.
That’s pretty fucked up.