seven
Duke Dolce
I hold back from returning the gesture, even though I crave the comfort, the intimacy.
For once, she can know what it’s like to give more, and I’ll make sure she knows it, even if it keeps me from getting what I need.
So I let my arms hang at my sides instead of wrapping her into a mutual embrace. Neither of us deserve that, anyway.
“You going to tell me what happened?” she whispers in the dark.
“I just…” I say, turning my face toward the ceiling. “Stopped. That’s all.”
“Well, I’m glad you restarted.”
She wraps her arms tighter around me, like she doesn’t even need me to hold her back.
Tonight, she’s the first to fall asleep. Usually it’s Baron if we’ve brutalized her enough to satisfy him, or me, if I resisted an evening pearl and drank myself stupid instead.
I lay there, annoyed that my cold shoulder didn’t work on her. After a while, I hear Baron shifting in the sheets.
“I think we should go back tomorrow,” he says.
“We just got here,” I point out, absently scratching at my arms. Inside me, under my skin, the itch for more has sprung up. I can’t remember the last time I went a whole day without visiting Wonderland.
“This place isn’t good for any of us.”
I know he’s just saying that so he doesn’t single me out. He and Mabel are too rational to let a place get to them.
Then again, he’s the one who snapped first. He choked her out. I didn’t hurt anyone.
“Don’t you want to find her?” I ask, giving in at last and wrapping my arms around Mabel. She nestles closer in her sleep, as if I’ve ever protected her.
“I’m not a bounty hunter,” Baron says behind me. “I can work from anywhere.”
“What about that Ingrid chick?”
“I’d rather put distance between her and Mabel,” he says. “If she’s even the one who was here.”
“You think it was Jane?” I ask, a little shiver racing up my spine.
“I don’t know,” Baron admits quietly. “If she’s alive, and she wanted to find me, she would have gone back to the rental we had last summer.”
“She could have asked around,” I point out, turning onto my back. “Even if no one in Havoc Harbor knows us, we’re pretty noticeable, even in a place that sees a lot of tourists in the summer.”
“True,” Baron muses. “They could have found out that we had a connection with Mabel and where she lived, especially if her aunt is still around here somewhere. Which is all the more reason to leave.”
“So if Jane was staying here before we came back…” I trail off, cold dread racing like spiders over my skin.
“Where is she now?” Baron finishes.
“Don’t you want to know why she waited for us here?”
“There’s only one thing she’d want.”
Revenge.
I roll back toward Mabel and cradle her close, suddenly sure we’re being watched, even at this very moment. Selfishly, I’m glad I’m in the middle, that no one can creep up behind me from either side.
“What if she’s here now?” I ask into Mabel’s hair. I don’t want to see my brother’s face, to see his disappointment or scorn. He’s not afraid of Jane. Nothing scares him, not even death.
“We’ll leave in the morning,” he says, resting a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll stay up tonight. I want to look into some things.”
“You don’t have to,” I say, but I’m relieved.
“I can’t sleep anyway.” Baron stands and grabs a pair of sweats. “Besides, I have a connection to establish on the way home.”
When he’s gone, I lie in bed, unable to sleep even after the long, fucked up day.
I think about going back. I think about my family, what’s left of it, back in Faulkner sitting around the tree, laughing and talking, telling the kids about Santa.
I can’t stop wishing I was there, even though it wasn’t that great last year.
Baron was gone and Dad was dead and Ma didn’t come home because she had some charity gala to go to the day before and she was too hungover to fly the next day.
Besides, she said, we were all grown up now and we wouldn’t want to spend time with her anyway.
She was wrong, but no one argued. It’s impossible to argue with her.
At least I had Olive. This year, I won’t be able to hang out with her. Harper and Royal wouldn’t let me near her after what I did, and it’s probably for the best. With all the Alice I take, I probably would get hard if she climbed in my lap this time.
I told myself I’d slow down over our time away, and the thought of not getting that break fills me with dread.
At the same time, the craving intensifies at the thought of how close we are to going back, to being around all those shiny blue pearls all day long, able to pop them at will, any time, without anyone knowing.
I can still slow down, though. I can limit myself to one pearl per day.
It’ll be good for me to clear my head a little.
Mabel stirs against me, her lashes fluttering against my neck. “Duke?” she whispers sleepily.
“It’s me,” I say, relieved that it was my name on her lips when she woke. I wrap my arms around her, pulling her tight to me.
“Where’s Baron?”
All the good feelings sour. Of course she asks for him.
“I don’t know,” I say, rolling away from her. “Why don’t you go find him if you’re so worried about him?”
She’s quiet a long moment, and I think she fell back asleep. But then her fingers brush my side. “I’m worried about you,” she says quietly.
Some mean, selfish part of me is vindicated.
It likes that she’s worried, that she noticed, that she cares.
I think it’s my demon, but I can’t be sure anymore.
Colt broke the barrier between us when he said what he did, that there’s no demon, there’s just me.
Now we bleed into each other more and more often, so I can’t tell where he ends and I begin.
“You shouldn’t be,” I say. “I’m not a good person.”
She lets out a soft snort of breath. “None of us are good people, Duke.”
“You were,” I point out. “Before we ruined you.”
“I was ruined long before you came along,” she says quietly, her tone bitter.
“But we made you a monster like us.”
“That may be true,” she says. “But if I’m a monster of your making, that doesn’t make me less monstrous than you.”
It’s my turn to think that over, and then I say the thing that’s been tormenting me since last summer, the thought I try to drown with pills and booze, try to escape in Wonderland.
“I might be the kind of monster the Black Widow takes out.” My words come out flat, but suddenly I’m shaking, sick at having said the words aloud.
“Why do you think that?” Mabel says, her voice careful.
“I—I have a friend who’s a kid,” I say. “Isn’t that the kind of man you kill?”
She thinks about it, and even though I wish she would jump in and reassure me right away, her thoughtfulness reassures me more than any denial could.
She’s considering it before she gives me an honest answer, something I can’t rely on most people to give.
That’s why I told her first, before even Baron.
But finally, I can’t take her silence. My stomach is knotted and sour, and my heart is racing so hard I can’t think straight. “Is that weird?” I manage. “Is it more than weird?”
“I wouldn’t say it’s normal,” she says at last. “Why are you friends with her?”
“I don’t know,” I say miserably. “She’s just…
Fun, and simple, and I don’t have to impress her or worry about what she thinks.
It reminds me of how it was to be a kid, when I didn’t care about all the shit I have to care about now.
” I cover my eyes with my arm, since looking at her when I ask this would be unbearable.
“Do you think that means I’m a pedophile? ”
“Are you attracted to her?”
“No,” I say, horrified that she’d ask that.
“Have you done anything physical to her?”
“What? No! It makes me sick to think of it. We just hung out and ate cereal for dinner and, I don’t know… She’s easy to talk to.”
“Then why would you think you it’s wrong?”
“Because. Everyone said that. Or acted like it.”
“Sounds like they’re the ones who shouldn’t be around children,” she says. “Why else would their minds go there?”
“Probably because our dad was basically one,” I say, wanting to fucking die. “And they think if I was raised by one, I’m suspect, and now I have a kid friend, so they’ve got to watch me and see if I’m as sick as him. What if I am?”
I’m quaking so hard Mabel can feel it, and she rests a steadying hand on my chest. “I don’t think wanting to feel like a kid again makes you sick,” she says.
“Sounds like they’re projecting, or else they’re just sanctimonious cunts who would rather ruin someone’s life than consider the many facets of being human. ”
I’ve never heard Mabel use that word before, but she says it so calmly, in such a straightforward manner, as if it’s an indisputable fact. Maybe it is.
“You really think so?” I ask, rolling back to face her. I tuck a pillow between my head and my arm, watching her. “Are you just saying that to make me feel better?”
“That’s not something I do,” she says, but I’m not so sure.
Maybe she doesn’t mean to, or do it intentionally, but hearing her get defensive of me like that has already made me feel a thousand times better.
Just as she needs me to get out of her head, I need her to get out of mine, to calm the raging storm inside it.
In all the time I’ve spent with her, the pearl lady has never made me feel as good as Mabel has in these five minutes.
“Am I sick for wondering, though?” I ask. “Because they’d probably think so. They didn’t even like her coming in my room.”
She’s quiet a minute, and then she answers slowly.
“I think that’s good,” she says. “Not because of you, but because they’re protecting her.
More people should do that instead of assuming everyone has good intentions.
But their caution doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong.
Just as being introspective and wondering if you’re a monster because you were raised by a monster and everyone is telling you that you are one doesn’t make you a monster.
It makes you self-aware. Your actions make you a monster. ”
I swallow hard and force the next words out because I’ve come this far, and maybe I want her to finish what I couldn’t today. “I thought about her once… when we were hooking up.”
She stiffens in my arms. “You were fantasizing about her while you were fucking me?”
“No,” I snap, a shudder going through me. “She popped into my head, like, I didn’t want to think about her, but she came up.”
“And then?”
“And then I pushed the thought away,” I say. “It wasn’t a sexual thought. It was… I didn’t want to think it. I hate that it happened, that I can’t control my mind, Mabel. What if it happens again?”
“That sounds like an intrusive thought,” she says. “Not like you were getting off on it.”
“I wasn’t,” I promise her, so miserable I want to die. “I hate that my mind does that. What’s wrong with me?”
“You can’t control intrusive thoughts,” she says. “They intrude. You don’t want them to. They’re terrible.”
“It was terrible,” I agree, squeezing my eyes closed. “How do I make them go away?”
“You don’t,” she says, pressing her ear to my chest and wrapping her arms around me again. “You just know that you’ll be okay anyway. They’re not real. Just thoughts.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I have them all the time,” she says. “Mine are gruesome. Usually someone dies in a terrible way. Sometimes they’re things I’d want to happen. Sometimes they’re the worst things that could happen. But I don’t get to choose which one comes.”
“I love you so much,” I blurt, diving into her. I press my face into her chest, my eyes burning, and squeeze her tight. I didn’t know how scared I was that she’d say something different.
She wraps her arms around my head, holding me to her heart like that’s where I belong.
“You’re allowed to have friends, Duke,” she says.
“And anyone who’s never stopped and asked themselves if they’re a bad person when someone told them they were, only proves that they’re incapable of self-reflection and therefore, by most humans’ definition, a bad person.
Anyone who would question why you did is not only a bad person but a stupid one. ”
“You love me?” I ask, running my hands up her sides, pressing my ear to her chest to hear her heartbeat, as if I can hear a lie if she tells one.
“Yes,” she says simply, threading her fingers through my hair.
“I won’t let him hurt you,” I tell her, my voice ragged but fierce. “I promise.”
It’s a promise we both know I can’t keep, but I wish more than anything that I could find a way to protect this girl who understands me and lets me be my most vulnerable self without judgment.
I wish I could find a way to make her trust me enough to do that with me.
But I don’t know how, and I don’t know how to protect her from my twin the next time he comes for her.
One of these times, I’m afraid it will be the last.