Chapter 9 #2
“Not doing what I tell you to do.” Henry has a way of saying things like this, with an offhand ease that belies the sting of his certain follow-through.
He may sound unserious, but he means what he says.
You will be sorry. You will be scared. But you will also feel elated.
There is no word for this feeling, but you will miss it, mourn it, stress-dream about it when it’s gone.
Henry revives my phone with a pat of his finger.
“This is an Instagram post that I have scheduled to release on your account later today.” He begins to read.
There is no context. No point. It is just a curated collection of catty things I’ve said in private conversations over the years, about friends to other friends, about executives to writers, about writers to executives, about actors to writers, about writers to other writers.
It is no worse than what any of these people have undoubtedly said about me, but it is bad, and even if I get out of here and explain I’ve been drugged, kidnapped, starved, forced to wash my hair with Pert Plus, I will be ruined.
“So this is about revenge,” I deduce. Ascribing a motive feels good.
It calms me. My brain is doing the thing it does when I miss even one day of my medication, bouncing around my skull like a rubber ball.
Dizzying me, dulling me. “I broke your heart. I wrote about you and got famous. And you’ve been lying in wait all this time, and finally you got the chance to grab me by the balls. ”
“Some mouth on you,” Henry says, tsking.
He goes over to the bookshelf outside his parents’ bedroom.
From the middle shelf, he removes a Scott Turow novel, revealing a safe I’d forgotten was there.
He slides my phone inside. “This is going in here, for now. Don’t be a hero, Faye.
If you stab me in the neck with a fork and I bleed out and die, yeah, sure, you might get away if you remember how to drive the boat, or if you want to risk your life in the woods—there’s high black bear activity at the moment—but that thing will post, and I imagine you will lose everything.
” He slams the door to the safe and covers the keypad with one hand while he enters the code with the other.
“Now.” He turns to me, slides a hand through his sandy hair in a boyish manner that inflames me painfully.
“If you listen to me, if you behave, I will open the safe at the same time every day and delay it another twenty-four hours. And we will continue like that until we are done here.”
“Done with what?”
“This conversation is over now,” Henry informs me.
“You need to eat.” He goes over to the kitchen counter and begins to crack eggs into a silver mixing bowl.
Using something he thinks is healthy but is probably full of GMOs, he sprays a pan and waits for it to heat while he whisks the eggs with a fork.
In the sink is a bowl of frozen berries, thawing in lukewarm water.
No bread. No butter. Henry has kept himself lean, something I know takes womanly effort for him, and he has obviously retained those early aughts ideas about what makes a person fat.
He brings me my breakfast on a silicone kid’s plate, the kind that sticks to the tabletop, and as much as I want to throw it in his face, it’s really stuck on there and I am ravenous.
I finish everything and Henry goes back into the kitchen and makes me more, and when I finish that, he tells me to go sit on the couch.
“Why?”
“Because I know the code to the safe and you don’t.”
I go over and sit down on the couch. Henry perches on the edge of the coffee table, across from me, and though the table is lower than the couch, I still have to tilt my chin up to meet his eye. “Hold out your hands.”
Instinctively, I curl my fingers into fists and hold them tightly to my chest.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Why stop now?”
Henry stares at me with heavy brows, liquid eyes. He speaks to me in an impossibly kind voice. “I always hated hurting you.”
My throat is gnarled with something like grief. “Then you’ve lost your edge.”
Henry looks away from me a moment, shakes his head slightly. When he turns back to me, he’s wiped clean of any unnecessary nostalgia. “Hands, Faye.”
One at a time, I float my hands, palms down, fingers soft, like a dancer. It only looks like I’m shaking because there is so much tension from my elbows, pressed tightly into my sides.
“What’s this?”
I turn my right wrist over in confusion. “A bracelet?”
“What kind?”
I look at him like he’s given me no time to solve a riddle. “Gold? A gold bracelet?”
“Who makes it, Faye?”
I narrow my eyes at him and speak in a haughty tone. “Cartier.”
“Who got it for you?”
“I did,” I say defiantly. “It was a birthday present to myself.” I made the appointment for one at the flagship store on Rodeo Drive.
I wanted something weird-shaped and borderline ugly, something that didn’t look like what anyone else had.
You are the first person to ever purchase this bracelet from this store, said the sales associate with unmissable approval as he presented me with the red leather billfold that contained my authentication documents.
“You got it for yourself, did you?” Henry isn’t smiling, but I can tell he finds this hysterical. “It looks like something you might try to hurt me with, so take it off.”
I hold his eye bitterly as I flick open the clasp, wiggle my wrist free, and place the very thing I was considering hurting him with into his open hand.
“Put your hair behind your ears,” he says.
“Fuck you.” But I do what he tells me. “They’re not anything you’ve ever heard of,” I taunt through my smashed lips. He’s got my chin in his hand, and he’s crushing my cheeks together, forcing my face down and to the side.
In a hick voice, “ ’Cause we go to Jared round these parts, right?”
“Because you’re the cheapest snob I’ve ever met,” I sneer.
“It’s called class. Take them out before I rip them through your fucking earlobes.” Off come the invertebrate-like gold climbers, the blackened diamond studs in the second hole I got in the ninth grade, along with a month of silent treatment from my mother.
Henry uses both hands to split wide the lapels of the old Patagonia pullover he’s given me.
He stares at the skin on my chest longer than he should.
You are the softest thing I’ve ever touched, he once told me.
Later, when I went in for a liposuction consult, I would learn I had hypermobility.
The doctor asking me if anyone had ever commented on how soft my skin is, because it’s one of the symptoms, and I would flash crimson, thinking of where Henry’s fingers were when he said that.
Henry pinches the gold-and-diamond locket at my clavicle.
“I have a picture of my grandmother inside,” I say. Then, rather pathetically, “Please. How am I going to hurt you with a locket?”
Henry slips his fingers under the heavy rolo chain off which the locket dangles. “Maybe I just don’t like looking at you wearing all this.”
“Because it reminds you that I don’t need you?
” I retort. There is fiery friction at the nape of my neck, a final-sounding snap.
I feel the chain slither between my breasts and land in my lap.
Henry pockets the locket. I lift a knee and aim for his balls, but I freeze, thinking about my phone in the safe.
Henry gives me a diabolical smile. “I admire your restraint,” he says.
He takes my stilled, airborne foot in his hand.
I feel his fingers on my ankle like hot poker sticks.
“We used to have some good times,” he says, twisting my ankle so that instinctively I curl up on my side, trying to follow the angle to mitigate the damage to my ligaments.
I am in the fetal position, whimpering like a cornered animal.
“Remember? I could get you to do anything. Never a sparkly thing you wouldn’t bend over for. ”
“I assume,” I say in a mocking, strained voice, because my ankle is radiating with pain, “you are referring to that mall-rat heart necklace from Tiffany. But, Henry? You should know you could never afford me now.” At that, Henry’s face goes purple with rage.
He grabs me by my wrists and pulls me up from the couch.
We are struggling, touching, breathing hotly on each other.
I want him to restrain me, subdue me. I want him to do things to me that will split me in two. What is this? What is this?
“You’re going to get yourself killed, Faye,” Henry spits at me, and then he tries to drag me back to the cabin, but my ankle, the one he twisted, buckles.
I stumble forward, and Henry hooks an arm around my waist, pulling me into him in an unintended embrace, embarrassing for both of us.
He bends at the knees to gather me up, and for a moment, his face buries in the crook of my neck, and I feel the warm muzzle of his mouth.
He carries me into the cabin and tosses me on the bed like he used to, only, in this new lifetime, he doesn’t grab my ankles and yank me toward him.
I don’t wrap my legs around him and raise my hips to meet his, our faces sick with need.
In this lifetime, Henry leaves me untouched in a flash flood of my own blood and locks the door behind him.