Christ, this girl. I want to rip her to pieces so she can’t look at me, so fucking innocent and brave. “I’m not angry at you. I’m angry at the world. You haven’t figured that out yet?”
“Then why is this the last time?”
There’s a shadow on her cheek. That fucker touched her. It’s going to be a bruise. “Because all I do is hurt you.”
“You don’t hurt me.”
“Have you forgotten what just happened in that bathroom? I’m not good for you.”
“You protected me.”
“I brought you here. I made you come here.”
“I wanted to come.”
“I don’t have anything you want, little bird. You need to get that. There’s no taking me to the movies. You can’t bring me around to your prep-school friends or put my picture in a locket. And you sure as hell can’t bring me home to Mom and Dad.”
She touches my arm. “This is what I want.”
I have to laugh, because women have wanted to use me for my dick before. I can rough them up a little in bed and walk away before morning comes, a dark little memory for them to use with their vibrators when their husbands can’t get them off.
But this girl isn’t using me for my dick. She doesn’t want to fuck me—or more to the point, I can’t let myself fuck her, even though there’s nothing I want more.
She wants me for my company, and that feels strange. Satisfying. Sickening.
I pull away.
“Fine.” She spins on her heel and gets into the car. “Take me back to school.”
I love the imperious way she says that. Like I’m a fucking chauffeur. That’s more like it.
In a matter of minutes, we’re back on the highway, cruising toward town. Except I’m not planning on taking her back to school, not at first. Because I know what she’s thinking—that we’ve still got something going on. That all she has to do is wait and I’ll show up again.
I almost never see her with guys her own age. It’s always made me happy. The idea of her being with a ham-handed high school boy who can’t appreciate her, some kid looking to get his rocks off, it fills me with fucking rage.
But what does it mean for her that I never see her with a boy alone? What if she’s waiting for me? Comparing boys her age to me? Am I making a mess of her life without even being around? The thought horrifies the fuck out of me.
You don’t hurt me. You protected me. I wanted to come.
She doesn’t get it. She thinks I can give her something I can’t. She needs to understand.
I’m heading there, of course. Without really even thinking about it.
She begged me to let her in. Careful what you wish for, I think.
Most of the guys have never been back there. A few try not to think about it. It’s possible Nate goes entire days without letting his mind sink into the pain and hell and twisted-up feelings of that place. Working on his animals. I’ve seen him work all night to repair a broken wing on a fucking crow. And Knox, losing himself in all his tech. But I never turn away. Not ever.
We head southeast. To Ferndale, the scrubby little suburb with boxlike homes fronted by grass gone to seed. And near the very end of an especially decrepit block, the burnt remains of the house, jutting up from the ground like charred teeth on a long-buried demon.
She was a witness to me killing Madsen. Hell, she had a front-row seat to me almost killing her, for fuck’s sake, but she still has things twisted around in her mind—I’m getting that now. Her and her campfire fantasy.
You don’t hurt me. You protected me. I wanted to come.
She’s looking at me like I’m a fixer-upper that maybe needs some sanding to smooth the rough edges. Maybe a bright coat of paint. She doesn’t get that I’m wrong from the inside out.
“This place,” she says. “Have we been here before?”
I pull around the corner, park along the side. No sense in having her car connected with this place. She doesn’t want to get out. I go around and open her door for her, but she just stares up.
“Out.”
She doesn’t move. She senses something’s wrong. She has no fucking idea how wrong. “Isn’t this what you wanted? Me opening the car door for you? Me taking you home to where I grew up? A visit to the folks?”
“That night you killed that guy. We came here.”
“Come on, little bird.” I pull her out. Not rough. She comes. She just doesn’t want to.
“This is where you grew up?”
“Grew up might be a nice way of putting it.” I help her over the wrecked part of the fence, which is posted with no-trespassing signs, and lead her to the edge of the place. To the spot where you can see beyond the charred remnants of walls and into the basement.
It’s just a deep, dark pit with a few cinder-block partitions here and there. There are dried leaves and garbage in the corners. Some scrub brush looming up toward the sky. “Come on.”
I jump onto what’s left of the steps, surprised when she willingly follows. I lead her all the way down and help her as we near the bottom.
She’s too pretty, too pure to be down in this open pit grave where the best parts of us died. What the fuck am I doing?
Teaching her a lesson about me, I remind myself. Showing her what’s in me. She won’t wait for me once she sees this. Won’t get in a car if I’m inside.
I flick on my iPhone light, play it over the dank walls, weathered and cracked. “You have your whole life ahead of you, but this is where mine started and ended.”
She says nothing. I can’t look at her. Already the place is closing around me.
I walk around the familiar corners, so different but so much the same.
I kick a rusted paint can aside and kneel by the metal carcass of the hot-air furnace, a rusted box just a bit smaller than a coffin, once painted blue, but now it’s mostly gray from years of dirt and weather. I crouch there, remembering how it would heat up like a motherfucker in the winter.
I touch a rivet on the side. Cool. Dirty. “We’d be down here twenty-four seven. Well, more like twenty-three seven. They’d keep us down here except when they needed us. You know, when a guy like Madsen would show up. Sometimes women, but mostly men. They’d make us go upstairs. Clean us and dress us like little whores. Me and my brothers. And they were my brothers. Never mind that I’d never seen them before. That we came from different mothers, from different cities. We were a fucked-up family.”
“Stone.” Her voice is shaky. She’s finally getting a clear picture of me.
“It’s cool. While you were getting aspirin and Band-Aids for your skinned knees, we were getting the good stuff. I don’t know what it was they gave us, but it made it like you weren’t there. Sometimes we’d even get off with the customers. The line between feeling good and bad was pretty thin in this place.”
I hear the soft intake of breath. This is hurting her, but it’s better that I tell her what I am all at once. She needs to take on a little damage, or she’ll keep holding out hope.
“This rivet would get really hot in the winter. I’d make the boys touch their finger to it. Like when they came down from up there in a bad way. Or like if they wouldn’t stop crying. I’d tell them that if they touched this really hot rivet, it would take whatever happened up there and suck it out their fingertip and burn it inside the firebox. I convinced them that if they touched their finger to it long enough, it would make it like it didn’t happen.”