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“I’m going to go sit down.” I say in a rush, barely managing to get the words out before backing through the door as fast as I can without breaking out into a sprint.
Rhea sits on the bench, a joint pinched between her fingers, her legs curled under her, and a not-entirely-unamused smirk on her face. “All good?” She teases, taking me in.
“Yes.” I shrug, swiping my hair off my neck and sitting down opposite her. There’s a small tabletop between us, and I drum my fingers against it until she laughs and hands me the joint. I take it simply to occupy my fingers, but when I take the first hit, it fills me with a sort of impending calm, like it’s filling my lungs with all the air that’s been missing since the night Remy and I were together.
I’d never done any sort of drug prior to meeting Rhea. We don’t do it often, but she uses it every once in a while to de-stress after exams and I use it every once in a while to supplement my lack of social skills when I let her drag me along to parties and events that are outside of my comfort zone. It’s about as taboo as underage drinking on a college campus, but we’re lucky to have our own place off-campus and live in a state where it’s been legalized. I don’t know if it’s legal in Costa Rica, but it hardly matters. I don’t think murder is legal anywhere, and that ship has already sailed into hell with a spot saved for me.
I pass the joint back to her, regretting that I didn’t change out of this stupid dress. It feels absurd to be sitting here with her smoking weed on a docked boat with my tits on display… particularly given the things we’re about to discuss.
Remy joins us a moment later, dropping onto the bench beside his sister and setting up the glasses on the table in a perfect line. When he sets the bottle before her, Rhea straightens a little, her eyes lighting with excitement. “You’re bringing out the good stuff.” Her eyes flick from the bottle up to him, then to me, guarded with suspicion. “What’s going on?”
Remy is silent as he pours two fingers in each glass and then slides one to Rhea and one to me before taking the last for himself. He doesn’t sip it though—he stares into it solemnly, leaving Rhea to stare at him. I, on the other hand, don’t hesitate, taking a long pull.
It’s smooth and just the right blend of sweet and strong, tracing a warm path from the tip of my tongue down to where it settles in my stomach.
“Okay,” Rhea says, puncturing the quiet. “You guys are scaring me.”
I don’t even know where to begin. I just know that if I don’t start somewhere, I’ll never start at all. Remy is quiet because he’s giving me the chance to tell my own story, to control the flow of information. He told me that he read the entire police report, and coupled with what I’ve told him, he has a pretty complete picture of everything. But it’s my cross to bear, my tragedy to carry on my shoulders until I learn to heal again instead of just ignoring everything, if that’s even possible.
“Before we met, I tried to kill myself.” I clamp my mouth shut, not sure why I decided to start there. I know she’s seen the scars—they’re light, faded well thanks to a prescription cream Addie gave me and the fact that I didn’t cut deep enough. It’s the true mark of friendship to accept everything about a person without knowing everything about them, and we’ve never needed to discuss this. Rhea has never asked about them, and while I’ve caught her gaze lingering, I think she’s always just assumed that I went through a phase where I liked to hurt. I’ve never given her any reason to think otherwise. Since she has been a part of my life, I’ve never had a reason to want to throw in the towel. I’m not suicidal anymore—just homicidal.
“Claire—” Her voice already sounds like it’s about to break on a sob for me, so I shake my head.
“No, Rhea. If you want to know what we do, you need to be strong like I know you are. You need to let me talk and save your pity for someone else.”
“I would never pity you.” She says, sounding hurt. She reaches across the table, holding out a hand that I just stare at for a minute. “I hurt for you when you hurt, but I don’t pity you.”
I don’t have any words for that. If I go off script, I may cry, and I really don’t want to do that. I feel like if I start crying again, I’ll never stop. So, I simply drop my hand in hers, a benefit to her more than it is to me, and carry on. “You know I got emancipated so that I could enroll in school earlier. I did that because I couldn’t stay in my last foster home any longer. He was a really bad man…” I bite my lip. “One of the worst I’ve ever met.”
I’d say the worst, but is what Wes did worse? Sure, they never got the opportunity to rape me themselves, but they were turning me over to people who would do so much worse than what Eric did. Something about being complicit, and being complicit on the scale that he is, makes me think that he’s the greater evil. And that I should drive a blade between his ribs, too.
She stays blissfully quiet, and I focus on my nails, the pink polish cracked and chipped. I don’t even remember when we had them done, but I know I tried to paint my life with a coat of polish, shiny and pretty to keep people from looking too closely. But it’s cracked with time, peeling off in some places while holding stubborn in others. “He came to my room for months before I couldn’t take it anymore. It’s the kind of thing that you just learn to dissociate from. I’d leave my head when he was in my bed, and then after he left, I’d pick up the pieces. Once you get used to that sort of violation, it’s easier to stomach the rest of the world’s injustices.”
I can’t stomach the thought of looking at either of them right now—I don’t want to see their disgust. I saw Remy’s once already, and it was nearly enough to destroy me. He looked at me like I was damaged, and while it hadn’t been enough to stop him from fucking me, I know it’s enough to keep him holding back. If Rhea looks at me the way Remy did when he had me pinned to the wall as I confessed my darkest secret, I think my heart may just stop beating.
But as much as I don’t want to look at them, I’m turning the conversation over to Remy. He hasn’t figured it out yet, so I suck in a breath and pull my hand out of Rhea’s so that I can squeeze my own palms together, locking the fingers to try and keep the nervous energy from showing. When I look at him, Remy is watching me. My heart skips a beat, threatening to quit, but I’m not sure whatever I’m seeing in his eyes—which look more amber than green tonight—is disgust. It looks like anger, like pain, like the things that skitter around inside us so rarely that we don’t even have a chance to put names to them.
It's too much to bear, leaving me feeling like he’s just staring at me without any of my clothes on, so I glance away. When I look back, I tip my head toward him, indicating that I’m tagging him in for this part of the relay. He nods his understanding and angles himself a little more toward Rhea, who turns to him. Now that I know her attention is on him, I can stand to chance a glance at her. Her eyes are glistening, but unlike Remy’s, it’s the green in them that’s prevalent tonight. Her glossy lips quiver as she tries to hold it together while she waits, bewildered, for her brother to continue to crush her view of the world.
“Do you remember when I broke up with Monica?”
A strange heat spills through me at the mention of his ex-girlfriend, who I’d only ever known as the quiet but pleasant housekeeper at their Oregon estate. Monica felt like she was the house manager who made sure that everything was running smoothly and organized the cleaning and cooking and everything, while Rhea and I just stayed under her roof every summer and winter break. Though Rhea is cordial with her, they’ve never seemed terribly close, and yet she’s never seemed like just ‘the help’ either. But thinking of her as Remy’s girlfriend—a girlfriend he had wanted to build a life with—is the hardest thing to imagine, and I don’t know what it is that makes it that way.
“You mean when you brought her best friend over and fucked her in the kitchen?” Rhea laughs, but it’s condescending, disbelieving. She doesn’t understand the direction our conversation is taking her. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad one.
Remy ignores her, taking a sip from his glass and then watching as he swirls the contents around. He’s told me this story, although maybe not all of it. And it was probably easier to share it with me than it would be with her, because in doing this, he is about to shatter the view she held of her father… the view she holds of the world. She’s about to see just how cold a place it truly is.
“You also remember when dad took me to Amsterdam before that happened?”
Rhea makes a face like she doesn’t understand why he’s switching directions, but she closes her eyes a moment and then nods. “Yes. You were in a mood when you got back. It wasn’t long before everything happened with Natasha.”
“Yeah,” Remy agrees. “We went to stay with Davos for a few days.”
“I was pissed that you guys were taking vacation when mom wasn’t doing well.” Rhea chuckles. “It felt like you were just running away.”
“I was being recruited.” He smiles, and I think it may be the first time I’ve seen a smile on his face rather than a smirk or grin. And it’s not even a happy one. It’s a sad, wry smile, meant to cover the pain of the memory he’s dredging up. “That was the weekend I found out what our family business really is. That was the weekend I found out that our father and Davos and thousands of others make their fortune off the backs of others.”
A crease appears between her eyebrows as her confusion deepens, and then Rhea seems to remember I’m here and something clicks in her mind. It’s just the first piece of many, but it falls into place, and I can see recognition following when she looks at me. “You mean…”
