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I waited until Sig left before losing my shit.
The shakes, the tears, those had been tame. That response had been something he could see. Within minutes after he left, I was sitting in my shower, still fully clothed, letting the red-hot liquid pour over me while I rocked back and forth.
I’d told Holden I needed a shower so he would give me privacy.
What I needed was a frontal lobotomy. Anything to make this helpless feeling go away.
Why had I asked? Why had I insisted on knowing?
My life had never been my own. It was one long series of different men choosing whether I lived or died. And now that I knew, what did it make me? If a chess pawn discovered it was cannon fodder, could it stop being a pawn? No.
I was a toy, being played from all angles, but now that I knew, could I just up and quit the game?
The water shut off, and I looked up to see Holden standing over me. I hadn’t even heard him come in.
When he spoke, he sounded weary. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it helping?”
I pulled my knees up to my chest, and the waterlogged denim was already starting to get cold. Did anything help? “No.”
“Then get your sexy ass out of the tub and out of those clothes.” He wasn’t hitting on me. I knew what his foreplay tone sounded like, and this wasn’t it. “Come on.” He held out his hand and pulled me into a standing position. I struggled to find traction on the slippery tub floor, but he held both his hands on my waist until I was steady, then helped me climb out.
“Woman, you’re a fucking mess, you know that?”
I smacked him, but I didn’t put my back into it. “Yeah, I have a pretty good idea of my messiness.”
“I know you’re having trouble processing what happened in California.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
He ignored me and kept going. “I was there too, you know. I was… It happened to me too. You don’t have to go through this alone.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said again, pushing myself away from him. There was a wet imprint of my body on the front of his shirt. “I can’t talk about it.”
“You’re not dealing with it either, though.”
“And you are? What’s your trick, huh? How do you chase the nightmares away? He didn’t put his fucking hands inside you.” I left the bathroom, shucking off layers of wet clothes as I went. Normally being naked made me feel more exposed, more vulnerable, but with only Holden around it didn’t impact me one way or the other. He’d seen me naked, it was his seeing me weak I didn’t like.
In the bedroom I found a semi-clean towel on the floor and dried my hair. The curls were already starting to frizz, but I wasn’t in much of a mood to find my leave-in conditioner right then. Holden followed me into the room and settled himself in the armchair by the door.
“You need help.”
Great, now both my boyfriends were telling me to get therapy. “I know. But you know what? Right now I can’t exactly sit in a shrink’s office and talk my mommy issues out with them, okay? I have to kill my mother. Then I’ll talk about it until the cows come home.”
“Will killing Mercy help? Did killing Peyton help?”
I fingered the tooth necklace. The leather strap was damp from the shower, and some of the blood had come off, but enough remained to keep it looking grim. I resisted the weird urge to put it in my mouth.
“It helped a little,” I said.
“Did killing The Doctor help?”
I closed my eyes, squeezing the tooth tightly in my hand. In my mind’s eye I pictured the moment of death for both Peyton and The Doctor. The final splash of blood still felt warm and fresh from both of them. My lips curled in a smile.
“Jesus, Secret, you look crazy right now.”
