AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It was the same pattern as Don: threatening, then sweet; angry, then sympathetic. “I don’t care how I’m supposed to act, Cal.Thisis what I care about. Here in New York.”
“Do you hear how cruel you’re being? Fine, Shay, stay. But I’m not going to bankroll whatever you’re doing. If you don’t come home, I’m cutting you off.”
There it was. All that talk about Cal and me being equals, and yet he was using money to corner me. The memory blazed back: the smell of gasoline, a perfume so strong it made me high to breathe it. The rip of the match against the box, my hate becoming tangible, sparking and catching fire. The spike of adrenaline right before I tossed the match, turning my body into an inferno a second before the world became light and heat.
I felt that same spike now. “I thought it wasourmoney, darling.”
Cal was silent. I lit the flame and tossed it. “I don’t want it, anyway. Do your worst.”
“Jesus, Shay—”
I hung up, dropped the phone, and stared at the woman in the window. Who was she? Was she unraveling, like Cal said? I raised a hand, and she touched her face. Her fingers were long and elegant: the fingers of someone who might’ve played piano, or plucked a harp, if only she’d been born to a different family.
I drew close enough so my breath fogged the glass. When it cleared, her face was framed, beautiful as a doll. Hair and eyes as dark as ink, lips so full they couldn’t help but invite attention. They were lips that provoked, that men found sensual, no matter how desperately she’d wished to be invisible.
Fitting, then, that she had grown more invisible with every passing year. Other women had warned it would happen: The ones who’d stroked her hair backstage in pageant dressing rooms; the mothers of friends taking pictures before dances; her own mother, examining her reflection in the bathroom mirror, telling her,Learn from my mistakes. Your beauty’s your power, and it’s slipping through your fingers.
In the window’s reflection, I could see that the thick black liner around the woman’s eyes had started to bleed. I rubbed my fingers over my face, scrubbing harder, and the coal smeared, her lipstick pushing past the boundary of her lips to stain her skin. The woman in the window smiled, bloody mouth and haunting eyes, enjoying being frightening.
Really, who was I now? When I said goodbye to Laurel after graduation, we’d sat side by side onstage, gowns splayed open, caps in our hands, silent with the knowledge that we would never again be the girls we were when we first came to Whitney. I’d squeezed her hand quickly, all the touch I could bear after Don, and we’d vowed to get ourselves on track. Meet up one day when it was safe.
I’d been the first to walk away, to where my mother waited in the car, relieved enough to hear from me after a year of silence that she’d made the trip for graduation. When I turned back and saw Laurel sitting alone in the middle of the crowd, saw how she fixated on me, I’d pushed it aside. Assumed she was only doing what I was: saying goodbye. But now I wonder if the look meant something else.
I should have called. Written. Anything. It was only that when I moved back to Texas, the sheer relief of having a blank slate was too enormous. I’d wanted a small, quiet life. And then I’d started writing forThe Slice—light, stupid pieces, a little feminist, even. Corporate feminism, but it was a toe in the water, trying it back on. A good way to write again, skating the surface, no stakes. I told myself I was better than happy; I was safe.
And before I knew it, the gradual ebb of time made me an adult. Did I wake some mornings burning to talk to Laurel, or Jamie, or Clem? Of course. But the desire was replaced the next moment with paralysis, a sense of overwhelming shame. Better to leave it alone. Best of all to meet Cal Deroy, a respectable man who didn’t want to peer into the dark corners of my mind or know who else I’d been, what different versions of me existed. He wanted a wife like all the others, a life like the comfortable one he’d had growing up. It was so much easier to dissolve myself in his desires than wonder about my own.
Yet here I was, back where it started. Returning should terrify me. The idea of Cal leaving me penniless—leaving me in general—should break my heart. The men at Fox Lane should make me want to run, put the world between us.
Should, should, should. Yet all I felt was rage. Cal had been right about that.
Through the window, the sun broke over the horizon, rays of golden light shimmering on the Hudson. The woman in the glass wavered, then disappeared, leaving only the world outside.
Leaving me to face the truth. Of course I would go back into Don’s house. It was an inevitability, not a decision. I would go back for Laurel, and Clem, and the missing women whose names I didn’t know. But I would also go for myself. Maybe I could find the part of me still locked inside.
Maybe I could free her.
Part Two
Scheherazade, you cunning bitch
You went in to offer yourself in place of your sisters. You went in to perform a feat of heroism.
But.
Did you not feel your skin tingle at the sight of the blade in the corner of the room? Did you not feel yourself get slick when you beheld the king, the man who would either take your life from you or fall to his knees on the bed and be conquered? Were you not desperate to know whether you could do it? Whether you were powerful enough, and in what ways?
You weave and you weave, until you can no longer tell if you are the storyteller or the story being told. And when he craves it, your paper-thin skin, when he wants to drink your blood, your living stories, do you not let him lick up every spoonful? Do you not swirl around the look in his eyes like a cup of tea, desperate to read the leaves, to parse who you are to him, who you will be to history? After all, names like yours are never etched into the books unless men like him allow it.
Did you not grow to love him, you sad, masochistic little beast?
Yes, this is an interrogation.
You had one thousand and one nights, and he never was deposed.
Chapter Eighteen
“There’s something about suburbia at night that makes my skin crawl.” Jamie glanced at me from the driver’s seat, moonlight cutting across his face. “It’s too quiet. You can feel the menace buzzing just under the surface.”
