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“Thank you kindly, ma’am.”
She smiles with that little blush of hers, the one I find so goddamn cute. Josie is very pretty. She has a natural beauty, the kind you get in farm girls. It’s a damn pity her Pa didn’t see the value in her and just cast her out like a stray cat.
“So,” I say as she sits down. “Maybe we should get to know one another.”
“What else do you need to know?”
“It’s not a need to know matter, it’s wanting to know. How did you make it this far all on your own, a single girl? I know plenty of men who don’t make it. You did.”
“I stole stuff. I begged for stuff. I um, stole stuff. And then I got caught.”
“By Atticus Bunch.”
“Eventually, but I got caught before that too. And every time I got caught, some disgusting man would want to do something disgusting to me.”
“Hell, I’m sorry.”
“They never did. I had a little knife. I learned how to use it. Worked every time until it didn’t.”
I don’t need to ask more. I know what happens to women who have knives that stop working.
“Atticus caught me,” she says. “In the end. And he was the big lawman. He had too many men to get away from, and I…” she trails off, and I know this conversation was a mistake. We’ve avoided talking about anything real for a reason. I had to literally whip the basic facts of her life out of her. We’ve both got more skeletons than clothes in the closets we don’t have. Now we’re sitting out here with nothing but the clothes on our backs, and the truth coming ever closer to the surface.
Josie
“The things he did to me in the few days he had me,” I say. “What he made me do. It… was…” I trail off, unable to voice the horror of being captive to a broken man. Atticus Bunch is more than evil. He is an utter menace of a man, utterly without any redeeming qualities.
“He hurt you,” Orion says.
“Yes.”
“I hurt you too. With my belt. The first day we met.”
“It was different with you. You didn’t take pleasure in it. Not the way he did. He wanted me to scream. He wanted me to beg. When he tied me down to those train tracks, he made me ask him for mercy. I didn’t want to, but he made me. He made me beg him for my life, and then he told me he was going to take it anyway.”
“Did he…” Orion tries to form a sentence. I know what he’s asking. I know he doesn’t want to form the words either. His teeth are gritted and his jaw is clenched and there’s violence in his eyes.
“He didn’t force himself on me like that,” I say. “He threatened to, but he didn’t touch me that way. I don’t think he likes to touch girls like that. I think he was actually disgusted by me. But that didn’t stop him messing with me. Like the train tracks. He liked seeing me scared. He would have hurt me more, but he didn’t have time. Most of it my captivity he kept me locked in a box.”
“You mean a cell?”
“I mean a box.”
“Hell,” Orion swears. “No wonder you came off those tracks ready to kill.”
“He caught me and put me in the box for a day. Then he let me out and told me I had to sign the marriage license. I refused, so he put me back in. I don’t know how long I was in there for the second time, but when he let me out the second time I was really weak. He gave me some water and told me he was going to keep me in the box until I signed.”
“So you signed. No shame in that.”
“No. I knew he was going to kill me when I signed. So I went back in the box.”
Orion is looking at me as if I must be mad. But I’m sure an outlaw like him has heard much worse stories in his time.
“The third time he took me out, it was bad.”
“Bad, how?”
“Just… bad.” I don’t want to elaborate on it. Living through it once was bad enough, talking about it makes it feel as though it is happening all over again, and there are some memories I’d rather die than recall. What Atticus Bunch did was depraved. It wasn’t just designed to hurt me or scare me, it was designed to take the core of me out and leave me as a hollow shell of meat to be destroyed for his pleasure. “He’s crazy, Orion. He’s not just a bad man. He enjoys pain.”
“I know,” Orion says heavily. “I’m real sorry you had to live through that.”
The mood has become heavy. I regret saying anything. I want to leave everything that happened on this planet in what will hopefully one day be a very distant past.
