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He turns and studies me with those searching eyes. I always get the feeling that War wants to say something but he’s holding it back for some secretive reason. It’s like whatever he really wants to say is locked behind his lips, and he’s too afraid to let it out.
“Why are you cousins all pricks to you?” he asks as casually as anyone can ask that question.
It makes me laugh though. “I bet you’re starting to understand why I never come home.”
“It was always like that?”
“Not likethat, but they liked to tease me a lot, sure. I was always sort of the odd one out.”
“Fuckers,” he mutters and looks over his shoulder like he might spot Evan and Bruno riding around.
“But that’s not why I left,” I whisper, and I don’t know why I say it, but once the words are out, I suddenly want to tell him more. I’m desperate for someone to hear it, maybe not the full truth, not the total story, but a piece of it at least. A big and horrible piece of it.
“You don’t have to tell me.” He narrows his gaze before he walks over and sits down next to me.
I like the warmth of his leg against mine. He’s close, too close, and if I had sense, I’d shift away.
Instead, I only tilt my head back and look up at the ceiling where several crystals hang down, catching the light and casting rainbow shapes across the floor.
“It was Daisy’s sister that really did it. Her name was Rosie.” I close my eyes and see her again. Chomping on gum. Sneering at me. “She was the worst of all my cousins. I don’t know why, but Rosie always hated me, ever since we were little. She was a year older and she made it her life’s mission to torture me. Sometimes the other cousins played along, but mostly it was Rosie, telling me I was stupid or lame for liking the ranch so much, or pulling horrible pranks. Like the time she cut my hair in my sleep and glued it to my face. Or the time she stole all my books and burned them out back.”
“Those don’t sound like pranks,” War says. “It sounds more like she was trying to hurt you.”
“She was.” I close my eyes. Rosie’s sneer, her wicked laugh. “There was an accident when I was fifteen, a couple years before I left for good. She died—I mean, I guess she choked to death. And I was there. I tried—” I stop talking and take a trembling breath. “Anyway, she died, and after that, things changed. They got worse.”
War’s quiet except for his slow, steady breathing. I want to lean my head against his chest and listen to the march of his heart if only to have something human to hold on to. This story is at the heart of my nightmare, in the center of why I can’t come back to this place and why I’ll never take it over. It’s my trauma, and it’s worse than that. It’s my origin story and everything that drives me to keep on running.
Rosie’s hands scrabbling at her throat. Her blue lips, her bulging eyes, the way she fell over crashing to the ground and flopping on her side, clawing and clawing and clawing, trying to get the gum dislodged from her throat, the desperation and fear in her eyes. God, so much fear, and slowly that fear leached away, slowly her thrashing stopped.
“That must’ve been hard, losing someone so young like that,” War says and shifts closer. “How’d your family take it?”
“Hard,” I say. “Her parents basically turned into recluses. Daisy was a total wreck. My dad—” I stop and lean my face in my hands. “Well, my dad wasn’t kind.”
“They blamed you.” War’s voice is silken and smooth, but not sympathetic.
“They did,” I agree. “Because I didn’t save her. They said I should’ve done something. But I was fifteen, I didn’t know, I was panicking, and I just—”
“You froze.”
I sigh and scrape both hands over my eyes. I’m not crying, not again, not over that old nightmare. I don’t have tears to shed for Rosie. Frankly, I never did.
“Things got bad after that. The cousins were brutal, especially Daisy. She was relentlessly mean to me, and Dad didn’t do anything to stop it. I still don’t understand why. Maybe he wanted me to stand up for myself and wanted to teach me some kind of lesson, or maybe he thought I deserved all the hassle. But either way, it got to the point where I figured I’d either stay here and die or leave and keep on living.”
“So you left.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I should’ve stuck it out.”
His hand touches my leg. Big and bold. He squeezes, tightening his grip, and shifts to look me in the eye. “You did what you had to do. I’ve seen what families can be like when they want to hurt each other. It’s so much worse than a stranger.”
“You went through something like that?”
He tilts his head slightly. “Something like that. But I’ve also worked jobs—” He takes a breath and lets it out. “A girl named Marcy was on the outs with her grandmother. But the sweet old bat had a necklace that Marcy couldn’t stop thinking about. And so I was hired to go into the ancestral family’s home, sneak into the grandmother’s room, and fetch the necklace back for dear old Marcy. Well, Marcy broke the thing down, sold the diamonds to the highest bidder, and replaced them with glass. When the grandmother found out, Marcy was excommunicated, prosecuted, and committed. My name was blessedly left out of the proceedings.” He pauses, looking out the windows, eyes far away. “I’ve seen worse. Sons hurting their fathers. Cousins hurting cousins. I’ve never killed, but there are a few situations where I’m pretty sure I would’ve gotten paid handsomely to do it. That’s the world we were born into, all these rich people and their grudges, desperate to defend their place in the world.”
I watch him carefully, surprised at the emotion in his tone. On a whim, I reach out and touch his cheek, not sure why I’m doing it. The skin’s stubbled, freshly shaven but beginning to shadow, and he looks at me as my fingers linger there. He’s warm, almost hot, and his eyes burn into mine. His expression is hard, pained, but also longing—also hungry.
I feel that same hunger, deep inside my chest, deep in my guts.
When his lips come toward mine, I don’t move. I smell him, bright and acidic and musky. I feel him, both soft and firm. I open my mouth and taste him—citrus and mint. And I kiss him, and let his tongue wrap against my tongue, and let him pull me by the hips onto his lap until I’m straddling him at the top of the tower where I spent so much time as a little girl, sometimes imagining scenarios a lot like this one. I melt into that kiss, let myself get lost in that kiss, because for the first time in as long as I can remember, this feels good. This feels better than anything has felt, better than I thought I could feel, and I don’t want it to stop.
