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"Look at you," he sneers. "You keep saying she's just a whore, but you're going to fight me for her."
"I don't need to fight you for her." I settle back down and wave the men away. I'm fine. "She's not yours."
"She's not yours either, brother. None of these girls are ours. And they're never going to be, no matter what you do. They're just breeders."
The fight's still brewing in me. The confused-but-attacked fight. I hate what Luke just said. None of these girls are any of ours. Lisa is apparently a factory for Steve babies, and she's still not his. But they're not breeders. That's vile that he would even say that of a human being.
They're also all of ours, in a way, and my adrenaline is pumping too high for me to piece together where the lines are.
"Have your shit ready to go in two hours," I say as I pivot and leave the room.
Eleven
"Well, the dressseems to have worked," Addison says sarcastically as we walk back to our rooms after brunch, but her tone is stilted.
"Oh, that's what was supposed to happen," I say with a weak shrug. "So umm, so thanks. For everything. You were super cool about it."
She really was. When I banged on her door this morning and asked for help, I was fully expecting to grovel and for her to half-ass it. But she acted like we were the best of friends and even gave me the dress she'd planned to wear.
"Oh, oh of course!" she stammers. "I wasn't thinking . . . well, I guess my mind was wandering. I was thinking about . . ."
"About Luke?" I ask. I know there was an incident last year between them, and I know he was acting weird today. Even I'm dwelling on the way Luke bolted like that when I skipped him. The festivities of the morning certainly rebounded, but it was a rough moment.
"I wasn't expecting to see him this year. Some men only do this once. They get the baby they wanted out of this, or it turns out not to be their thing. They get a girl, whatever. And he knew I was going to be here, I made that clear—"
"He was the father," I blurt out.
Addison nods. "BBHH — you know, the company that organizes this — they don't usually DNA test for miscarriage. Part of the contract for the men stipulates that if it happens, they're all liable for ten percent of what we're paid. Nothing goes to BBHH. Luke insisted on a paternity test, just for himself."
"He shouldn't have come back here," I murmur. I couldn't pretend to know what set him off this morning, but I've seen people grieve over miscarriages just as hard as they would grieve a child's death. And grieving people do stupid things. "Did he see you? Like, outside of the group activities? Did you two hook up?" I know I was his first this weekend, but I honestly have no idea what happened after that.
"Yeah, but mostly he just . . . he just snuck into my bedroom in the middle of the night and held me for a long time."
We're at our rooms across the hall from each other, and it's a good time for me to look back at her, to see her shake her head as she pauses and takes a deep breath.
"That's not what you came here for," I say.
She shakes her head, not to deny but to clear her thoughts. "We're gonna drive into town once the men leave," she says instead. "It's tradition. They even give us some pocket money to blow on souvenirs, restaurants. We can rent jet skis. And there's a candy shop–"
I interrupt her with, "I'd love to go," before she tries any harder. In another week we'll be going home, and I'll put my guards back up. But Ted has made me realize that this moment, here and now, is its own existence. Whatever he intended to give me for being a good girl today doesn't even matter.
I hop into the shower, hoping Addison won't get offended that I'm washing away all her hard work. She made me beautiful, but it's not me. And I think she’ll be really happy when I ask her to help me pick out a couple bathing suits for afternoon jet-skiing, which will just lead to running mascara. I've just turned the water off and am grabbing for the towel when the lights go out.
We're on an island, I figure power outages are normal here, but then I hear Ted's distinctly meticulous voice in the dark.
"Did you know that most Disney movies — and the fairy tales they come from — are cleaned-up versions of far darker, far more sinister ancient tales?"
"What the fuck?" I breathe out.
"Beauty and the Beast, for example, comes from a line of stories where the young beauty isn't allowed to look at her beast. Do you see where I'm going with this?"
"I can’tseeanything right now,” I joke with a nervous laugh.
Ted laughs too. The sound is dark but not scary or intimidating so much as sensual. He's absolutely not supposed to be here right now, those were the rules, but I have a feeling he's the sort of man Addison was talking about. He'll never come back. That laugh tells me that he's definitely here for good reasons despite the strange words.
"The beasts are cursed men, just like in the Disney story, but in many of the other versions, the only way to break the curse is for the beast to win the beauty's love without her ever seeing his face. And these tales come from a time before black-out curtains or light-proof shutters, so that means the beast could only come to her in the night, while she slept.
"And just so we're clear, in some of these tales, love doesn't come until after children."
