CHAPTER TWELVE

Liana turned her back on Nick and went into to the living room. He didn’t blame her, figuring she knew that at least there, she could collapse on the sofa and be comfortable and not feel like she was sitting in an interrogation room, waiting to be accused.

 

He tried to avert his eyes, to not follow her, to not hungrily memorize the way she moved in the gentle incandescent light from the overhead dimmer light Kirrily had left on.

 

But, to his surprise, she stopped directly in front of his chair. He wondered what she was seeing, or what she thought she saw--the gangly, broad-shouldered boy who had made her smile, then made her cry. At times he'd been convinced he'd never see her again. He hadn't been convinced that the moment in the garage yesterday hadn't been delirium, a hallucination caused by his injury.

 

Her chest heaved, her golden décolletage, her golden-brown eyes afraid but resolute. She was no hallucination. "I'm sorry."

 

"Liana." Nick leaped up out of his chair, pressed his lips up against hers, seizing her arms in his hands as if to hold her in place, to anchor her, ensure she couldn't flee, like so many dreams he had of her, days and nights when he'd been alone and lost. He'd expected her to struggle, to pull away, but she didn't.

 

She stood stiffly, hesitant, as if it had been too long since she held a man's body against hers that didn't want to do her harm, as if she wasn’t even sure what to do. This thought tore him apart even as his cock shifted inside his jeans; in all their years apart, had no one touched her right? He was afraid to acknowledge what that meant, not that he could have ever denied what Liana had done to him. Even in the garage yesterday, he'd felt it; he'd chased her away just in time to avoid doing something he regretted.

 

But now it was different. He didn't want to fight with her, didn't want to recuse her, or hear her apology, or watch her fall to her knees and beg. All he wanted was to feel her under him, to use his height and strength to keep her there. He wanted to, for the first time with her, feel like a man should feel, to love her freely, in the open, without worrying that it was forbidden, that he was considered beneath her. He wanted everything he had missed out on the first time around.

 

Her mouth hung open, her pupils dilated; she was almost frozen in an emotion that looked like fear, but could pass for anything.

 

"I dreamed about doing this for so long. You have no idea," he murmured.

 

No reply. She stood, still as a statue. His hand slid up under her shirt, igniting goosebumps over her smooth skin; he could feel them all one by one, coming alive like Christmas lights. He ripped open her button-down shirt underneath her sweater, fumbling for her panties. Still she did not flee. She was still. This was the body of a woman who had been abused.

 

Jesus Christ. He dropped his grip, turned away, ran both hands through his long hair, damp with exertion, horrified at what he'd been about to do.

 

"Nick," she murmured, barely able to make herself heard.

 

He came back down to earth, dropped out of heaven like a fallen angel. "I'm sorry, Liana. I’m so sorry. I didn't mean to do that. Not to you." He held up his hands and moved quickly toward the door, doubtful about whether he could get out of here without Kirrily noticing, as if his nightmare had never happened, as if he had never held Liana again--because knowing she had been in his arms, that her plump, rose-colored mouth had been on his--was something he'd never been able to forget, knowing he could never have it again.

 

"Wait." Her eyes flew open, as if she were seeing him again for the first time in years. She crossed the room in one long stride, crashing her mouth into his.

 

He wrenched himself away.

 

"'We can't do this."

 

She stepped back, breathing heavily, blinking, as if she'd been under as much of a spell as he had. She turned away, closing her eyes, covering her mouth with her hands. "You're still mad."

 

"It's not that."

 

"You are," she said, her expression scrunching up, growing harder. "You didn't wait for a second yesterday before you brought up Circleville."

 

"Well, not all of us are lucky enough to be able to move on with our lives so completely. Besides, I don't even know why you're back. You won't tell anybody."

 

She sunk silently to the sofa, hugging her knees. "Because people like you and Tryg will just use it against me."

 

"So you lie instead?”

 

"I'm not lying. I'm ashamed. I was terrified. There was someone in New York who...who hurt me."

 

"Who?" Nick wasn't expecting that. He thought back to what Tryg had said, about the Vipers dominating parts of New York.

 

"You want to know why I'm ashamed? Because I did it wrong. I did every single thing wrong. And even after I should have learned my lesson, I kept doing things wrong.”

 

“Liana--”

 

“Wait,” she cut him off. “Nick, I'm as fucked up as a person can be. I keep trusting and being used and abused by people, and I can't seem to ever stop. You want to know why I never explained what I did to you? Because I couldn't explain. How could I explain this?"

 

"What do you mean?"Hiccupping now, she pulled down her shirt. Nick drew in a sharp breath. What he saw made him physically ill. Long, thin silver marks on her back, like the claws of some giant animal, marring what once had been smooth and perfect angelic.

 

“Are those--” He couldn’t bring himself to finish. He’d been ill, then, thinking of what Noel was capable of doing to his stepdaughter. He was even more ill now, knowing that he’d done it. And that Nick hadn’t been there to stop it. The one thing he’d promised, the one job he’d given himself. He wanted to scream.

 

"Nick, he beat me after you were arrested – that same night. He beat me until I couldn’t get out of bed. I had to call in sick to school the next day. Nothing I did stopped him," she said. “It was all a waste. I threw your life away for mine, and it didn't help anything. And I never learned my lesson. And now I don’t have anything. Not even..." she sucked in her tears, the words on the tip of her tongue as if she'd wanted to blurt them out ever since she'd seen him in the garage, leaning over the sink. Not even you.

 

Nick tipped his head up, stared at the ceiling, as if trying to reconcile what she was telling him with what he'd believed for so long. "But you moved away the next year," he said blankly. "When I got out, you were gone. I heard you went to college. I thought--"

 

"I didn't. I got in, but I had to withdraw my acceptance. I couldn't afford it anymore. Noel couldn't stand the fact that I'd defied him. He took back the money he was going to use to pay my tuition. He took everything, and there was nothing Mom could do. He locked me in my room. He wouldn't let me see my friends. I had to drop out of high school to get away from him. I borrowed some money from a friend and moved with her to Cincinnati, and then to New York. I thought it would be a new start. I figured I would be a few months at most, of waiting tables until I got that big break on Broadway, or on TV."

 

"I thought that if anybody could make it in New York, it would be you," said Nick, knowing he sounded dumb, but hoping she realized he meant every word. He may have been too busy being a badass to see her play Sandy, but that didn't mean he didn't believe in her.

 

"Yeah. Me and every girl like me from every other high school graduating class in America from the last twenty years. You wouldn't believe it, Nick, the kind of shit you have to put it up with to make it." The sobs had vanished a bit from her voice now, as if talking was therapeutic.

 

Nick sat down on the other end of the sofa, not quite able to comprehend all that he was hearing. She was telling him about a world he knew nothing about. It made him feel strangely young, and a little naïve. The farthest he'd ever been was a few miles over the Ohio-Kentucky border--not like he wouldn't have loved to get out of here, given the money or the opportunity.

 

"One time a girl before me at an audition actually came out and lied to me that the director was making girls taking their tops off just so I'd get disgusted and leave. I only found out later she was lying. And another time--" she gulped.

 

"I don't want to hear it," Nick cut her off, closing his eyes briefly, the pain of even imagining what she'd been about to say, for him, was almost physical. He'd seen Liana hurt before--only once, since Noel was careful to do it out of public view--but once was enough. Her pained gasps for her air and pleas for mercy were as seared into his cerebrum as if the pain had been his.

 

She sighed, as if recalling all of this had exhausted her. He stared down at his hands, not quite knowing where to look. He wanted to touch her, but he didn’t dare to, now.

 

"For six years, I barely scraped by. I barely covered my rent most months. But it was never the same. And the worst part was, I couldn't put it behind me. I was always thinking about--I was thinking about you, Nick. All the time. You haunted me. I couldn't sleep at night. My doctor in New York put me on antidepressants, but, without health insurance, I couldn't afford them anymore. My therapist tried to help, but I didn't want to talk it out. I didn't want to practice my breathing techniques. All I wanted was to see you – to apologize, to promise to be better." Liana crossed her legs, head bowed so low, as if she found the carpet in front of her fascinating, two fingers working on a pill on the sofa cushion, as if she wanted to pull the whole thing up. Her honey-blonde hair swung forward over her face. “But what would I say?"

 

"Jesus, Liana," Nick burst out, turning away from her, clutching his head, unable to believe what he was hearing. "Say anything. Say you bought a new vacuum cleaner, or that you found a quarter lying in the street. I would have found it fascinating. It's not like anybody else was writing to me, or coming to visit. I had all the time in the world to read it, at least when I wasn't working in the laundry room and trying not to get stabbed in the liver by my batshit crazy cellmate."

 

"Bullshit, Nick. The only thing you wanted to hear from me was an apology. And that was the one thing I couldn't give. What would I say? Sorry for lying? Sorry for being a stone cold bitch? Sorry you're sitting in a prison cell while I'm lying on a beach towel in the Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park? I could have written you five letters a day, telling you how sorry I was. I could have tried to explain that my life wasn't as peachy as you thought, but would you even have believed me, Nick? Would you even have opened the envelopes?"

 

Nick stared at the floor. "I probably would have ripped it up and tossed it down the laundry chute," he said, then clarified. "But just because I was angry, doesn't mean I didn't, deep down, want to hear from you. That I didn't--" he swallowed. He couldn't say it. That would make him vulnerable, and wasn't vulnerability the one thing he had learned, first in foster care, then in prison, then in the Black Sparks, to never, ever show? Vulnerability was what got you killed. It was what made you weak. Everybody knew that.

 

"That you weren't thinking about it. About me," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. She was speaking quickly, the words pouring out of her mouth shakily as if some outside force were compelling them. She clutched her stomach.

 

Suddenly, she swung her head up, and Nick was momentarily transfixed.

 

It was as if the lively, golden girl who had so fascinated him in high school had aged, grown pale and wan, over years of sleepless nights, a shell of her former self. Even her posture was different, slumped forward as if the world were too much to bear on her back alone, like a torture victim. Here he was nursing a grudge over a lost year of his life, and this poor girl, the girl he had once cared about, despite all logic, had been in a prison of her own making for much longer than that. And he hadn't even offered the one thing that might serve to break it open--his forgiveness. Forgiveness, unlike just about everything else fine in life, didn't cost a dime. It was something he could afford--maybe the only thing. And still, he had withheld it.

 

"Liana." His tone was still sharp.

 

She looked up, her lower lip shaking. She was afraid still, he realized, and he curled his lip into the kind of sly smirk he knew she'd recognize from all those years ago.

 

"Get over here."