Eight
She would be better off, Holly reasoned, to stop thinking about him. She would put him from her mind, stop engaging him if he came into the bar, and let him fade slowly from her every waking thought. She would stop penning his name in her journal, stop seeing it printed in her slanted, masculine handwriting each night. She’d ask one of the other girls to take his drink and dinner order. She’d do what she’d always done best: make herself small and unnoticeable.
A great idea in theory. But when he came into Bell Bar at his usual time, he wasn’t carrying a book, and his gaze wasn’t fixed to the floor like it always was. He took his table, and she felt his eyes come straight to her across the dim interior, locking on like laser guided missiles.
She felt a weakness ripple through her, a softening of muscles, a clawing desperation. She didn’t want to stop thinking about him. It wasn’t just about him being The One anymore, the perfect killer. Mostly, it was just about him, and the way being around him made her want to be around him more.
Was this what normal women felt for normal men? Or was this just as twisted as every other part of her life?
He wanted her to come to him – that was plain by the way he watched her. But she wasn’t going to hop to. She’d done plenty of that in the past, out of fear, and necessity. She’d followed orders to stay alive. But she wasn’t afraid of Michael.
She felt the tiniest flexing of power inside herself. He didn’t own her, control her. She could make him wait a second. He, in his calmness, steadiness, his self-assured masculinity, had given her the gift of that tiny power. And because she was so grateful for that, she finally went by the bar, picked up his usual Jack, and went to his table.
His eyes were still fixed to her face.
She tried to appear calm, indifferent. “Something to eat?” she asked, setting the whiskey in front of him.
“A burger. I don’t care. Something.”
So unlike him.
Holly nodded, and turned to walk away.
“Hol.”
The shortening of her name froze her to the spot. She dampened her lips, lifted her brows, tried to keep her voice steady. How stupid, she thought, that something like a nickname should leave her breathless and giddy.
“Yes?”
“The food can wait. Sit with me.”
It was both an order and a request, the harshness of his voice softened by the fractional lifting of his brows.
She couldn’t have refused if she’d wanted to.
Holly slid into the booth across from him, tray leaning absently against her leg. She didn’t speak, but waited for him to say whatever it was that was burning inside him, forcing him to breach all his protocols.
He downed the whiskey in one gulp without flinching, and said, “I want you to tell me about them. The men who you…” Elegant gesture. Wanted me to kill. “What did they do to you, Holly? Why did they follow you here?”
She felt panic welling at the idea of telling him. But she felt something else, too: a relief, so profound she could cry, lingering at the horizon. He wasn’t giving up on her after all. He’d come back around to the idea. He wanted to know. And if she told him, it might ease this awful ache of knowing her own past. Living with what had happened was exhausting. She would never want to burden someone with her story, but Michael wasn’t someone. He was the sergeant at arms for the Lean Dogs MC, and he’d seen his share of horrors, no doubt. She held such hope that this outlaw might understand her outsider soul.
She leaned toward him. She wanted to touch him, but refrained. “Not here. Can you wait till I get off tonight?”
He nodded. “I’ll follow you home.”
The earnest attention in his hazel eyes was too much. She did touch him, reaching forward to briefly close her hand over the back of his. Then she left, before he could retract his interest.
There were a handful of lights on at the Victorian mansion, including the lamps Holly had left blazing in her attic loft, the tiny Christmas tree twinkling behind the fogged glass.
Inside, there were the faint sounds of music, and the smell of sweets baking.
“Mrs. Chalmers has insomnia and does night baking,” Holly explained. “And Eric never sleeps, I don’t think.”
He followed her up both shadowed stairwells, the old house creaking under their feet. Muffled human noises from the other tenants: a cough, a murmur of a voice, a door closing, water running, TV rumbling. Did no one go to sleep in this place? It was almost four.
Oh well. This way, nobody would be disturbed by them moving around in the attic.
The loft was almost too warm, and Michael peeled off his jacket, hung it up on one of the pegs inside the door.
Holly took off her jacket too, and kicked off her uniform sneakers, but she didn’t go change clothes, as he expected. She was drawn tight as a bowstring tonight, nervous and furtive, and exhausted because of it. She walked to the kitchenette, pulled a bottle from an upper shelf, and took a long slug from it as she walked back toward him.
It was Crown Royal, he saw the label as she reached him, and she was drinking it straight down like water.
“That’s some nasty shit,” he informed her. He felt clumsy and awkward, here in her personal, feminine space, with her in such a fragile state.
She shrugged. “All of it’s nasty. It gets the job done.” She sat down on her peach sofa, curled her bare legs up under her, tugging at the hem of her silk shorts. She clutched the bottle into her middle. “Sit,” she said, and he did, settling beside her, an arm’s length between them.
Holly let her head fall to the side, against the back of the sofa. It was wearing her out already, thinking about what she’d say to him. The lamplight caught the shadows beneath her eyes. She looked small and pretty, like he could pick her up in one hand.
“Your father, your uncle, your husband,” Michael said, recalling what she’d said before.
She nodded, silken hair rustling against the sofa. “Some of their friends were involved sometimes, but I never knew their names. It was usually too dark to see their faces.”
Michael felt the slow, even pounding of his heart against his ribs. He didn’t want to hear the story she was about to tell him. The dread was already building in him, swirling like bile at the base of his throat. But he needed to know how bad it had been. He needed to have this justification for what he was fast realizing he had to do.
“What did they do to you, honey?” he asked, quietly, his shoulders stiff with anticipation.
She closed her eyes a moment, pain lining her face. “Promise me something first.”
He waited until her eyes were open, and nodded.
“Try – at least try, please – not to hate me, after I tell you.”
“I won’t.”
Her smile was small and wry. She took a deep breath. “My mother fell in love with a monster…”
Holly had a handful of precious, closely-guarded memories of her mother. Lila Jessup had been slight, almost boyish, with lush tangles of dark hair that were always catching in the wind. She was soft-spoken, always-gentle. Trapped in the old farmhouse out in the woods, with no one but her husband and daughter for company, she had been far from depressed. She loved nature; she knew the name of every songbird, every tree and tiny sprouting flower.
She took Holly by the hand, and together they walked the wooded trails, passing in and out of golden shafts of sunlight, freezing at the sight of a doe and fawn passing through the trees, staying so silent the mother deer never noticed them, and they could marvel at the fawn’s perfect blanket of white spots.
They clipped flowers and carried them back to the house to arrange in old jelly jars and sweet tea glasses, set up in the window above the sink, so the sun shone through the water and translucent petals. Lila knew which berries were safe to eat, and she baked them into pies and tarts. She stood behind tiny Holly, helping her roll out the dough with the floured pin, holding her little hands steady on the knife as they cut the lattice strips for the pie tops.
Holly’s father, Abraham, was a handyman, on the road all day every day looking for work among the local farms. Fixing a fence here, installing a new bathroom sink there, mowing grass in summer and shoveling snow in winter.
On Sundays, he held a bible study group in their living room, somber men in pressed plaid shirts talking about the King James version for hours, smoking cigarette after cigarette until the entire house was swimming with the exhalations. Those were the days when Lila took Holly down to the pond, where they hunted for frogs and minnows. And inevitably, Abraham would come looking for them, and he’d grab Lila by the arm, squeezing until Lila’s skin was red, and take her back to the house.
Abraham’s brother, Holly’s Uncle Jacob, stayed with them often. He didn’t work, and spent his afternoons on the sofa, watching soaps and calling for Lila to bring him another beer, to rub his feet, to treat him “like a good sister should.”
A horrible memory, one Holly couldn’t shake: She came bolting into the house, pigtails flying behind her, clutching a bundle of wildflowers for her mother. Down the long cool hallway from the front door, Holly stepped into the kitchen, and tried to make sense of what she saw.
Her mother stood at the kitchen sink, hands braced on the porcelain edge, eyes fixed on the window, face blank and lifeless. Her legs were spread wide, and her dress was hiked up to her waist in back, so her pale legs were bared up to her round white bottom. Jacob stood behind her, right up against her. His jeans were unbuttoned. His hips thrust forward, again, again, a fierce gyration, almost like he was dancing. He panted, and grunted, his face pressed into Lila’s hair. His hands clutched at Lila’s thighs, leaving dark bruises. And Lila rocked forward with each movement, swaying in time to Jacob’s hips.
Neither of them noticed small, silent Holly standing there.
“Say you like it,” Jacob growled. “You say you like it, bitch!”
“I like it,” Lila said in a high, breathless voice, as devoid of emotion as her face.
Holly fled, running out of the house, across the yard, into the forest until she thought her lungs would burst. She sank down onto the dirt path, and sobbed into her hands, the flowers scattered at her feet, the songbirds trilling in the trees above.
Lila found her just before nightfall, her smile its usual warm reassurance. “Come on, darling. It’s dinner time.” She took Holly’s hand and pulled her up, and Holly didn’t dare mention what she’d seen, though Lila’s eyes were sad, like she knew anyway.
It grew worse after that. Lila’s dress torn open in the front, her lip split, Abraham zipping up his jeans in the middle of the living room on a Saturday afternoon, Holly unseen in the doorway.
At night, when she should have been sleeping, Holly saw Jacob go into the bedroom with both her parents. Heard the door lock. Heard the incomprehensible sounds from within. Saw her mother’s bruised wrists the next morning.
A Saturday. Cold kitchen. No sign of Lila. Abraham and Jacob sat at the table, smoking, foreheads heavy with creases.
“What’re we gonna do?” Jacob asked. “Dig a hole?”
Abraham glared at his brother. “We wouldn’t have to do anything if you hadn’t covered her damn mouth.”
“You did it too!”
“But I didn’t suffocate her!”
Abraham tapped the ash off his cigarette onto a teacup saucer and sighed. “We can’t just leave her up there.”
Holly crept up the stairs on her tiptoes. To her parents’ bedroom. Door ajar. Narrow ribbon of light slithering across the hall floor.
The door swung inward with the lightest touch. Sun pouring through the bare windows, framing the wooden bedstead. Ropes at all four posts. Lila, pale and limp, lashed to the bed, naked, her skin tinged with blue. Eyes open, glassy. Mouth agape. Like she was screaming. But her skin was cold, cold when Holly touched her.
“Mommy?”
But there was no response.
An unmarked grave in the forest, a place where the dirt was fresh and wet on top. No explanation from anyone.
Jacob moved into the house permanently.
Holly scattered wildflowers over the place where her mother was buried. She sat in the woods for long hours, watching the deer come and go, watching the fawn grow into a young buck with tiny buds for antlers.
Her mother was dead, and she belonged to the monsters.
Michael didn’t want her to continue; from this point, he could guess what she’d say. But her eyes were dry and there was a certain fierceness in her now. She wanted, needed, to keep going. It was strengthening her resolve, bringing it all back to the surface, replacing her fear with fury.
“I was fifteen when these came,” she said, closing her hands over her full breasts, straining against her tank top. Her smile was bitter. “That was when they replaced Mom with me.”
She’d inherited her mother’s knack for cooking, and she’d made a big breakfast of bacon, eggs and hash. She’d fished all the shell from the eggs with her fingertips, because the last time Abraham had bitten down on a piece, he’d slapped her so hard she’d lost consciousness for a moment. She wouldn’t let that happen again.
She stood at the kitchen sink, washing the skillet by hand, enjoying the sight of the little brown wrens hopping around on the windowsill outside.
Then she heard the footsteps behind her, the heavy breathing. A hand landed on her waist. Jacob’s voice in her ear, his hot breath fanning her skin: “When you stand there, in the sun like that, I can see right through your shirt.”
She shuddered, gooseflesh breaking out all down her arms and legs. “I–”
The words were snatched out of her as she was spun around. Her hair whipped across her face and the room revolved as she struggled against the sudden loss of balance.
When she tossed her hair back, Jacob’s hands were at the buttons of her cheap cotton blouse, and he was opening them with rough, excited movements, threads snapping and popping in his haste.
“Uncle Jacob–”
He slapped her mouth, jerking her head around on her neck, pain radiating up her throat to the back of her skull, merging with the stinging in her lips.
“Keep your trap shut,” he ordered.
And then her shirt was open, and the new feminine curves of her breasts were in his rough hands. He squeezed them hard, his tan fingers dark against her pale flesh.
Face smarting, shaking all over, Holly stood rooted while he played with her a moment, his eyes glazed-over, his mouth hanging open in an absent smile as he molded her breasts and dug his fingertips deep into the soft round weights.
Then he spun her again, pressed her stomach up against the edge of the sink, and he reached around her and tore at the fastenings of her cutoffs. Yanked them down to her ankles. He ripped her panties.
“Now you just be a good girl, and you’ll like it.”
She thought of her mother, lying cold and dead, tied to the bedposts upstairs, as she felt his hand go between her legs.
She was fifteen, and it was no longer some abstract spectacle, as it had been when she’d witnessed him raping her mother. She knew what was happening, now, as he forced himself inside her.
The pain painted the inside of her head white for a moment. White, consuming, blistering pain, too awful to put a name to, too intense and intimate to be believed.
And as Jacob grunted and heaved against her, she realized she could see her dim reflection in the sun-glazed window. Her shirt open, her breasts swaying as she was rocked forward and back, forward and back. Wet tears tracked silently down her face, glinting like crystal.
I’m pretty now, she thought. Look at me, I turned out pretty. Just like my mama.
A Sunday, before bible study. The upstairs rooms were stuffy and humid, because the AC needed repairing, and Abraham had, as he’d said, other things on his mind besides that.
Holly could hear the men gathering downstairs, the shuffle of feet and the low tumble of masculine voices. Someone laughed loudly, and it sounded like a pig snorting. She could already smell the sharp tang of all the cigarette smoke.
Her father’s bed had been stripped down to a single white sheet, and he stood beside it, beckoning her forward with one hand, a length of rope held in the other.
Holly stared at her bare toes a long moment. If she refused, there would be more slapping. She didn’t know how many more times she could be struck without suffering brain damage. There was no chance of escaping, not while the downstairs was so packed with Abraham’s friends.
If she relented willingly, maybe it would be easier for her, she reasoned, and stepped toward her father.
He tore her clothes from her, and he forced her down onto the bed. He tied the ropes tight to both her wrists, until her hands grew numb.
She stared up at him, vision blurred by the bright sheen of the sun shining off her white naked skin. She could see the raised mounds of her breasts, lifting as she breathed, the knobs of her knees.
Abraham stripped off his belt. And then unbuttoned his jeans.
“It isn’t your fault that you’re full of sin, Holly,” he told her. “You’re a woman now, and your body was designed by Lucifer to draw the evil out of men.”
And then he climbed over her.
He left her tied, after, when he redressed and went to greet his bible study group.
Holly grew exhausted and hungry, waiting, as the shadows lengthened across the ceiling. Her hands had lost all feeling hours ago. Her arms quivered and crawled with awful sensations, the nerves clamping against this constant strain. She dozed. Or maybe she blacked out.
But then there were footsteps coming up the stairs, many sets of them. And Abraham came into the room followed by the men from the bible study. They all crowded inside, bunched in the corners, all of them staring down at her nakedness.
One after the other they climbed up to settle between her thighs.
She closed her eyes and thought of the woods, of the birds, of the deer, of the flowers scattered across her mother’s unmarked grave.
“Holly. Oh, Holly, Holly, Holly!”
Dewey Jessup was her third or fourth cousin. The nephew of some step-something-or-other, a chain of relation Abraham had explained to her while she was drawn deep inside herself, and not listening. He was skinny, and he had clammy, pale skin, and his head was too big for his narrow neck, and his ears should have been pinned back when he was a boy.
He was a virgin the first time he came to join the bible study group, and he’d fumbled and blushed the first time Abraham had urged him up on the bed and given him instructions. Ever since, he’d been fascinated, obsessed, almost rabid in his need, awkward and clumsy still.
“Oh, Holly,” he groaned, fingers digging into her hips as he gave one last thrust and spilled himself inside her. The orgasm stiffened him all over, locked his hands on her hipbones, drove him against her and held him there, still, quivering as the pulses overtook him.
Then he relaxed, his shoulders slumping, so his sunken chest seemed to cave in even farther. He passed his clammy hands up the soft skin of her belly.
“Thank you, Holly.” He lay down on top of her, most of his weight on the bed, his head cushioned on her breasts. “What you give me…it’s so special. Thank you, thank you.”
Holly stared at the ceiling, silent.
“Holly,” Dewey said. He petted her belly, her breasts.
“Hurry up, boy,” one of the others said, impatient. The room was mostly dark, save for the lamp burning on the nightstand. The men were all the same, a blur to her. Only Abraham, Jacob, and Dewey were more than cocks and hands.
“I want to be with you all the time,” Dewey continued, oblivious. “Holly…will you…will you marry me?”
“You’re lucky, just damn lucky is all,” Abraham told her, “that some sweet boy wants to marry you. Wants to give you his name.”
But it’s the same as my name, she thought to herself.
And as her head was forced to the side, and her father leaned over her, she was forced to watch what happened to her in the dressing table mirror.
“It wasn’t a real wedding,” Holly explained, taking another long gulp of Crown and dabbing the amber droplets off her lips with the back of her hand. “Obviously. There wasn’t a preacher for miles in those fucking backwoods.”
It was the first time Michael had heard her cuss. The alcohol was loosening her up, allowing the emotion to shine through, glimmering in her eyes like fever.
Her smile was more of a sneer, lips drawn back hard with pain. “My father presided. In the kitchen. Pronounced us man and wife.”
Michael took the bottle from her, and took a long pull from it himself. The rim was slick with what had been left of her lipstick. He hated the awful taste of the Crown, but he needed some fortifying at this point.
“Your own cousin,” he said, the words brittle with his closely-reined fury. He ground his molars together and passed the bottle back when she reached for it.
“Yeah,” she said, sipping. Her eyes lifted to his, full of misery. “You’re wondering why I never ran away,” she said.
Michael didn’t answer. Yeah, he’d been wondering. But at the same time, he understood how someone who’d been raised amid such violence would think there was no escaping. She might not have even conceived of a world in which there was anything besides slapping and raping and ropes tying her to beds. Too often, the lifelong abused grew dead to the hideousness of their lives, or they blamed themselves for their treatment.
“I did run away,” Holly continued. “Once.”
It was when the mail came. Thank God for those long walks down the dirt track of the driveway to get the mail. If it weren’t for letters and bills, she wouldn’t know her own address, the town in which she lived, not even the state. Sometimes, she would hold an envelope to the sun and try to see the writing on the letters within, but never managed more than a word or two. Save the bible, the advertisement brochures for pest control companies and satellite TV installers were her only reading material, and she read those pamphlets front and back twice or three times on the walk back to the house.
On the day she bolted, she went for the mail early, the three men of the house all asleep in front of the rabbit-eared TV, the evangelical spiel on their only functional channel babbling away to itself. So Holly pulled on her threadbare jacket with the holes in the elbows and walked out into the sunshine to get the mail.
The mailman was still at the box, sitting in his white truck, sorting their letters.
Holly had never encountered him before. He was a heavyset man, his stomach folding over the top of his belt, with a mustache like a push broom and fat, red cheeks that made his letter-carrier cap seem much too small on his head.
She paused at the end of the driveway, watching his thick fingers tick through the basket of correspondence. He was a stranger, and he was a man. Holly had never met a strange man in her entire life who hadn’t shoved his cock inside her. So she was fearful and timid a moment, wondering what to do.
And inside her chest, a pressure was building. Something was happening that she didn’t understand, this swelling, growing pulse that radiated into every finger and every toe. Her stomach felt tight, and full of living, pattering things. Things with wings that beat frantically.
Excitement.
Daring.
Hope.
Here was this person who wasn’t her blood, who wasn’t one of the smoking, faceless bible study men. Wasn’t her cousin-husband. Her father, her uncle. This person with a truck. This person who was about to drive away from this farm and go somewhere else. Someone where Abraham, and Jacob, and Dewey weren’t waiting for her.
Did she dare? So many times she’d thought about bundling up a kerchief full of cheese and crackers and cooked bacon and setting off through the woods. She was so quiet and careful and small, she could slip off undetected, making her way through the forest like one of the animals. But always she hesitated because she didn’t know how deep and dark the woods were. She didn’t know if she’d ever reach civilization, or if she’d be lost, and run out of food, starving in the rain until Mother Nature ended her misery.
But this wasn’t so chancy. This was a man and a truck and roads to travel on. This was her ticket to the outside world.
Holly walked across the street, stepped in front of the mailbox, and smiled broadly when the mailman glanced up at her, clearly startled, his button eyes bugging.
“Excuse me,” she said, “but do you think you could give me a ride into town?”
Holly had no concept of the scale of a big city. When the mailman reached an intersection dotted with a used car lot, a Dress Barn, a salon and a diner, and let her out saying he really wasn’t supposed to have anyone in the truck with him, Holly didn’t know if this was a roaring metropolis, or a tiny shabby town. Months later, she’d realize just how tiny and shabby it was, but in that moment, it seemed as wondrous as Disney World.
She didn’t have so much as a nickel in her pocket, but she was hungry, and she was lost, and she had no idea where to go or what to do now. She went into the diner, where a harried-looking woman with a falling-down topknot served heaping greasy plates to truckers at the counter. Holly stood politely by the register, until the woman noticed her with a little start.
“Excuse me, but I was wondering where I might go, because I think I’m homeless now, and I don’t have any money.”
The woman stared at her a long moment, a strange expression on her face, stray wisps of graying hair dancing in the drafts of the air conditioning. Holly had a brief wonder if her mother would look like this lined and weathered now, if she’d been allowed to live.
Then the woman said, “Come here with me,” and came around the counter, leading Holly to a booth by the window, where a puddle of sunlight warmed the vinyl seat. “Sit right here,” she said, “and I’ll be back.”
Holly sat, lulled immediately by the warmth of the sun. In the glass, she could just make out the bruises on her face, but she looked beyond them, out at the street bustling with traffic, the ladies in the spinning chairs in the salon across the way.
The woman brought her a plate of chicken, green beans, potatoes with brown gravy, and a bubbling glass of Coke with a striped straw. “Eat as much as you want, darlin’,” she said, “and I’ll make a phone call to the shelter.”
A shelter. That’s where the homeless went for help, wasn’t it?
Holly didn’t care. She’d rather go there than home. Anywhere was better than home.
The chicken was baked, and the skin was crusted with herbs. She cut into it and the steam rose up into her face, fragrant with spices.
As she ate, she planned. She would go to the shelter first, so she’d have a place to rest a moment, a base from which to begin her real search. Shelters helped people find work, didn’t they? Maybe there would be a job board with postings. If she could find work, any kind of work, she could save up enough money for a bus ticket, and then she could get a little farther away, and she could get a job somewhere that wasn’t so close to home.
It thrilled her, the idea of escape. This foreign sense of freedom. She’d work as hard as possible, do whatever she had to, but she’d make this departure work. None of the horrors of the street frightened her: she’d lived through horrors much worse.
She was mopping up the last of the gravy with a honey-buttered roll when movement at the door caught her eye. The bread got caught in her throat.
Abraham and Dewey stood just inside the diner, staring at her, Dewey with abject relief, Abraham with quiet murder in his gaze.
The woman from the counter came toward Holly. “Darlin’, your family’s come for you.” She hovered at the edge of the table, expression etched with concern. In a whisper, she said, “Should I call the shelter anyway?”
Holly shook her head. “No thank you, ma’am.”
Time had lost meaning. Her body could no longer be Holly-shaped, could it? How could one small vessel contain such throbbing, awful pain?
She’d stopped counting the strike of the belt after fifteen strokes. The hot blood running down her arms from her wrists where the rope was tied tight enough to cut into her flesh had cooled. Her arms themselves were like someone else’s arms, for all she could feel of them. Every inch of skin was aflame, fevered, even the sheets beneath her too rough to lie against. She closed her eyes tight and let her face rest on the mattress and prayed for unconsciousness.
“Who are you?” Abraham had asked, as he held the belt. “Who do you think you are that you can go running off like that?”
Dewey had knelt on the floor beside her, crying. “Holly, why’d you do it? Why’d you disobey when we love you so much?”
Now she was alone, and the house was quiet around her, and she thought it had been a blessing, truly, that Lila hadn’t survived this.
“I knew, after that,” Holly said, “that I had to get away, but I’d have to be more careful, and clever. They kept the gate locked down. I had no sway over anyone but Dewey, and so I used it. I got him to teach me how to drive. Just the old truck, back and forth across the yard, when Abraham and Jacob were out. The Chevelle was in the barn, under an old tarp. It took almost six weeks once I started looking, but I finally found the keys.”
She been the best she’d ever been, for three months. Perfect meals cooked at the perfect time, not a breath out of turn, not one frown or grimace. Pliant in their hands. Just a few tears for Dewey, to show her contrition.
And all the while she planned, and she’d never been more terrified.
Then the perfect chance came.
Abraham and Jacob had picked up work loading fresh-cut hay bales onto a truck. A backbreaking, all-day affair. They left just after dawn, leaving her alone with Dewey.
In the kitchen, she washed the skillet at the sink and watched her father and uncle drive off through the window. When they were gone from sight, she counted to fifty, time enough for them to get through the gate and out onto the road.
Dewey was at the table, eating the last of his eggs, his back to her. Holly lifted the dripping skillet from the suds, spun, and cracked it across the back of her husband’s head with all the force she could muster. There was an awful sound of the cast iron hitting his skull, and the skillet rang like a gong afterward. Dewey crumpled forward onto the table, boneless, maybe even dead.
Holly didn’t have time to check. She had to move.
There was a makeshift sack composed of an old knotted bedsheet in a closet upstairs, already packed with all the clothes she had worth taking, a toothbrush, paste, and what money she’d been able to squirrel out of the men’s pockets and store away in the old sewing machine for the past three months. She raced upstairs, stepped into her old sneakers, collected the sack, and from inside it, fished the precious keys of the Chevelle.
All the way across the yard, she waited for the truck to come back into view. What if they’d forgotten something? What if they came back? She wouldn’t survive the beating; she knew she wouldn’t.
But then she was sliding back the barn doors, and there was the tarp-covered glorious beast of a machine, waiting for her. It started on the fourth turn of the key, the giant engine roaring as it turned over. There was a shovel in the backseat that she’d stowed there earlier in the week. She used it to break open the lock on the gate, terrified with every strike that the sound would rouse Dewey, and he’d come for her.
But the chain had given way, and then she’d been behind the wheel again, ill-prepared for the power in the old muscle car, pushing it hard anyway.
Driving, driving, driving…
And she was gone.
Michael had the Crown again, drinking it like it was water. Holly played with the purple screw-off cap and told him how she’d stopped in Nashville for a while, without money for gas or food. She’d roomed with an aspiring country singer who was trying to make it big with cliché songs about girls in bikini tops, who’d made use of her a few times, in exchange for a roof over her head. She’d found work as a waitress. And when she could afford it, moved east, to another town, and another diner.
In Chattanooga, she learned about the Lean Dogs, about the violence and law-breaking associated with them, and she’d come to Knoxville out of curiosity and desperation. She’d taken a job at Bell Bar. And there she’d met him.
“That’s it,” she said, finally, sitting back with a deep sigh. “That’s how I got here. That’s why I approached you.”
Then she was done with her tale, deflated against the back of the couch, watching him, waiting for the scorn, the disgust, the censure.
“I was looking for a killer,” she added, softly. “And I took one look at you, and I knew you were The One.”
Michael set the Crown bottle on the coffee table with great care. The sun was coming up, bronzing the windows, dancing in the tiny droplets of condensation on the glass. The birds were waking in the trees outside the house with a rising tide of chatter. Below, tenants were getting ready for work, the mansion alive with the thumping and creaking of water pipes, the low buzz of wakefulness.
For hours he’d sat here listening to the long, awful story of her life, and he was very drunk at this point. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d overindulged like this; couldn’t remember a time when his head had been this fuzzy, and his thoughts so clear despite it.
“My life’s been nothing but one long rape,” she’d told him, and she hadn’t been exaggerating.
He took several long moments, staring at the soft glow emanating from the windows, collecting the violent anger cycling through him into something expressible and manageable. He had to say something, he had to find some kind of focus, or he’d reach a point of such fury that he’d be forced to act on it.
“You told all of this to the cops?” he asked, hearing the awful tightness in his voice.
“Not in detail, no. But they said they’d need evidence – physical evidence – to bring charges, and by that point, I didn’t have anything that could tie them to the old scars.”
“Typical,” he growled. He understood how the law had its hands tied, but it infuriated him anyway.
He took a deep breath, and then another, and then looked at her.
Her beautiful little face with its delicate features and those huge green eyes was a mask of hurt and uncertainty. She was already fearing his reaction, so sure of another rejection.
The most awful part was the painful way he wanted her. He always had, in a subconscious way. She was a pretty girl, and he was male, after all. That much was natural. But now he desperately wanted to smooth all her fragile sharp edges in the only way he understood how.
Selfishly, he wanted it for himself, too. He wanted something besides a semi-willing groupie looking to punch another hole in the Lean Dogs belt.
He wanted, if he was honest – and being this drunk, he could shoot straight with himself – to be something besides the angel of death for once. And for this girl, he could be. For her, death would be the most precious gift, a gift that would make her…
Love him. He knew that. Given all her trauma, she was the sort of girl in grave danger of falling in love with her savior.
He’d deal with that when it happened.
“Holly, I want you to do something for me.”
She straightened, tension coiling through her. “Yes?”
“I want you to keep all this between you and me. You can’t breathe a word about your family to any member of my club. Do you understand? They can’t know you’re related to them.”
She shook her head. “I would never tell.”
She would never reveal that connection to anyone. Not anyone but him, because he was The One.
“And I need you to trust me, okay? And do what I say, when I say. None of my brothers can ever find out that I killed them.”
Her eyes widened, and then flooded with tears. “Oh…” she whispered, voice a quavery, broken breath of sound. “You mean…you mean you will? You’ll do it?” She started to tremble all over. The tears glimmered at the corners of her eyes, threatening to spill over.
“Yeah, I’ll do it.”
In a fast flurry of movement, she rose up on her knees, and leaned across the couch cushions to get to him. She pulled up short, gasping a little, with her hands braced on his shoulders, their faces just inches apart. Sudden flash of fear in her eyes. Uncertainty.
Keenly aware of her closeness, and the warmth of her skin, he said, “What were you going to do?”
She dampened her lips, let her gaze fall downward, lashes dark fans against her cheeks.
His voice sounded coarse and alien to him. “It’s alright.”
It wasn’t what he’d expected; it was so much more delicate and stimulating than that.
She laid her small, soft hands on either side of his face, against the harsh lines of his cheekbones, and her eyes fluttered shut in the last second before she placed her parted lips against his. It was a gentle, hesitant, virginal kiss, and he realized something truly terrible before she pulled back a fraction and told him, “I’m sorry. I’ve never kissed anybody before.” A blush stained her face, deep embarrassment.
She’d been raped countless times in her short life, but never kissed. A tragedy.
Michael caught the back of her head in both hands and drew her in close. She stiffened one brief second, and then softened, her mouth opening under his as he kissed her.
She tasted like Crown and she had no idea what she was doing, but she kept opening wide, giving and giving, letting him in.
Once he started he couldn’t stop. He was starving for her, and for this. Her lips had the most feminine shape and movement to them. Her tongue flexed when he stroked it with the tip of his.
Dimly he was aware of pulling her into his lap, of the silk of her hair sifting through his fingers, of the warm press of her breasts against his chest. She was melting, falling against him, her neck going limp between his wrists as she surrendered completely.
He felt both her hands on his forearm, and she tugged, pulling his hand from her hair. As he kissed her, she guided his fingers to her chest, the oh-so-soft skin at the tops of her breasts. He knew he shouldn’t, but she was urging him into her shirt, and so he dove, reaching down into her tank top, working under the lace of her bra until her breast filled his hand, the nipple a hard pebble against his palm.
Holly made a sound against his lips, a gasping, crying sort of sound, and Michael broke the kiss, pulled back so he could see her face.
Her eyes were heavy-lidded and drowsy, her face slack save for the little crease of tension between her brows. She was turned on, and she didn’t know what to make of that, and she was a little bit frightened too.
Michael’s gaze went to where his hand was, the shapes of his fingers stretching the black fabric of her shirt from inside, the pale exposed slope of her breast.
He gave her a gentle squeeze. “Are you scared?”
She looked down too, hair falling to shield her face, as she stared at the way he cupped her. “Yes.”
“Does it feel good?”
“It…God, yes.” She was breathless, like she couldn’t believe it. “It does, it does.”
Michael pulled his hand away, adjusted her top so she was covered. Her bra was still out of place, and he could see her nipple outlined perfectly beneath the fabric.
“Oh, no,” she gasped. “We have to. Because you said you would do it after all.” The killing, she meant. Her hand went to his lap, pressing at his erection through his jeans. “Michael” – she lifted her eyes to his – “I want to honor our bargain.”
Her little fingers found the shape of his cock, straining against the denim, and she molded her palm to him, gave a gentle squeeze. She took a deep breath, her chest lifting, and there was her raised nipple staring at him, and he could almost believe she was ready for this, that she truly wanted it.
His hips lifted without his permission, boot heels digging into the rug as his body sought contact with hers.
He ground his teeth. He had to stop this, and stop it now, or he’d be on top of her, and it wouldn’t be the careful gentling that she needed.
“Stop.” Taking her by the waist, he swung her off his lap, setting her on the sofa beside him.
Holly looked surprised. “But I–”
“You’re not paying me that way,” he said, roughly. “You’re not paying me at all. I’m taking care of those bastards because no one’s ever deserved to die as bad as they do, and when I come inside you, it’ll be because you want it, not because it’s part of a business deal.”
Her eyes were huge.
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
He had to get out of here. He staggered to his feet, and only then realized just how truly drunk he was. Unsteady, stiff and hurting and wanting her, he walked to the door and pulled down his jacket like an eighty-year-old.
“Michael.” She followed him. “You had too much to drink. You can’t get on your bike like this.”
“Right.” He leaned against the wall a moment. “I’ll sit on the curb for a bit.”
It sounded like she giggled. “No, come on. You can lie down for a while.”
“Oh no.” Like hell was he lying on her sheets, that smelled of her, when he was already hard and aching for her. He’d probably hump the mattress in his delirium.
“At least let me make you some coffee–”
“No,” he snapped. “Open all these damn locks.”
She did, fingers nimble on all the latches.
“Get some sleep,” he commanded as he stumbled out onto the landing.
“Yes, sir,” she said, and he definitely heard a giggle this time.
Holly stood in front of her bathroom mirror, naked to the waist, halfway through changing out of her uniform and into something warm and comfortable. As she watched her reflection, she reached to cup her left breast in her hand, the one Michael had touched. She ran a fingertip around the nipple, watching it shrink and tighten. A pleasurable chill chased through her, just as it had when it had been his hand against her.
That had never happened before. So tiny a gesture, such a small stirring, and he’d been the first to give it to her.
It felt like a gift. Some awareness she’d always been lacking.
Turning away from the mirror, she pulled on a hip-length hoodie and went out into the loft, in need of the coffee she knew would be ready by now.
Before she filled a mug, she glanced through the dew-glazed window out at the street below. Michael was still sitting on the curb, feet in the gutter, a thin wisp of smoke curling over one shoulder as he worked on a cigarette. Two white butts lay on the asphalt, tiny from her view up here.
With a smile, she pulled down two coffee cups, filled them both, and then began her careful way down to the front foyer, not spilling a drop.
He didn’t turn at the sound of her approach, but she could tell he heard her the way his shoulders tightened. The morning was awash in a light fog that was rapidly being blasted apart by golden sunlight, the grass white and crunchy with frost.
Holly’s breath plumed as she sat down beside him. “Gosh, it’s cold.” She passed over a mug. “Here. In case the cold’s not sobering you up.”
He gave her a narrow-eyed, nasty glare, but took the mug. “I thought you were going to bed.”
She felt a laugh bubble up in her throat, and she let it spill out into the morning. “You’re not the boss of me.”
He groaned and sipped the coffee.
“Besides. I wanted to do something nice for you. It makes me happy. So if you won’t accept any other hospitality, I can at least bring you coffee.”
Another glare, but he said, “Thanks.”
Sensing he was embarrassed by how drunk he was, she gathered herself to leave. “Leave the mug out here when you’re done. I’ll come get it later.”
He grunted in the affirmative.
On impulse, she leaned over and kissed his cheek, lingering a moment, loving the press of her face against his bristly skin. “You’re a very special man, Michael McCall,” she said, and left him alone with his coffee and his thoughts.
When she was safely locked in her loft again, she sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her journal from its drawer, put the pen to the paper with a smile on her lips.
I had no idea men like this existed.