Page 20

June

She moves fast.

Faster than I expected. The whip is in her hand and she’s coming across the room with her feet bare and her braid half-destroyed and her face doing something I haven’t seen on her ever — the fiery look of a woman who has run out of things to be afraid of.

But I still have the knife.

It’s a good one. Heavy, balanced, an eight-inch chef’s blade that I pulled from the block maybe twenty minutes ago when I was looking through her kitchen for something that could get through the skin of the two oranges sitting in a ceramic bowl on the counter. Because that’s what I was doing when she woke up. Cutting oranges. Squeezing juice. Looking for a glass that wasn’t a novelty mug with a rooster on it. A small, stupid, pointless gesture — the thing I used to be incapable of because gestures like that require you to think about another person’s morning before you think about your own, and I never did that, not once, in the entire ruinous history of us.

But she doesn’t know that.

What she sees is a man with a knife and a smile. And she has every reason in the world to interpret that exactly the way she’s interpreting it.

“I won’t let you hurt me anymore.”

She screams it and she means it. The sound tears out of her with a force that rattles the still air of the apartment.

I did this.

Me.

She’s fifteen feet away. Fourteen. Thirteen.

The part of my brain that’s kept me alive through things that should have killed me does the math without being asked. She’s five-two. She’s hungover. She’s running on adrenaline and terror and whatever compressed, violent thing has been building in her since the moment she opened her eyes and saw me. The whip is a real weapon in the right hands and hers are capable hands — she’s already proven that, over and over, and my crotch still throbs with the memory — but I have a knife and I have almost a hundred pounds on her and I have years of violence written into my muscle memory.

I could stop her.

Easy.

I could do it clean. Step aside, catch her wrist, take the whip. I could have her on the floor in under two seconds. Controlled. Quiet. The way I used to make everything quiet when I needed it to be. Slip my hand over her mouth, stare into her eyes, press the knife to her throat and take the last fearful, fiery bits of her soul and snuff them out with a look.

The thought moves through me the way it always did. Smooth. Practiced. Wearing the costume of reason — it would be safer, it would be easier, it would give me back the leverage I need to make her listen. To make her understand. To make her…

To make her.

That’s the whole sentence, isn’t it? That was always the whole sentence.

To make her.

I see her face. I mean, I actually see it. The eyes blown wide with the terror of someone who expects to lose and has decided to go down anyway because they just can’t fucking take it anymore. That’s not defiance. That’s not stubbornness. That is a woman who has been cornered so many times that she would rather run at it and die, because at least that way she gets to choose and she doesn’t have to suffer anymore.

I did that to her.

Not Midnight. Not the Sons. Not the men who held her and hurt her and left those marks I saw on her skin when she was sleeping.

Me.

She’s twelve feet away.

I think about last night. The way she sat on the floor and knotted those dish towels with her tongue between her teeth and kept talking to herself like she was trying to talk herself into being okay. The way she caved and let me loose to use the bathroom, somehow managing some fucking kindness to me — even though I don’t fucking deserve it — because that little bit about her that’s kind refuses to die, and she hates that about herself, I could see her hate it even as she said it. The empty wine bottle she set on the nightstand before she went to sleep. The shit she says about responsibility, about a new life, about Guy fucking Fieri.

She is trying to build something here.

Where June can be the kind of June she wants to be.

She’s building it, and I walked through her door and broke it, the way I’ve broken everything.

Fucking god damn it.